A weekend of films here at B&W:

On Friday, saw Talk to Her, a film everyone seems to be talking about. It's been a while since I saw an Almodovar film, and somehow I expected something a little more zany and a little less...icky. A film that made me feel misanthropic--not an optimal outcome, at least for me.

On Sunday, saw A Skin too Few, a documentary about Nick Drake. Since there's very little footage of Drake himself, and not that many photographs, the film is more of a meditation than a documentary at some points. There's lots of contemplation of the English countryside, rain sliding down the window, etc.

When it gets down into the nitty-gritty, it's quite fascinating: I was interested to hear one of the engineers talk about the individual components of recording one song. And there's a sad, ghostly moment where Drake's sister plays a tape recording of their mother singing a song she wrote, a voice of the past of the past.

On the whole it's an affecting movie, although I would have like to have seen commentary by one of the many Nick-Drake-influenced bands out there today. This would help dispell Drake's despairing assumption that he'd never managed to reach anyone, which is mentioned several times. Oddly, Paul Weller makes what amounts to a celebrity cameo to fill this role, seeming out of place.