Matrices
23 May

So the week of birthday celebrations has continued apace.

I took myself down to the Liverpool Museum one lunchtime as a special treat so that I could have a quick lunch there and perhaps a little potter round. I've not been in the place since it re-opened after hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of re-development. Suffice it to say that I was bitterly disappointed. The canteen was poor in the extreme and the displays were meagre and poorly laid out. Goodness only know where the money has been spent.

Wednesday night gave us the premier of Matrix Reloaded - or rather the selected preview screening which we attended. I was glad of having watched my CD of first film last weekend as it helped a great deal in making sense of it all.

It's going to be an enormous hit so anything I say is sort of irrelevant. So, it doesn't matter that I enjoyed myself and think that it is a really good and entertaining film. Yes, it gets a bit up its own arse with the portentous philosophising and the over-use of religious symbolisms and some of the fight sequences went on for moments too long but, hey, it was a small price to pay for a film that does have some intelligence besides the special effects.

And Keanu is gorgeous and still good looking with all his clothes off. He's forty next year. Good grief. For that reason alone, it's worth four stars.

I took Friday off in advance of the Bank Holiday and to give Ross and I some time together before he heads off to his parents for a week. We took the opportunity to go over to Salford to visit the new Imperial War Museum North - a building designed by architect of the moment, Daniel Libeskind. The site is a triumph. Like all great concepts it is deceptively simple. It takes the idea of a shattered globe which represents the way that war has devastated our world. Three dramatic entities or shards represent the three arenas of war - land, sea and air. The whole is contained within a military style complex which has all sorts of resonances of Cold War Berlin.

If the main museum in London has its emphasis of the Imperial - nice uniforms, heroic deeds, veneration if not glorification of the militaristic - then this collection has its emphasis is on the human cost of war. It is simple, provocative and of a size which is not overwhelming and yet is engaging enough for me to want to return.

I'm happy to pass on a good four stars.

Less captivating were the exhibitions at the Lowry. There were some rooms of Lowry's paintings of landscapes done throughout his life as he travelled around. I've come to the heretical conclusion that I don't much like Lowry's work. I find it very cold and unloving, very bleached in terms of colour and temperament, abstracted out into pure shape and then taken back towards architectural and human form so that the works are somewhere between cartoon and geometry. I know that he's loved by many but I can only offer two stars.

In another gallery room was an exhibition of contemporary Ghanaian art which I'd spotted at the Oriel Mostyn Gallery when we were in Llandudno last year. Thinking about it, it will not be long before we are back there again for Handel's Jephtha and Mozart's Don Giovanni. We already know that 2004 will give us Carmen and a new La Traviata. Which is somewhat like wishing you life away but also feels like the security of well laid plans and the comfort of routine. Anyhow, the exhibition was much more colourful and lively. I still don't feel moved to give more than two stars, however. Maybe, we'd already seen too much and it would have felt better viewed in a small gallery in Llandudno.

We ended the week with 28 Days Later - a virus-based post-apocalyptic thriller written by Alex Garland (of The Beach) and directed by Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting) - seminal works both.

This was well into the George Romero zombie genre with a contemporary twist. Really it was about being a stranger in a strange land. That being a way of taking a sideways glance at ourselves. Think of Gulliver's Travels. Think of Pilgrim's Progress. Anyhow, it was genuinely involving and appropriately scary in places. I kept wondering who the lead reminded me of until his character took a shave and then I suddenly placed Cillian Murphy as the idealistic character in The Way We Live Now. I'm inclined to give it a well deserved four stars.