Sarah’s out of town, visiting her parents in Providence for the weekend, before flying to Toronto for a couple of days’ work.
That left me at a loose end, so I went for a couple of coffees with Geoff and dug out a couple of great British DVDs, namely The Firm (no, not that one; the great BBC film with Gary Oldman) and Mike Leigh’s irrepressible protaganist, Johnny, in Naked.
Incidentally, it’s a mystery to me why Naked isn’t available in either the UK or US on DVD. I had to buy a region 4 copy from a shop in Australia a year or so ago. Another masterpiece not yet on DVD is Willy Russell’s brilliantly observed Shirley Valentine. I wish the studio would get its act together and commit this tale of domestic heroism to the digital medium. Oh well; I digress.
Anyway, apart from watching those films with Geoff, I also headed up to my once home of San Francisco again on Saturday to take some shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and, especially, to try out my new wide-angle lens. As usual, a new album of photos is the result. Unfortunately, the wide-angle lens can’t take filters, so it’s impossible to block out haze and achieve better colour saturisation through the use of a polariser, but the results are quite nice, nonetheless.
I’ve finally finished wading through the A2‘s 180 page manual and can finally start reading O’Reilly’s Digital Photography Pocket Guide by Derrick Story. That thing is small enough that I can cram it into the camera bag and refer to it while on holiday, which is one of the reasons I bought it.
One other book I have to read in fairly short order is Elio Pelzers’ Dutch Faerøer guidebook. Since The Lonely Planet published the 5th edition of their book on Iceland , they’ve dropped the coverage of the Faroe Islands (and Greenland, for that matter), leaving very little in print about those tiny, remote islands in the North Atlantic. We still have our copy of the 4th edition, which has decent coverage of the Faroes, but I wanted another perspective and a Dutch book will be good for that. Apart from that, there are a couple of German language guidebooks to the Faroes, but my German isn’t really good enough to elicit the full benefit from those.
Plenty to do and no sodding time. Business as usual, in other words.
I dont think Johnny was a protagonist. I dont even think he was an anti-hero. He was a real bastard.
He’s just presented as the main character, and besides his numerous horrible qualities, you manage still to like him when hes not raping or beating women.
-geoff
Well, the definition of ‘protagonist’ is: one who takes the leading part in a drama. He was certainly that. Whether or not he is a positive character is something that has been widely debated, as Mike Leigh explains in the extra interview on the DVD.
Ah, this was just my lack of vocabulary showing thourgh. 🙂