Spank The Monkey

MOSTLY FILM: Terracottadammerung 2012

Let's face it, the Terracotta Far East Film Festival was made for people like me. For four festivals now, they've been bringing the best movies from all over Asia to the Prince Charles cinema in London. I saw a bit of the first festival in 2009, and wrote about it here. I had to miss 2010's completely, because I was actually in Asia at the time. And then in 2011, I caught as much of the festival as I could, and did a big thing about it for Europe's Best Website.

The latest Terracotta Festival took place last weekend, and once again I've covered it for Mostly Film, in a piece I've chosen to call Terracottadammerung 2012 because the title went down well last time.  And as is usually the case, I have some bonus material for visitors to my own site. You see, as festival boss Joey Leung kept saying during his introductions, Terracotta isn't just about films. The Mostly Film piece covers the 16 feature films that were shown over the weekend: but here, I'm going to talk about the Masterclasses.

MOSTLY FILM: Obscure Gems Two

"In 1984, Alex Cox made Repo Man." This was the attention-grabbing sentence that launched Mostly Film on April 4th, 2011. Bit of a shit start for Europe's Best Website, wasn't it? Still, it got better, and they've let me write more articles for it since, despite everything.

By accident rather than design, the week surrounding Mostly Film's first birthday will be largely taken up with multiple-author pieces, and I've contributed to a couple of those. My input to this Wednesday's birthday celebration is fairly wee, so I'll leave you to remember to read that yourself when it's published. Instead, let's focus on today's article, Obscure Gems Two: Revenge Of The Obscure: it highlights six films that have been widely overlooked, and two of them have been chosen by me.

It's an educational piece, and the main thing it taught me is that I've almost completely lost the ability to write to a word count. My two contributions started life around the 400 word mark, and took absolutely ages to hammer down to the required 250. Still, at least the stuff I had to cut out for space can be recycled in this bonus feature, so it wasn't all wasted.

British Animation Awards 2012 (part 3)

The story so far: British Animation Awards, once every two years, Public Choice screenings all over the UK in February, three programmes of short films, audience gets to choose their favourites. Here's a review of Programme 1, and here's a review of Programme 2. So this should be where I tell you all about Programme 3. Except there's a problem: I haven't really seen Programme 3.

If you're reading these pieces on the day they're published, then over the next two days you'll be hearing about the trip to São Paulo I made in mid-February. That trip, enjoyable as it was, meant that I was out of the country for both London screenings of Programme 3. I had a backup plan to try and get to the equivalent screening in Brighton, but that fell through. So I haven't been able to catch these films in a cinema, unlike the other ones I've written about so far.

But you've presumably noticed that I've tracked down oodles of web reference for all the films: the shorts themselves, or clips, or animator websites. So I've done the same for Programme 3, and will now attempt to review the films using just whatever information is available online. As long as you accept that as a caveat, hopefully we can do them all some justice, with apologies to the four or five films below where there's only a clip available on the internet rather than the whole thing. Let's go, shall we?

British Animation Awards 2012 (part 2)

I've already explained what's going on here in part 1, but here's a quick recap. The British Animation Awards have a special section each bi-year called the Public Choice Awards, in which three programmes of short films are sent around the UK so that a general audience can vote for their favourites. You've missed those programmes, unfortunately, as they were touring in late January and early February 2012. But you can read what I thought about them here, and watch out for the official announcement of the winners on March 15th.

So, here we go with Programme 2.

British Animation Awards 2012 (part 1)

It's that time of the bi-year again. Every two years, the British Animation Awards celebrate the best of what's been happening in the medium, covering the gamut from expensive studio features to tiny student films. And in the middle of it all are the Public Choice Awards, in which 50 or so shorts are toured around the country for a general audience to vote on which ones are best.

In previous years - 2006, 2008 and 2010 - I've written one big piece reviewing all the films up for the Awards, splitting them into the categories of narrative shorts, music videos and commercials. But for reasons which should become apparent shortly, this year I'm going to write three separate review articles, one for each of the programmes which went on tour earlier this month. Don't worry, you'll still get more links than anyone can reasonably handle, with every short accompanied by at least two websites with animator information, clips, or even the whole damn film in several cases. We start, inevitably, with Programme 1.

MOSTLY FILM: Whose Film Is It Anyway?

The Japan Foundation's touring film programme has become an annual fixture, not just in the UK's arthouse cinemas, but also on this site. For the last few years - specifically, in 2008, 2010 and 2011 - I've been catching the tour on its opening London leg at the ICA, and I've been writing about the films here after the fact, for the benefit of the cities further on down the schedule.

But this year's going to be a bit different. I'll be writing about the 2011 programme - entitled Whose Film Is It Anyway? Contemporary Japanese Auteurs - for Mostly Film, now firmly established as Europe's Best Website. And because, unlike me, they have Proper Journalistic Credibility And All That Shit, I've been able to mooch some advance screeners from the Japan Foundation via them. Which means I can proudly bring you reviews of all of the films in the season several days before they hit the cinemas (the tour starts in London on Friday February 10th).

You can read those reviews on Mostly Film right now. If you'd rather just sit around and look at the trailers, though, then you're in the right place.

MOSTLY FILM: The Dutch Angle

This won't be news to anyone who's ever spent time looking at the Travel section, but here goes anyway. Sometimes, I like to go to foreign countries and see films in their cinemas, even if I don't speak the language.

I've written about the experience several times on this site, reviewing films I've seen in Japan, Japan again, Japan once more, actually make that twice more, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland, a Denmark & Sweden double bill, back in Japan, the Czech Republic, and a bit more Japan, yes it does seem to be our favourite. But I thought it was about time I spread the idea a little wider. So today on Mostly Film, you'll find an article entitled Monoglot Movie Club: The Dutch Angle, in which I talk about my recent experiences in the Netherlands and the four films I saw while I was there.

Bonus material for regular readers? Yes, we've got that too.

MOSTLY FILM: Tucker and Dale vs Distribution

Six months ago today, it was. Six months since a bunch of former inhabitants of the Guardian film talkboards pulled themselves out of the smouldering ruins of their former home, and set up shop on a new blog called Mostly Film. Since then, every weekday has seen a new post go up, building into a repository of only slightly warped opinions on music, telly, art, comics, books, hotels... but mostly, film.

I had the honour of contributing the first article on Mostly Film six months ago, looking at Alex Cox's contribution to cult cinema. And purely by coincidence, I've also contributed today's half-birthday piece: again, looking at cult cinema, but this time from the perspective of how changing distribution models and the death of video rental have affected the way we consume it.

Once again, readers of this site get some related bonus material to stop them complaining about how I've written hardly anything for my own website over the past month. Having said that, the bonus material is another bloody YouTube playlist. But an interesting one, I think.

MOSTLY FILM: Scala Forever

It's that time of the month again. Actually, August should see a couple of appearances from me on Mostly Film, but one of them will happen during the pile-up of posts that occur here during the Edinburgh Festival, so I may not be able to say too much about it at the time.

Anyway, seeing as we're on the subject of festivals, today's post on Europe's Best Website finds me reminiscing about the Scala cinema in London, as a new festival called Scala Forever celebrates the 30th anniversary of its opening. Some of the anecdotes may be familiar to regular readers of this site - a couple were wheeled out for my 1999 review of A Clockwork Orange, a film that's crucial to the Scala's history. But there should be plenty of new stuff for you to enjoy.

And as always, readers of this site get a little bonus material as a present for being loyal to me. Well, I say 'little', but...

MOSTLY FILM: Terracottadammerung

In these matters, I take my lead from Chris Sims. He started out as an amateur comics journo with his own site, Chris's Invincible Super-Blog. At some point down the line, he became a professional comics journo with Comics Alliance, but couldn't bring himself to abandon the fanbase he'd built up on his own blog over the years. So, he still posted when he could on The ISB, but at the same time he used it to announce his frequent contributions to Comics Alliance: not just with a straightforward link, but also with additional commentary and the occasional bit of material from the cutting-room floor.

So yeah, what I'm doing with these Mostly Film articles - such as today's piece on the Terracotta Far East Film Festival - is a similar sort of thing. Except Sims gets paid for at least one of his writing gigs. And he's contributed to a book - Write More Good - that you can buy in proper shops, not just as print-on-demand. But apart from all that, similar, right?