Cinema, Ballet and Friends

Despite feeling like shit, it's all worked out for the best really. Arrived in London at midday yesterday and walked down from Euston, via the British Museum, and Shaftsbury Avenue to soho where I walked directly to the Curzon arthouse cinema to be in time for a 1pm showing of Nocturnal Animals
I was so glad that I did for the film is one of the best I have seen this year, and two hours out of the drizzle in the warm cucoon of a dark cinema was just what I needed.

Right, you have got to keep up with me here.
Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a successful yet somewhat haunted gallery owner. Slowly realising that her second marriage is on the rocks, she finds herself obsessing about her first marriage which she ended cruelly some two decades earlier. The catalyst for this is the arrival of a gift in the shape of her ex husbands first novel ( in proof form). The book is a violent and disturbing story of murder and revenge, which captures Susan's imagination, and it's veiled subtext of how her ex husband  Edward ( Jake Gyllenhaal) dealt with his feelings of grief and loss after their split, causes her to question her own motivations within their brief relationship.

It sounds good on this simplistic level, does it not?  but when you add in the complication of seeing the read novel unfold on film, with Gyllenhaal playing the traumatised Tony Hastings who lost his wife and daughter to an arbitrary act of violence during a road trip through the Texan desert, fiction blends almost seamlessly with fact as Susan realises just how much she has traumatized her first husband.
Director Tom Ford has crafted a sylish, almost hypnotic film here.
The violent desert scenes bookend the aseptic and slightly detached nature of Susan's life perfectly as two other characters come into play, to almost steal the show. The first is a tour de force cameo by Laura Linney who in flashback plays Susan's dominant and coldly pragmatic mother in one wonderfully icy scene and the second is an underplayed almost reptilian turn by Michael Shannon as a dying Sheriff, assigned to solve the murder of Hastings' family and who wants to do the right thing even though the law isnt quite on his side.
How does the story end? Well  you will have to see the movie to find out. Suffice to say, the whole piece will leave you thinking well past the time that the final credits roll.
It's a great movie
9.5/10

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After all that I met Nu after work and we had a good natter until we went to Sadler's Wells to see only the second performance of Mathew Bourne's production of The Red Shoes.
I knew I wasnt the most sparkling of company but I tried my best! 

Bourne's work is always a real treat, and The Red Shoes didn't disappoint even though the production was not as " magical" as some of his other ballets,the scene where the evil shoes take control of Victoria  (Ashley Shaw) has to be seen to be believed and is well worth the price of any ticket!

I'm exhausted but happy that I touched base with Nu....it's 9am and I'm aleady on my way home dosed up with antibiotics and paracetamol