Film Fans at Fed, Followed by Frights!

Today, I got up at a reasonable hour and chatted with Christie for a bit over a cup of tea. It was a sunny morning so we went and sat out in the back yard. I then went inside and helped him with his computer, as he was having some problems (user error!). Niamph appeared, had a cuppa with us, then headed off to work and Christie followed shortly afterwards.

A couple of cups of tea later, Matt and I went to the tram stop and headed to the city. As usual I got excited when we went past the funky art-deco Maccas which I like to look at whenever I go on the tram. On arrival in the city, we noticed a lot of hub-bub in Smith Street – there were people everywhere plus a lot of big trucks, it didn’t take us long to work out it was some sort of film crew doing something filming-related, but we couldn’t quite make out what.

We walked from Flinders Street to South Wharf – the shopping centre inside the Crown casino. I hadn’t been there before and it was quite exciting! We went to JB Hifi to see if they had a slightly obscure DVD I had been after and the woman explained that they had sold their only two copies that very same morning, which was both a rather strange coincidence and a bit annoying! We then took a wander about some of the other shops and through the casino, which was filled to the brim with pokies and all sorts of other gambling-related activity, which I had no idea about. You could see people who looked like they’d been sat there for days on end. All the flashing lights and plinky-plonky sounds were doing my head in, so we made a quick exit.

Next we took along the wharf by the exhibition centre and I was surprised at how pretty it was – I had never walked on this side of the water before and it was a lot nicer than the other side, especially in the sunshine.

We wandered back up and met my friend Nic at Flinders Street – it was so nice seeing her again – and went off to find a quick spot of lunch on Fed Square. She had also seen the film crew and had walked past, asked someone and discovered that it was filming for a new De Niro film, but she hadn’t seen the man himself either! The three of us then moseyed on over to ACMI to see the Tim Burton exhibition that I had been so keen to visit. As it was still school holidays, it was rather busy, but good nonetheless, although a little annoying that it wasn’t possible to take photographs.

The exhibition wasn’t entirely what I expected, although I am not altogether sure what I had expected. It seemed to focus heavily on his artwork, which was very cool indeed and it kind of told his life story as you went through the exhibit, from his childhood attempts at design and film making, through to his work for Disney, then his own films. Some of the pieces were fascinating and what I liked was when I saw a creature or concept he had created when he was younger, that I could recognise as something he had gone back to and used in his own films at a later date. There were some models and costumes from some of his films including Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks, Alice in Wonderland Batman. There was a tunnelled section to walk through which was lit with black light, so we had fun in there; once we’d looked at all the images and models, we pulled out all sorts of different things from our bags to see what they’d look like under the black lighting.

Once we’d been through the whole exhibit, we went to the ACMI screening rooms and found some of Tim Burton’s early short films. We watched the ones he’d made as a teenager and they were not brilliant, but funny to watch nonetheless.

We popped to Little Cupcakes for a coffee and mini cupcake, then Nic headed back and Matt and I hopped on a tram back to Thornbury. When we got in, Niamph was home and wanted to know all about the Tim Burton exhibition, so we chatted about it over a cup of tea.

In the evening the four of us went to the cinema at Northfield, with the intention of seeing Toy Story 3D, but when we got there, it was absolutely heaving with people, in particular families and then we realised that perhaps trying to see a kids’ film in the school holidays wasn’t such a great idea. There wasn’t much else on, so we changed the plan and headed back to the house, via the chippy, supie and video shop – deciding that a movie at home would be a safer bet. We ended up with two movies; ‘Is Anybody There?’ (a British film with Michael Caine) and ‘Paranormal Activity’.

Back at the house, someone had the great idea of watching the Caine one first – it was actually a really good film; a drama about a family who run an old people’s home with a boy obsessed with trying to record the dead. We then watched Paranormal Activity – a stupid film about a demon haunting a house, but although it was silly and not a lot happened, it still managed to freak me out. I wished we’d watched them the other way around as I went to sleep being scared of demons!