Studio Note is the creative project of Norihiko Terayama. One of his designs is a beautiful piece of jewellery for those of us who fear the cold and flowerless winter months. It's a silver brooch that doubles up as a wearable vase, meaning you can have fresh flowers near you all year round. It's rather cute, don't you think? It reminds me of a heart blooming with love, creativity or whatever else you'd like to remind yourself of when it's a bit grey outside and your mood is blue.

Norihiko says it's possible to put water into this tiny hand-crafted tube, with a damp piece of cotton wool. That way your plant of choice stays in place and has some water to drink. 

It's that scary time of year again when something as innocent as a Tatty Devine necklace turns spooky and just a little bit different. Have a happy Halloween from us all at oh comely.

It’s difficult to make something last. This is especially true with cinema, where the eddies and tides of progress are felt more keenly. A great song will sound as good when heard decades later by a new audience, but films aren’t as lucky. They have a tendency to age poorly. Some of this is down to aesthetics, which strands them in the years they were shot (a gripping drama from the late 80s is rendered ridiculous because everyone has massive hair).

More damaging to a film’s continued relevance are sea changes in acting, particularly in regards to naturalism. Unlike theatre, where a play can be imagined anew by subsequent companies of actors and directors, a film is stuck forever with the acting styles that were prevalent at the time. Performances that garnered critical and popular acclaim in the past seem too stagey by today’s standards. And there’s no line where it stops – there’s nothing to say that films made today aren’t going to seem somehow off to the audiences that follow.

The reason this is all relevant to A Dangerous Method is that the entire film hinges on its three central performances, and one of those performances is absolutely mental.

Adapted from Christopher Hampton’s stage play, A Dangerous Method is about the complicated relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), focusing on Jung’s treatment of a troubled young girl, Sabine Spielrein (Keira Knightley), and their later affair. While Mortensen and Fassbender are typically excellent, giving subtle, restrained performances, Knightley is on another plain altogether.

Throughout her career Knightley’s acting abilities has received criticism by some, but her work in A Dangerous Method is nothing if not bold. It’s a performance that’s impossible to ignore: she yells, she moans, she quivers her lips and juts out her teeth. She pounds food into mush and cackles through her throat and pulls at her skin. For much of the film Sabine is madness personified; her repulsion and shame and desire are indistinguishable and all-consuming. Regardless of whether you enjoy the performance or not, there’s something undeniably remarkable about it.

That doesn’t mean that her acting in the film is good necessarily – it’s remarkable in the strictest sense of the word. The performance is so big that it wouldn’t really be possible to discuss the film and not mention it. Whether it actually works or not is subjective; some of the most celebrated performances of cinema’s history are also the largest (significantly, they’re also the ones that receive awards). Regarding the quality of such performances, it comes down to whether you believe that accomplished acting is something that draws attention to itself or not. Even if there’s realism to be found in playing someone with such serious mental problems, Knightley is still very clearly acting. While it’s possible to appreciate the effort that’s going into the performance, that isn’t the same as inhabiting a role.

Do we want actors to inhabit roles and disappear, or do we want to see them act? There’s an argument to be made for both positions. It depends on the film, and the work of the entire cast. An outsized performance amidst more subdued ones can completely tonally unmoor a film. And yet, this unbalance can also be a deliberate decision: this seems to be the case with A Dangerous Method, where Sabine is an unpredictable, chaotic force amongst the film’s more repressed characters. As an actor, where better to express that than in the body, as Knightley does, shaking all over and trying to tear herself apart?

A Dangerous Method was screened at the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Read more of oh comely's coverage of the festival here.

We interviewed sculptor Andrew Logan in issue six of oh comely. He's an iconic creative and founder of Alternative Miss World, who loves people and lots of colour. 

Andrew was recently commissioned by Clapham Council in South London to create a public sculpture outside the local library. He has planned to make seven huge letters, spelling out 'library', and to cover them in his trademark mosaics.

Most wonderful of all, the local community has been invited to donate mementos to be incorporated in the mosaic surface. There are still a couple of days left to donate your items for use in the mosaic.  

Find out more information on the project's website.

Photo: Andrew Logan working on the mosaic heart that will hang at the entrace to Clapham Leisure Centre. © Daniel Morgan

Photo: The letter 'R' being made in FabWeld, Norwich. © Daniel Morgan

Expectations are dangerous. There can be little more damaging to how much you enjoy a film than actually hearing about its quality before you see it. To be told that a film is terrible before viewing is to plant seeds of doubt, even for the most level-headed of cinemagoers. The same works in reverse, too: if you hear that a film is amazing then at best it will only be able to meet that expectation. At worst, it will provoke a negative reaction against a film that has committed the crime of being merely very good. Hype can only bring disappointment.

Call this the King’s Speech theory. An enjoyable, if not especially remarkable film, the experience of watching The King’s Speech for latecomers must have been soured by the attendant hype and its long road to the Oscars. Instead of being pleasantly surprised by an entertaining, well-made film, they may have wondered just what the fuss was all about.

The journey of a film from surprise hit to awards season darling to critical backlash is a depressingly familiar one. It’s a journey that’s possible to glimpse in the future of The Artist. One of the most purely enjoyable films to show at this year’s London Film Festival, The Artist is a valentine to the silent era of Hollywood. A story about a film star (Jean Dujardin) who suddenly becomes undesirable in the age of talkies, it’s a funny, warm, beautifully crafted film. Despite being black-and-white and virtually dialogue-free, The Artist is so shamelessly entertaining that a wide audience seems assured. It’s the sort of film that has the chance to be a sleeper word-of-mouth hit along the lines of something like Amelie, and yet that’s also the problem.

Sometimes when something reaches a certain level of success a natural instinct is to rebel against it, and it’s easy to see how one might start to feel that way about The Artist months down the line when your grandmother has gone to see it and you keep hearing it mentioned in checkout queues. The film isn’t perfect, mostly due a second act that drags out longer than it should, and as such it wouldn’t be difficult to be disappointed by too much hype, rather than enjoying it on its own merits. If anything, the Festival was the perfect time to appreciate it, when there were suggestions of something special but not the weight of expectation that is likely to come.

Of course, nothing is certain and perhaps the film won’t click with the public in the way that it promises to. That would be a shame. The Artist is a film whose only goal is to please its audience, and it’s very good at doing this. Joyfulness is an underrated quality, and perhaps eventual oversaturation is a small price to pay in order to obtain some of it.

The Artist is being screened as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Find out more information on the film here.

If you like magazines, then you'll love Printout.

Organised by Stack and Colophon, the evening is a gathering of editors and readers and fans of independent magazines.

It's happening on 3rd November at The Bookclub, and you can expect a healthy line-up of talks on the making of magazines from Les Jones, founder of Elsie, Cathy Olmedillas of Anorak, and Gareth Main from Bearded. Music, we're excited to report, will be provided by Oh Comely!

Entry is £5 and includes a copy of the Australian publication Patterns of Creative Aggression. Find out more over on the Stack blog. 

When artist Dmitri Galitzine moved from his city life in London to the Herefordshire countryside, he got interested in the Saturday afternoon pursuits of his new neighbours. One of these was vegetable growing. In his current exhibition at Fold Gallery, he presents some of the huge specimens of marrow, celeriac and cabbage he found submitted to a local agricultural show.

Whilst cities are a hotbed of regulation-size supermarket veggies, these gargantuan legumes show us the true size of people’s passion for growing their own. In short, they put my preoccupation with frozen broccoli florets to shame.

Find the veg on show at Fold Gallery, alongside paintings on polyester by artist Toby Christian, until 30th October. 

At its heart, Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is endlessly hopeful. It’s a film about how difficult it is to connect with others, but how doing so can be a transformative, defining experience. It’s about the first time someone takes their hand in yours. As such, watching it is an uplifting, gorgeous experience: the sort of film you could watch again and again. In comparison, July’s second film, The Future, is the sort of film one might never want to see a second time.

That’s not a criticism. If MAYAEWK (to use an awkward acronym) is about the tentative first steps of a relationship, then The Future takes place sometime beyond that. The Future is about a relationship that no longer works, a relationship that due to its comfortableness and length has been taken for granted and as such has wilted with neglect. July shows how this begins, with the death of small kindnesses, the turning inward of oneself, and the creative ennui that stasis can provoke. It’s an everyday experience but no less horrible for it, and one that everyone encounters eventually. In its own way The Future is more wrenching than any kitchen sink drama because it’s about the horror of how the most lovely thing in your life can wither before your eyes, and then disappear, and then life just continues as if it was never there at all.

It might seem strange to describe The Future as wrenching considering that its narrator is a cat, or that it contains a sequence in which an old tee-shirt slowly crawls back to its owner, or in which a girl buries herself in her back garden. These whimsical touches may distance some from the film, and it’s a shame because these surreal moments never exist purely for the sake of quirkiness alone. Instead they work as metaphors for the emotional states of the characters, showing a fragile openness that’s easy to overlook or laugh away.

There’s a deep sadness to all of Miranda July’s work that’s sorely underrated: as an author and filmmaker she’s painfully honest about how lonely you can feel when you’re with another person. Do you stay in your comfortable, threadbare relationship or risk the strangeness and terror of something new? At a certain point one has to try and forget about how twee the idea of a cat narrator is (and it is so very, very twee), and instead place a bit of trust in what July is trying to accomplish. If you do that then you’ll find a reflection of yourself, or at least the version of you that wakes up at three in the morning and can’t drift off again, troubled because the person lying next to you became a stranger while you slept.

The Future is being screened as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Find out more information on the film here.