Television started out well tonight, but the decent programs fizzled out, and I turned to Amazon Prime. Where, I'd already established, my film list was throwing up The Legend of the Ugly King, a documentary about a groundbreaking Turkish film director. So I decided to watch that.
Unlike other documentaries I've seen, this mainly takes the form of anecdotes from people who knew the guy, or met him briefly. We get some nice shots from Cannes, where he won the Palme d'Or, and there's interesting talk of him shooting inside a prison. We hear a lot from his daughter, who tells us how, when they were kids, they had to pretend to be Colombian. And we learn that he was Kurdish, and heavily involved in politics.
The anecdotes are interesting, but not meaty enough to sustain an entire film - I kept waiting for a structure that never arrives. When we finally get to see clips from his films - gee, they look like B-movies to me! Not good ones, either. I just couldn't get what everyone was so excited about. Now, Storm Francis is passing over - torrential rain, again - and that might be what disturbed the internet connection: but when the film paused briefly because of lack of signal, I took it as a sign, and gave up on what had turned out to be a disappointing film.
With nothing online on Meetup for Saturday - apart from something on the BBC iPlayer, which I can't access here - I'm thinking film again. With several at the same IMDB rating, what stands out to me on the list is Repulsion, the Roman Polanski film starring Catherine Deneuve as a young woman, seriously disturbed by sexual fantasies..
And on Sunday, London Social Detours is hosting a "virtual visit to the Galapagos", complete with a chat about Charles Darwin. So, off I go again with them. Includes a quiz, apparently, for which the prize is one of the millions of books the organiser says her house is full of. Hmm..
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