Glasgow Film Festival Cine Skinny - 21 February 09

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DAily Guide SATURDAY 21 February 09

What’s insIde? 2 » Tomorrow’s picks Our highlights of tomorrow’s films and events 2 » Shhh!

Tyler Parks on a night of (not so) silent movies

Whittaker’sWay Michael Gillespie had a right old natter with one of West-Yorkshire’s finest exports, Jodie Whittaker.

The actress was in Glasgow to talk about her new film Good, a dark drama about compromise. The actress, however, has chosen projects carefully and was more than happy to share her feelings with us.

As the object of Peter O’Toole’s septugenarian salivation, Jodie Whittaker made her feature film debut in Venus. It wasn’t just the veteran actor’s heart she won: since then, the Huddersfield born actress has gone to become one of the true rising stars of British cinema. Her remarkable range and refusal to compromise are evidenced by this week’s gala pick, Good. Adapted from Glaswegian CP Taylor’s award-winning play, Good tells the story of a Weimar era literature professor (Viggo Mortensen) drawn through his own weakness and naivete into the Nazi regime, at the expense of his principles and his Jewish best friend (Jason Isaacs). The actress plays Anne, young mistress of our protaganist and a character, Whittaker says, “women who see the film always tell me they hated!”.

It’s a difficult story and a tough role, but one the actress was passionate about. “If my character belonged to any other party she’d have been the best thing that ever happened to him (Mortensen)”. “It’s a great story because the characters don’t have the benefit of hindsight. It’s easy for us to say we wouldn’t have done that, but at the time were dealing with domestic issues, they could have lost their jobs, everything.

Obviously, that’s nothing compared

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to what happened to millions of people”. What does the story have to say for us today, then? “I think human beings are essentially selfish, even though we say we’re not. We never think about the repercussions of small decisions. In that way, I think it’s really modern. The amount of countries that are in that situation now. Even here, everybody’s always complaining about the government but nobody’s doing anything”.

Good was a project Whittaker actively pursued, describing it as “one of those auditions you really work hard at”. Much of that was to do with the cast, but also because “it’s independent, it’s made with passion. I’m not really into the big budget thing”.

The big budget offers have come in, but Whittaker, unlike Anne, refuses to make any concessions: “I drive my agent mad. She’s saying “No one’s gonna see it”, but when I see who’s involved and where I’ll get to go. I could have gotten a mainstream ITV job and been a regular on something. I’d have a mortgage by now! But I’ve not been boxed in, and if you’re lucky enough to be given these amazing opportunities I’ve had after Venus, then you’ve a great environment to learn in”.

3 » reviews The Infinite Frontier  Bart Got a Room Blue Eyelids  4 » what’s new online Updating you on new online content FOR GFF 4 » bloody binge drinkers Michael Gillespie gets his teeth into a worrying new trend 4 » win tickets!

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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

SHHH! An Evening of (Not so) Silent Movies Tyler Parks takes a look at an event that fuses sound and vision at the Glasgow Music and Film Festival.

My Fair Lady

13.00 @ GFT

It’ll have you dancing all night… or all afternoon anyway.

Last Chance Harvey

19.00 @ GFT

GFF Closing Gala performance featuring Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson

Music and Movies Quiz

15.00 @ King Tut’s

Test your knowledge against our esteemed team.

The Age of Stupid

16.00 @ GFT

Eco-drama-doc featuring Pete Postlethwaite

Everlasting Moments

16.15 @GFT

Golden Globe nominated historical drama by Swedish director Jan Troell

SHHH! An Evening of (Not so) Silent Movies 19:30 @arches

Tyler Parks takes a look at an event that fuses sound and vision at the Glasgow Music and Film Festival.

The relationship between film and music is cause for joy and scepticism. It was the norm for narrative films during the silent era of the early 20th century to be accompanied by live music. This facilitated the immersion of the spectator in the images upon the screen, a fact that could not be lost on anyone who has ever seen a feature length silent film in a cinema without auditory accompaniment. The incidental sounds of people packed into a darkened room tend to disrupt the suspension of disbelief that accounts for one of film’s primary pleasures. On the other hand, many an experimental filmmaker (Stan Brakhage comes most immediately to mind) has been fanatical in asserting that the absence of sound is a condition necessary to heighten the viewer’s visual concentration.

Music always adds new meanings to the unspooling images of a film.

These can be unpredictable and dynamic, flowing out of associations and emotions that would never emerge from the images or the music alone. The interplay of the two mediums can become the very

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centre of the work. Or, as is the case in many a big budget blockbuster, the music can be used to enforce programmatic responses from an audience. The sombre music lets one know that she should be feeling sombre.

SHHH! An Evening of (Not so) Silent Movies is part of the Glasgow Music and Film Festival, itself a new strand of the Glasgow Film Festival. It is an event which will explore the more fugitive and experimental interaction between music and image. A room at The Arches will be made over in imitation of the ambiance of a 1920s film theatre and an eclectic group of musicians will be playing conceptual pieces that link their music to a segment of film. Among those performing will be the winsomely charming Zoey Van Goey and the more epically-oriented Bella Union act, My Latest Novel. Dolby Anol will provide some Technicolor maximal electro, while Ben Brother & Mouse Pad will dish out some Vangelis-inflected variations on proggy disco. Finally, Holy Mountain will enrage and engage with their particular brand of noise.

In addition, there will be theatre artists accompanied by the films that have inspired the works they will perform, and students from across Scotland will be working with the Glasgow based video production company Forest of Black - specialists in creating visual content for music promotion - to concoct moving image accompaniment to songs by the evening’s musical guests. The unexpected is to be expected.

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Reviews The Infinite Border (La Frontera Infinita)

Director: Juan Manuel Sepulveda

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Despite what could be an interesting topic - immigration between the Mexican and American borders - La Frontera Infinita has little sense of place, time or purpose.

Juan Manuel Sepulveda does not offer much to viewers unfamiliar with the situation. His eloquent yet sparse narration poses questions rather than providing explanations or insight, while his slow panoramas of people-covered trains stretching into the distance reflect the pace of both the film and the migrants’ movement. It is contradictory

Bart Got a Room

Director: Brian Hecker

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that this is a film about people’s journeys yet no one is given a name, so they become merely individual representations of one mass desire to leave their homeland, for reasons unknown. Consequently, it is hard to empathise or understand the journey of these people. In fact, the film’s most revealing moment is the director’s reply to a woman who asks “why are you so interested in immigrants?” His response is silence.

Becky Bartlett

Blue Eyelids

Director: Ernesto Contreras

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Brian Hecker’s semi-autobiographical indie debut Bart Got a Room plays on the seemingly universal prom-night angst of a generation of geeky American teenagers.

As nerdy protagonist Danny Stein (Steven Kaplan) struggles pathetically with finding a date, his parents Ernie and Beth (William H. Macy and Cheryl Hines) are coming to terms with their divorce and are in search of new partners of their own.

Like Bart Got a Room’s mainstream forebears, the film fluctuates from grossly corny to just plain gross, albeit with a greater level of subtlety than usual. There are undeniably funny moments: Danny’s divorced father’s prolific yet unsuccessful dating cycle uncovers some suitably grotesque suitors, and his attempts to aid his son’s equally fruitless search raises a laugh or two. Yet, Hecker ultimately struggles with self-contradiction, sentimentalising the life lessons Danny learns on his road to the “big day”, whilst simultaneously trying to critique the mystifying hold of “the prom” on American popular culture. But if Hecker did indeed learn from these experiences himself, at least that’s something.

Stephen Mitchell

Mid-way through Contreras’ beautifully photographed Mexican drama Blue Eyelids the two central protagonists, both awkward and accustomed to their individual lives of solitude, go on a date to the cinema.

Projected onto the big screen are a mirror couple, who in contrast to our characters are decisive and empowered. Unsurprisingly the postmovie experience fails to play out like the film that the pair have just

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watched. These scenes perfectly embody the ideas behind the film.

Whereas a typical romantic story is concerned with the connections forged between people Blue Eyelids explores quite the opposite; the lack of connection and the shortfall that exists between ideas of love and actual experiences. Using stationary shots that capture the monotony of everyday life, accompanied with sparse dialogue, Contreras paints

a picture of quiet melancholy. This visual style recalls Coppola’s Lost in Translation and the films of Jim Jarmusch (albeit with far less irony), and whilst it is nothing new, it is fitting for the message that is being conveyed. The ending may not be as surprising as it initially appears; it speaks far more of compromise and disappointment than of love.

Gail Tolley

SATURDAY 21 FEBRUARY THE CINESKINNY 3

bloody bingedrinkers With the success of Let The Right One In at this year’s festival and the Twilight sequel already in the works, it seems there is a genuine thirst (wha-hey!) for all things vampiric. What’s astonishing, however, is just how young these blood bingers are. Which raises a question: do vampire movies encourage binge drinking? Well, we decided to consult Marius Von Trapp, a known authority on vampirism (well, he’s read I Am Legend a few times). His findings were, shall we say, grave (wha-hey!). Here, he highlights some of his findings: “When I remember my youth… well, I REMEMBER my youth, which is more than many of today’s generation of vampires.

A recent survey showed that 1 in 5 vampires had already started drinking blood at the age of 1200.

That is 15% more than 200 years ago, and 27% more than 201 years ago, when prohibition had taken hold. “I find these results upsetting. Like many young people, these poor,misguided vampires believe they will live forever.”

One worrying trend amongst vampires is their complete lack of shame about their binge-drinking.

I spoke to several, who cannot be named due to a mix-up with their birth certificates. One, whom we shall refer to as Ploppy, claimed to have drank the blood of SEVEN people in one night, none of whom were wearing Burberry. When I asked his reasons for doing so, he laughed “God does everything in sevens, so why can’t I?” The most horrifying testimony was that of Baggy, who drank so many people in one weekend he began to resemble an infant Su Pollard: “It was tough. But I work all week and feel I have the right to do what I want with my weekend.”

The effects of binge-drinking can be devastating to a vampire. According to one consultant, many of the vampires she has treated have shown symptoms of binge-drinking: “What these vampires do not realise is the effect this can have on their livelihood, as well as their health. One man had begun to regress to the state of a foetus. The long term effects are horrendous: a vampire can become so young looking they may find it difficult to ever gain access to a Bauhaus gig after spending so much time coaxing an innocent virgin to that domain”.

WORRYING STUFF indeed, Mr Von Trapp. Maybe the problem then is that vampires are just simply too sexy. Isn’t it time we saw a new, gawkier nosferatu? One who likes Heartbeat, for instance.

Michael Gillespie

What’s new online?

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

VIDEO

We’ve uploaded the Q&A with today’s cover star, Jodie Whittaker.

Go to www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk/video to see it!

PHOTOS

Charlie Levi came to GFF with his first film, Childless. There are plenty of images in our gallereies.

Keep checking, as we’re always uploading new stuff! www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk/gallery

BLOG

Allison Young has posted an interview with the director Am I Black Enough For You? Check it out here: www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

info

Keep checking out our Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and The Skinny’s forums.

Pic of the day PHOTO: andrew greer

Director Charlie Levi discussing his latest film Childless at the GFT yesterday.

win tickets!

We have two tickets for the 20.30 screening of The Wrecking Crew on Sunday at GFT. Director Denny Tedesco profiles his father’s band and highlights their musical achievements. These were the musicians, after all, who played on the hits of The Beach Boys, The Monkees and Phil Spector, while they would record more number 1 singles than The Beatles! To win, answer this question:

The recent documentary End of the Century profiled which band? email michael@theskinny.co.uk by 10am 21 Feb to enter

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