Spank's LFF Diary, Monday 20/10/2008

Reviewed today: Adoration, I Am Alive, RR, Under The Tree, Uprise, The Warlords.

Spank's LFF Diary, Sunday 19/10/2008

Reviewed today: A Christmas Tale, Hunger, International Animation Panorama, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, Quiet Chaos, RR.

Spank's LFF Diary, Saturday 18/10/2008

Reviewed today: Goodbye Solo, Religulous, Tokyo!

Spank's LFF Diary, Friday 17/10/2008

Reviewed today: Birdsong, Dean Spanley, Love Live Long, A Perfect Day, Quick Gun Murugun, The Secret, A Simple Heart, Winstanley.

Spank's LFF Diary, Thursday 16/10/2008

Reviewed today: Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo, That Sinking Feeling.

London Film Festival 2008

Oops.

I'm afraid that London will have to start its 52nd Film Festival without me this year.

The Bald Trilogy

I kept telling The Belated Birthday Girl that one of these days, we needed to see a Ken Campbell live show. The last occasion was even documented here, when it was announced last August that he'd be at the Edinburgh Festival doing some late night shows with improv musical group Showstopper. Unfortunately, there was no way we could fit him into our schedule, but we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that he'd doubtless be turning up in London again fairly soon.

By the end of the month he was dead. A Ken Campbell live show is now, as far as I'm concerned, exactly equivalent to pre-Katrina New Orleans: one of those wonders of nature I wanted The BBG to fall in love with the same way that I did, but events have conspired to ensure that it'll never happen.

James Gunn's PG Porn

To help bump all that Caligula unpleasantness off the front page, here's a more wholesome pornographic experience for you: James Gunn's PG Porn. The director's introduction sums it up best:

How many times have you been watching a great porn film – you're really enjoying the story, the acting, the cinematography – when, all of the sudden, they ruin everything with PEOPLE HAVING SEX? A bunch of times, right?

Simian Substitute Site for October 2008: Fight Like Apes

Okay, those book reviews I was promising you last month didn't quite happen. To be honest, at the start of September I wasn't expecting to have much new stuff to write about: and then Lipsynch and Caligula turned up unexpectedly, and there was the whole 40,000 hits on YouTube thing (actually, it's over 41,000 now), so I didn't feel the need to fall back on literature. I've got about half a dozen half-completed reviews on the back burner, though, so expect them to turn up in a quiet moment in the future.

There's no chance of that quiet moment being in the second half of October, when our traditional coverage of the London Film Festival kicks off. The planning meeting's been held, the postal bookings have been made, and we're just waiting to see what we've got tickets for. I'll warn you now that - as has been the case for the last couple of years - pressure of work may well mean that I won't be hitting the three-films-a-day minimum that I was achieving a few years ago. But we'll see how it goes when we get there.