London 2010 Film Festival Preview & Miscellanea

Whew, I’m finally getting round to wrapping up my Frightfest coverage, only one more review to go – for Monsters which I really need to sit down and devote some time to complete as I took a break over last weekend – and a couple more items I need to migrate over from Sound On Sight and that’s it. I quite simply don’t have the time or inclination to craft any more reviews, there is more than enough going on with my ‘proper’ job so you’ll have to make do with my submissions to date. Notable misses which I can partially recommend are the I Spit On Your Grave remake which may appeal to some completists and the debut of Korean first time helmer Jang Cheol-soo Bedevilled which was good, a slow-burn alternative to the rest of the carnage but the remaining films I saw aren’t really worth the time or effort. Still, the final word is I enjoyed this exercise immensely, I learnt a few things and will certainly be repeating the extravaganza next year.

Casting my eyes over the schedule for this years London Film Festival leaves me singularly unimpressed. Granted there are a few items I have sketched into my calendar – The Black Swan is getting some buzz and Aronofsky is jetting over for a Q&A, The American looks interesting with its alleged European Art Film meshed with Hollywood Action picture potential, John Sayles is always worth a look, the Carlos The Jackal bio-pic looks intriguing (all 325 minutes of it, yikes), the stalwart Takashi Miike looks like fun  – but there are absolutely no ‘must-sees’ if you will, there’s no Coen film for example or Enter The Void type items that really have me excited. This is very much an initial reaction as I haven’t had the full programme through yet and am basing this analysis on a quick skim-read of the site during my lunch break so we shall see. As usual with the LFF neither of the opening or closing gala films rock my boat but if I get the potential press pass I’m up for then I’ll have to reconsider my commitment and we’ll see how it goes. Besides, if some recent plans that should shortly come to some sort of fruition pan out then I might not be in London, or in fact Europe when this all commences…..

In terms of some other stuff that’s been floating around then I enjoyed this article, a friend recently asked me why certain periods of film all have the same texture and colour palette and the best I could offer up was some weak explanation of new film stocks being introduced at the time and adopted in the art form coupled with lense choices and general developments of cinematic techniques on the part of cinematographers – the deployments of the key, fill and backlights – then one of the bullet points in that article articulates recent developments far more professionally than I could muster even if it has collated some more extensive research from here, here and here. Good stuff.  If you ever thought I extrapolated too much into genre cinema then have a gander at this, an interesting read if you’re cultural theorist inclined but he does make the text-book and annoying error of lumping in the 28 Days pictures with more traditional zombie pictures – they are not fucking zombies, they are infected humans and there is a big fucking difference. I can’t remember if I posted Simon Peggs well observed genuflections on the matter but regardless here it is again. Just to repeat myself (yet) again I’m looking forward to both The Social Network and Machete over the next few months, the latter has been getting some terrific reviews on the podcasts that I’ve kind of listened too – I’ve been avoiding spoilers of course but it sounds like it’s going to be all of the explotation themed extravaganza that I wanted. Excellent;

Jesus, spot the Wilhelm Scream in that trilogy eh?