Knitting, and more...

Such a treat - a whole day of knitting. This morning there was the monthly meeting of the Inner-City Branch of the NSW Knitters Guild, and this afternoon, after a meander through The Rocks, via the convict-hewn Argyle Cut



and past views of the Harbour Bridge,



a get-together to mark World-Wide Knit in Public Day.



We had around 90 people gathering in the charmingly old-fashioned community hall lent for the day by the Sydney City Council. Sally had organised everything so well, and we had generously donated prizes for competitions and just for attending. Good company, lots of chat, and time to knit. Lovely.

All this knitting has given me a day's respite from the film festival, and some time to process last night's film. Like Jody, I saw Michael Winterbottom's 'The Killer Inside Me'. Winterbottom's clearly a very gifted film-maker who works across many different genres. With this film he tries his hand at film noir and captures the suspense and the macho laconic characteristics of such films well. Casey Affleck plays a small-town deputy sheriff whose encounter with a sex-worker (Jessica Alba) with a taste for violent sex sets off a set of associations that leads to further violence, deception and murder. I have quite a high tolerance for violence in movies, but this film is uncomfortable. There's a very fine line for movies such as this one between depicting the 'reality' of extreme violence and titillating the audience through its depiction. I'm not sure that Winterbottom always stays on the right side of such a line in this film. It's very disturbing because much of the violence in this film is against women, and often shows the women, as well as the Affleck character, to take sexual pleasure in violence and abuse. The film's led to much interesting discussion and critique.

So, a disturbing and interesting film with a great performance from Casey Affleck - even though I wanted to shout at him to stop mumbling! There was often only tenuous integration of more peripheral characters into the plot, and motivation for the truly awful acts of violence was treated most cursorily. Maybe a 3.5.

I've a very full day of film festivaling tomorrow - four films on my program.