On The Road Again

I went to see On The Road the day before yesterday, on my own in the afternoon. I dunno if this is the best way to go to the cinema or just a bit sad. The day before I took the 9 year old daughter to see Ice Age 4. I think On The Road shaded it. I enjoyed it, despite what the critics have said. It is a tad overlong and there is a coffee table element to the jazz and the clothes and the good looking cast and there is also a little truth in the reviews that said watching people drink, take drugs and have sex is pretty boring but even so I thought it was a good effort and better than I'd been led to believe. The film looks good, the scenery frequently stunning, the period details spot on, the cinematography beautiful. Sam Riley is good as Sal Paradise, the eternal observer looking for stuff to write about and on a search for kicks, but I half expected him to turn into Ian Curtis at any moment and start doing the jerky dance. Tom Sturridge (Carlo Marx/Allen Ginsberg) steals most of the scenes he's in despite some clunky scripting and the female leads of Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst are excellent. Mostly though, for a film based on a book that has narrative but no real plot, no three act formula, no twist, no denouement, none of the things that 'make' a film, I thought it worked. It was watchable, funny, absorbing in parts, and to me (no film critic admittedly) Walter Salles made a decent job of a book long considered unfilmable.

Ice Age 4 tells the continuing story of three animated prehistoric friends- a sabre toothed tiger called Diego,a woolly mammoth called Manny and a sloth called Sid. The continents are drifting apart leading to all kinds of japes and capers, plus there's a crew of animal pirates and a teenage mammoth called Peaches learning about friendship.

Friday Afternoon In The Universe