Edinburgh International Film Festival: WORLD ANIMATION: FILMHOUSE 3, INFECTION, THE PRICE OF MILK, ME AND ISAAC NEWTON

Ozymandias contacted me several weeks ago and said he had found someone to report on the Edinburgh International Film Festival for us if I wanted, then Edgard and crew over at Euro-AICN Headquarters said Holly Martins would be covering it as well, coooooool. Well, Father Geek is happy to be posting here the first of those reports from Scotland along with the added coverage from our Euro-AICN offices in Paris. This fest has a great lineup so we'll be getting reports on alot of interesting little films from around the world over the next several days. I hope you all discover something in these reports that excites you enough to journey to your local art house cinema to catch it when the film hits our shores...

Ozymandias here with the first of many reports from our man at the Edinburgh International Film Festival Otto Maddox.......

SUNDAY, 13/8/00. D-DAY (D FOR DEMENTIA, THAT IS)

"Well, well, well...if it ain't the REPO MAN..."

Yes it is. Otto here, just back from my infinite trip through time and space with Miller in the Chevy Malibu. Decided to land in Scotland for the hell of it, at a place called Bonnybridge. Heard the get a lot of UFO activity there. Or they do now. Boy, I could tell you a few things about life, the universe and everything. But have to save that for another time. Could take a few light years.

Right after I got back to earth, I realised I had to do something. So what was I going to do? Join Kevin in the burger bar he manages down in Florida now? No fucking chance. Huh-uh. Then I thought to myself, well, what can a chronically unemployable ex-punk character like me in his thirties do? The answer was obvious.

Write about movies.

To this end, I found mysely on the train to Edinburgh at 8.20 this morning, reading The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard and trying to ignore the guy across from me nervously jiggling his legs for no reason. Sometimes you why how some people cannot realise just how freakish they are being in public. But I really had other things to worry about. I was on my way to the first day of press screenings for the 54th Edinburgh International Film Festival. I knew my life was about to accelerate beyond all control. Much like the Malibu round Betelgeuse 3. But that's another story altogether. They're showing a celluloid selection from round the world in Scotland's capital right now, and letting a film freak me go to it is like giving an alcoholic the keys to the liquor cabinet. Right now I will file the first of my daily reports about what I saw...

9:30-10:55 WORLD ANIMATION. FILMHOUSE 3.

Well, I couldn't get a train through to Auld Reekie to get me in on time to go see the screening of DANCER IN THE DARK (sigh - my life is over), the new Bjork film by Lars Von Trier, so I decide to plump for this instead. Contrary to what you might think, it's not just 85 minutes of a globe spinning (and boy, is that globe a view from space), but is instead a smorgasbord of animation from all over the world. Feeling slightly cheated - but somewhat relieved - I sat down to watch it. Most of it was very, very good. Some of it was just okay. But there were two stand-out pieces: one German, one from New Zealand.

The German one - VIRJULE, THE INNER BERLIN - stood out for some of the right - and a lot of the wrong - reasons. It was a live film with stuff animated into it, so it came across as a kind of low-rent WHO KILLED ROGER RABBIT or old A-Ha video. It concerned a blind woman who got led about a cheesily animated speaking dog (Muuz, with an accent so deep and crap I laughed every time it came on) into the 'Inner Berlin', a place that is utterly impossible to describe at all. Suffice to say that the director must've taken a trek through the tropics of psycho (if you catch my drift) one time too many. Weird shit, to be blunt about it. Some nice, fuzzy, buzzy imagery. But much, more more portentous, pretentious crapola. I laughed out loud a couple of times at some of the cheesy dialogue, and was somewhat embarrassed to see the lead actress was nearby in the screening room in the crowd of 20 or so people when the lights came up. Have to be a bit more poker-faced. Oh well. Better luck next time, kiddies. And lay off the psychotomimetic chemicals. Them things just ain't good for ya...

The other digital piece was called INFECTION and was absolutely brilliant. It concerned a hacker who breaks into a student loan repository and sets his loan back to zero, as if it has been repaid. Sure many of you out there can sympathise with this course of action. I owe the Venusian college elders billions of drogna. The hacker got a walking three-fingered hand to dig deep into the bowels of the bank, combatting syringes and eyeballs with ears and feet as it did so. I could have watched this thing all day. Nine minutes just wasn't long enough. If Dali had been alive - and into kung-fu flickershows - this is what he would have come up with. Take a bow all concerned. Riotous stuff indeed. Was sorry when it ended, which was more than I could say about some of the stuff. Ah well, that's the beauty of animation: if you don't like it, it doesn't last too long anyway. Sure some of you women out there will have had this problem with your boyfriend. Not me with Layla, mind you. She's married now, by the way. Two kids. They're into NOFX and Screeching Weasel and The Queers and Puppet Porn. The next punk degeneration. There's hope for the no future of the world yet.

11:15-13:02 ME AND ISAAC NEWTON. USA 1999. This was an interesting documentary by the guy who directed GORILLAS IN THE MIST and the latest Bond movie. Supposed he must've got tired of simians of all shapes and sizes - and in suits - and decided to do some work with real, live people for a change. The people in question included a primatologist, a computer scientist and a theoretical physicist. It was basically Psychoanalyse A Scientist, with the people on parade being asked to relate what had drawn them to their respective fields. The answers were illuminating, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. If the thought of a teenage scientist building an atom-smasher in his parents' garage doesn't make you laugh as he relates it straight-faced, nothing will. This thing almost read like a recruiting drive for scientists, and to try and get the wonder of life back into an increasingly jaded, cynical, hurt world. They could show this thing in schools - kids would love it. No garage in the world would be safe after it, though. Only annoying thing was that overbearing 'we scientists hold the key to Infinity just within our grasp' factor upon occasion. Yeah, right. Cure the common cold before you try to talk to me about a 'unifying theory of everything' and I might just be able to take you a bit more seriously. Special Award For Most Manly Square Jaw: Steven Pinker, the language and cognitive expert. He could shatter a brick with that thing. Damn!

14:15-15:45 THE PRICE OF MILK. NEW ZEALAND 2000.

This could have been a really, really short film. If somebody had just walked in and said 30 pence, that could have been it. But no. What we got instead was a modern fairy tale, with all the perils such an appellation brings. Rob and Lucinda are a young couple very much in love. They live on a farm and live for each other - lust among the cowshit and everything. Lucinda looks very sexy in her wellies. She wants kids, he doesn't. She plots and plans to get her eggs scrambled. Then one day she hits an old woman in their car who steals their quilt from them in the night as punishment to keep warm. Lucinda goes to the old woman's house and swaps hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of their cattle to get the quilt back. Rob is devastated for some obscure reason at the loss of their livelihood, and falls out with her. Thus begins a titanic struggle to get back the cows, the quilt, and Rob's love. The motto of this story: hell hath no fury like a broody woman. Please don't try and impose some sort of linear logic on what I just told you, by the way. It's a FAIRY STORY. A likeable enough fairy story - but then again, I stopped reading them when I was, oh, 25 or so. It's nonsense, but not ultimately all that entertaining. Very saccharin-sweet, but not too cloying. The cinematography was great, and made NZ look lush and windswept as hell. Then again, so does every other NZ film, because there IS nothing else to make it look like. Not much there. Dunno if it's just my own current disposition (eh, R?) but I found the couple likeable enough, though borderline risible. Danielle Cormack (who is a complete honey) and Karl Urban (cool name - he should be in a punk band) are great in their respective roles, and the thing has a lot of beautifully surreal, lovely imagery. A woman running across New Zealand hills in a flowing red sari, anyone? There's an agoraphobic dog in a box that's absolutely classic, but it seems to get thrown in when things start to flag a bit. The surreal and the 'real' stuff just didn't hang together well enough, though, and ultimately the thing was left very lopsided, especially towards the end. Bonus Insult: the film (I think) invents a race of creepy invisible people who cause chaos to happen. What are they called? The Jacksons. Wonder if that's a little dig at or covert reference to New Zealand's favorite shockshow producer? I'd like to think or hope so, at least...

Well kiddies, that's it for today. Tomorrow will bring more of the same. Only different, if you know what I mean. Only remains to bring you the RUMOR OF THE DAY: Bjork stabbed Lars Von Trier in an Edinburgh pub over 'artistic differences' when they got into town a couple of days ago. Ah, those temperamental 'artiste' types, whatcha gonna do with them? Dunno if this true or NOT but, well, you never can tell...

Later days,

Otto.

L8r,

Ozymandias

Euro AICN Ireland/UK Office, Penthouse Suite, Ozymandias Towers, Dublin, Ireland.

If you're involved in the Irish or UK movie industries I want to hear from you!

Mail me at ozymandias@dublin.com

Father Geek back with more on the fest from Edgard and crew at Euro-AICN...

Hello folks... Edgard here... our good man Holly Martin is now in Edinburgh, ready to see tons of (hopefully good) movies. This is his first report from Edinburgh. So enjoy...

Holly Martins here with an update from the first few days of the Edinburgh Film Festival: Dancer in the Dark, Angels of the Universe, a documentary called The Exhibited about Lars von Trier and ants. Next update, a report on the opening night party (I¹m still too wobbly to return to that debauchery at the moment), the Japanese horror sensation The Ring trilogy, and Mark ŒBrassed Off, Little Voice¹ Herman¹s latest ­ Purely Belter.

Dancer in the Dark

Lars von Trier is an expert at grabbing the viewer¹s hearts and minds in the opening five minutes, squeezing until raw and throwing them back in their face just before the closing credits. Palme D¹Or winner, Dancer in the Dark is no different.

It was a miserable looking day as a gaggle of journos and industry delegates congealed outside Edinburgh¹s Odeon at the heathen hour of 9 on Sunday morning. And while we left the cinema to more rain, with dampened spirits after some of the most heartrenching cinema in recent memory, the feeling was almost uplifting, as most agreed we had just seen A Great Film. Dancer in the Dark tells of Selma Jezkova, played by Bjork in her screen debut, a Czech immigrant working in a tool and die factory in rural America. Selma has a secret ­ she is going blind and her son stands to suffer the same fate if she does not put away enough money to pay for an eye operation. She works day and night saving every cent she earns, taking time out only to indulge in the Technicolor world of her imagination. To the sounds of factory machinery or pencils tapping on paper, Selma can close her eyes and open them again in the all-singing, tap-dancing, Gene Kelly and Vincente Minelli landscape of the American musical. Of course, fantasy is just protection from a harsh reality, and in this case the threat comes from neighbour Bill (David Cross), a cop who steels Selma¹s money and then frames her for the theft. Shot entirely on digital, Selma¹s Œreality¹ is a drab and stark world, told through Dogme-style handheld photography. In contrast the dream sequences are richer in colour and more classically framed. Von Trier boasted of using 100 cameras for each musical sequence to give a more spontaneous look and feel than conventional musicals. Some of these work very well, such as Bjork¹s song ŒI¹ve Seen it All¹ on the top of a slow moving train that harks of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Elsewhere the effect is more Stanley Donen shoots Stomp! in a Diesal advert.

Bjork deservedly won at Cannes for her performance, which is often disconcertingly honest and frank. She lays her soul bare, not so much acting as being. As the drama escalates and Bjork suffers greater and greater misfortunes at the hands of an increasingly hostile environment, it is impossible not to be moved. Most tragic is her inherent goodness, reminiscent of Brecht¹s Good Person of Szechuan. Few notice this save boyfriend in waiting Jeff (Peter Stomare) and fellow factory worker Cath, played by Catherine Deneuve. Yes, that¹s right, Catherine Denueve works in a factory, and few but her could manage to appear so perfectly suited in the environment while still looking stunning.

Needless to say, though the film has many bright moments, the ending isn¹t. In fact the tragedy becomes so overwhelming as to be cathartic. I confess to shedding tears, as did a number of the hardened critics in the cinema. My throat was choked, and it¹s a film that will stay long with me. God, I¹m sounding like Harry here (Knowles, not Lime). But I mean it.

Angels of the Universe

Billed as an Icelandic One Flew Over The Cuckoo¹s Nest, Fridrik Thór Fridriksson¹s Angels of the Universe tells of Paul (Ingvar E Sigurdsson) an angst stricken poet, artist and thinker, jilted by love and left on a descending spiral of violent despair and eventual schizophrenia. Paul is a modern day Raskolnikov, tormented by dreams and ideas. Within the cell-like wallls of his bedroom he paces back and forth, playing the drums or filling vast canvasses with Daliesque sprawls. ŒI¹m not a human¹ he tells his muse, Sara (Halldora Geirhardsdottir) ŒI¹m a cloud in pants¹. Paul finds comfort in the words of Macbeth: ŒLife is but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.¹ Living with his parents, he entertains his younger siblings with elaborate stories, and fun filled games. But after being dumped by his social climbing girlfriend, who stands him up at a screening of Chaplin¹s City Lights (ŒI wouldn¹t have minded if it was any other film. But City Lights?¹), Paul swiftly falls into neurosis, violent rages, and eventual schizophrenia. Finally his parent¹s reach their limits and section him at the local asylum. Heavy viewing indeed, but lightened by the sensitive handling of Paul¹s fellow inmates. Oli Beatle (Baltasar Kormakur) claims to have written all of the Beatles songs, transcribing them telepathically, while Victor (Bjorn Jorundur) gives a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a neo-Nazi. On one occasion, after the suicide of fellow inmate Paul (Hilmir Snær Gunarsson) Victor takes the inmates out to a lavish dinner at one of Rekjavik¹s most expensive restaurants. Signing the bill Adolf Hitler, he tells the bemused waiter that they are all escaped inmates and that the police should be called immediately.

Fridriksson¹s direction is well paced and balances the dark and light elements of the script with care. Harald Paalgard¹s photography is particularly strong, displaying a rich range of colours that reflect well against Iceland¹s often bleak landscapes. Although the film occasionally risks falling into cliché ­ Paul¹s shaving of hair and frequent rubbing of head being well-worn signifiers of madness ­ it largely manages to deal with the issue sensitively and without judgement. The hallucination and ghost sequences also appear somewhat incongruent in an otherwise realistic aesthetic.

Adapted from Einar Màr Gudmundsson¹s award winning novel, Angels Of the Universe is a harrowing yet humorous rites of passage between the lines of insanity and genius, dreams and reality. These themes are summed up by Paul, who in retort to criticism that his ideas bear no relation to reality, quotes Hegel, Œpoor reality; it must feel bad¹.

The Exhibited

In 1999, Lars von Trier was commissioned by a leading Danish gallery to develop an installation called The World Clock. Cameras in New Mexico film the movement of ants across a stretch of desert. These images are broadcast by satellite to a 19 room Big Brother meets The Truman Show gallery where 53 actors improvise all day, every day for weeks on end. Each of the 53 actors has a pre-defined character, which in turn has four different states of mind which are triggered by a sort of multicolour traffic light in each of the rooms. And these lights change colour on the basis of the movements of the ants in New Mexico. Make sense?

The Exhibited offers a fly-on-the ­wall expose of the whole process, following the stories of the actors ­ or exhibits ­ throughout the whole process. It might sound like an excessively indulgent European art experiment, but with von Trier¹s hands pulling the strings it actually works. What we see is a soap opera of epic proportions, with the added fun that it¹s live, the audience stand on the set, and none of the actors know the different moods that will be triggered in the other characters. For example, The Cur is a man Œwho hates everyone¹, and when the lights go red, he has to start a fight with someone. What the other actors don¹t know is that he must always lose those fights if challenged ­ but because of his aggressiveness, no-one tries challenging him. Of course, if you allow 53 actors to write their own scripts, they will all want the best part. So as the experiment continues, small drama such as seductions escalates into high melodrama, with suicides, abortions, murders, assassinations, rapes and weddings. But that¹s all part of the fun. As the installation goes on, the actors find their lives becoming intertwined with those of their characters. And in turn the characters are intertwined with the ants. One day the man in New Mexico feeds the ants a French fry, and madness ensues; another time the ants eat each other leaving only two survivors, and very little drama as a result.

As a documentary The Exhibited is decent, standing back to allow the story to tell itself. Because that is where the most interest lies ­ in this part social experiment, part interactive art ­ watching a group of actors at the hands of grand master von Trier having their lives dictated by a group of ants on the other side of the world.

Don't forget to send us your own reports to the Euro AICN offices here in Paris at euroaicn@yahoo.com