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Coverage of this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival should be along shortly. A preview of the festival was commissioned by a commercial website and written by me but subsequently spiked, the kind of occurrence that makes the whole unpaid film journalism-vocation fandango sound even more ridiculous than it does when I’m explaining it to the man who polishes my bullion.
Meantime: I reviewed The Purge here for Critic’s Notebook. The staging is a mess and characters do inexplicable things just to fit in with the plot, so the most interesting aspects are the borrowings from Manson-ology, which paint the film’s One Percenter outrage in a most disconcerting light. But that’s such a knotty issue that the film opts not to get stuck in — a missed opportunity having got halfway there, and not the only hint of solid conservative values. The campaign to get Lena Headey into a Marvel super-villain role rolls on, though.
And: I have a lot of time for Neil Jordan films, and although limited resources cause Byzantium to puff a bit on its way up the hill, there are still enough subtexts about the historical plight of women living and undead alike to raise it out of any vampiric rut it looks like it might be settling into.