Sunday, October 02, 2005
The weekend started with Guy X at the Raindance Festival. Now, the Raindance is a funny, poor, black sheepish relative to the London Film Festival; everything is always a bit ad hoc - the makeshift queues, the delays, the relatively small, intimate screens. Elliot Grove usually hangs out, talking to the punters, cracking a joke, plugging something or other.
The programme is much more exctiting than one should think, given my choice of movie to see, and there's still another week left, so go see.
Guy X was by all means not a bad film. On the other hand, it was not a particularly exciting film. It starts off beautiful, intriguing (and interestingly, these first couple of minutes, according to director Saul Metzstein, were what attracted him to the script) - almost a perfection, especially compared to the rest of the movie. Obviously I could not stop thinking about M*A*S*H, Catch 22, Three Kings, Buffalo Soldiers, all of which are better than Guy X. My date mentioned Kafka, which is true; the story has got much potential to be kafkaesque, but lets this promise down halfways through the movie. Jason Biggs does well (insert own pie joke here) and he is a likeable actor. Guy X is not a wast of time by all means - should you come across it you may find lots of enjoyment there, but, alas, you probably don't need to go out of your way to see it.
Last night was the interesting business of RESFEST and more importantly, the Director Keynote Address from Anton Corbijn. This was really a talk/interview/conversation with Corbijn and Paul Morley, interspersed with Corbijn's music videos.
This is a much hipper and thus much more tiresome festival; there are fantastic showings and really useful information to be had but the audience would be better off...no, I would be better off would the audience not ask any questions. In the words of Pharrell Williams; fucking posers.
However, back to an energetic and interested evening - it started with music by U2 and a slideshow of Corbijn's photographs, all fantastically beautiful, poignant and hysterically funny. Corbijn's English is not fantastic but he has buckets of charm and warmth and everything is so effortless and friendly and the evening runs so smoothly that suddenly 2 1/2 hours have breezed past and its time to go home.
Btw, Anton Corbijn was plugging his new Director's Label DVD of which there are seven all in all, and if the new batch (the other directors being Mark Romanek, Stephane Sednaoui and Jonathan Glazer) is half as good as the first three of the series (Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry) they are definitely worth splashing out on.
The programme is much more exctiting than one should think, given my choice of movie to see, and there's still another week left, so go see.
Guy X was by all means not a bad film. On the other hand, it was not a particularly exciting film. It starts off beautiful, intriguing (and interestingly, these first couple of minutes, according to director Saul Metzstein, were what attracted him to the script) - almost a perfection, especially compared to the rest of the movie. Obviously I could not stop thinking about M*A*S*H, Catch 22, Three Kings, Buffalo Soldiers, all of which are better than Guy X. My date mentioned Kafka, which is true; the story has got much potential to be kafkaesque, but lets this promise down halfways through the movie. Jason Biggs does well (insert own pie joke here) and he is a likeable actor. Guy X is not a wast of time by all means - should you come across it you may find lots of enjoyment there, but, alas, you probably don't need to go out of your way to see it.
Last night was the interesting business of RESFEST and more importantly, the Director Keynote Address from Anton Corbijn. This was really a talk/interview/conversation with Corbijn and Paul Morley, interspersed with Corbijn's music videos.
This is a much hipper and thus much more tiresome festival; there are fantastic showings and really useful information to be had but the audience would be better off...no, I would be better off would the audience not ask any questions. In the words of Pharrell Williams; fucking posers.
However, back to an energetic and interested evening - it started with music by U2 and a slideshow of Corbijn's photographs, all fantastically beautiful, poignant and hysterically funny. Corbijn's English is not fantastic but he has buckets of charm and warmth and everything is so effortless and friendly and the evening runs so smoothly that suddenly 2 1/2 hours have breezed past and its time to go home.
Btw, Anton Corbijn was plugging his new Director's Label DVD of which there are seven all in all, and if the new batch (the other directors being Mark Romanek, Stephane Sednaoui and Jonathan Glazer) is half as good as the first three of the series (Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry) they are definitely worth splashing out on.
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