What a busy bee I have been lately Constant Reader... film and a musical (two bits!)

On Wednesday Me and Tall Paul (I've never seen so much of the elusive bugger) went to see another double bill of Carmen Maura films which also marked the end of the brief 2nd Spanish Film Season at the Cine Lumiere. Again as on Sunday it was an evening of diminishing returns.

The first film was LA COMUNIDAD, directed by Alex de la Inglesia in 2000. I had missed it when it was first around - am I glad I finally caught up with it! A deliriously black comedy thriller which kept me on the edge of my seat when I wasn't rolling in the aisles. Carmen plays the temp estate agent Julia who, while attempting to sell an apartment in a crumbling block of flats, discovers that the flat above not only contains the decaying body of it's owner but also the 300 million Pesetas he won in the lottery. She retrieves the money and hides out in the vacant flat below. All her attempts at escaping with the money however are frustrated by the other occupants of the building who have all signed an agreement to share the money should the old man die... and they are getting more and more murderous in their desperation. Carmen won five Best Actress awards for her performance as the resourceful Julia, a role originally written for a man but changed just for her and she is quite wonderful.

I would have been more than happy to sit through it again but instead we got 800 BALAS (800 Bullets), also directed by de la Inglesia - but where LA COMUNIDAD held it's pace right up to it's cliff-hanging finale the tone of this film was so out of whack I would never have believed it was from the same director. Carmen played Laura, a leisure promoter who is so busy closing deals with her business partner (Eusebio Poncela) that she has no time for her rebellious son Carlos (Luis Castro) so he runs away to stay with the grandfather he has never met. Julian (Sancho Gracia) is an old movie stuntman from the spaghetti western days of the 1960s who lives and works in a run-down wild west 'town' frequented by easily-pleased tourists. There he, his friend Cheyanne (Angel de Andres Lopez) and fellow old-timers stagger through their routines recovering from nights of drinking, shagging the local tarts and remembering the good old days when Julian was Clint Eastwood's stunt double. When Laura discovers Carlos is not on a ski-ing trip but with the man she holds responsible for her husband's death during a failed stunt, she and her partner exact revenge by buying the land the town stands on. The stuntmen view this as the chance to have one last stand and barracade the town for a good old-fashioned shoot-out with the police - using real bullets.

Why they picked this film to close the festival and to include it as part of the Carmen Maura retrospective is beyond me - she is genetically unable to give a bad performance but she disappears for the main part of the film. I was aware most of the time of having to make a conscious effort to concentrate on the film but found my mind wandering all too easily. Fine performances from Castro and Gracia aside, it provided an opportunity to see two Maura co-stars from some of her Almodovar films: de Andres Lopez played her husband in WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? and the police detective in WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN while Poncela was the detective tracking down the killers in MATADOR as well as the lead in LAW OF DESIRE playing Carmen's film director brother stalked by a murderously obsessive Antonio Banderas. Sadly de Andres Lopez has put on some serious beef and Poncela looked like he was botoxed to within an inch of his life! A disappointing end to my Carmen festival as there are loads of films where she played lead roles.

Tonight (Thursday) Owen and I made the long journey back to Oz by way of the Apollo Victoria to see WICKED which we saw on Broadway last November and which now looks settled into the west end for a long run. I still have doubts about the show - the second act gets bogged down in a welter of plot and too many songs that sound alike and the show could do with more humour - so often you feel the ideas of Be Yourself and People Who Look Different Are The Same As You Inside are battering you over the head. However the London cast is headed by Idina Menzel, re-creating her Tony Award-winning role as Elphaba, the misunderstood girl who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West and she is quite marvellous. She can raise the roof with the first act closer "Defying Gravity" but also turn in a restrained performance of the lovelorn ballad "I'm Not That Girl", she has excellent diction while singing too which is a rarity these days. Australian Helen Dallimore is also making her London debut as Glinda the all-too-good Witch and she is fine. I also enjoyed Miriam Margoyles as the formidable Madame Morrible but missed the nasty streak Rue McLanahan gave the role. Nigel Planer as the Wizard is a major mistake however. His role is written for an actor who although not on stage for very long should also have such a charismatic persona to keep him in mind when he's not. Ben Vereen who we saw on Broadway had this and I'm sure Joel Grey had it in the original cast... but Nigel Planer? Not that there was anything wrong with his performance per se just not in this particular major role. The show also managed to produce the same hysteria at the interval and curtain calls as we witnessed in NY - boffo mitt-pounding with mad screaming. It's a girl (and show queen) thing which I can't say I fully understand. I did sneak a photo on my mobile of the rather grand stage and frontcloth tho'!