Paul Attinello

Category: Film

  • All of Us Strangers: a comment

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    paulattinello
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    All of Us Strangers (2023), a film that I found absolutely amazing… Alexander Haigh is the cute-bearish writer and director of Weekend (2011), which was also amazing, in a way that had some parallels – layered, complexly real dialogue, a love of men who are in love, bodies and feelings and memory and loss, and…

  • Temporal

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    paulattinello
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    Perhaps the problem is one of time… Yes, I am influenced by finally (i.e., at a later point in time than anticipated within the implied framework of some unspecified but apparently familiar system of planning) seeing Arrival. But also wandering through spaces of analysis, self-reflection, mild illness, trying to get some writing done. Late, of course. Time…

  • Easter

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    paulattinello
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    On the one hand, longer days, sunlight, a still-chilly and intermittent promise of spring. On the other HCV medications, confusions, changing demands, papers to write – Behind it all is still a greater calm, dreams that tend to move through anxiety to relief and resolution. Not an imagined change, clearly a real one… But no,…

  • To Züri

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    paulattinello
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    A busy, rapidly moving ten days or so, resulting in numerous things done – patients, classes, editing, emails – and also at some points just stopping, almost startled that I didn't want to work on the next thing. My new version of procrastination, I think: something barer, simpler – with far less anxiety. Perhaps this…

  • Rocky Horror

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    paulattinello
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    Between Christmas and New Year… Tonight we showed yet another musical at the Tyneside Café, our regular Sunday night event, which is linked to teaching my course on musicals – something I'm teaching for the first time in ten years, to my surprise, as I discovered when I looked through old records. Musicals are, to…

  • Solstice

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    In the dark of the year, I had the task of introducing one of our series of movie musicals at a local café. We'd chosen Meet Me in St. Louis – always an odd one: sentimental, structured – but at the same time there are strange, dark eruptions into the story: the youngest daughter in…

  • For Jarman

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    paulattinello
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    In April 2010, I gave a presentation about Derek Jarman, where I worked through The Garden, Edward II, and Blue, showing the closeness to death in each film. Or maybe: not just showing. When I polished the presentation to give in New Orleans, I felt close to something…. I promised, last year, to turn the…

  • South

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    … a conference in New Orleans. On an airplane, headed from northern England, via Amsterdam and Atlanta, to the real heart of the very South. Unfortunately, I keep being surprised at the sloppy, smelly American passengers in my last couple of air trips to the States – and they always seem to be so loud,…

  • Packing

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    paulattinello
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    … no, not *that* kind. I'm off to Zürich in an hour – the Jung-Institut, seminars, and my first series of exams. The weather is very warm there at the moment – entirely unlike here; trying to pack a variety of things, of course. Do you remember Sunday Bloody Sunday? Peter Finch and the incredible…

  • … double vision…

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    paulattinello
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    It is years since I've seen this… A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir… and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you…