An Affair to Remember

a film by Leo McCarey

I never understood the Hollywood’s obsession with remakes. That includes self-remakes. What’s the point? In 1939, McCarey directed Love Affair starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. According to Wikipedia, it was Cary Grant who convinced McCarey to remake it starring himself in Boyer’s role. Why did McCarey agree, is anyone’s guess. The result “was almost identical to the original on a scene-to-scene basis” — quite a change for a director known for his improvisational approach.

Back in 1957, Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that “something goes wrong with the picture, after the couple get off the ship”. And he was right, if too polite: practically everything goes wrong after that point. Which is a shame, because I quite liked Cary Grant — Deborah Kerr interaction onboard the liner. Considering that the titular affair wasn’t really an affair, even though the rest of the passengers were convinced otherwise (it would be so much nicer if it was the other way around, but c’est la vie, et cetera), the authors could have developed the comedy of errors further or, better still, concluded it right after disembarkment. That would spare the viewers, who might have remembered how the original Love Affair ended anyway, one full hour of sheer embarrassment.

The last funny scene in the movie which I think better should have been simply the last.

For a really good McCarey film starring Grant, I recommend The Awful Truth.

An Affair to Remember (as Tú y yo — why?!) was shown as part of the cycle 90 años de la 20th Century Fox organised by Asociación de Cine Vértigo.

Free live music and stuff in Las Palmas, November 2025

What we’ve seen in November:

• 6 November: «Con el Latido de la Madre Tierra» @ Castillo de la Luz, Calle Juan Rejón, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
  A concert of La Banda Sinfónica Municipal de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria conducted by Teresa Hernández Vega. The programme included works by Alfred Reed, Satoshi Yagisawa, Giancarlo Castro D’Addona, Jesús Agomar and Moisés Moleiro.

  

• 8 November: «Calles con Arte» @ Calle Taliarte and Calle Guaires, La Isleta
  A Saturday full of cultural activities, all just a block away from us. We went to see pole dance by No Limits Pole Dance Studios; tango dance by Abrazos en movimiento accompanied by Atorrantes Tango Club; Bollywood dance workshop with Lavina Saradangani; and «El coro de La Luz» by Chelys Odalis.

  

• 11 November: Taller de danzas folklóricas venezolanas @ Casa de Colón, Calle Colón, 1
  The first event from the cycle «Américas» organised by Casa de Colón and produced by Tájara producciones: a Venezuelan dance workshop by the Asociación Cultural Cambur Pintón.

  

• 13 November: Conciertos de música popular venezolana @ Casa de Colón
  Mestizo feauturing Marcel Montcourt (cuatro venezolano), Danny Martínez (guitar), Óscar Sánchez (flute), Kiko González (percussion), Winter Sánchez (double bass) and Adrián Brito (vocals), plus a special guest Claudia Álamo (vocals).

• 14 November: «Américas» @ Plaza del Pilar Nuevo
  With crowd-pleasers such as Libertango, Oblivion and Tico Tico, La Banda Sinfónica Municipal de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria conducted by Juan Roda Sapiña closed the cycle «Américas».

• 18 November: Arrorró solidario @ Casa de Colón
  Featuring Guada Márquez, Ángel Ravelo, Luis Quintana, Sixto Armas, Esther Rodríguez, Helena González, Sylvie Hernández, Daniel Lamb, Cinzia Mare, Marta Bolaños, Cira Rodríguez, Tite Fernández, Misael Jordán and others. Presented by Tonono González and Nanda Santana.

  

• 27 November: «Una noche vieja» @ Biblioteca Pública Municipal Josefina de la Torre, Paseo de las Canteras
  A very amateur comedy performed by Teatro Mínimo XXI. The audience was full of Rabbit’s friends-and-relations. Everybody was given a cup with twelve grapes, which was nice.

  

Is it the end of November already? Unbelievable.

The Köln Concert

by Keith Jarrett

Can you think of any jazz album that has not one but two films dedicated to it? I can’t either. Unless it’s The Köln Concert, that is.

Köln 75 is a German drama focused on Vera Brandes, a (then 18-year-old) German producer who was responsible for the concert taking place at all. The film was actually shown in mainstream Spanish theatres, sometime in July, but it passed me by. Damn.

And Köln Tracks, aka Lost in Köln, is a French documentary tracking (or losing?) that notorious Bösendorfer piano played and hated by Mr Jarrett on 24 January 1975. It is supposed to be released about now.

So these are tributes that I didn’t see. What about The Köln Concert itself? I discovered it about 30 years ago, thanks to The Penguin Guide to Jazz which I used to borrow from the Leeds Central Library on a regular basis. The Guide gave the album four stars of four and said ^*:

This is perhaps Jarrett’s best and certainly his most popular record. ECM has been dining out or, to be fairer, recording others on the proceeds for over a decade^†. Made in conditions of exceptional difficulty — not least an audibly unsatisfactory piano — Jarrett not for the first time makes a vurtue of adversity, carving out huge slabs of music with a rare intensity. His insturment does sound off-puttingly bad-tempered, but his concentration on the middle register throughout the performance has been a characteristic of his work throughout his carreer.

Armed with this knowledge, I embarked on a search — and found the CD in the very same library. The concert didn’t disappoint. And the piano didn’t sound half that bad. Some years later, I bought my own copy directly from ECM, further contributing to the album’s bestselling status.

It so happened that on the 50^th anniversary of the concert, Friday 24 January, I was listening to the Sólo Jazz programme of Spanish Radio Clásica. Curiously, the authors of this golden jubilee programme chose to play the concert in the following order: Part II c; Part I; Part II b. The result? I heard the old concert with new ears, and it was as beautiful.

I can understand why Jarrett himself is not a fan: a true artist rightfully refuses to be defined by a half-century-old LP as if he didn’t record anything decent since. But I am not Keith Jarrett. I love this “huge slab of music”. If the author wants to disown it, let him do it. I’d put it on the next Voyager Golden Record as an example of what an (anonymous) human musician can do.

*	Cook, R. and Morton, B. The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, LP and Cassette, 2nd Ed. Penguin Books, London, 1994, p. 682.
†	In later editions, “for over a decade” was changed to “for two decades”; see e.g. The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, 8th Ed. Penguin Books, London, 2006, p. 697.

A Night at the Opera

by Queen

Squeezed uneasily between Sheer Heart Attack (IMHO the best Queen album, period) and A Day at the Races (the first Queen album I heard in its entirety so I can’t be objective), A Night at the Opera is that proverbial “second part of the trilogy”: grandiose but ultimately disappointing. Besides, it has a fatal flaw, for a prog-rock record anyway: a hit song that everybody knows, to the detriment of the rest of the album. (You might recall I said the same about Machine Head, and I’ll say it again.) Luckily for those of us who still listen to rock albums in correct order, you can stop it right after Good Company. Try it.

The opener, Death on Two Legs, is a diss track par excellence. I loved it before I could understand the lyrics. (Now that I do understand it, I prefer Rata de dos patas.) I’m in Love with My Car is a great number by Taylor (is that the “open car” he was asking for in Tenement Funster, I wonder). ’39 is a space shanty all future astronauts should learn in kindergarten. The Prophet’s Song is an epic. Cheesy lyrics notwithstanding, You’re My Best Friend actually has got soul — check out the Astro Samurai cover for that soul dimension. The same could be said about Love of My Life, except this latter practically asks to be made fun of by a barbershop quartet. This Russian-language parody from the 1986 Soviet TV show «Весёлые ребята» does just that.

My favourites though are the three retro songs (they were retro already 50 years ago): Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon, Seaside Rendezvous and Good Company.

As for Bohemian Rhapsody, it fared really well for a single, so I think that’s how it should have stayed. Perhaps naming a 2018 biopic after it was not the best idea but it perfectly illustrates that by now — and this “now” has started long time ago — it’s more a cultural reference than a song. There are zillions of covers but for me the Father Noel Furlong’s version and that by Chirigota Los Quemasangre are the best.

Le otto montagne

a film by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch
based on a novel by Paolo Cognetti

Так оставьте ненужные споры, Я себе уже всё доказал — Лучше гор могут быть только горы, На которых ещё не бывал. Владимир Высоцкий, «Прощание с горами»

The Eight Mountains is a long film of indescribable beauty that is worth every second. Consider it a 147-minute-long Song About a Friend. Watch it on a big screen with no distractions.

Starring Alessandro Borghi as Bruno and Luca Marinelli as Pietro. Le otto montagne closed the third edition of the cycle Tiempo de memoria, memoria en el tiempo organised by Instituto Canario de Desarrollo Cultural (ICDC).

House of Bamboo

a film by Samuel Fuller

Good thing I didn’t watch the utterly ridiculous official trailer before heading to the cinema. Starring Robert Ryan as Sandy, Robert Stack as Eddie, and Yoshiko Yamaguchi as Mariko, this 70-year-old movie has its share of dumb moments, but is saved by a few bits of comedy.

According to Wikipedia,

For many years after its initial release, the film was seen only on television in pan-and-scan prints, leading people to believe that DeForest Kelley has a small role near the end of the film. When Fox finally struck a new 35 mm CinemaScope print for a film festival in the 1990s, viewers were surprised to see that Kelley is in the film all the way through; he was just always off to one side and thus had been panned out of the frame.

House of Bamboo was screened as part of the cycle 90 años de la 20th Century Fox organised by Asociación de Cine Vértigo.

Seven short films

The screening of Latin American documentary shorts organised by Asociación ProDocumentales Cine y TV and Casa de Colón. La Sombra de Don Roberto is probably the most powerful film of the lot but my favourite was Mini Cine Tupy.

El Tambor Mayor by Carlos Lamaitre (Bolivia, 1999) Los Ojos de la Habana by Osvaldo Daicich (Argentina—Cuba, 2000) Road Coffee by Ricardo Benet (Mexico, 1997/2000) Mini Cine Tupy by Sergio Bloch (Brazil, 2003) Comadronas, guardianas de la salud by Rafael Quinteros González (Guatemala, 2004) PTT by Alicia Mata Tur (Venezuela, 2010) La Sombra de Don Roberto by Juan Diego Spoerer and Håkan Engström (Chile—Sweden, 2006)