Please click through to read my review of Ai to Makoto on uk-anime-net
I know, two links in a row, I’m so sorry! More original content coming soon, I promise (probably). The movie’s awesome though, a total delight!
Tag: LFF 2012
Doomsday Book (Inlyumyeolmangbogoseo) – LFF 2012
Festival Round Up – LFF 2012
As I’ve now seen my final film in this year’s festival a run down seems to be in order:
- Doomsday Book (Korea)
- The Samurai That Night (Japan)
- For Love’s Sake (Ai to Makoto) (Japan)
- Helter Skelter (Japan)
- Memories Look At Me (China)
- Dreams For Sale (Japan)
- A Liar’s Autobiography (UK)
- In Another Country (Korea)
- The Red and the Blue (Italy)
- Romance Joe (Korea)
- Caesar Must Die (Italy)
- Seven Psychopaths (US/UK)
- The Manxman (UK)
- Dormant Beauty(Italy)
That’s only 14 films which is a big drop off on last year’s total. Partly this is because the festival itself is a few days shorter but also I was busier and the schedules didn’t work out as well for me as they have done before. I have to say although I enjoyed all of the films I saw (at least a little, I flat out hated none of them) this year’s festival experience wasn’t as exciting as other years. It was though much better organised and I never once found myself wandering round outside trying to find the way in and having to ask unco-operative security people where to go! Most of the films seemed to start about ten minutes late but I suspect this must have been built into the schedule as nothing over ran and delayed the next film. Oddly then even though the programme seemed less exciting (or I picked the wrong films) the experience as a whole was much better. I got so sick of the ident though, my goodness.
Top pick of the films I saw would have to be Ai to Makoto – a really riotous, outrageously fun seishun eiga musical that exceeded all my already high expectations. I also really loved Seven Psychopaths even though I’d been seeing quite negative things online it turned out to be exactly my kind of thing and more in keeping with what I love about McDonagh’s stage work. The only real disappointment was A Liar’s Autobiography which failed entirely at what it was trying to do but did have moments brilliance scattered amongst the tedium. Memories Look at Me wasn’t my sort of film and I can’t claim to have enjoyed it very much but there are a lot of people who do really like that kind of thing.
There were lots of films I’d have liked to see but couldn’t. Luckily a lot of those films are out on general release fairly soon/already anyway – Frankenweenie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, Rust and Bone among others. Matteo Garrone’s Reality has apparently been picked up for release and Amour is screening at the BFI next month. Key of Life is the only one I’m missing where there might not be another opportunity.
All in all I’m very happy with how it all played out, I guess that’s it until next year – feeling a bit deflated. Oh well, hopefully I’ll be able to see few things in the Korean Film Festival, right? Ah London, you’re such an enabler!
Seven Psychopaths – LFF 2012
I won’t lie – I almost didn’t go to this screening as I’d seen a lot of ‘worst film I’ve even seen’ comments coming in from various festivals and then from the LFF press screening and I wasn’t sure I was definitely going to be able to make it. However being a huge fan of McDonagh’s stage work (I count the original production of The Pillowman at the RNT one of the theatre going highlights of my life) there was no way I was never going to see this film. Although I wasn’t as enamoured with In Bruges as many people were – mostly because I missed the sense of anarchy from his stage productions – I’d been looking forward to his next film for some time. Seven Psychopaths plays out almost like a big screen version of Lieutenant of Inishmore only it’s a missing dog rather than a cat and psycho crook rather than a guy who was thrown out of the IRA for ‘being too mad’ with a whole load of metatextual commentary going on. Oh and bloody violence, lots of that, alongside totally absurd, jet black humour – yep, that’s a McDonagh script!
Marty (Farrell) has some problems. The first of which being that he’s way behind on a screenplay he’s supposed to have delivered already – in fact he hasn’t even started it, well he has the title ‘Seven Psychopaths’. Only he’s only come up with the one – a Buddhist psychopath but he can’t work out how all the homicidal mania and enlightenment go together. Besides which he really wants to write a film that’s not all guns and violence, one that’s about peace and love and humanity. His second problem is drink, which is possibly part of the cause of his first problem. His third problem is a incredibly poor choice in friends – i.e. an out of work actor, Billy Bickle (Rockwell), who makes his money through a dog kidnapping scam and thinks a really great way to help with the psycho problem is to take out an ad asking for the biggest psychos around to call Marty’s own number and offer their stories for the film. One day however Billy and his friend Hans (Walken) are going to mess with the wrong guy’s dog and drag Marty into a whole world of psychopathic violence and general existential despair.
Yes, like its filmic counterpart the Seven Psychopaths that we are watching is a film about humanity and friendship and art that ended up having lots of guns and violence and blood in it anyway. There’s a great moment near the beginning where Billy and Marty are discussing the screenplay problem whilst sitting in a virtually empty cinema watching Takeshi Kitano’s Violent Cop and Marty insists he doesn’t want the film to be all about guys with guns in their hands. The violence is inevitable though as the two tussle over how the film’s going to end – in a hail of bullets or with a fireside heart to heart.
You might think so far so nineties Tarantino with its long stretches of stylised dialogue and classic/cult film references but it’s much less alienating than Tarantino’s approach and somehow manages to be both reflexive yet unpretentious. It’s much all less obvious and if it’s winking at you it’s doing it without looking you in the eye and certainly without waiting for you to wink back. The absurdity of the piece feels totally natural and effortlessly constructed so that all the crazy goings on just seem to roll together with a feeling of ‘of course, it must be so’.
Seven Psychopaths is a totally insane thrill ride of a movie – the sort of film where you feel like jumping up with arms stretched out to the sky and shouting YES! as soon as it’s finished. It’s a fair assumption that a lot of people won’t like this film, it strikes a very specific tone that you either go with or don’t and even those who admired In Bruges might find themselves lost in this film’s comparative lack of control. However, Seven Psychopaths is a hilariously funny black comedy that’s also very smart in its criticism both of itself and of cinema in general. Destined to become a cult classic this is one film too much to miss!
A Liar’s Autobiography – LFF 2012
A few years before he died, Graham Chapman recorded a a kind of audiobook detailing some of his experiences embellished with flights of pure whimsy. Now, in 2012, these recordings have enabled Chapman to become the star of a new animated feature attempting to bring some of his story to the big screen. Starting with an audio clip of Chapman asking for his thirty seconds of abuse, it then moves to a sort of framing device in which he forgets his lines on broadway, promptly collapses and hits his head provoking a surreal odyssey through his life so far. Boasting three director credits (one of whom being Bill Jones – son of Terry) and the work of fourteen different animation studios the film uses many different animation styles and techniques.
It is perhaps a matter of aesthetic taste but some of the animation styles serve their subject matter better than others. The seeming lack of motivation for the switching between styles lends the film an episodic felling which prevents it gaining any real traction and is often more of a distraction than something that brings any kind of artistic contribution. Undoubtedly, much of the animation is good, solid work but taken as a whole it fails to come together in any meaningful way.
It also doesn’t really help that it ends up being fairly light on the autobiographical detail so that anyone with even a cursory interest in all things Python or even just having been raised in the UK over the past thirty years isn’t going to hear anything they didn’t know already. Even the darker elements of Chapman’s life are glossed over in an ‘all jolly good fun, ho ho ho’ sort of way rather than engaged with any kind of insight.
Thirdly, it really just feels as if it’s trying way too hard. Unfortunately it misses the effortless silliness of Monty Python that’s the best example of English whimsy and winds up feeling by turns juvenile and laboured. Crushingly, it’s sometimes as if the animation seems superfluous where Chapman’s voice alone might have done the job better as the animation just isn’t really adding anything into the mix. Slightly gimmicky things like casting Cameron Diaz as the voice of Sigmund Freud initially scream ‘genius!’ but prove too on the nose and collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.
That’s not to say it’s a total disaster – it is moderately enjoyable and at times quite funny, just not quite as much as it seems to think it is. It felt very much like the sort of of British grown up animation that was commoner in the ’90s but forced into the biopics mode that’s really popular with BBC4. Possibly, it may have worked better on the small screen in one of the lighter documentary spots but as a big screen experience it fails as either a documentary or an entertainment film. Diverting rather than a must see.
At the European gala screening we were treated to a few actors playing various Graham Chapman roles such as King Arthur/Brian beforehand and a pop up (literarily) performance from the London Gay Men’s choir during the film’s musical interlude. Something of a curate’s egg but worth seeing.
Windows on Worlds 