Edinburgh International Film Festival 2016. Moon Dogs.

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2016. Moon Dogs.

The annual Edinburgh International Film Festival is in full swing just now, celebrating its 70th edition. I have never before been to see anything at it, but had the chance this year to head along the M8 from Glasgow to attend the premiere of Moon Dogs, a Celtic road movie set between Shetland and Glasgow. 

I had a couple of family members involved in the film and also two of my wee nieces were meant to be in it as extras, bopping about at a club, so I have known about this film for a while. With a couple of my aunties and cousins we trundled east on Friday night to see if Keira and Issy's dancing made the final cut. 

I don't know anything about film-making but hearing second hand the lengths people have to go to, to secure funding and bring an idea to the screen it makes you wonder why people bother even trying. Beyond the world of superhero blockbusters it seems to be a very hand-to-mouth existence. Any screenings of films which involve a Q&A with the director or cast that I have been to, such as the Graeme Obree documentary film Battle Mountain, Sunset Song directed by Terence Davies and a recent award-winning Scottish film starring Kate Dickie and George MacKay, For Those In Peril, the same message is heard. We struggled to get funding, we had to cut these corners to stick to budget, we are now struggling to get any distribution, to make back any of the money put into it. Directors, writers, producers often appear to have to do much work unpaid in order get the film completed.

Moon Dogs is the first feature film from director Philip John who hails from Wales and has worked on Being Human, Downtown Abbey and Outlander for TV. In the film, after his girlfriend leaves Shetland for university in Glasgow, Michael (Jack Parry-Jones) and his step-brother Thor (Christy O'Donnell - who you may recognise as a handsome young busker from Buchanan Street) embark on a road-trip to the big city, aided and abetted by Caitlin (charismatic Irish singer and actress Tara Lee) who they meet on the way. The other major cast member is the Scottish scenery. From grey skies over Shetland and Orkney, through the green Highlands to Stirling and Glasgow (where I got to play "spot the location"). The three young lead actors, from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, are always entertaining whilst on screen and the different personalities of the characters create friction along the way. Naive young Michael gets all the best lines, whilst my teenage sons were rooting for Caitlin and your heart goes out to Thor's emo-introspection. You want to give him a big hug. 

Cast, crew and musician Anton Newcombe at the Moon Dogs premiere, Edinburgh

Music is an important part of the story and it was imaginative to avoid the easy heedrum-hodrum Scottish music option and choose American experimental/ psychedelic/ rock/ innovative musician Anton Newcombe (Brian Jonestown Massacre) to provide the soundtrack. Working on his first movie score he seems to have really thrown himself into it and his music was present during filming, as he explained at the screening, and is completely interwoven into the plot. I could happily sit and watch it with my eyes closed, but then I would miss the Scottish scenery. 

Other well-kent Scottish faces appear in the film (such as Denis Lawson and Tam Dean Burn, all eyebrows and attitude) and the step-parents (is that a word?) played by Jamie Sives and Claire Cage are warnly played. However the young leads in the film are the stars, full of personality and strong character. Gently rebelling. 

It was a really enjoyable night out in Edinburgh, lovely to hear from the cast and crew at the end and I can only wish the film well, as it makes Scotland look lovely. And yes, my nieces smiling faces did make it onto the screen, the true stars of the whole production, obviously.

Live music reviews : Ela Orleans. Joanna Newsom. Glasgow

Ela Orleans. Live Score for "Lucky Star". Glasgow Film Festival
Joanna Newsom. Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Ela Orleans 

Live review. Queens Cross Mackintosh Church. 26 Feb 2016.

The Glasgow Film Festival is now a sprawling event, moving out far beyond its origins at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Rose Street. One of the most intriguing performances in this year's schedule was the showing of 1929 silent film, Lucky Star, accompanied by Ela Orleans playing her newly composed score for the film live. To add to the magic of this idea, the film was shown in the beautiful Queens Cross Church designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I have seen Ela Orleans before, supporting Julia Holter and performing at the Counterflows festival, where she played music to accompany the film visuals of artist Maja Borg. I do enjoy these old silent films, dusted off and presented to a new audience with live music. One of the best that I have seen was ZombieZombie performing to the film "Battleship Potemkin". The film "Lucky Star" maybe provides less drama than Sergei Eisenstein's film to hang music to, but Ela Orleans created a beautiful soundscape for the film. 

The film itself is entrancingly filmed. The poor farm girl Mary, played by Janet Gaynor (who was later to become the first winner of the best actress Oscar), falls for handsome Tim, Charles Farrell, just as war is declared. He goes off to war with the bullying Martin Wrenn, played by Guinn Williams who played sidekicks in many Westerns for another 30 years. Tim is crippled in the war and as he and Mary fall for each other, Martin is ready to steal her away. The acting was beautiful to watch, with some greatly choreographed scenes, such as the fistfight at the top of a telegraph pole. I wasn't familiar with the work of director Frank Borzage, but his life makes interesting reading, and in 1929 he was the winner of the first Oscar awarded for a director. The melodrama of the ending may seem a bit dated now, but you are watching the denouement with a satisfied smile on your face. I really enjoy Ela Orleans lo-fi electronica sound and she has some gorgeous albums out that I would encourage you to seek out. With keyboards, violin, electronic sounds and field recordings Ela's soundtrack added so much to the film, defining the characters, the mood, the settings. From bird tweets adding to the bucolic rural idyll, to the bangs and crashes of trench warfare it was an integral part of the whole picture, way beyond what any Wurlitzer organ player would have managed back in the 1920s.

Joanna Newsom

Live review. Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. 2 March 2016

Joanna Newsom has been ploughing her own furrow for over a decade now and arrived in Glasgow this week touring with her impressive four-piece backing band to promote her new album, Divers. First up was Robin Peckhold, lead singer of Fleet Foxes, playing a solo set with acoustic guitar. Distinctive and bluesy he held the hall in silence. The church-like atmosphere of adulation continued when Joanna Newsom arrived on stage. With a breezy smile and business-like manner you swept through her set, alternating between playing at the harp or piano, both of which she plays beautifully. Her fellow musicians, including brother Pete on drums and keyboard, rotated through a bamboozling collection of instruments, often changing mid-song several times. Her quirky singing style lies somewhere between Kate Bush, and Bjork on helium, and at times I found it too off-putting to make any connection with the songs. Also the lyrics are interesting and intriguing when read, but unintelligible heard live. When she paused to re-tune her harp she offered a quick Q&A but gave away nothing, her focus seemingly more on her harp than her audience (though most questions were along the lines of "you're great aren't you?" she probably was right just to blank "do you like Buckfast?"). 

Sonically interesting, but I found it all disappointingly unengaging.

Stalingrad and Dostoyevsky at the Cinema

The 10th Glasgow Film Festival is town this week.

 

As well as a lot of well loved classics there are a smattering of new releases on show. As I am a big fan of the writing of Fyodor Dostoyevsky I took the chance to see The Double, a few weeks ahead of its general release. The film, directed by Richard Ayoade, is based (loosely) upon the novella by Dostoyevsky of the same name. I have written here before of the lengths I went to in St Petersburg tracking down Dostoyevsky releated spots, so I grabbed the chance to see one of his stories being told on screen at the GFT.

 

The Double was written in 1846, a story of a put upon government clerk who starts to see a doppleganger of himself, but a doppleganger who is more confident, brash and pushy. The double begins to take over from him, and succeed where he has failed, driving him mad in the process. It is a recurrent and appealing idea in literature, even Scottish literature (written 20 years after James Hogg's "Confessions of a Justified Sinnner" and 40 years before Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). Nobel prize winner Jose Saramango also re-wrote "The Double" for modern times.

 

It was a full house in the GFT's main screen for this showing, with a heavy presence of beards amongst the audience (I think suggesting an appeal to the hipster movie goer crowd). The film stars Jesse Eisenberg in the title role, more noted recently for portraying characters leading the vanguard of capitilism's onward march (Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and LexCorp's Lex Luther). The film is highly stylised and set in a dystopian world with steampunk overtones. Jesse Eisenberg is excellent in both his roles and there are a couple of entertainingly weird cameos from Paddy Consadine and comedian Chris Morris. The film plays with the same ideas that Dostoyevsky did; is it really happening or is he going mad? I suspect that ultimately he is an author whose ideas work better where there is the room to explore them in books, rather than onscreen, but I really enjoyed the film on its own merits. Far superior to William Shatner as "the saintly Alexey Karazamov" (the movie trailer for this is a classic in itself). 

 

When I had a couple of hours to kill this morning whilst my car was in for an MOT I decided to pass on the opportunity to see "Goodbye, Mr Chips" (again) at the film festival and took the chance to see Stalingrad (trailer here). This is Russia's highest ever grossing film, and also a huge success in China, Poland and the Ukraine, the first film shot entirely in 3D and for IMAX outside north America. 

 

Russian cinema has been an innovative and dynamic art form ever since the Lumiere brothers first put on shows in St Petersburg. Sergei Eisenstein used editing techniques and montage in new ways to tell the stories in his silent films such as Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Nevsky and Battleship Potemkin. The latter, telling the story of the warship crew's role in the 1905 revolution has found new life with recent performances with a live score by the Pet Shop Boys and I saw French electronic act Zombie Zombie do the same at the Glasgow Film Festival 3 years ago at the Arches. If you don't think you know Eisenstein's film you might recognise his scene of a pram falling through the gun shots down the Odessa steps when Brian De Palma recreated it in The Untouchables. Whilst I like the graphic design that Socialist Realism produced in painting in the post-war years, it had a rather more stultifying effect on post-war Soviet cinema. Then along came Andrei Tarkovsky with films such as Solaris and Stalker which showed a whole new way to make film (usually leaving you with a pleasant feeling of confusion). More recently there has been the excellent Russian Ark by Alexander Sukurov, telling hundreds of years of Russian history in one continuous rolling shot through the rooms of the Hermitage Museum and the blockbuster vampiresque films of Timur Bekmambetov, NightWatch and DayWatch.

The movie, Stalingrad, had a huge budget and the director is a supporter of Putin so I wasn't going into the cinema expecting to see something revolutionary. However the battle of Stalingrad is a phenomenal and horrendous story and is often described as the turning point in the second World War, where despite tremendous losses the Russians won out and for the first time the German advances were halted and turned to retreat. I don't think that this film captures the breadth or import of the battle of Stalingrad. It has been captured before in the stunning episode of The World at War documentary series narrated by Laurence Olivier, and in the Peter Blackman poem featured as a B-side on a Robert Wyatt single.

I'm not sure that the scale of it can be crammed into a film such as this. What this film brings it down to is a handful of soldiers and one woman (a not so subtle metaphor for Mother Russia), holding out for 3 days in a single building in November 1942 in the city. It seems to rely heavily on the action remembered within "Pavlov's house" which has even, bizarrely, featured as a mission in the Call of Duty video game. Some newspaper reviews have dismissed the film as overtly pro-Russian (What? A film about the battle in Stalingrad, crazy, eh?). I think that the nearest comparison I could make is to a patriotic, chest-thumping, American war movie, where a small band of American soldiers (probably amongst them John Wayne) holds out against impossible odds on a Pacific island. If you want to dismiss those as pro-America propaganda, then go ahead. If you want to enjoy a modern version of one of these films, with spectucular 3D shots of bullets careering through walls then Stalingrad's your film. Personally I rather enjoyed it (despite having to dash out twice to answer calls about my failed MOT).

Cone Gatherers and Holy Motors (as I Couldn't Get to the Football)

The Cone Gatherers, Theatre Royal. Holy Motors, Glasgow Film Theatre

As I was working this Saturday morning and couldn't make it to Kirkcaldy to see Partick Thistle tackle Raith Rovers, I decided to avoid being glued to my phone for twitter updates from @ThistleTweet by seeing what else was on in Glasgow. After a quick dash into town I made it in time for the matinee performance at the Theatre Royal of The Cone Gatherers by Aberdeen Performing Arts. As I had got the subway into town this is an excuse for me to post my photo of Alasdair Gray's fantastic mural at Hillhead station, which I got to have more of a look at this time as Nicola Sturgeon wasn't standing in the way after cutting the ribbon to open the station.

Nicola Sturgeon looking studious for the TV cameras
last week at Hillhead Subway station mural

The Cone Gatherers by Robin Jenkins is a "classic" of Scottish literature and I think a common text for Higher English students, but I hadn't read it until last year when I was given it as a birthday present. The author was a conscientious objector during WW2 and was directed to work for the Forestry Commission, an obvious source of inspiration for the book. Set during the war, two brothers are sent to an large estate to gather cones to replant forests being cut down for the war effort. Like George and Lennie from 'Of Mice and Men', older brother Neil tries to protect his simple-minded brother Calum from the evil in the world and the attitudes of others. Their arrival unveils the prejudices and class division of the world they inhabit. The play, written by Peter Arnott, looked great. The set design of projections of a forest onto thin ropes hanging down on the stage worked really well and was very immersive. However I found the story very episodic, as if they had tried to squeeze every scene from what is quite a slim book into the play. When they couldn't quite manage this they had a chorus walking across stage explaining bits that could more effectively have been given to a character as dialogue. Some things can be more powerful when they are suggested, or off stage, rather than shown, such as Duror's wife, who appeared like a Hammer Horror monster. There was the unecessary confusion of where the songs, or dance moves fitted into the, at other times, straight storytelling. The chopping and changing of techniques rather meant scenes such as the dramatic crescendo to the deer hunt became quite muddled. The actors playing Calum (Ben Winger), Neil (John Kielty) and Duror (Tom McGovern) did well, and the idea of showing Duror's aggression at Calum's strangeness echoing Hitler's fascism worked well. However Calum, Neil and Duror never seemed to get enough material to work with to have any real depth to them.

I enjoyed it, but had hoped for a little more insight and a bit less re-telling of the book scene by scene. It is always a bit weird coming out of the theatre or cinema and it's still daylight so as Partick Thistle were losing 1-0 at this point I decided to scuttle off back into the dark after a quick bite to eat in the CCA which has a fine pine of Williams Draught beer on the go for £2.80 a pint. So I scuttled back into the dark by going to the GFT to see Holy Motors by French director Leos Carax.

Holy Motors is completely bonkers. It is the opposite to what I had been to see earlier where a play tried to tell a book's story page by page, when theatre can do more than that. Cinema can do more than tell a straight story too. You spend time here trying to see the link between the different scenarios of the film and discern a message, but it just works as a fantastic bit of cinema washing over you. The director starts by getting out of bed, pushing through a wall decorated as a forest (today's theme) and emerging into a cinema which is maybe full of an audience of dead people. Then we follow Denis Lavant, who looks fantastically worn out, through Paris in a limo as he dons different costumes and make up to act out various "appointments" across the day. These are like confusing episodes of "Quantum Leap" where the angel figure doesn't really have a purpose in the scenes he undertakes, other than just the act of doing what he has been scripted to do. At times bizarre, surreal, full of pathos or hallucinatory and for real cinemaphiles these appointments I am sure are full of various references and nods to the history of cinema, ending up like a scene from Cars as the limo ends the day at its garage. Just when you think it's getting a bit weird Kylie turns up.

Excellent stuff all round. I would encourage anyone who gets the chance to go see it. I suspect people will either love it or hate it, it's a hard film to be ambivalent about. Anyway, by this point Partick Thistle had equalised with a Doolan goal in injury time through in Fife. STILL unbeaten after 7 league games, but only just. Can we start thinking about the "promotion" word yet???