Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Five

My inexperience with working on PCs, and there only being PCs to use in the Delegates' centre, mean that the post I originally wrote here got accidentally deleted by a twitch of one of my little fingers. Which is a total pain in the arse because I'd just written a long review of Duane Hopkins' 'Better Things', which we saw yesterday.

Rachel (who produced the film) and her husband Al (who co-produced) are friends of ours from Nottingham (Rachel produced my short film 'Cry') and they very kindly got us tickets (it was a sold out screening). My thoughts on the film, as I remember them from the original review were something along the lines of...beautifully lit and shot...Bresson-like approach to acting...felt a bit like being on heroin...deliberate eschewing of story...got a bit confused over who was who for the first hour (made note to self to suggest actors wear name-tags next time)...all in all a bit cold...didn't dislike it, but found it hard to fully engage. Just imagine all that, except strung together in an intelligent, witty and perceptive review.

Afterwards we went to another party, this time for the 'Trailblazers' - one of whom is Lisa. This meant that the bar we were in kept showing shots from all the Trailblazers' films, including 'M&D', so I kept seeing Olga's face pop-up above the bar - especially disconcerting because Olga was also in the bar. I met another journalist who said how much he loved the film, and was really praising the cinematography, which was brilliant to hear, because Jonathan Bloom, our DOP, doesn't always get the praise he deserves for doing such a good job with such limited resources (i.e. three lights). Early night tonight (well, before 2 o'clock) because I'm starting to flag. I've obviously not got the stamina for all this.

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