Grounded

I'm sure this guy hadn't landed on the beach -- it seems implausible that he could get to the takeoff site without using a vehicle. I expect he was just practising -- I've seen people a few times on the beach practising letting air into the sail and then letting it out again.

The day followed the usual Groundhog Day pattern: walk in the morning, Spanish lesson, reading on the terrace, and today a little walk in the evening. The daily applause has petered out though. Last night there were only four of us, and tonight Vuvuzela Guy evidently decided it wasn't worth showing up. We've come to rely on him to let us know when it's time, so this is probably the end, for our barrio at least.

Last night's film from the Barcelona D'A festival was The Twentieth Century, a Canadian film from director Matthew Rankin. If the French film Chambre 212 was quirky, this one was completely bonkers. Despite the title, it was set in the late 19th century. it was a "biopic" of long-serving Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. If you look him up in Wikipedia, he might seem quite dull. But the film featured foot fetishism, cross-dressing, the Boer War, Quebec separatism, and a Monty Python-like competition to become Prime Minister which featured ribbon-cutting, identifying trees by their smell, a leg-wrestling contest, and whack-a-mole with baby seals instead of moles. Among many other very weird things. 


The film was shot on super-8 and 16mm, channeling Monty Python (as above), German expressionism, and maybe a tad of Powell and Pressburger. Goodness knows what Rankin was on when he made this, but it must have affected the backers too. It was, er, interesting in a car-crash way; another film that will make a splash and then disappear I think. You might need to be Canadian to appreciate it.