|||

A cave dweller

This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival produced the following:

An attempt to parse the British narrative feature programme for Little White Lies. The moral is that the supply and demand equation is out of whack, no doubt putting UK-based festivals in a very difficult position. But the time when they just acquiesce passively to the situation must surely be coming to an end.

Reviews at Critic’s Notebook for:

A Most Wanted Man, in which Anton Corbijn and John le Carré admire each other to a standstill.

The Green Inferno, in which Eli Roth admires other people’s films to a standstill; but if you have a talent in this world and that’s your talent, then let it fly.

The Skeleton Twins, which made a lot of folks very happy but felt to me like dead weight.

Snowpiercer, in which correctly spotting the roots of the Tilda Swinton character was apparently a function of age and time spent under the Harold Wilson government.

Far weirder than anything dreamed up by Bong Joon-ho was the debacle around Welcome to New York, two screenings of which were shoved into the festival programme later than the last minute and got roughly zero promotional push. The first screening duly unfolded before a desultory handful of people, although those sofas in the middle of the Dominion’s auditorium were as comfortable as I remembered. The second screening was the subject of whispers suggesting a truncated cut of the film at the insistence of a potentially-attending Gérard Depardieu, who then cancelled anyway.

Was the Edinburgh International Film Festival really preparing to show a drastically sawed-off version of a film to full-price ticket payers without a peep of warning or comment or explanation? Are there any witnesses to this mythical short version, since judging by the radio silence that followed it seems possible that not a single person actually went? Is this going to be the tale that film festival programmers tell their children at bedtime while urging them to take up respectable trades such as plumbing or merchant banking instead? Rarely can the circumstances of a film festival screening have been swept under the nearest available tapis more tout suite.

Up next X-Men Days of Future Past Grace of Monaco, The Young and Prodigious TS Spivet In Critic’s Notebook, reviews of Grace of Monaco, a key text in the current phase of impotent biopics which dares to subvert the limitations from
Latest posts Hypericum Sundance Film Festival 2024 Comics of the year 2023 Films of the year 2023 Golda X-Amount of Comics Edinburgh Film Festival 2023 Stan Lee Tribeca Film Festival 2023 I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future Sundance Film Festival 2023 Comics of the year 2022 Films of the year 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll 2022 Shortwave infrared imaging The Legend of Luther Arkwright Crimes of the Future Luda and Grant Morrison Acting Class and Nick Drnaso Tribeca Film Festival 2022 Tigers and Goal! Project MK-Ultra Zero Fucks Given SXSW Film Festival 2022 High-tech glass inspection The Matrix Resurrections Sundance Film Festival 2022 Comics of the year 2021 Films of the year 2021 Foundation Year, Dune No Time to Die