Glasgow Film Festival - Cine Skinny - 15 February 09

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The Official

DAily Guide SUNDAY 15 February 09

What’s insIde? 2 » Tomorrow’s picks Our highlights of tomorrow’s films and events 2 » our fair lady We take a closer look at Audrey

Dropping the Anvil On Glasgow Michael Gillespie turned his dictaphone up to eleven, clutched his remaining hand into the sign of the goat, and grew his hair down to his ankles for a rockin’ chat with Anvil director Sacha Gervasi and band members Lips Ludlow and Robb Reiner.

This hilarious and heartbreaking rockumentary charts the near success and further tribulations of the veteran Canadian headbangers.

The unsung heroes of 80s metal and a major influence on Anthrax, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, Anvil never quite hit the big time that their energetic live shows promised.

But their performance at Glasgow’s Cineworld, part of their world tour of cinemas, proved their naysayers wrong and their supporters right: Anvil, quite simply, ROCK! It was Gervasi’s idea to create this “Anvil Experience”, and the band were more than enthusiastic. As Robb said, “We thought about it, experimented, tested it out, now we’ve been doing it, ten or twelve times, it’s awesome! I wish we could do this everywhere, no one’s ever done it”.

It’s also good to know that Glasgow has a place in Anvil’s heart. “I’ve always loved Scotland, we haven’t been here in 27 years, it’s been too long”. Lips was equally enthusiastic, “When we went on tour with Motorhead this was the best place of the entire tour”. The band then gave their renditions of what Gervasi

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deemed “some of the worst Scottish accents I’ve ever heard”.

The director made the film as a tribute to the band he toured with as a teenager (he even took them on a tour of London), and if it resembles Spinal Tap, that’s not unintentional. “We saw Spinal Tap as our trojan horse: the audience comes to see it and they laugh… but then they’re surprised that it becomes so emotional. It’s because we have the laughs that it gets so emotional”.

Emotional because the band have endured serious hardships since their heyday, with work and finances running low. But unlike Metallica, subjects of seminal metal doc Some Kind of Monster, spirits remain strong: “When things are tough it creates even more of a bond. We have nothing but ourselves. Lars (Ulrich, Metallica drummer) would say we’ve been having a better time”.

The success of the film has had an immeasurable effect on the band’s lives. “We now have real representation, a real agent, and we’re entertaining some serious recording contracts”.

For all those companies about to rock with Anvil, we salute you!

3 » reviews Encounters at the End of the World  The Desert Within  Mark of an Angel  4 » what’s new online Our update on GFF related content on the world wide web 4 » war and peace of mind

Michael Gillespie asks if we need Tarantino’s latest war effort 4 » win tickets You can win 2 tickets to see 32A

the cineskinny Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival editors Gail Tolley

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Michael Gillespie Eve McConnachie

GFF Box Office Order tickets from the box office at www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk or call 0141 332 6535 or visit Glasgow Film Theatre 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

tomorrow’s

Picks

The Fairest of Them All

Audrey Hepburn is a true icon of the cinema and welldeserving of this year’s retrospective.

Erin McElhinney looks back at some of her roles.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

13.45 @ GFT

Hepburn’s delightful Holly Golightly is one of the truly memorable characters of cinema.

New Town Killers

20:30 @ GFT

Richard Jobson’s fourth feature film is a gripping Edinburghbased chase thriller.

Franklyn

21.00 @ Cineworld

Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature is an ambitious sci-fi featuring Ryan Phillippe and Eva Green.

32A

20.45 @ GFT

A delightful growing-up tale about 13-year-old Maeve from Irish director Marian Quinn.

Tokyo!

16.00 @ Cineworld

Similar in format to Paris Je t’aime (2007) Toyko! is made up of vignettes directed by a selection of directors including Michel Gondry.

‘Icon’ is a word that’s bandied about quite a bit these days; anyone who’s ever glanced at a copy of Heat magazine will have seen it hovering near the words ‘Paris Hilton’, for example. So we’d like to take this opportunity to remind you what the word actually means, to suggest an infinitely more worthy example; we give you Audrey Hepburn.

She’s the kind of star that traverses art form – becoming a legend of both film and fashion - that laughs at the diminishing power of time, blows a kiss at the upstarts that believe they can fill her shoes.

And honey, what shoes. Not only was Hepburn a goddess of the silver screen, but her image and style stepped off the set, taking on lives of their own; walk down any French street or through any Japanese mall and her instantly recognizable visage will wink out at you from postcards, t-shirts and mugs. The legend of Audrey has almost – not quite, but almost – eclipsed her films; people may know who she is without being able to name one or more of her titles. Which is where GFF’s inspired retrospective comes in…

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From the greats – there are few whose cultural consciousness does not contain some reference to Breakfast at Tiffanys, to the more obscure, a strange little film with Sean Connery called Robin and Marian examines said mythical romance twenty years on – the selection has been chosen with care and offers an excellent summation of a career that spanned 38 years. There’s the musicals – My Fair Lady and Funny Face – the comedies – Charade and Roman Holiday – and the just plain unlikely; Unforgiven is a fairly harsh Western in which Hepburn plays a Kiowa Native American Indian, torn between her adoptive Caucasian family and her blood relatives. The production itself was fraught with difficulties, filming being suspended for several months whilst Hepburn recovered from a broken back sustained in a fall from a horse.

Whilst her more famous characters tend to be the first that leap to mind, (Holly-Go-Lightly, anyone?) time exploring her more unknown roles is time well spent; the GFF is offering a unique chance to see one of the few little known roles in

Hepburn’s repetoire. The Children’s Hour is a tense exploration of human nature, in which Hepburn and her co-star Maclaine, both teachers at an exclusive girl’s school, are accused by a pupil of being in a lesbian relationship. Walking a fine line of what was permitted in cinema at the time (44 years before Brokeback Mountain) the screening next week is a must for any true fan of the fivetime Oscar-nominated actress.

And if all of that hasn’t convinced you, let your fellow citizens add the final argument; last week a survey conducted by Sky amongst thousands of film fans showed Hepburn fending off the likes of Angelina Jolie and Keira Knightley to be declared the ultimate Hollywood beauty. Lucky for us, and for cinema, she had the grace, the style, the talent and the brains to go with it.

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Reviews Encounters at the End of the World Director: Werner Herzog

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For over a year, Encounters at the End of the World has travelled the festival route, and its many awards have culminated in a much-deserved Oscar nomination.

And while Werner Herzog’s latest documentary shares its location with previous Oscar-winner March of the Penguins, there is no real comparison - the only penguin here is a suicidal one. What else would one expect from the man who once ate his own shoe?

Encounters is a triumph, encompassing Herzog’s flair for capturing the bizarre in both nature and humanity. With his dry humour

The Desert Within

Director: Rodrigo Plá

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and his blatant appreciation for anything out of the ordinary, the people he meets, those who intended to “jump off the margin of the map”, are as eccentric as the director himself. Meanwhile his ethereal, alien underwater imagery is a testament to his abilities as a filmmaker, and a reminder that we still know staggeringly little about our planet.

Becky Bartlett

Mark of an Angel

Director: Safy Nebbou

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In 1920s rural Mexico, a man accidentally causes the death of his wife and every other member of his village. Left hysterical with guilt, God ‘tells’ him that he and his children have been left alive to atone for his sins, but he will have to watch all of his children die as punishment. Isolating them from society in the desert, he slowly drives each of his children over the edge with extreme delusions of penance. Atheism is a subject rarely dealt with so directly, and coming from such a heavily Catholic country this is an extremely controversial and brave piece. Beautifully shot, tightly scripted, and extremely well acted by all, it’s a well crafted polemic of national Catholicism and religion in general. But it’s so heavy handed with its single minded agenda that it’s hard to recommend it as entertainment rather than effective propaganda.

Jack McFarlane

“I can’t think why she came,” Claire says after another seemingly chance encounter with Elsa. But as the camera pans out, framing her picture perfect family we begin to wonder if all is not as it seems in Safy Nebbou’s Mark of an Angel.

When picking her son up from a party Elsa (Catherine Frot) notices a little girl, Lola. Convinced she is her own child who died seven years

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previous she shrewdly befriends the mother Claire (Sandrine Bonnaire) and gradually insinuates herself into their lives. There is a jittery sense of unease throughout, from the stark white of the ice rink where suspicions are first aroused to the dramatic ballet recital where Elsa watches Lola from the wings, bathed in an eerie red light. Yet the acting never quite convinces.

Veterans Bonnaire and Frot keep a lid on their emotions but when they finally let go, it seems forced. However, despite a meandering pace, the surprising twist is worth the wait.

Marjorie Gallagher

SUNDAY 15 FEBRUARY THE CINESKINNY 3

WAR and peace of mind

A trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s much delayed WWII opus Inglorious Basterds has gone live, and it promises to be every bit as cool, violent and tastelessly funny as anything the director’s ever done. He has promised a good old-fashioned men on a mission movie in the mould of The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare. But the whole enterprise raises some fundamental questions about how war is represented on film.

I wonder if you were around upon the initial release of Saving Private Ryan? New innovations in filmmaking technology approximated the sensations of warfare like no film before. Bear in mind that Spielberg had always envisioned the film with the same mindset as Tarantino, until testimonies from veterans convinced him of a greater moral and artistic responsibility.

Since then, the kinetic force of Spielberg’s technique has been appropriated into the most mainstream of action pictures: what was once a distressing approximation of the psychological impact and visceral carnage of war has become de rigeur for the cinematic battlefield. This was more than apparent when Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, an “antiwar but pro-military film” according to its director, was rushed into cinemas in the wake of 9/11. Spielberg’s valiant efforts were now being used to satisfy jingoistic bloodlust.

Returning to Ryan, then, one finds little else to recommend in a commendable but ultimately rather hollow picture (and just where, oh where, were the rest of the allies?).

The war generation to which the director dedicated his film is dying out. A generation is emerging whose connection to the past is being ruptured. With doctored images of war on our news screens daily, there is an increasing disconnect from the realities of global conflict. Video games and movies are as real as it is likely to get for many.

Which is where the issue begins with the Tarantino film. Unlike one of his heroes, Sam Fuller, Quentin Tarantino has not lived through war, his films drawn not from personal experience but from a vigorous appetite for other people’s movies. The best war films are not about violence and heroism: they deal with the injustices, arrogance, futility, cynicism and sheer insanity of war.

Time will tell if Inglorious Basterds proves to be as interesting a film as recent work by Oliver Hirschbiegel, Rachid Bouchareb, Paul Verhoeven or Brian de Palma. According to the trailer, “You haven’t seen war until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino”. The question is, while we might want to, do we really need to?

Michael Gillespie

What’s new online?

Comment online at the GFF site, MySpace, Facebook & on The Skinny’s web forums.

Pic of the day

FORUMS

Ray on The Skinny GFF Forum: “The Class was awesome. It’s… wait for it…too cool for school.

I can see you grimace. Sorry.”

INTERVIEWS

Watch In the Loop’s comedy glitterati being interviewed at the opening gala at www. glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

VIDeo coverage

Latest coverage includes an interview with the director of Anvil and coverage of the band rocking out in Cineworld. Go to www.glasgowfilmfestival. org.uk/videos

PHOTO: Jonathan Pritchard

Anvil! The guys after their post screening gig.

win tickets!

We have two tickets for Marian Quinn’s delightful coming-of-age tale 32A to give away. While you’ll get to enjoy this story of a Dublin teenager going through the motions of her first love (and first bra) in the seventies, there’s also the chance to put your questions to the film’s director, Marian Quinn, who will be happy to hear your thoughts after the screening. For a chance to win, simply answer

Which Irish actor played the part of hitman Ken in the recent hit, In Bruges? email michael@glasgowfilmfestival.co.uk by 10pm to enter

What did you think?

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We asked 5 people on their way out of classic musical Funny Face their verdict.

Mary Fantastic!

Really of it’s time, a fine old movie.

Paul It was great, it has a real feel good factor to it.

Jeanette I like Audrey Hepburn and she was great in it.

Monique The first part was too slow, dated and I found it very boring.

Marie-Paule Hepburn can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned and I love the dancing and singing.

Fiona I’ve seen it hundreds of times before - I love the choreography and the set.

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