Friday 25 June 2010

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010 - Monday 21st to Friday 25th June

This is my last day in Edinburgh and I'm dog-tired.

The last few days have been a bit of a blur and I'm aware that I haven't been keeping up with this blogging lark the way I should. But that's what happens I guess when you spend all your time sitting in a dark room watching films. I've been putting in 12 hour days at the festival, averaging about 7 films a day. At some point I may even get around to writing proper reviews for them.

I've seen good films (Winter's Bone, The Secret in their Eyes, Yo, Tambien). I've seen bad films (Chase the Slut, brilliantlove, Vacation!). And I've seen more than a couple of mediocre films (Skeletons, Thelma, Louise and Chantal, almost every Brit flick). I've seen films made by people I was at film school (and there's nothing worse than being forced to admit, even if only to yourself, that they're quite good). And I've seen a couple of films which have featured auto-erotic asphyxia quite prominently (brilliantlove and World's Greatest Dad).

Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait (who memorably played the squeak-voiced loon in the Police Academy films, the one who wasn't Steve Guttenberg), World's Greatest Dad is a pitch-black comedy which follows sad-sack teacher and failed writer Robin Williams as he turns his teenage porn addict son's masturbatory mishap into a suicide, faking a suicide note and confessional journal which give the frankly despicable little pervert depth and a tortured nobility in the process. As events spiral beyond his control, Williams finds himself having to tell bigger and bigger lies and also gets a taste of the success he's always dreamed of. It may not be as funny or as taboo-busting as it thinks it is but the film does have some pant-wettingly funny moments and features Robin Williams' best performance in twenty years.


Tuesday 22 June 2010

Edinburgh International Film Festival Saturday 19th & Sunday 20th Part 2

One film that really taps into the darkness and magic of Edinburgh is Scottish werewolf movie Outcast. A mysterious pair of Irish travellers, mother and son Mary and Fergal, settle into ghetto life on one of Edinburgh's less salubrious high-rise estates where Fergal catches the eye of ballsy local beauty Petronella (the excellent Hanna Stanbridge) and romance blossoms. But as night falls, something is tearing the locals to pieces and two menacing strangers (Ciaran McMenamin and James Nesbitt) are closing in on Mary and Fergal...

While it doesn't make a lick of sense, Outcast is a ferocious little horror movie, a dark adult fairy tale where the deep, dark woods the beast stalks is our modern urban wasteland. Professional leprechaun James Nesbitt is positively unhinged as the werewolf hunter who's hairier than the beastie he's after and newcomer Hanna Stanbridge is gorgeous and fiesty as the damsel who's perfectly able to save herself.

Based on a true story, Austria's The Robber is a breathless, kinetic crime thriller whose existentialist protagonist, a marathon running bank robber, seems to be in constant motion, propelled by fate, circumstances and his own single-minded compulsions, towards a doom that's both avoidable and inevitable. Andreas Lust is magnetic in the title role and the chemistry between him and love interest Franziska Weisz is palpable, hinting at redemption even as events close in on them.

Proving there's a reason why most underground filmmakers never make it overground, John Michael McCarthy's Cigarette Girl takes one good idea (it's the future and cigarettes are outlawed, available only in the dodgy pat of town where they change hands for $63 a pack) and a charismatic lead (fiesty Goth babe Cori Dials) and builds a film around them that is little more than an excuse to pour the statuesque Dials into "a corset that could stop a bullet or start a conversation" and have her run from one posing opportunity to another as she cleans up the mean streets of the near-future Memphis.

A triumph of bad acting, bad writing and lacklustre direction, the only possible reason for watching this movie is if you like to see tattooed, pistol-packing Goth chicks in pose in corsets and fetish heels.

Which is pretty much why I watched it too.

Monday 21 June 2010

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010 so far - Saturday 19th & Sunday 20th June Part 1

At the moment I've got more time than money so I get the night-train to Edinburgh.

Finish work at 5 on Friday, run around like a headless chicken, trying to pack a laptop and a week's worth of clothes into too small a bag. Get the train from London Euston. Stuck next to the weirdest couple on the train. A Pinball Wizard in his 30s and his mother, heading home after some kind of pinball tournament. Unfortunately, unlike the song, he ain't deaf, dumb and blind. In fact he never shuts up.

And there's something weird about his relationship with his mother.

They seem a little too familiar.

They're not snogging or anything but...you get the feeling they have in the past.

At one point, reading aloud the onboard menu, she says "Blueberry muffin...What's a muffin?" I don't wait for his reply, I head for the bar, buy a couple of brandys, take a sleeping tablet and wake up 7 hours later in Edinburgh.

I love Edinburgh. It's one of the few cities I've ever been to that actually has an identity of its own. It's full of nooks and crannies, hidden places. For centuries its streets have been walked by rogues and vagabonds, scientists and thinkers, royalty and capitalists, body-snatchers and witches. Bodybuilding milkmen. And above the streets broods the Castle, glowering down on Princes Street, on the tramworks that have brought the city to a standstill, the middle-class hausfraus ducking from Jenner's to Marks & Spencers, the Big Issue sellers and the pipers, here a piper, there a piper, everywhere a piper. It's no wonder that JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter here. The place just has magic.

It's a shame this year's Edinburgh Film Festival programme isn't quite as magical.

10 films in and the first film I saw, The Last Rites Of Ransom Pride, is, so far, the best. A grimy, doom-laden Western, The Last Rites Of Ransom Pride is almost a feminist revision of Sam Peckinpah with True Blood's Lizzy Caplan heading down Mexico way to claim the body of her dead lover, outlaw Ransom Pride (Scott Speedman) from voodoo priestess Bruja (Cote de Pablo). Along the way she's aided by Ransoms's callow brother, aging buffalo soldier Sergeant (Blu Mankuma), a pair of Siamese twins and a shotgun-toting dwarf (the ever brilliant Peter Dinklage) while trying to stay one step ahead of Ransom's vengeful father, the Reverend (Dwight Yoakum), hired gun Shepherd (Kris Kristofferson) and a pair of murderous bounty hunters (Deadwood's W Earl Brown and an unrecognisable Jason Priestley). Dark and violent, The Last Rites Of Ransom Pride is a brooding meditation on the passing of the Old West. And in case you haven't been paying attention, it has a shotgun-toting dwarf. What more does a film need?

How about former child stars getting sapphic in their undies? The Runaways, Floria Sigismondi's breathless bio-pic of the all-girl rock band, is a guilty pleasure, charting the band's meteoric rise and just as speedy disintegration. Professional sulky face Kristen Stewart plays creative driving force Joan Jett as the sulky teenager she no doubt was in the 70s while Dakota Fanning fills the fishnets of singer Cherie Currie. I defy you not to feel like a dirty old man.

Danish prison drama R is a nasty short, sharp, shock to the system which revisits all the usual cliches of prison movies, painting a very different picture of incarceration to that of Porridge. If Ronnie Barker's Fletcher did his time in Denmark he'd probably have been raped, beaten and had boiling oil thrown in his face in the 1st week.

While its frank, explicit sex scenes will ensure that Ashley Horner's brilliantlove will probably be the most controversial film of the Festival, brilliantlove just wasn't that brilliant. But I suppose mediocreshitewithpointlessnudity would've been too literal a title. It's the steamy tale of two idiots who live in a garage and shag a lot. She's a taxidermist who stuffs the birds a local cat leaves for them. He's a photographer who gets discovered when he gets drunk and leaves snaps of her vagina in the pub. He's seduced by the Art Establishment, she gets mildly miffed that now everybody has seen her fanny. There. I've just saved you 97 minutes of your life. No need to thank me, just use them wisely.

Saturday 19 June 2010

If you go down to the woods today… - Rashomon

One of the very few films that can genuinely be considered a work of genius, Rashomon is probably the most important landmark in narrative cinema since a gurning Al Jolson excitedly told the audience “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Winner of both an honorary Oscar and the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, it’s the film that introduced the world to Japanese cinema and it’s still the best thing you’ll see this Summer when a digitally restored print will be released in time for director Akira Kurosawa’s centenary.

In feudal Japan, three very different men, a monk, a commoner and a woodcutter, shelter from the rain and discuss a recent court case; a case that has shaken the monk’s faith in humanity. A samurai (Masayuki Mori) and his wife (Machiko Kyo) are travelling through the forest when they’re attacked by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune). The wife is raped, the samurai killed, the bandit caught. These facts are beyond dispute but as each participant including, via a medium (in scenes of near hysterical horror that could give the Ringu movies a run for their money), the murdered husband, gives their own wildly different account of the incident, the question becomes what really happened in the woods that afternoon?

The genius of Rashomon is that it never gives you a definitive answer. What’s really on trial isn’t Mifune’s bandit but the very concept of objective truth itself. Essentially we are given four flawed accounts of what happened (the wife’s, the bandit’s, the samurai’s and the eyewitness account of the woodcutter) but each account contradicts the others: Was the samurai’s death murder or the result of a duel? Or the suicide of a proud man? Was the wife raped or did she give herself passionately to the bandit? Was the fight between the samurai and the bandit a balletic clash of skilled, honourable equals or a grubby scrap between two scared, desperate men? Was there even a fight at all? The perceptions of each protagonist skew their testimony; they unconsciously embellish their tales in their own favour. None of them is flat-out lying. Truth is subjective. In his memoir Something Like An Autobiography, Kurosawa reflects “Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves,” Rashomon is built on the lies we tell ourselves that allow us to look at the face in the mirror.

While Masayuki Mori is a model of Japanese stoicism and subtlety as the doomed samurai his wife, played by Machiko Kyo, swings wildly from shamed innocence through hysteria to cold, calculating temptress depending on whose eyes she’s seen through. Kurosawa’s alter ego, the brilliant Toshiro Mifune, gives a barnstorming performance as the swaggering bandit. A creature of lecherous appetite, he is a lusty, vigorous presence, his sweaty, animal physicality overpowering the screen but hinting at the insecurity and desire that drives this almost elemental force of nature. Though Mifune dominates the film, it is Takashi Shimura’s flawed but fundamentally decent woodcutter that illicits our sympathies, a man trying to survive in a hostile world without losing his humanity, he ultimately restores not only the monk’s faith but that of the audience.

Boldly eschewing the cinematic conventions of the time, Rashomon’s reliance on flashback was innovative and daring, allowing Kurosawa to present multiple perspectives and, for the first time, giving the audience the freedom to consider each alternative take on events. Shooting into the sun, Kurosawa and cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa have given the forest scenes a sun-dappled, dreamlike feel, creating a natural world of primal instincts, desire and sin. Hypnotic and intimate, the film is tighter than a Shoreditch twat’s skinny jeans, the tension repeatedly rising to the crescendo of the samurai’s death and it may be the most visually beautiful of Kurosawa’s early films, shot in a crisp, ravishing black and white.

Arguably entering the global consciousness in a way no other film has, Rashomon has influenced generations of filmmakers. Any film since with a tricksy, too-clever plot, a disjointed narrative and conflicting perspectives from simple Hollywood fare like Vantage Point to the indie cool of The Usual Suspects to more oblique French New Wave fare like Last Year at Marienbad we a debt to Rashomon. It’s even inspired The Simpsons. But they’re all just standing in Rashomon’s shadow. 50 years after release, Kurosawa’s meditation on the fleeting nature of truth, memory and perception is still as absorbing and exciting as ever, a genuine work of art.

And if you don’t believe me, try watching the American remake The Outrage with Paul Newman (doing his best Speedy Gonzales impersonation in the Mifune role) and William Shatner (”KHAAAAAAAAANNN!!!”).

Even the Shat can’t improve upon perfection.

(A version of this piece appeared at filmjuice.com)

A sickeningly cutesy, red-headed stepchild of a film - The Brothers Bloom

Terrence Malick is a genius. The older I get, the more I appreciate that. His films are often hypnotic, glacial studies of the innate savagery and beauty of the natural world and Man’s place within it. But, more pertinently, he managed to almost completely excise charisma-vacuum Adrien Brody from The Thin Red Line, his masterful, epic meditation on war, based on James Jones hefty WW2 tome in which Brody’s character was pretty integral, what with him being one of the main characters and all. Unfortunately not everyone is as discerning as Malick.

With his hangdog face, slope-shouldered, shambling gait, and whiny, nasal delivery, Brody inexplicably appeals to the new breed of indie directors like Wes Anderson who invariably cast him in the same sort of roles as fellow nasal whiners Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and barely-sentient constipation-face Zach Braff. He’s also done sterling work as a bi-sexual punk go-go dancer/rentboy (talk about your specialist market) in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, a monkey-botherer in Peter Jackson’s rape of King Kong and won an Oscar for being better at hide and seek than Anne Frank (The Pianist). Some directors, perversely, even insist on building entire films around Brody, allowing the worst actor ever to win an Oscar™ to continue to find gainful employment and indulge his gay goat rape phobia (Seriously, I’m not making that up. Google Adrien Brody Gay Goat Rape if you don’t believe me). The Brothers Bloom is a case in point.

It’s an accepted fact of rock ‘n’ roll folklore that 2nd albums are always ‘difficult’. A bit of a mess. A bit flabby. Not as fresh, not as original, not as lean, not as tight.

Not.

As.

Good.

Well, for director Rian Johnson The Brothers Bloom is that ‘difficult’ 2nd movie. Debuting in 2005 with the dazzling neo-noir Brick, it was practically inevitable that Johnson’s next film was going to be a disappointment. Made for under $500,000, Brick was slicker than baby-snot; a smart, unique thriller that transposed the hardboiled detective heroes and femme fatales of Dashiell Hammett to the John Hughes-world of suburban American high school. So, in the long cinematic tradition of throwing money at the latest wunderkind, allowing him to make a messy vanity project no-one wants to see (Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio, everything M. Night Shyamalan’s done since The Sixth Sense, Vincent Gallo. Screw his films, I actually mean Vincent Gallo), someone thought it’d be a good idea to give Johnson $20 million to make his 2nd film. A knockabout caper about two lovable conmen. Starring Adrien Brody.

The titular Bloom Brothers are orphaned scallywags who grow up to be gentlemen thieves and conmen. Stephen (human/bear hybrid Mark Ruffalo) is the brains of the operation who apparently constructs cons “like Russians write novels” (though the cons we see owe more to Scooby Doo and seem to involve robbing gullible women) while Brody’s Bloom (which would make his name Bloom Bloom. How sickeningly cute is that?) is the tortured, soulful accomplice who charms women out of their fortunes. In the tradition of caper movies, Stephen has planned one last big score; all they have to do is screw wacky orphaned heiress Penelope (Rachel Weisz) out of some dosh without lovelorn Bloom falling in love with her. Can the Brothers Bloom, aided by sexy mute Japanese explosives expert Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), get the money and the girl?

Like being repeatedly smooshed in the kisser for 2 hours with a raspberry pavlova wielded by a curly-haired, gap-toothed moppet, The Brothers Bloom is messy, sickeningly, tooth-rottingly sweet and annoyingly cute. It’s wacky. It’s kooky. It’s zany. This film wants your love, demands your love, needs your love, has to have your love. But, like someone else’s redheaded stepchild performing magic tricks at a party, you just can’t bring yourself to love it. Which doesn’t mean The Brothers Bloom is a terrible film. It’s not. It isn’t even a bad film. It’s not a disaster of Southland Tales-proportions. It’s not as obnoxious as Hudson Hawk. It won’t make you want to stab yourself in the eyes with a sewage-smeared grapefruit spoon the way Battlefield Earth or The Hottie and the Nottie will. It just isn’t as cute or funny or smart or lovable as it thinks it is.

For a start; it’s a caper film about two conmen. With the notable exceptions of The Sting and Nine Queens, films about conmen never really engage. Conmen just aren’t that attractive. Characters who prey on the weakest members of society tend not to invite audience sympathy. That’s why in the movies, conmen tend to be portrayed as Robin Hood-type figures, dispensing justice by robbing rich, odious gangsters (The Sting, Confidence, etc). You just don’t see many films about bogus gas engineers robbing pensioners.

You have to like the protagonists. The Brothers Bloom just aren’t that likeable. Their big score consists of seducing and then ripping off a lonely, mentally fragile woman with epilepsy. So what if she’s played by Rachel Weisz in full-on kook mode? On paper it’s still pretty despicable. To make matters worse she ends up falling for Adrien Brody who as a romantic lead makes a very good sad giraffe with floppy hair. While Mark Ruffalo is a fine actor, he’s more suited to playing lunkheads and violent, sexually aggressive bullies than he is genius conmen, though his casting did add an extra layer of tension for me, as, at any moment, I expected him to dry hump one of the other main characters (Brody included).

Despite being played by Rachel Weisz and Rinko Kikuchi, the women aren’t characters; they’re adolescent geek wank fantasies. Weisz’s Penelope is lonely, rich, beautiful, collects hobbies (cue overlong montage where Weisz raps, skateboards, juggles chainsaws, plays the banjo, etc) and gets the horn during thunderstorms. Kikuchi’s Bang Bang is silent, sexy, drinks Campari and enjoys blowing things up. What self-respecting geek wouldn’t adore either of these women? Only the two actresses gifts as light comediennes raises their characters above the level of cipher. The focus of The Brothers Bloom may be their attempts to get their hands on Penelope’s cash but they’re blind to the heist going on under their noses as Kikuchi steals the film.

The biggest problem with The Brothers Bloom is it’s just too smug and knowing to satisfy. A studied exercise in cuteness, it tries to pack too many ideas in and while there’s a lot here to enjoy (the film is worth seeing just for the one-legged rollerskating kitten) the film still manages to run out of steam about half an hour from the end. From its cheery, nostalgic opening narrated by Mamet-stalwart Ricky Jay (note to all directors - NEVER cast Ricky Jay in a film about conmen unless you want your film to be compared unfavourably to Mamet) to its rat-tat-tat dialogue to the succession of crosses, double-crosses and flashbacks which climax the film, The Brothers Bloom feels like it’s trying too hard. Flitting breathlessly from continent to continent, getting into madcap adventures, wearing cool clothes and causing more noise than a brass band being kicked down a flight of stairs, The Brothers Bloom leaves you feeling a little hollow. Ultimately, for all its ideas, for all its cutesy hipness, quirkiness is just no substitute for a plot and characters you care about. Hopefully Johnson will remember that before he starts shooting his new film, Looper. And fingers crossed Adrien Brody doesn’t completely ruin Predators.


(A version of this piece appeared on filmjuice.com)

Where Are All The Bitches At? Hollywood used to make chick flicks with balls but where’s the Sex And The City generation’s Bette Davis?

I went to the movies recently. Saw Sherlock Holmes. Quite enjoyed it. And it was the first Guy Ritchie film since Snatch that didn’t make me want to snip off my eyelids with a pair of nail scissors and pour bleach and talcum powder directly onto my defenceless eyeballs for 90 minutes.

But as with any trip to the cinema, one of the most enjoyable parts of the experience is sitting in the dark, filled with anticipation, watching the trailers and waiting for the movie to begin. Sometimes (often) the trailers are better than the film you’re there to see. Other times it’s the Sex In The City 2 trailer.

If you’re not a thirtysomething woman or a gay man and you haven’t seen the previous film or the TV show that vomited it forth, Sex And The City 2 is the continuing adventures of a pantomime horse (Sarah Jessica Parker), Quentin Crisp (Kim Cattrall), the prim one (Kristen Davis) and the ginger one (the ginger one). What those adventures will actually be is anyone’s guess as the trailer manages to tell you precisely NOTHING about the film whilst still showing heroine, Shergar, in a dizzying selection of outfits. Oh, and there’s some sand. Quite a bit of it. While knowing nothing about the film other than what I’ve gleaned from the trailer, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say the film will probably involve our heroines talking loudly about anal sex over lunch (in the kind of restaurant that, in reality, throws you out for anal sex talk) while putting away enough booze to give Oliver Reed heartburn. Admittedly, while I’m not the film’s target audience and I’m oblivious to the delights of the conspicuous consumer porn promised by the trailer, the prospect of Sex And The City 2 fills me with dismay. Is this what chick flicks have become?

Hollywood used to make some great chick flicks, films full of strong, gutsy independent women. You know, like Beyonce sings about. And unlike today’s female role models they weren’t defined only by finding a man and the perfect pair of shoes (not necessarily in that order). Sure, Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone With The Wind was a conniving bitch and she may have had her frivolous moments but, fiddle-dee-dee, there was a war going on right outside her house, she was starving and she had to blow a soldier’s head off while caring for her ailing friend. And she built her own lumber empire (that’s right, nobody ever remembers Scarlett the hardnosed businesswoman). Who can blame her for wanting the occasional pretty dress?

The films of the 40s were full of tough femme fatales like Ava Gardner (Robert Siodmak’s The Killers), Jane Greer (Jacques Tourner’s Out Of The Past) and Barbara Stanwyck (Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity), ball-busting bitches who twisted the men in their lives around their little fingers as they plotted and schemed to get what they wanted. And they rarely wanted a wedding ring and a happy ever after. But it wasn’t just in crime films that women were strong. Actresses like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis built their careers on playing strong women in bitchfests like Mildred Pierce and All About Eve (still the only film ever to have four actresses, nominated for Oscars. And George Sanders is in it. It couldn’t be any bitchier.), but it’s in their willingness to play unsympathetic roles that their true strength lies. We liked Bette Davis precisely because she didn’t care whether we liked her. These days, when a pretty Hollywood actress plays bitchy, she wants to do it without the audience thinking she’s a bitch (the exception being Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions who gives great bitch. And some hot girl-on-girl action). And she normally has a gay best friend. Or a Greek chorus of loved ones who serve as her conscience. And she always has to fail or redeem herself in the end.

In My Best Friend’s Wedding, Julia Roberts sets out to wreck a wedding so she can steal the groom with only waspy Rupert Everett as her moral compass. In the end she redeems herself by abandoning her evil plan and resigns herself to a life of Burt Bacharach and clubbing with Rupert. In The Wedding Planner, Jennifer Lopez falls in love with the groom of the wedding she’s arranging while her father and his mates comment from the sidelines. But fear not; the bride’s a cow and calls the wedding off leaving the field clear for Jenny from the block to bag herself a man. In Bride Wars we get two hot young actresses (Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson) as childhood friends who’s weddings clash and each sets out to sabotage the other’s happy event before finally realising the true meaning of sisterhood (and that Anne’s fiancĂ© is a wrong ‘un) and making up. Notice anything significant? They all revolve around seemingly strong, independent women losing their minds at the first hint of confetti. Hardly a positive role model for the modern woman.

While crime movies are still the best place to find a bitch in today’s Hollywood (lesbian femme fatales Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon in Bound, manipulative trailer trash Neve Campbell in Wild Things, Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers, virtually anything Kathleen Turner has done in the last 30 years), being a bitch is increasingly the solitary preserve of the older actress. And by older actress I really just mean Meryl Streep and Kathy Bates. From Kramer Vs. Kramer through to 2008’s Doubt, Meryl Streep has excelled at playing the kind of onscreen bitch who terrifies us (with or without a funny accent); strong, independent women with their own agendas. The true successor to the likes of Bette Davis however, is the excellent Kathy Bates. Whether she’s crippling James Caan (Misery), hopping, naked, into a hot tub with Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt) or battling an iceberg (Titanic), Bates’ courage and lack of vanity always fascinates. But she’s at her best when she’s a bitch. As her character in Taylor Hackford’s Dolores Claibourne says:

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”

If there’s a Sex And The City 3 (and God help us, there probably will be…), I hope it involves the Atomic Mutton quartet being stranded in the middle of nowhere and forced to take refuge with Kathy Bates. And I hope she has a sledgehammer.

(A version of this piece appeared on filmjuice.com)

Toothless

Is it just me or do modern vampire movies…suck?

I blame Anne Rice. Ever since Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt cruised the back alleys and boulevards of 18th Century New Orleans in the big-screen adaptation of her homoerotic classic, Interview With The Vampire, vampires have kinda lost their bite.

Once upon a time vampires haunted our dreams and stalked our nightmares. Just as almost every culture has their own version of the creation and deluge myths, the myth of the vampire is universal. From Transylvania to Ancient Mesopotamia, South America to the Philippines, the vampire is as ingrained in our collective psyche as fear of the dark. And they’ve been flickering across our screens ever since the dawn of cinema. But despite the rich and terrifying source myths from around the world, whether they’re monstrous ghouls like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or dapper Eurotrash like Bela Lugosi or the lewd and libidinous nymphets of Jean Rollin, cinema’s vision of the vampire owes a lot to the Victorians.

The dawn of the Industrial Age symbolised the victory of science, technology and reason over superstition and the supernatural, allowing the Victorians to embrace a lifestyle of strict social rigidity, liberating them from their more carnal instincts. For the stiff, buttoned-up Victorians nothing was more transgressive and threatening (or alluring) than the vampire. Forced to live in the shadows and reeking both of the corruption of the grave and their own rampant sexuality, the vampire horrified Victorian sensibilities because he was everything they wouldn’t allow themselves to be; free. A creature of illicit appetites, existing outside of cosy human society, preying on the weak, indulging their lust for blood and their raging libidos. Immoral and immortal, obeying neither God’s laws nor man’s, vampires didn’t just threaten our lives, they threatened the fabric of our lives. The vampire came to symbolise the ultimate outsider.

Each generation since has reinvented the vampire myth for their own time. In the 20’s, with The War to End All Wars still a recent memory, Max Schreck’s portrayal of Count Orlock in the silent classic Nosferatu as a perpetually starved, ratty ghoul spreading fear and contagion, resonated with a shattered Germany while in the 30’s, Bela Lugosi’s aristocratic Dracula seemed perfectly in tune with the times; a suave, sinister, dispossessed foreigner, insidiously worming his way into British society.

In the 60’s and 70’s, Hammer Films gave us the robust Christopher Lee as Dracula while also flouting the UK’s antiquated censorship laws with the equally robust Ingrid Pitt in their breathless adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, The Vampire Lovers. Now I love a good lesbian vampire flick as much as the next guy. Particularly if the next guy dribbles and mutters to himself at the thought of nubile girls biting each other. And after the success of The Vampire Lovers, Hammer made a bunch.

While never approaching the surreal lunacy of Jean Rollin’s lesbian vampire movies (La Vampire Nue, Requiem Pour Un Vampire) or the hallucinatory eroticism of Jaromil Jireš’ Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, films like Lust For A Vampire (lesbian vampire sucks her way through a girls boarding school) and Twins Of Evil (not that much lesbianism but hey, naked Playboy twins), by placing a greater emphasis on violence and sexuality, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable but also pushed Hammer further into camp. When they tried to drag Christopher Lee’s caped Count into the Twentieth Century in the lamentable Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites Of Dracula the writing was on the wall for the failing studio.

With the exception of the Blacula films which gave the vampire a blaxploitation makeover, the 70s were a lean time for the vampire as the films got camper and audiences deserted in droves in favour of more explicit slasher movies and video nasties. It wasn’t until the 80s that the vampire truly escaped Ye Olde Worlde.

Tony Scott’s terminally stylish The Hunger gave us sophisticated omnisexual vampires, Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie, stalking 80’s New York’s club scene. Despite it’s emphasis on style over substance, the film also boasts an erotically charged scene where Deneuve seduces Susan Sarandon, a scene that’s scorched into the minds of every teenage boy who’s ever seen it.

The Lost Boys gave us a motorcycle gang of teen vampires who, just like J.M. Barrie’s Lost Boys, will never grow old while in perhaps the most underrated vampire film of them all, Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow gave us a surrogate family of trailer trash vampires, slaughtering their way across America’s Mid-West.

In the 90s, while Interview With The Vampire reigned supreme, movies like Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, Michael Almereyda’s Nadja and even Francis Ford Coppola’s old-fashioned Bram Stoker’s Dracula offered a decidedly arthouse vision of the vampire while Mexico’s Cronos had originality to burn and introduced us to the saviour of modern horror and fantasy, Guillermo del Toro. From Dusk Till Dawn gave us motor-mouthed bank robbing killers (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) and Harvey Keitel’s “mean motherf@cking servant of God” battling an army of vampire strippers while Blade’s comic book sensibilities gave us the first vampire action movie.

But by the noughties, the rot had set in. While on TV, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel were reinventing the vampire genre, on the big screen we had Kate Beckinsale’s boyish frame poured into a leather catsuit for The Matrix-lite Underworld series (seriously, UV bullets?), the diminishing returns of the Blade sequels (he was barely even in the third one) and Anne Rice’s Queen Of The Damned (with emo-leprechaun Stuart Townsend taking over from Tom Cruise as antihero Lestat), a film so bad it made both being a vampire and a rock star look, well, a bit shit. While recent years have seen some fantastic vampire movies like the scary/sweet Let The Right One In, the stunning and demented Night Watch movies and the darkly erotic lunacy of Korea’s Thirst, not one of them has been in English.

Sure, 30 Days Of Night might have featured the dreamy Josh Hartnett battling an army of feral vampires laying waste to his small Alaskan town but despite a foreboding first half and an orgy of bloodletting it failed to find its feet. The recent Daybreakers, which borrowed not just its visuals but its plot from The Matrix, gave us an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying vision of the future where human’s are farmed as livestock. Which is disappointing because now that he’s outgrown his healthy slacker image and looks like a cadaverous meth-head, Ethan Hawke is perfectly cast as the vampire trying to give up blood. And this is in a movie where Willem Dafoe plays an Elvis-fixated ex-vampire. Despite (because of) that Daybreakers is unlikely to find favour with today’s pubescent audience.

The problem is that the Children of the Night have become just that; children. Movies like Twilight and New Moon* and their tweenage audience have castrated cinema’s most virile outsider, killing him in a way no wooden stake ever could. The vampire for the new millennia isn’t a beautiful monster or a bloodthirsty killing machine but a floppy-haired, fey, young man moodily shoegazing his way through eternal damnation, seeking true love against an emo soundtrack. But true love waits kids and when he finds that special girl he’ll respect her far too much to suck her blood. At least until around the fourth film when they’re happily married.

Vampires everywhere are turning in their graves.

* New Moon has also made the werewolf look a bit pussywhipped too…


(A version of this article appeared on filmjuice.com)

A grim and grungey voyage deep into the heart of darkness - Valhalla Rising

Imagine if you will gentle reader, Sam Peckinpah dragging Terrence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky off on a booze and acid-crazed binge and the three of them deciding to remake 2001: A Space Odyssey. With a boatload of Scottish (?) Vikings instead of astronauts. And a mute, one-eyed, hatchet-wielding Dane as the monolith.

A grim and grungey voyage deep into the heart of darkness, Valhalla Rising is no passive night at the movies; it’s a brutal, bone-splintering experience that demands your surrender. Opening with the stark title “In the beginning there was only man and nature. Then men came bearing crosses and drove the heathen to the ends of the earth”, the movie drops the audience straight into the middle of a bloody human cockfight. A one-eyed, tattooed warrior (Mads Mikkelson), chained to a pole by his neck, takes on all comers; biting, kicking, gouging, snapping limbs and necks, smashing skulls to jam. A slave, forced to fight for survival in ferocious gladatorial contests by his masters, a tribe of Scots pagans, One-Eye is kept caged and shackled, his only connection with humanity the symbiotic relationship he shares with the young boy (Maarten Stevenson) who tends and feeds him.

When the opportunity for escape presents itself, One-Eye wreaks savage vengeance on his captors, butchering them, before heading for the hills, the boy in tow. They encounter a group of Christian Vikings, slaughtering their way across pagan Scotland on their way to the Crusades, and One-Eye and the boy join their quest to rid the Holy Land of heathens. But their longship is becalmed in a supernatural fog and they find themselves way off course, marooned in an unfamiliar land, assailed by an unseen enemy…

One of Denmark’s most charismatic actors, Mikkelson, so criminally ill-used in movies like Casino Royale, here is an elemental force of nature, implacable wrath made flesh. Never uttering a word nor even making a sound during the films frequent bursts of violent action, Mikkelson’s brooding presence dominates the film. Slowly humanised by his relationship with the boy, Mikkelson’s One-Eye is a man out of time, a relic of the past who’s already passed into myth. Ably-supported by every Scottish character actor not currently playing a TV detective (Gary Lewis, Ewan Stewart, Alexander Morton, Jamie Sives), Mikkelson’s biggest rival in the acting stakes is the excellent Maarten Stevenson, son of Scots actor Gary Lewis (here playing the most sympathetic and compassionate of the warrior band), who gives One-Eye first a voice, then a personality and finally a fragile humanity which will ultimately destroy the warrior and prove his redemption.

Best known for the gritty Pusher films and 2008’s Bronson, Valhalla Rising is Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s magnum opus, an ambitious medieval meditation on violence that’s both lyrical and stomach-churningly violent. Valhalla Rising presents a world in flux, undergoing violent, painful rebirth as the old ways are swept away in favour of the new, upstart religion of Christianity. Less a man and more an avatar of Odin (King of the Norse Gods representing both war and transformation), One-Eye oversees the end of one age and ushers in a new one, an age in which there’s no place for the Old Gods and no place for One-Eye. The strange land the warriors find themselves in may just as easily be the warrior heaven of Valhalla as the as-yet undiscovered New World. As madness takes hold and the men give into their primal instincts, One-Eye becomes a metaphorical messiah, leading them to their deaths and, in some cases, some measure of redemption.

At times as stylised and deliberate as a Japanese Noh play, Valhalla Rising is reminiscent of Oles Sanin’s Mamay while its depiction of a primitive, natural world at war with man calls to mind Terrence Malick’s The New World. With its foreboding score and hyper-real visuals, Valhalla Rising feels like a fever dream or a half-remembered nightmare. Static tableaux frame characters against boiling cloud-filled mountain vistas, lashed by the elements, or moving through lush, otherworldly wilderness, the dreamlike atmosphere intermittently punctured by the sudden, violent eruption of sheer, bloody carnage.

While it’s about as subtle as an axe to the head, Valhalla Rising is an intense, hypnotic, immersive experience and the best film this year you won’t see. It’s not so much going to be released as escape, chase you up a dark alley and kick your head in. See it before it has to come looking for you.


(A version of this review appeared on filmjuice.com)

The biggest thing to come out of Sweden since ABBA - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

A publishing phenomenon to rival JK Rowling, it was inevitable that Swedish author Steig Larsson’s Millennium series of novels would get the cinematic treatment. What’s surprising though is that the Swedes got there before Hollyweird with the first in the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is hired by elderly tycoon Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), patriarch of the wealthy Vanger dynasty, to investigate the 40-year old disappearance of his favourite niece from the family’s private island. Stalked and then aided by damaged young Goth computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), Blomkvist uncovers a dark, secret family history, opening up a Pandora’s Box of violence, sexual abuse and Nazism. But when their investigation stumbles across a series of seemingly unconnected murders, Blomkvist and Salander find themselves in a race against time to unmask a serial killer who may just be hunting them…

Selling more than 10 million copies worldwide since its posthumous publication in 2005, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a hefty potboiler, one of those novels read by people who don’t normally read novels. An instant cult hit, the book and its sequels became Sweden’s biggest cultural exports since ABBA and IKEA. Juggling multiple plotlines and themes, the novel is both an effective crime thriller and a scathing, scabrous meditation on the corruption and dangerous misogyny lurking at the heart of Swedish society, a fact reflected by its more Swedishly literal Swedish title, Men Who Hate Women.

While its translation to the screen is faithful to the tone and spirit of the book, the film feels crude and unwieldy in places. Originally a mini-series made for Swedish television and recut for the cinema, the film betrays its small screen roots and, at 2½ hours long, feels both half an hour too long and half an hour too short. Characters and plotlines feel undernourished and the first forty or so minutes drag. Particularly superfluous is Salander’s queasily upsetting relationship with her guardian/probation officer (Peter Andersson), a sexual predator. Though her rape and abuse at his hands are chilling and her almost biblical vengeance is undeniably a crowd-pleasing moment, the scenes, while darkly effective, feel episodic and serve only to foster impatience, the film only kicking into gear once its two protagonists meet and join forces.

At its core a fairly workman-like police procedural-style thriller (there’s an awful lot of montages where characters look at photos or scan old records while muttering plot points to themselves), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’s biggest assets are its two protagonists. As Blomkvist, a character clearly modelled on deceased author Larrson (a principled crusading journalist himself), Michael Nyquist brings a likeable crumpled nobility to the role but the film, like the books, belongs to Salander. Tough and spiky, Rapace brings a wounded vulnerability to the virtually sociopathic Salander, her outward hostility hinting at her inner fragility. She dominates the film whether she’s sodomising her abuser and tattooing “I rape women” on his chest, saving the passive Blomkvist’s life or moodily shoegazing while listening to her IPod.

Slick and tight, Niels Arden Oplev’s direction is as typically Scandinavian as flat-pack furniture; cold, clinical and precision engineered. It does the job well enough but there’s little passion. Similarly the script, while competent, hides few surprises and if you can’t work out who the killer is by the halfway mark, you probably shouldn’t be out on your own never mind sitting in a dark cinema. Claustrophobic and controlled, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an efficient, enjoyable thriller which will doubtless delight and disappoint fans of the books in equal measure. You may as well see it before Hollywood remakes it with Kristen Stewart.

CandoCo : The Stepfather/And Who Shall Go To The Ball? @ Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 26 September 2007

I’m not a great fan of contemporary dance. Or any kind of dance, for that matter. To be honest, I’d probably rather be home cleaning the hard to reach parts of the toilet bowl and getting a slight buzz from the cleaning fluid fumes. Also, I knew I was going to see CandoCo, a dance company which has pioneered the integration of disabled and non-disabled dancers. To me, it all sounded just a little bit too worthy, a little right-on. So it was with some trepidation that I took my seat in the Queen Elizabeth Hall for Celeste Dandeker’s last show as artistic director of CandoCo, the twisted double-bill The Stepfather/And Who Shall Go To The Ball.

Of the two pieces, The Stepfather was the more accessible. A cheery little slice of American Gothic set in a Deep South not unlike Norfolk, The Stepfather makes inspired use of the Violent Femmes Country Death Song and more surprisingly, Ethel Merman, to weave its tale of incest, murder and suicide. The wonderfully twitchy Jorge Crecis plays the Stepfather, a poor sap who marries a brassy ukulele-player (Nadia Adame) only to find himself unable to resist the charms of her three daughters (Bettina Carpi, Natalie Ayton and Zoe Brown). So he does what most men would do. If they’re from Norfolk. He gives in to temptation, has sex with one of his stepdaughters (Bettina Carpi), is exposed and, driven by guilt and remorse, drowns her before hanging himself.

Dark and playful, The Stepfather is a claustrophobic, sweaty little tale, bubbling with illicit sexuality and forbidden desire. Nadia Adame is particularly good as the mother, her crutch as much a part of her sexuality as her wiggling walk, but the stand-out performer is Bettina Carpi. Accompanied by the sounds of dripping water, her ghostly, post-murder dance with the Stepfather’s dead alter-ego (disabled performer Marc Brew) as he sways from a noose makes for a hypnotic, haunting, strangely satisfying climax.

After a twenty minute interval, I find the second piece And Who Shall Go To The Ball? is much closer to the type of contemporary dance I’m familiar with. The type of contemporary dance that strikes fear into my black little heart. The type of contemporary dance that’s devoid of narrative and features the kind of discordant musical accompaniment that makes Nine Inch Nails at their most ear-bleeding sound like the Von Trapp Family. The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore was a loooong time ago for composer Scott Walker.

Strobes flash like lightning in the dark illuminating the dancers moving to Walker’s harsh, brutal score. The intensity builds, the dancers’ movements become sharper, more violent, almost primal at times, throwing themselves around with a raw, bruising, desperation (couldn’t help noticing Carpi sporting knee-pads). The only respite from this aural and visual onslaught is provided by Brew and Crecis whose duet (do dancers duet?) is simple and beautiful; an interdependent ballet of doppelgangers.

Ultimately, I haven’t a clue what And Who Shall Go To The Ball? was about, what the point was meant to be or if it even had a point. The piece is dark and violent, an assault on the audience’s senses. I came away feeling as if I’d just received a good kicking; battered, weary, glad to have survived more or less intact. Maybe that was the point. Dandeker may be leaving CandoCo after 16 years but she’s bowing out at the top of her game with two very different pieces, each challenging and exciting in their own way. The Stepfather/And Who Shall Go To The Ball may not have been the most cohesive satisfying night I’ve ever spent in the theatre but it was certainly enthralling.

Published in art disability culture

Has CGI Killed The Movie Midget?

The funniest moment in Tom DiCillo’s film industry satire Living In Oblivion comes when the bitter diminutive actor Tito (the excellent Peter Dinklage), playing a dwarf in a David Lynch-style dream sequence, loses it. “Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it?” he asks director Steve Buscemi “Do you know anyone who's had a dream with a dwarf in it? No! I don't even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I see dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this! You can take this dream sequence and stick it up your ass! Tito may have had a point, but at least he had the job. Today he’d be counting the days to panto season.

When I was a kid our movie screens were full of midgets. There were scary midgets (Don’t Look Now), evil midgets (The Man With The Golden Gun), heroic midgets (Willow), German midgets (Even Dwarfs Started Small), orange midgets (Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory), even Kung Fu midgets (For Your Height Only. Seriously, this film exists. If you don’t believe me, look it up. You can watch the trailer on youtube.com). For an actor of restricted growth, the seventies and eighties were a pretty sweet time. Sci-fi/fantasy films were packing them in down the Odeon, armies of rampaging teddy bears were toppling galactic empires (Return Of The Jedi) and E.T. was phoning home. Nobody was playing Hamlet and Hollywood was still years from producing films like The Station Agent (or even Bad Santa) where little people would get to play fully-rounded, believable characters, you know, like other actors do. But if you had to play a stereotype, who wouldn’t want to play a thieving time-travelling dwarf (Time Bandits)? Or a machine gun-toting pint-sized Martian prostitute (Total Recall)? Okay, maybe not that last one, but be honest has there been a decent Bond baddie since HervĂ© Villechaize stabbed Roger Moore in the arse with a pitchfork in The Man With The Golden Gun?

But things have changed in Hollyweird. Suddenly little people aren’t being played by little people. Something dark, something sinister has crept out of Mordor and changed the way movies are made. CGI used to simply be a tool, a trick the director kept up his sleeve for those astonishing, open-mouth moments where the killer robot from the future would reform from a puddle or those creepy adverts where a dead actor shills for a car company. Then along came Peter Jackson and his buttock-numbing vision of Tolkien (682 minutes and rising with every new special edition). Instead of employing Hobbit-sized actors he took ordinary actors and shrank them down to Hobbit-size. And its not like we’re talking about great actors here. One of them was in The Goonies for God’s sake. You can’t tell me Warwick Davis isn’t a better actor than some of those bozos. Warwick Castle is a better actor than some of them. Since then CGI has also been used to shrink down one of the moronic Wayans brothers for Little Man, a ‘hilarious’ comedy (complete with breast-feeding jokes) about a midget burglar masquerading as a baby. And as for Tim Burton’s take on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, one man played all 165 Oompa-Loompas. And he was 4’4”, hardly Oompa-Loompa-sized.

Strangely this CGI trickery only seems to work the one way. No-one is stretching Kenny Baker to Gandalfian proportions and despite sterling work in a monkey suit in Mighty Joe Young and Instinct ‘Mini-Me’ Verne Troyer’s phone remained strangely silent during the casting of King Kong, the part eventually going to Andy Serkis who at 5’8” (admittedly no Andre the Giant) was still about 30 feet shy of the Big Apple-wrecking ape. Maybe Peter Jackson’s just scared of midgets? These days the only place you’ll see an actor of restricted growth is in cheap horror movies (most of which seem to star Warwick Davis as a sociopathic leprechaun/goblin/plate-throwing inbred mutant) but sooner or later the computer geeks are going to infiltrate even this area of cinema. L.A. is going to be awash with really short waiters.

Still, at least there’s always porn or panto….


Published in art disability culture

The 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival

Around this time last year, I remember praying that if Shane Meadows didn’t make any more films in the next 12 months, the 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival might just be worth going to. Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news.

The good news is that despite celebrating its 63rd birthday with a stupendously underwhelming Opening Night film (Sam Mendes’ Away We Go), the Edinburgh International Film Festival isn’t ready for retirement yet.

The bad news is that God is a harsh, capricious mistress and my prayers went unanswered; Shane Meadows somehow managed to get his hands on a camera and Paddy Considine and is back with Le Donk, a free-wheeling mockumentary that’s about as amusing as an Ebola outbreak in a ward full of haemophiliacs. Le Donk (Paddy Considine) is one of life’s also-rans, a legendary Rock roadie and hanger-on. Now managing shambolic Midlands rapper Scorz-Ayz-Ee (played by real-life shambolic Midlands rapper Scorz-Ayz-Ee), the film follows Le Donk’s efforts to get his prodigy on the bill with the Arctic Monkeys (whom he ‘hilariously’ keeps calling the Article Monkeys) and along the way he imparts the wisdom and wit we’d expect of a man who’s been setting up for bands for twenty years. If you’re stoned or if you’ve never seen Steve Coogan’s superior Saxondale (in which a legendary roadie imparts the wit and wisdom of a man who’s been setting up for bands for twenty years to a younger, dumber sidekick) you might get the occasional smirk out of Le Donk but if you’re sober it’s 74 minute running time feels at least an hour too long.

Allegedly a comedy, Opening Night film Away We Go is yet another shoe-gazing mope through the lives of a couple of middle-class, thirty-something slackers and the existential crisis they face as they try to get to grips with adulthood and figure out the best place to settle down and spawn. Directed on autopilot by Sam Mendes, Away We Go is the type of laid-back, unfunny, comedy mumbleathon normally made by earnest young indie directors and starring earnest, young indie actors with names like Zooey. Full of the kind of loveably eccentric kooks you’d cheerfully garrotte if they existed anywhere outside of smug, self-satisfied films about thirty-something slackers, Away We Go is like being stuck at a dinner party full of Guardian columnists. And not the fun ones like Charlie Brooker. No, we’re talking about the whiny, spoilt ones like Lucy Mangan. Hopefully at some point in the future, some genius will decide to programme Away We Go as one half of a double bill with Sam’s recent laugh-fest Revolutionary Road.

Far funnier was Justin Molotnikov’s dark, little Scottish film Crying With Laughter. Equal parts black comedy and Cape Fear-style revenge thriller, Crying With Laughter charts the worst week in Edinburgh stand-up comic Joey Frisk’s (Stephen McCole) life as a chance meeting with old school friend Frank (Malcolm Shields) leads to him being made homeless, framed for attempted murder and involved in a kidnapping as old scores are settled and the guilty are punished. Scots actor Stephen McCole is fantastic as the put-upon comic and his performance is hilariously un-PC and subtly vulnerable with Shields a sympathetic, if relentless, villain and the final revelation, while signposted far in advance is, nonetheless, affecting and goes some way to explaining Frisk’s angry, misanthropic stage persona.

While there were the usual honourable examples of British miserablism (A Boy Called Dad, Running In Traffic), most of this year’s crop of British films were surprisingly satisfying. Mad, Sad & Bad with its neurotic family in meltdown felt like a British-Asian version of a Woody Allen film. Except that unlike Woody’s recent output, it was mildly amusing. Lindy Heymann’s KICKS, however, was anything but, playing more like a Merseyside-version of Misery. Scary and compassionate, KICKS skillfully dissects Britain’s obsession with celebrity culture as its two teenage wannabee WAGs (Kerrie Hayes and Nichola Burley) kidnap the object of their affections, swaggering footballer Lee (Jamie Doyle), in an attempt to stop his transfer to another team. What starts out as a lark, with the girls leading Lee on with the promise of a threesome (he even willingly allows them to tie him up!), swiftly spirals out of control when the girls’ true agenda is revealed and Lee’s misogynistic inner-lad rears his ugly head. Dark and edgy, KICKS explores the hollow ambitions of the Heat-generation without ever demonising it’s teen protagonists and the intensity of the friendship between Hayes and Burley echoes that of the murderous teens in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures.

Andrea Arnold’s eagerly awaited Fish Tank, while a little too long and somewhat predictable, was far more satisfying than her excellent, if chilly, debut Red Road. Ostensibly a coming of age tale, Fish Tank feels more like a chav retelling of Lolita as tough, abrasive, 15 going on 35-year old Mia (Katie Jarvis) dreams of escaping her dysfunctional family and no-hope housing estate through her talents as a dancer. Slowly she becomes enamoured of her trashy mother’s too-attentive new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) and I’m not letting any cats out of bags by revealing it all ends in tears. Far from downbeat, Fish Tank is an affecting, entertaining film about life on the margins, featuring fantastic performances from first-time actress Katie Jarvis, the ever-dependable Fassbender and a scene-stealing turn by Rebecca Griffiths as Mia’s potty-mouthed little sister.

Duncan Ward’s scabrous satire Boogie Woogie turns a jaundiced eye on the London art scene. With a cast to die for (everyone from Christopher Lee, Charlotte Rampling and Joanna Lumley to Alan Cumming, Heather Graham and American starlet Amanda Seyfried), Boogie Woogie’s densely layered narrative lays bare the vapid, superficial world of the YBAs, the Shoreditch wannabees and the Russian oligarchs who throw money at anything as long as they think it’s ART. Unfortunately, like the world it portrays, Boogie Woogie is a little glib, a little soulless. It’s entertaining but doesn’t linger long in the memory after the end credits. It’s all surface gloss and glitz, its hugely talented cast for the most part wasted in one-dimensional roles with all the subtlety of a Christmas panto in Woking. In fact, I’d pay good money to see Alan Cumming play Mother Goose while Danny Huston’s scenery-chewing turn would make for a great Big Bad Wolf. The heart of the film for me, however, is Jaime Winstone’s cocky, Cockney lesbian video-artist Elaine whose work consists of documenting her own salacious life in minute detail. Spiky and ambitious, willing to betray anyone and anything to get to the top, Elaine’s membership form for the Groucho club is probably already in the post.

The best of this year’s crop of British films however was the excellent Moon. A tight little sci-fi thriller more interested in the psychological effects of isolation than in explosions and wham bam action, Moon features fantastic performances from Sam Rockwell and, well, Sam Rockwell. Rockwell plays Sam, a lonely miner stationed on an isolated moonbase who’s coming to the end of his three-year contract and looking forward to getting back to his wife and daughter, his sole companion a robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). But after crashing his moon buggy, Sam starts to doubt his own sanity when he finds his base invaded by a stranger. A stranger named Sam. A stranger who looks exactly like him. And just how trustworthy is GERTY? Rockwell is a revelation as Sam, playing two very different sides of the same character, and Kevin Spacey makes GERTY a charming and slightly sinister presence, both caring and menacing, an echo of 2001’s HAL 9000. Brilliantly directed by the artist formerly known as Zowie Bowie (David Bowie’s sickeningly talented son Duncan Jones) on an ultra-low budget of $5million, Moon is both a fascinating study of paranoia loneliness and a thrilling vision of the near-future which stays with you long after you’ve left the cinema.

This year’s Retrospective strand featured the work of one of the last true Hollywood mavericks; Roger Corman. An independent before there were independents and the undisputed king of low-budget filmmaking, Corman’s made and released somewhere in the region of 300 films as a writer, director and producer in a career that spans the ‘50s to the present day. They haven’t all been good. In fact, many of them have been terrible. But along the way he’s given us classics like the Vincent Price-starring Edgar Allan Poe movies of the ‘60s, ground-breaking gangster movies like Bloody Mama, biker movies like The Wild Angels and the psychedelic lunacy of The Trip, while playing midwife to generations of filmmakers as diverse as Scorsese, Coppola and the Movie Brats, Jack Nicholson, Charles Bronson, Joe Dante, James Cameron and Russian wunderkind Timur Bekmambetov all of whom got their start courtesy of Uncle Roger’s ‘film school’. Now in his eighties, Corman’s still working and his entertaining appearance as part of the In Person strand was one of the highlights of this year’s festival.

As ever at Edinburgh some of the most enjoyable films were part of the Night Moves strand; late night genre movies to see you through the midnight hour. Tense and claustrophobic, first-time director Stuart Hazeldine’s Exam is an ambitious little shocker. Unfolding in real time, Exam’s killer premise take’s a disparate group of strangers, puts them in a sealed room with an armed guard, a scary invigilator (Colin Salmon) and some simple rules: leave the room and you’re disqualified, talk to the guard and you’re disqualified, spoil your paper and you’re disqualified. However, when the invigilator instructs them to begin, the candidates turn over their papers to reveal a blank sheet without a question… As the candidates turn on each other and descend into mind-games and desperate violence the audience quickly realises that there’s more at stake than just a job and that survival itself may just be the reward. I’d watch The Apprentice if it was anything like this. Salvage, with its suburban street violently quarantined by the army and secret military project gone awry borrowed heavily from George Romero and offered some mechanically effective scares right up until it revealed its monstrous antagonist at which point logic and tension went out the window.

Disappointingly, logic, tension and scares were three things missing from Italian horrormeister’s Dario Argento’s new film, Giallo. A shuffling serial killer is kidnapping and mutilating beautiful women and only Milan’s troubled, top cop Adrien Brody (we know he’s troubled coz he lives in the basement of the police station) can save her. While Giallo is ludicrous, it did give me a new appreciation of Brody’s acting talents. He definitely deserves the Oscar he got for The Pianist just for being able to deliver with a straight face some of the most ridiculous dialogue I’ve ever heard. Also borrowing from Romero, Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool is a sly Francophile reinvention of the zombie movie. When a deadly virus turns the respectable citizens of Ontario town Pontypool into a mob of violent psychopaths it’s up to talk radio host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) to try to save the day from the relative safety of his DJ booth.

This year’s clutch of international films were as diverse and eclectic as one’s come to expect of Edinburgh and while the last minute inclusion of Lars Von Trier’s controversial Antichrist smacked of audience baiting, it fit well in a programme that served up a satisfying mix of crowd pleasers and the elegantly uncomfortable. Essentially a two-hander, the grieving couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) at the heart of Antichrist retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods to get over the death of their infant son. Which mostly involves Gainsbourg demanding violent sex and masturbating joylessly in the woods while she slowly dissolves into madness. Lushly shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, the first two thirds of the film are unnerving and claustrophobic, its vision of a hostile Nature a palpable third character in the film. Then a talking fox turns up, announces “Chaos reigns,” and the increasingly unhinged Gainsbourg starts raiding the tools in the woodshed… Overblown and hysterical, with scenes of genital mutilation and violence that wouldn’t be out of place in an Eli Roth movie, Antichrist is torture porn masquerading as a serious movie which ultimately fails because you just don’t care about the characters. You get the impression that Gainsbourg’s character was already as nutty as a cashew tree before her son’s death and Dafoe’s smug cognitive therapist richly deserves the two-by-four to the balls he receives.

Antichrist wasn’t the only film in this year’s programme where if you went down to the woods you’d be sure of a big surprise. In Fabrice Du Welz’s similarly themed Vinyan, an ex-pat couple (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart) in Thailand, still mourning the son they lost in the Tsunami, take a terrifying voyage into the heart of darkness after Beart glimpses a child in a charity video of Burmese orphans. The video is grainy and indistinct but Beart is convinced it’s her missing son and before long she and Sewell are lost in the jungle at the mercy of Burmese pirates and menaced by a tribe of feral children. Hallucinatory and genuinely disturbing, with a climax that’s both shocking and satisfying, Vinyan is the film that Antichrist could’ve been.

Based on the life of legendary French bank robber Jacques Mesrine, Jean-Francois Richet’s double bill Mesrine: L’instinct de mort (Killer Instinct) and Mesrine: L’ennemi public no1 (Public Enemy No1) is a ferocious, adrenalin-fuelled ride through a criminal career that if it wasn’t true no-one would believe it. Featuring a charismatic, seductive performance from Vincent Cassel as Mesrine, the best way to enjoy these films is back to back. Aussie director Rowan Woods’ Fragments is a Short Cuts-style ensemble piece which follows the survivors of a mass shooting in an American diner while Denmark’s Little Soldier recycles the plot of Mona Lisa with a Gulf veteran returning to Copenhagen and slipping into a job chauffeuring a Nigerian call girl around for a jovial pimp. The pimp however is the soldier’s father and the soldier is a brittle young woman, haunted by her experiences. Stephen Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is a chilly episodic character study of a young New York escort girl (a standout performance by porn starlet Sasha Grey). Against a backdrop of the recent financial meltdown we follow Grey as she shops, dines, spends time with her clients, worries about a rival stealing her business and is interviewed by a journalist. All the while, the main topic, the only topic, of everyone’s conversation is how bad the markets are doing. It’s obvious that Soderbergh’s heavy-handed point is that Grey’s clients aren’t the only ones being screwed. Disappointingly, for a film about sex The Girlfriend Experience is damn unsexy.

If you’re looking for sexy though look no further than Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker; an adrenaline shot straight to the senses that makes war, and in particular, bomb disposal look damn sexy. From the intricate opening sequence where a US Army bomb disposal team’s leader is killed, the film grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. Focusing on the team’s replacement chief, an excellent Jeremy Renner, an adrenaline-junkie who’s only alive when he faces death, and his relationship with the rest of his team (the cautious, seasoned veteran Anthony Mackie and the fatalistic rookie Brian Geraghty), The Hurt Locker is more interested in putting you in the shoes of men at war, examining their motivations and mindsets, rather than action set-pieces, CG effects or political grandstanding. Which isn’t to say that the action scenes aren’t stunning. Covering the last 30 days of the team’s tour of duty in Iraq, The Hurt Locker is a bruising experience, as viscerally thrilling and visually exciting as Bigelow’s previous films Point Break and Strange Days. Perhaps the first truly important film to come out of Gulf War Part 2, The Hurt Locker is a film that doesn’t offer easy answers or a pat resolution but it is a tense, thrilling ride.


With films like this, Moon and the excellent Crying With Laughter the prognosis for next year’s festival is pretty healthy. But please Lord, I’ll do anything, I’ll climb a mountain and sacrifice my firstborn, anything, just don’t allow Shane Meadows to submit a film to the 64th EIFF.


(As there's no Shane Meadows entry in the 2010 EIFF it looks like bad news for any progeny I spawn)