weeknotes #16
Weeknotes 13/04/2026 - 19/04/2026
Finally caught up with these, I'm determined to have 52 by the end of the year. This one is very film focussed.
Things I've done ✎ᝰ.📓🗒 ˎˊ˗
- Still feeling lowkey ill. So a lot of sitting on the sofa watching Elementary and playing various games.
Films (and TV) 🍿🎥✮⋆˙
I watched Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004), Rose of Nevada (2025) and Being There (1979).
Firstly I should tell you Sex lives Of The Potato Men has an average 1 star rating on Letterboxd. It feels like an overlong randy sitcom episode with a lot of laddish gross-out humour. Not as sexist as it could have been because the female characters are just as filthy. However, I did get an oddly comforting sense of nostalgia from it because it's so early 2000s British in a way we don't make any more (which is a good thing, don't get me wrong). So I do not recommend, but have to admit to not hating it.
Rose of Nevada is about Cornish fishermen, and also about the melding of time, past and future. The director Mike Jenkin films on 16mm film stock and it really works for me, feeling like a part of the film's folk horror. Unfortunately, the director q&a made me like the film less (what do you mean film shouldn't comment on society?? you're making a film comparing a deprived Cornish fishing village in the present day vs the boom time in the 90s?? It has a food bank in it??) and the very aesthetic style can come off as impersonal, but the performances pulled it through for me.
I'd heard of Being There: a 1979 film where Peter Sellars' simple-minded gardener, Chance, gets exposed to the outside world and immediately falls upwards, lauded as a political visionary. So when I saw it on BBC Iplayer I put it on. It's a great film, satirical, gentle and bleak. As the black maid who raised Chance says, seeing him on TV, "it really is a white man's world!" - but you also can't help feeling for him, a naïve idiot who no-one understands. It's a great performance. Shirley MacLaine is also luminous in this. I liked it a lot.
I've been feeling 🫀🩹🥀❤️🩹
Really struggling with my job and feeling more trapped than ever, but my mood hasn't been as unmanageable recently. I still don't know how to get myself out of this rut.
I'm looking forward to
The weekends, mostly.
I've been reading 🍵📖
I'm still reading Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, for blook club.
Extras
I don't have anything extra for you this week :(
See you next week 👋