Brothers of the Head

The mockumentary format has been around for quite some time now and is usually associated with comedy or satire. For some reason music, and rock in particular, has been the inspiration for some of the best of the genre. This is Spinal Tap is the film most people think of when mockumentary is mentioned, and so it should as it is a highly original piece of comedy that highlights the excesses and nonsense of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Brothers of the Head takes the rock/mockumentary format and uses it to stunning dramatic effect.


The story, taken from a novel by science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, revolves around conjoined brothers who have been living in isolation on the east coast of England until a music impresario decides he needs singing Siamese twins on his books. The story is told by a documentary filmmaker and through interviews with people who knew the brothers, Tom and Barry Howe (played in bravura performances by Harry and Luke Treadaway), during their heyday. The majority of the film is made up of "archival" footage of the twins as they learn to play music and develop into the punk band "The Bang Bang", complete with rehearsals and gig footage, then their inevitable demise as they get caught up in the world of sex and drugs and record company demands.

Apart from the amazing performances from the two leads, what makes this film work is total believability of the footage. Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, best known for their two documentaries on Terry Gilliam, The Hamster Factor and Lost in La Mancha, who use their experience and skills at the format to full effect. Even though it is a fictional drama, adapted by another Gilliam collaborator Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing, Tideland), it has the feeling of something that is spontaneous and unscripted. This is further enhanced by the cinematography of Anthony Dod Mantle, who is best known for his DV work with Lars von Trier and on Danny Boyle's Twenty Eight Days Later. The "archive" footage really does look like it was shot in the 70s, which is why it seems so believable. And the appearance of Ken Russell, as himself, further bolsters the illusion.


The movie might not be to everyone's taste but there is no denying it is a fantastic piece of filmmaking. It perfectly captures the essence of the era of the rise of punk, as well as being an indictment of the manipulative nature of the music industry, and its ability to destroy lives. With great writing, direction, cinematography and acting it is definitely worth seeing.

Brothers of the Head won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Sherrybaby

Gritty, 'real life' dramas are a strange form of entertainment as there is voyeuristic feeling to them, but given the popularity of reality TV and docu-soaps it is obviously a genre that attracts audiences. Of course the advantage of dramatised versions is they real actors and scriptwriters to craft the story and develop some sort of resolution, and even empathy for the characters, whereas with 'reality' shows they are generally about people you don't really care about.


Sherrybaby is the story of Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who has just been released from three years in prison for a drug-related robbery. She has come out of jail positive about her future and wanting to become a proper mother to her young daughter, who has been cared for by her brother and his wife. Unfortunately she has to live in a half-way house, deal with a brutal parole officer and find a job that won't undermine her newfound self-confidence, and she struggles to cope with the rules imposed by different strata of society she is inhabiting, which leads her to making some wrong decisions.


Gyllenhaal doesn't play the role for sympathy but you are on her side throughout, even when she makes obvious mistakes. She plays it both tough and vulnerable, and no matter how hard she tries to do the right thing she ends up being the victim. This is very much her film and the best reason for seeing it.

The whole film is shot in a very neutral way, neither glossy nor gritty, so it gives it an almost documentary feel but still retaining a fictional edge. The ending is a bit unclear and ambiguous but does not detract from the quality of what came before.

The Prodigy

Starting with a chilling video interview with an unidentified child who has just killed someone, the film moves into an almost monochromatic, rainswept scene of two men in a car discussing what may be a bust, or possibly a sting. It's all a bit clichéd but not unbearably so right up to the moment of the armed stand-off, reminiscent of True Romance. Then the action kicks in, in an excellently choreographed shoot out sequence, which gets ramped up by the appearance of an unstoppable one-man killing machine. After killing practically everyone in the room, only the hero of the film is left alive and goes one-on-one with the brutal assassin, eventually drowning him in the bath, or so he thinks.


The story jumps forward several months and the hero, Truman, played by the movie's co-writer Holt Boggs, is called in by a gangland boss to help find his nephew, who has been taken by a mysterious man calling himself Claude Rains, the same one Truman thought he had killed. And so begins a frantic cat and mouse game with the antagonist seemingly always managing to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.


For a low budget movie, shot on video, it not only looks good, making full use of the format to achieve a mixture of noir, reportage and surveillance camera look, adjusting the colour grading to suit the mood of the scene. Apart from the technical aspect, where it really succeeds is in maintaining suspense. You know something nasty is going to happen but you don't know what or when. The dialogue can be corny and clichéd at times, but most action films aren't known for their dialogue.

There were some similarities to Se7en, not just with the look of the movie but with the killer's continual diatribe against society, although Rains' is nowhere as eloquent as that delivered by John Doe. And like Fincher's film it has a surprise ending, but not quite as shocking, but one that keeps you guessing.

For a first movie it is a great effort and one that keeps you enthralled. It's level of violence may not be to everyone's taste, but budgetary constraints do mean that most of the gore is not actually shown on screen. Se7en also used a similar method of gore by inference, which left audiences convinced they had seen more than they really did. So if you liked Se7en this is certainly worth a look, if it gets distribution.

Lives of the Saints

With three films on release at the moment, it would appear that Tony Grisoni is one of the most prolific screenwriters in the country. Tideland and Brothers of the Head are both adaptations of other people's books, as was Fear and Loathing, but Lives of the Saints is an original piece and one of the writer's first scripts.

Set in one of the low-rent multicultural areas of North London, inhabited mostly by that volatile combination of Greeks and Turks, it is magical tale of wish-fulfillment and instant karma. The area is run by Mr Karva, a big, loud and brutal godfather-like man, played with mesmerising force by James Cosmo. He is a man who likes to have his own way and will go to any extreme to get it. Karva's stepson, Othello, has his own ambitions, as does his off-sider, the weak-willed Emilio. The story is initially recounted from the point of view of Roadrunner, an errand runner for Karva, who can't stand still, that is until one nigh when he stumbles over a lost child in the park, forever changing the lives of those who come in contact with him.


Nothing is ever explained about who the child is or where he came from. We only know he has some sort of mystical, desire-fulfilling power and that power only seems to work on one person at a time, which creates some great moments of tension and conflict. Young Sam MacLintock quietly underplays the child with equal parts of wide-eyed innocence and Damien-like menace.

Co-directed by photographer and Dazed and Confused publisher Rankin, and film and TV director Chris Cottam, it is a fairly pedestrian affair, lacking any real original or standout imagery to make the settings appear more magical, in line with the story. There are some powerful scenes, but most of it is fairly mundane, as is the acting, or at least in comparison to James Cosmo's larger-than-life performance. Or maybe that was the directors' intention, to make Karva an even more prominent character.


This is definitely one of the more interesting independent feature films to be made in London in recent years that doesn't rely on familiar landmarks to establish its setting. Let's hope we can see more original movies that make the most of the city's diversity, without relying on stereotypical, urban stories about the obvious crime, racism and social injustices we see in our everyday lives. William Blake saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye, new filmmakers just need to find that magic. Lives of the Saints is certainly a step in the right direction.

EIFF Awards announced

As the 60th Edinburgh International Film Festival drew to a close, the outgoing Festival Artistic Director, Shane Danielsen, hosted a very low-key Awards ceremony to a room full of industry delegates and luminaries.


The Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film was awarded to the excellent Brothers of the Head, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. The Award was collected by the film's screenwriter Tony Grisoni and its stars Luke and Harry Treadaway.

The Award panel included Jury Chair, actor John Hurt, Irish writer John Banville, Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones and rock legend Chrissie Hynde.


The Skillset New Directors Award went to a bemused Paul Andrew Williams for his urban thriller, London to Brighton


The Best Documentary Award went to Jake Clennell for The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, about the young men of a Japanese escort agency.


The Standard Life Audience Award went to the hilarious fan-boy film Clerks II, with almost 70% of the votes. The Award was presented by local legend Sir Sean Connery.

The Ring Finger

Take a cult Japanese novella, a French woman director, a Hamburg setting and possibly one of the most beautiful women in the world and you have some of the ingredients that make up this mysterious fantasy film.

Based on a novel by Yoko Ogawa it is transposed to unnamed European location, where they speak French. The setting is contemporary but somehow timeless, which further enhances the overall mystique of the film.


Iris (Olga Kurylenko) works in a soft-drink factory and loses the tip of her ring finger in an accident. After the incident she moves into small hotel on the city's docks, where she shares a room with a sailor, whom she never sees. Whilst exploring the area, looking for work, she comes across an institution that is looking for an assistant to help with office tasks and the laboratory's preservation work. Nothing is ever really explained about what happens in the laboratory, except there seems to be an emotional healing process attached to the clients leaving their personal items for the enigmatic doctor to treat. The doctor gifts her a pair of pumps, which fit her feet like a glove, with the instructions she must always wear them, giving the film shades of The Red Shoes, which leads Iris into a relationship with her Svengali boss.

There is a real dreamlike quality to the film. Characters wander in and out without anything ever being explained as to who they are, leaving items for the doctor to preserve, and others leaving cryptic messages for Iris, who drifts through the story as an innocent, beguiled by all she sees until she falls under the doctor's spell.

Although so much of who, what and why are left unanswered it doesn't seem to matter. The film's visuals, and Iris's beauty, are so enticing they draw you into their dream logic without question. You just enjoy the moment and when it ends you want it to start again in the vague hope you will understand it next time, but without caring if you don't.

The Ring Finger is showing as part of Best of the Fest on Sunday August 27 at 10:15, Filmhouse, Edinburgh.

Sheitan

As much as the general French population want to deny it, France, and Paris in particular, is one of the great multicultural cities of Europe, mostly thanks to its past colonialism. The youth are far more integrated and are developing their own new cultural identities with ties to Africa. This French horror film takes its title from the the Muslim word for the devil and features three young friends (one African, one Vietnamese and one French).

During an evening out at a nightclub, the three men along with a young Algerian girl, meet up with beautiful girl, who invites them all back to her parent's home in the French countryside. What the trio were anticipating to be a weekend of sex and drugs starts turning weird when their path is blocked by a herd of goats and they are rescued by Joseph, the house's strange caretaker, played by Vincent Cassel in a superbly manic scene-stealing performance. The film is worth seeing just for Cassel alone.


Eve (Roxanne Mesquida) is a bit of an anomaly in the village in that she is the only one that doesn't look like she is from a French version of Deliverance. We soon discover that not only do the people look strange, but their behaviour is too, which must surely be a strong case for the mixing of races. Before long everything starts to get really weird, further bolstered by rooms full of dismembered dolls and Joseph's perpetually grinning face.

It's not a straight-forward horror film in the traditional sense, as it mixes elements of of the surreal, humour and sex (it is a French film after all), without jump-out-of-your-seat scares. Towards the end the film you are left wondering what is real and what is not, only to be brought back to the shocking reality of what is happening to them, with a truly bizarre ending.

Sheitan is showing as part of Best of the Fest on Sunday 27 August at 20:45 at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh.

Shut Up and Shoot Me

If there's one thing the British film industry does well is quirky comedies. Not the high-profile Richard Curtis rom-coms, but the smaller independent ones like Shaun of the Dead. Shut Up and Shoot Me isn't a purely UK movie, but a co-production with the new centre of European filmmaking, Czech Republic.


Given the cultural backgrounds of production partners, the comedy is morbid, or dark in filmspeak. Colin (Andy Nyman), a nervous and vacillating man, is on holiday in Prague with his wife when she is accidently killed in a freak accident. Grief-stricken, he unsuccessfully tries to kill himself, so decides to hire someone to do the job for him. He engages the services of a local driver, Pavel (Karel Roden), whose demanding, shopaholic wife leaves him constantly strapped for cash. Unfortunately, Pavel is rather an inept killer, or at least when it comes to his paying client. However the pair do manage to leave a trail of bodies in their attempt to end Colin's life, the only person in the film who seems to come out unscathed.

The idea is not particularly original and has been done before in many guises throughout the world. The strength of the film lies in the chemistry between Nyman's hapless Colin and Roden's inept Pavel. They manage to make the most of the material and deliver it with deadpan conviction that creates some genuine laugh out loud moments, but for the most part is fairly predictable and obvious.

Nyman is starring in Severance which is already getting rave reviews and is out today.

Shut Up and Shoot Me is showing as part of the Best of the Fest on Sunday 27 August 13:00 at Cineworld, Edinburgh.

Snow Cake

Movies about human drama are nearly always traumatic affairs filled with angst and a full gamut of other emotions that invariably involve shouting and crying. It takes a certain frame of mind to go and watch people suffering for an hour and a half (or more), but it's a mindset that appeals to people who give out movie awards and justifiably so. A well-written drama will stretch the actor and if they are not up to the task it will be patently obvious.

There is one such film that should be appearing on all the upcoming award nominations, just on the strength of its leads performances, and that film is Snow Cake with Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman.

Rickman plays Alex, a jaded and taciturn Englishman, a role that comes effortlessly to him, who is driving across Canada to visit the mother of a deceased son he never knew. On the way he meets a young goth girl, who is hitchhiking to a small town called Wawa, to visit her mother. On the girl's insistence, and against his better judgement, he gives her a lift. They are involved in an accident (stunningly executed on film) and the girl is killed. Filled with remorse, Alex takes the gifts the girl had bought for her mother, in the hope of somehow consoling her and absolving himself of blame. But when he arrives he discovers that her mother, Linda, is autistic. Wanting to help her with the funeral arrangements, he convinces Linda to let him stay with her, and a funny, bittersweet relationship starts to develop between them, within the confines of Linda's condition. At the same time Alex has fallen for Linda's neighbour Maggie, played by the thinking man's sex symbol, Carrie-Ann Moss (The Matrix). Within the the short period of time he is in the small town, the two complex relationships open Alex's heart and get him to face his inner demons.


The dramatic scope of the story is fairly limited, compared to other similar films, but this tends to ground it more in reality, especially given the personalities of the three main characters. Rickman is good but hardly stretched and the sardonic wit he does so well is put to good use. Moss is still sexy without her skintight leather and shows that she is a diverse actress whose skills were underused in that sci-fi trilogy. But it is Sigourney Weaver who steals the film, capturing the childlike innocence and obsessive behaviour that characterises autism, with great subtly. When we first discover her autism it comes as surprise and Weaver continues to surprise throughout the film. It is hard to believe this is the same actress that played the alien-conquering Ripley.


Even if this type of dramatic film is not usually to your taste, go and see it just for Sigourney Weaver's performance and then be surprised at how good the whole film is.

On general release soon.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

No matter what you think of the abrupt ending of Zidane's career during the World Cup, there is no denying that the method in which he did it was as unorthodox and inspired as the rest of his playing. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest footballers of our time, and one whose skills seem to have been largely ignored by the British public and media alike.

This film is simply a study of the man on the pitch during a match between Real Madrid and Villareal. Shot with 17 cameras, under the guidance of cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en), it just focusses on the legendary French captain as we are treated to a visual spectacular of footballing skills and personality.

As a piece of documentary filmmaking it is stunning, from its camera work to the editing and the soundtrack score by Mogwai. As a piece of entertainment, it is really limited to football fans who are more than prepared to watch men kicking a ball around for 90 minutes. Although I can appreciate the footballing and filmmaking skills on show, not being a fan of the "beautiful game" I found it all a bit tedious. Now if there was an edited highlights...

Showing as part of Best of the Fest, Sunday 27 August, 15:15, Cineworld Edinburgh

Coming soon to an art gallery near you

Little Miss Sunshine

Hollywood and the movies has always been about the American Dream; the freedom to do and be what you want. Come the Sixties and Seventies and the new generation realised that the dream was going bad and set off to look for America and for themselves. First in literature with Kerouac and Thompson, then with films like Easy Rider came the start of the road movies (not to be confused the Crosby and Hope films). As the youth were off in search of the truth and a new dream they found that family units were breaking down or were simply becoming dysfunctional, and creating a new sub-genre to be explored in writing and film, whether as drama or comedy. Little Miss Sunshine takes all these elements and rolls them up into a funny, dysfunctional family, road movie about the American Dream.


Douglas Coupland wrote a book called All Families are Psychotic and the Hoover family of this film certainly fit into that category. From the heroin-snorting, foul-mouthed grandfather, brilliantly portrayed by Alan Arkin, to his eternally optimistic son Richard, the motivational speaker (Greg Kinnear) to Richard's own son Dwayne, a typical sullen, angry teenager who reads Nietzsche and has taken a vow of silence until he achieves his goal of getting into the Air Force. Richard's wife Sheryl (Toni Collete) tries to keep the family together with her open, honesty policy, whilst trying to hide the fact that her Proust-scholar brother (Steve Carell) tried to commit suicide after being rejected by his gay lover. Perhaps the only bit of sanity is the youngest of the family, Olive, a plump, spectacle-wearing girl with dreams of becoming a beauty queen. It is her dream that is the driving force behind the movie.


After winning, by default, the local round of a pre-pubescent beauty competition, the titular Little Miss Sunshine, Olive has to go to California, from Albuquerque, but financial and familial situations dictate that the whole family have to go together in their car, a tired, old VW Kombi bus, which becomes as much a star of the show as the actors. As they try to race the clock to arrive on time for the pageant, whatever could possibly go wrong does, to create a great, almost farcical, comedy tinged with moments of powerful emotion.


There have been a string of disastrous family, road movie comedies recently (Are We There Yet, RV, but Little Miss Sunshine absolves those sins by being smart and funny. Although it is a movie about a family it is by no means a family movie (it has a 15 certificate). And it has a particularly disturbing ending in that it shows to what a low level American society has sunk to with the junior beauty pageants. Luckily Olive's routine restores some balance.

Just the film to renew your faith in humanity, with lots of laughs to boot.

Little Miss Sunshine is on general release from September 8.

Water

India is one of the most prolific filmmaking countries in the world, but most of its content is the populist Bollywood fare, but there are the occasional serious, as in art house, filmmakers in the vein of Satyajit Ray. Interestingly two of the most adventurous and internationally recognised are women; Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding) and Deepa Mehta, the director of Water. It is even more remarkable when you consider the topic of her latest film and that the attitudes it demonstrates are still prevalent today.


Water is the third part of the Canada-based director's elemental trilogy (the other two are Fire and Earth. Set in the holy city of Varanasi, India towards the end of British imperial rule, it tells the story of eight-year-old Chuyia, who is recently widowed. At that time widows had their heads shaved and were consigned to live their entire lives in isolated charity homes, rejected by the general public as polluted, and forbidden to marry again. Chuyia is sent to live out the rest of her life in one of these institutions. Here she meets Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a beautiful young widow who falls in love with an educated young man who, in reciprocating her affections, is prepared to overturn tradition. Unfortunately, self-appointed matriarch of the home has been secretly pimping out Kalyani to wealthy local men to augment the home's income.

But it is a time of great change in India and Ghandi’s politics are sweeping the nation. People are questioning religious interpretations that undermine social progress and the rights of women.

Underneath this very moving and beautifully shot film is a very powerful and controversial social statement, that saw the director receive death threats from Hindu fundamentalists (fanaticism isn't just limited to Muslims, as the press and government would have us believe). When the film first started shooting her sets were destroyed and production was abandoned for five years, eventually resuming in secret in Sri Lanka.

India is a land of great contrasts and it is further highlighted in this movie. Women and wives are worshipped as goddesses, and their chastity respected and yet widows are treated as untouchables. With child brides being a common occurrence in those days, it meant that institutions were filled with women who had no real childhood or life at all. Despite the huge social and economic changes in India over the last decade or two, and women have far greater freedom (even to make films of this nature), millennia of religious conditioning means that there are still millions of widows still treated as outcasts.

Although the injustice and unrequited love lends the movie powerful emotional content, ultimately it is a positive story about the prospects of change and renewal. The leads give well-balanced performances and are ably supported by what must a cast of non-professional actors. The real star of the film is the cinematography which exquisitely captures all the beauty and contrasts of India (even if it is substituted for by Sri Lanka). Every shot is perfectly composed and lit and really puts the Art into art house cinema.

Apart from the stunning visuals it has an excellent soundtrack from India's top young musicians including Anoushka Shankar (daughter of Ravi), and songwriters A R Rahman and Sukhwinder Singh. Luckily, the songs are just part of the overall soundtrack and not performed with dancing and playback singers, like Bollywood movies.

I can't recommend this film highly enough to anyone who appreciates good, intelligent cinema, but without pretense and grungy images.

Cameo 1, Edinburgh
Thursday 24 August 19:00

Cineworld, Edinburgh
Saturday 26 August 14:15

The Oh in Ohio

Imagine, a 21st Century sex comedy free from nudity and graphic onscreen sex. That's what The Oh in Ohio is. Freed from the attractions of the flesh this film relies on its smart script and excellent performances from a stellar cast to deliver an intelligent and hilarious look at the pressures placed on a society obsessed with sexual performance.


Priscilla (Parker Posey) is a high-achieving career woman, who is successful in the boardroom but not the bedroom, having not achieved an orgasm in ten years of marriage. Unfortunately it is her husband Jack (Paul Rudd) who is frustrated by this state of affairs, fearing his manhood is under threat. A highly respected teacher, he is becoming more and more disheveled as his self-esteemed slips, until a dalliance with beautiful student (Mischa Barton), who manages to reignite his lust for life, as he moves into his own bachelor pad. Meanwhile, his wife is trying to discover ways of achieving the elusive Big O, including a visit to a sex toys shop, a whacky sex therapist (Liza Minnelli) and a fling a swimming pool salesman (Danny DeVito), all with differing degrees of success.


Anyone entering into their thirties, or whatever age mid-life crisis settles in, and who has been in a long-term relationship will find this movie of sexual politics absolutely hilarious. Not that anyone else won't, but there is plenty for people of that demographic to identify with, even if they won't admit it. Apart from some broad comedy, that never really gets smutty, just a little close to the bone (so to speak), it is also a romantic comedy in the vein of When Harry Met Sally, if it was directed by the Farrelly Brothers.



Showing at Cineworld, Edinburgh
Wednesday 23 August 20:30
Thursday 24 August 17:00

National release to follow.

Future Cinema

With somuch going on in Edinburgh in August, what with the Arts Festival, Book Festival, Fringe and the Film Festival, it is very hard to find something that unifies all these diverse elements into a single evening's entertainment.

FUTURE CINEMA is a highly innovative cinematic experience, fusing film, music, theatre and cabaret together to dazzling effect. Brought to you by Stella Artois and Future Shorts, Europe’s leading short film label, the event is being held at former casino Club Ego and will will feature trapeze artists, installations, burlesque performers, gypsy bands, roving musicians and much, much more. The gothic cinema will also house Future Shorts, showing the very best in world short film and music video, including classic short films by Spike Jonze and Mike Leigh alongside the very best new directors. Dynamic theatre directors The Pikled Pikchers Theatre Lab are providing artistic direction and turning the space into a surreal, stimulating and highly interactive environment. Audiences will be treated to a rescore of the classic horror film Nosferatu by Darryn Harkness, as well as performances by The Dresden Dolls and The Real Tuesday Weld. Other highlights include work by leading installation artists and audio visual architects.

In total, there will be more than fifty performers, ten installation artists, five live bands and over 150 short films. FUTURE CINEMA is unique in the Edinburgh Fringe in its ability to fuse all aspects of the festival into one multilayered event. We ask you to let go and open your senses to another way of enjoying film.
 
Venue: C at Club Ego, venue 204, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Date: Wednesday 23 August 2006
Time: 8.00pm - 3.00am
 www.futurecinema.co.uk

Arthouse Films

Part of film festival experience is seeing films that would rarely get distribution outside of their home countries, and even then on a very limited arthouse cinema release. The films I'm talking about are not independent and mini-major releases that often get called arthouse but movies that are often personal, sometimes experimental, projects that don't follow the current, common perception of movies as linear stories, with good acting and cinematography. Which is not to say some of these don't have any, or all, of these qualities but many times these films take a great deal of willpower to sit the whole way through. Here are some that I saw, for better or for worse.


HOUSE OF SAND (Casa De Areia)
This story is about three generations of women, grandmother, mother and daughter, who live in an isolated part of northern Brazil between 1910 and 1969. A pregnant woman follows her eccentric husband, her mother and a group of settlers to the sand covered location, hoping to start a fresh life. A house is built, but with the appearance of a group of runaway slaves, the rest of the settlers leave. Before long the woman is left alone with her daughter and her mother. As the years pass, time and the elements take their toll on the grandmother, leaving the woman to raise the daughter on her own, with only the escaped slaves as neighbours.


The story unfolds slowly. There is very little action in this desert setting, and the story takes huge jumps in order to cover the long time span. Real life mother and daughter actreses, Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, play the different generational roles, which does get occasionally confusing, but the strength of their relationship and acting carries the film. But the star of the film is undoubtedly the stark scenery and the beautifully composed cinematography. The long, lingering shots of endless sand are reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia.

The movie is the antithesis of the Hollywood blockbuster and the perfect antidote to action overload. If you want to see a meditative movie that highlights the inner strength and tranquility of femininity, there are worst ways to spend two hours on a wet afternoon.

Cineworld, Edinburgh
Saturday 19 August 21:00
Tuesday 22 August 17:00

SEVEN HEAVENS (Sieben Himmel)
The blurb for this German film made it sound interesting, a trap I keep falling into with these types of films. A young goth girl is drawn into a covert relationship with a nightwatchman, whom she discovers has pornographic pictures of her on his computer, but she doesn't know how they got there.


The film plays with the timeline continuum, which tends to confuse more than add mystery. But it is the cinematography that renders it almost unwatchable. Shot on video in an almost monochromatic palette of dark, muted hues, using a lens that tends puts most of the image out of focus. While this may be intended to give the film a surreal, dreamlike quality, it just put me to sleep.

It was an interesting idea, but badly executed.

Filmhouse 3, Edinburgh
Monday 21 August 18:00
Wednesday 23 August 21:00

BLACK SHEEP (Schwarze Schafe)
Another German film, this one has a more linear story, although a multi-threaded one that follows the lives of five different groups of characters in Berlin. Shot in black and white, with the occasional flash of colour, the movie starts with a superb scam in a luxurious hotel restaurant.


The film shows the diversity and poverty of the German city since the wall fell. From a trio of horny Turkish youths, to a pair of wannabe satanists to a disgruntled tour operator, the stories are all self-contained but occasionally overlap to give some continuity to the film. Being a European film it is not always nice things that happen to the characters, and inevitably you don't really care either, which does make all rather pessimistic, even if the director does try to end the film on a more positive note.

This multi-threaded style of storytelling has become quite popular following the success of Pulp Fiction, but few, if any, have matched Tarantino's knack for great dialogue and pop-culture references. Somehow, California sunshine makes these complex, if sometimes violent and harrowing tales all the more viewable than the dismal grey of Berlin.

Black Sheep does try to be funny and ironic, and maybe it is to German audiences, but it doesn't work that well in a country that has mastered irony.

Filmhouse, Edinburgh
Saturday 19 August 22:00
Tuesday 22 August 21:00

Wristcutters: A Love Story

Making a film about suicide may be considered artistic suicide, especially a film that is aimed at a relatively mainstream audience. Wristcutters isn't a documentary or one of those incomprehensible arthouse movies that never makes it beyond the festival circuit. Quite the opposite. It is a love story and a road movie, with moments of subtle humour.


After taking his own life with razor blades across the wrists, lovelorn Zia (Patrick Fugit - Almost Famous) finds himself in a bland, nowhere world inhabited by other suicides, working in a pizzeria called Kamikaze Pizza. Here he befriends a Russian rock star, Eugene, who killed himself by pouring beer into his electric guitar while on stage. Zia is having trouble adjusting to his new "life", where no one smiles and the jukeboxes only play music by people who killed themselves, until he hears that the girl who drove him over the brink had also killed herself and was in the same netherworld. So he convinces Eugene to take his beat up car and go with him in search of his lost love. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker called Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon - Rules of Attraction, A Knight's Tale), who wants to talk to the "people in charge" because she believes she is there by mistake.


After several adventures they stumble across Kneller (Tom Waits) who runs a sort of refuge where good things happen. Here he discovers the whereabouts of his ex, who is with the self proclaimed Messiah King, played by Will Arnett (Gob from the excellent TV sit-com Arrested Development). When Zia finally catches up with his ex he realises that maybe it isn't her he loves now.

Director Goran Dikic has created a desolate world that is dirty, barren and washed out, which is accentuated by the films cinematography and colour grading. Although it is a joyless world of menial jobs and bad food, it is a contrast to the usual concept of the purgatory suicides are sent to in that it is identical to a world thousands of the living already inhabit, whether it is Russia or the American mid west. While the film is not condoning suicide it is showing that many people already lead lives of the dead.

It is a positive film about how love can conquer all, and it does it without having to resort to the usual saccharine sweetness that plagues most rom-coms. Not that this could really be classified as a typical rom-com. It does have lots of moments of gentle dark humour, like the black hole in Eugene's car, but it is not a laugh-out-loud comedy, which seems rather fitting giving the film's conceit. And it does have a happy ending.

This is an ideal film for confessed unromantics to take their more romantically inclined partners to see, without blowing their credibility.

Wristcutters is showing at Cameo 1, Edinburgh
Sunday 20 at 22:00
Monday 21 at 17:30

Neo Ned

The forbidden/mismatched love finishing in tragedy has been the theme of plays and films ever since the first performance of Romeo and Juliet, and probably even before then. Apart from straight cinema versions Shakespeare's play, it was the basis of West Side Story and hundreds of Bollywood films follow a similar formula. While Neo Ned does follow the basic concept of classic play with the tragic ending considerably toned down, it has its own unique setting and cast of characters that more closely resembles One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.


The titular Ned (played in a fantastic performance by Jeremy Renner) is what is usually described as 'trailer trash'. We see him as a young boy who idolized his father and dreamed of following in his footsteps. Unfortunately those footsteps kept leading to jail. Taken from his talk-show addicted mother, the young ends up in foster care, but he escapes that and finds a new family of his own, a neo-nazi group called the Aryan Brotherhood. This association leads him to being locked up in a metal hospital for the murder of a black man. Here he meets a young black girl, Rachael, (played by Gabrielle Union) who is pretending Hitler has reincarnated in her, and slowly romance and love ensue, bringing them both to face parts of themselves they have been hiding. All this climaxes with an unexpected, but happy ending.

The film addresses many issues, such as racism, child abuse, mental health and above all the need for love and its power to transform, all of which are handled with some great humour, and but also pathos. It will make you laugh, cry and even think a little.

It is movies like this that make independent films a force to be reckoned with. Conventional stories shown with unconventional characters and situations that the big studios won't take a risk with. The acting is excellent from the two leads, who are well supported by actors such as Cary Elwes and Ethan Suplee (the younger brother in My Name is Earl).

If you want to see a love story with a difference that is not a schmalzy rom-com or a harrowing melodrama then catch this one at the festival on Thursday 17 August at 21:30 or Saturday 19 at 14:40, both at Cameo 1. Hopefully it will get general release very soon.

Thursday 17 August at 21:30
Saturday 19 August at 14:40
Cameo 1

Hoodwinked

Ever since Disney made his first animated feature, Snow White, fairy tales have been a popular source for children's and family movies. Disney sanitised the original tales for the delicate minds of American children, (the same ones that have grown into killers, but that's another discussion for another place). Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm went some way to showing how dark fairy tales are, and Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolvesgave the story of Red Riding Hood a distinctly gothic and adult feel. Hoodwinked gives the same tale a more post-modern interpretation, which owes more to Shrek than anything else.


In this new animated version of the popular story, created and directed by Cory and Todd Edwards and Tony Leech, there is a thief that has been stealing the recipes from all the cooks of the forest, and Granny's collection is considered the best in the land. In order to stop it being stolen, Red decides to hide it in the bottom of a picnic basket and take it to her grandmother, who lives alone in the mountains. She is accompanied by a rabbit who has lost everything. Along the way they meet a wolf who wants to take away her basket, but Red escapes and eventually makes it to her grandma's cottage, where you finds the wolf disguised as her grandmother, while Granny is tied up in the closet. A bit of rough and tumble ensues until the axe-wielding woodsman crashes through the window. So far this sounds like the same old story except just at that moment moment the police arrive, lead by their Chief, Grizzly Bear and his assistants, the three little pigs (you see where this is going). The Chief is about to lock them all up when the suave, debonair frog detective, Nicky Flippers, arrives. Looking very much like a cartoon Poirot, but as everyone knows Poirot is Belgian and not a frog. Each of the suspects is interviewed and given a chance to tell their version of what happened up to the climactic moment, which leads Flippers to deduce who the real culprit is.

Like most contemporary Western animation this is of 3D CGI variety. Unfortunately it is not of a standard we have become used to from Pixar or Dreamworks, and it does look decidedly low-budget, along the lines of Jimmy Neutron. Saying that, I have seen some outstanding CGI animation that has been done on almost no budget, such as Rust Boy, which was made using cheap off-the-shelf software and a Mac.


Hoodwinked is saved by its script, and although the whole concept is not entirely original - there is a children's play called Wolfie that uses a very similar storyline - it does have some great moments of humour and plenty of film references to keep the adults amused. It also has a substantial voice cast including Anne Hathaway (Princess Diaries, Brokeback Mountain, Glenn Close (101 Dalmations, Mars Attacks, Jagged Edge, Jim Belushi (Red Heat) David Ogden Stiers ( MASH TV series) and Xzibit (MTV's Pimp My Ride) to deliver the gags.

It is flashy and fast-paced enough to keep kids entertained, with the dialogue being knowing enough to keep the adults amused. With the sometimes frenetic pace of the movie, the younger viewers aren't going to be too bothered by quality of the animation.

It is an entertaining children's film, just not a highly original adaptation or with great animation. And that hyperactive squirrel seems somehow familiar.

Art School Confidential

For most people, comic book movies usually involve superheroes, a hangover from their perceptions of the source material. But as any self-respecting reader of comics, or graphic novels as they prefer to be called, will tell you, they cover every genre, with Japanese manga being the most diverse and generally free from costumed super men. In the last year or so we have had A History of Violence and V For Vendetta, both of graphic novel origin. Daniel Clowes story Ghost World was a cult hit, but the latest collaboration between Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, Art School Confidential looks like it could become a more mainstream success.


The story of Jerome, a suburban boy with drawing talent, who dreams of becoming a great artist, like his hero Picasso, with a particular desire to emulate the master's power over women. But Jerome is shy and innocent and has a crush on a girl he saw in a brochure photo for a city art school. He enrolls at the college, which, he discovers, happens to have a problem with a serial killer. However, this is not a teen slasher movie, with the murders being a sub-plot to a witty and intelligent romantic, rites of passage movie. Jerome (Max Minghella) meets the object of his desire, Laura (Sophia Myles) and pursues her through his art, but he is having trouble reconciling his innate talent with the demands of the school system.


Apart from serial-killer and romantic strands of the movie, it is also an acutely observed satire on the art world. It is plainly obvious that the story's creator attended art school (after all, comics are really the last bastion of figurative art). The movie perfectly captures the environment and its characters, which are cleverly narrowed down into stereotypes by Jerome's friend. The movie took me back to my days as an art school student, with the never-really-made-it-as-an-artist tutors, and the pretentious students, more keen on "expressing themselves" rather than learning craft and technique. More importantly, it showed the loss of innocence that afflicts students as they enter the system.


It's interesting to see the three pivotal leads are played by Brits, Max Minghella (son of Anthony), Sophia Myles and Jim Broadbent. Broadbent's portrayal of a washed-up and disillusioned alumni of the art school is stunning and overshadows the performances of the rest of the stellar support cast, including indy favourites John Malkovich (as the tutor) , Angelica Huston (as another tutor), Steve Buscemi (as a gallery owner) and Ethan Suplee (as Jerome's filmmaking friend). Suplee appears in two other films at EIFF; Clerks II and Neo Ned.


Although it is not a particularly complex film, in terms of plot, it does not always lead you by the hand either, and comes with all sorts of surprises that keep you involved.

It's good to see more of the leftfield comics/graphic novels making to the movies, instead of just the superhero stuff. There is a wealth of truly original material out there in comics shops for the movie industry to adapt, and if the mini-majors are willing to take the risks, it can only be good for both industries.

Art School Confidential will be on release later in the year.

Clerks II: The Second Coming

Ten years after Kevin Smith's debut film made him darling of the independent film world, he has carved himself a nice little niche in New Jersey-based movies that feature a motley crew of reprobates including his alter ego Silent Bob and his (non-gay) partner Jay. It was so successful it even spawned an animated series and a comic book (comics being one of Smith's passions). After the original Clerks Smith produced a bunch moderately successful films, which peaked with Dogma, a film that showed his writing had reached a new maturity and depth. The created a lot of anger among the religious right, which is always a good sign.

Wanting to break away from dick and fart jokes he made Jersey Girl. which was a critical, and some say a total, failure. It was partly this that made the director reassess the type of films he really wanted to make.


Clerks 2: The Second Coming is a return to his roots, a movie with plenty of talking and potty-mouth humour, but tempered with his new writing maturity, with profundity among the profanity. In this latest outing for Dante and Randal, the two slackers have to take a new job at a Mooby's takeaway. Although many things haven't changed, Jay and Silent Bob are still hanging out in front of the store, Dante is engaged and planning to move to Florida with his new bride-to-be. Randal is upset with this, but still plans to give his best buddy an unforgettable send off. This new story introduces two other characters into the dynamic, if you can call what these slackers do dynamic. Apart from the Mrs Hicks-to-be (Jennifer Scwalbach), the first is Elias (Trevor Ferhman), a geeky Christian, who is also a fan of Transformers and Lord of the Rings. The other is Becky, the manager of the Mooby, played by Rosario Dawson, with whom Dante has developed a strong friendship.


It is these two new characters that act as the catalyst for the film's best moments of humour and emotion. Yes, there is emotional content in a Kevin Smith film! It was something he explored in Jersey Girl and Chasing Amy, but slipping it in between the dick jokes it doesn't get a chance to get mawkish. There are also some philosophical discussions, the likes of which made Dogma such a great film. And of course there are plenty of fanboy debates, which no View Askew project would be complete without.


In some parts of the film I laughed till I had tears in my eyes, which seemed to hang around for some of the other scenes (that's my story and I'm sticking with it). It's not a film to everyone's taste, with some of it guaranteed to offend people who take movies for real. Kevin Smith fans will definitely not be disappointed, for those unfamiliar with the Askew universe this is a good place to jump in. Smith's writing and direction assured and once you accept his brand of humour, it is a lot of fun. It is definitely not for those who are easily offended.

Showing at Cineworld, Edinburgh on August 20 at 18:00
On general release soon.

Destricted

Challenging and controversial are two words that could be used to describe this film, so are pretentious rubbish. I had the same reaction to this film as I did to Battle for Heaven last year, "What am I doing here?" It was another error of judgement that came from reading, and believing, the accompanying blurb in the programme. I was expecting something a bit different just because of the names of the filmmakers attached to the project: Matthew (Cremaster) Barney, Marco Brambilla and Larry (Kids) Clark. What I didn't realise was it was art masquerading as porn, or porn masquerading as art. The film was made up of five different pieces by five different directors looking at sex. Barney's piece was a long slow study of a well-endowed man, with some sort of vegetable matter stuck up his backside, having sex with the drive-shaft of a monster truck. Auto-eroticism on a grand scale. It was long, the film that is, with a pulsating soundtrack, but no other redeeming qualities.


Marco Brambilla's contribution was much shorter and an amazing piece of editing, but the editing together of hundreds of clips from porn films into a dazzling montage of movement, but with no real substance or meaning.

Larry Clark took the documentary route working with young people again. His idea was simple: offer young male porn fans the opportunity to actually meet a porn star and realise their fantasies. All the hopefuls were interviewed and introduced to a selection of industry ladies, whom they got to interview and probe in a sort of bizarre Blind Date meets Pop Idol. The "winner" then got to have his way with the woman, while they were videoed.

The last two films were of people masturbating. The first, called Death Valley, was a static shot of a man masturbating in the middle of Death Valley, while the second was of two separate people, a boy and a girl, probably teens, involved in some serious "self love" in their own darkened bedrooms.

Why a film of this type is shown at a highly-respected festival like Edinburgh, is beyond me. Last year there was Battle for Heaven, which in comparison was a lyrical tale, and I thought it was one of the worse films I'd seen, but that has now been superseded.

Destricted is not erotic, it is not art, is not even really a movie (as far as I am concerned), but a load of mental and physical masturbation. If you want to watch that sort of stuff, buy some proper porn and watch it at home and save your money for a proper film with some redeeming qualities.

Thursday August 17 21:40 and
Saturday August 19 22:00
Cineworld