We wake up this morning to find Ken Kesey's legendary Magic Bus parked over the road from our flat, looking like a great big explosion in a paint and drugs factory. The evidence would appear to indicate that Kesey and entourage - the last great travelling hippy commune of them all - are staying in a posh West End hotel prior to their gig on Saturday. Boo! Hiss! Sellout! Etc!
In search of some much-needed austerity after that early-morning freakout, I pop off with Lesley to see Lancelot du Lac, part of the Film Festival's retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson. I've only seen one film of his before now, L'Argent, which follows a moral decline that starts with a forged banknote and proceeds with unstoppable logic to an axe murder. Bresson has a very sparse, pared-down style which worked magnificently for L'Argent, and I was curious to see more of it.
Truth be told, the main reason why I chose Lancelot du Lac, Bresson's retelling of part of the King Arthur myth, was that I'd heard that it was a major influence on Monty Python And The Holy Grail: the two films were made about a year apart in the mid-seventies. Sure enough, within the first minute three knights have been hacked to death and are gushing blood like John Cleese's Black Knight of old. ("'Tis but a scratch.") However, it settles down after the opening to depict how the illicit love affair between Lancelot (Luc Simon) and Queen Guinevere (Laura Duke-Condominas) ultimately brings about the bloody downfall of Camelot. It's beautifully shot by Pascalino de Santis, and does some extraordinary things with background sound: there's a continuous background of horse noises that consists of a single horse whinny looped endlessly until it becomes hypnotic. And the final demise of the knights of the Round Table is a bravura piece of editing, as Bresson refuses to show us anything other than the aftermath of their climactic battles.
From there, off to the Pleasance to see Brian Appleton's History Of Rock 'N' Roll. Brian is a Media Studies lecturer at a polytechnic somewhere in the vicinity of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and the lecture he gives here is one which he's been forbidden from teaching on his course. This is because it reveals how every major movement in rock 'n' roll since the early 1960's has somehow or other been caused by Brian himself. Even as a child, his tender attempts to bring a maggot back to life to give it the last rites ("Wake up, maggot, I think I've got something to say to you") were misheard by passing gravedigger Rod Stewart and recylcled into one of his songs several years later: no credit was given to Brian, unfortunately. Ever since then, Brian has been inadvertently inspiring fledgling musicians: giving advice to Wham! when they were just a couple of Greek schoolboys busking at Green Park tube, starting the fight with Boy George at the Blitz that led to Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, and so on. Interspersed with this are some of the songs that Brian has been writing ever since childhood, from his Airfix-glue-inspired Narnia fantasy Lucy You're In The Wrong Wardrobe to the curiously Morrisseyesque It's My Turn To Be Poorly.
As you've hopefully twigged by now, Brian doesn't really exist at all. He's another creation of actor Graham Fellows, famous for his Jilted John record in 1978, and more recently for his performances as top singer/songwriter John Shuttleworth. There's a lot of Shuttleworth in the new character, notably his attention to detail and his tendency to ramble off on tangents. ("I tried playing the harmonica initially, but my saliva kept mixing with the metal and generating an unpleasant enzyme that made my gums bleed.") It helps that Fellows has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of the music himself, and can drone on about how Jimi Hendrix is the second greatest rock guitarist after Steve Howe of Yes in quite an unnervingly convincing fashion. If you can spot all the musical in-jokes, you'll have a hysterical time: and even if you don't, the Appleton character is strong enough to carry the show along. But even though Fellows tries to give Appleton as complex a back-story as John Shuttleworth (with a similar cast of offstage characters), it's difficult to see how he could get more than one show out of this idea.
People often ask me for hints and tips on how to choose what shows to see on the Fringe. (How's it going, Carole?) It's difficult to come up with hard and fast rules, but there is one rule I've stuck to ever since my first visit ten years ago. I realise it may be a rule that's based on some sort of deep-seated prejudice, but it's stood me in good stead ever since. The rule is this: Do not see any comedy show performed by groups of Oxbridge students. They will be shit. Everyone goes along to the Oxford Revue and Cambridge Footlights shows expecting to see the next Monty Python or Fry and Laurie, and they're always disappointed. It's not worth the effort.
But hey, prejudices are meant to be challenged, especially in a festival environment such as this. So I go to see The Cambridge Footlights in This Way Up. And they are shit. The setting is an ocean liner, the Stella Maris, where the cast of five play various members of the crew, as well as providing the entertainment for the passengers (that's us). Interspered with the weak standup comedy, lousy magic acts and stupid dancing are a series of songs meant to represent the development of twentieth century popular music. This means two or three original songs for the early part of the century (this is probably the only group in town still doing comedy barbershop numbers), and then really bad semi-straight renditions of old favourites to take us up to the present day. Some of the staging and design is fun to look at (notably a couple of black light theatre sketches), but for the most part it's just mind-numbingly unfunny. And they should stop trying to build Matthew Green up as some sort of future physical comedy genius just because he's got big ears. There is one decent joke in the whole show, and I'll tell it you now to save you money. Two goldfish are sitting in a tank, and one says to the other, "How do you drive this thing?" Well, it worked for me.
Back to the glamour and excitement of the Film Festival: and yes, I'm sure that everyone was quite thrilled when Pearce Brosnan and Rene Russo turned up for The Thomas Crown Affair last week, but the real event of the Festival this year has to be the world premiere of Gregory's Two Girls. As John Gordon Sinclair announced at the start, "it's great to premiere it in front of a Scottish audience... if you lot don't laugh, we've really messed it up." Don't worry, they haven't messed it up, and it's a great return to form for writer/director Bill Forsyth after his Hollywood misadventures of a few years ago. It's twenty years on from the events of Gregory's Girl, and Greg (John Gordon Sinclair) is now teaching at the school he used to attend. He uses English lessons to try to persuade his pupils to examine the world around them more closely, and challenge injustice wherever they find it. "Don't spectate, participate," he keeps telling them. But he ends up participating a bit more than he'd like when student Frances (Carly McKinnon) approaches him with a problem: somewhat embarrassingly for Greg, as he's had a secret crush on Frances for some time now. Frances suspects that Greg's old school pal Fraser Rowan (Dougray Scott) is making torture equipment in his electronics factory, and something should be done about it. What with Frances' investigations, Fraser's continual offers of friendship and employment, and the erotic overtures of fellow teacher Bel (Maria Doyle Kennedy), Greg's got a lot of things to juggle with. Can he cope? Course not.
Central to the success of Gregory's Two Girls is Sinclair's lead performance. Forsyth recognises his genius for physical comedy and facial expressions, which was used to great effect in the first film but has been sadly under-exploited since. Forsyth gives Sinclair free rein in this film, and between them they create a character who's recognisably a (slightly) grown-up version of the awkward schoolboy we saw all those years ago. The two female leads manage to be full-blown characters in their own right, rather than just support to Greg, while Dougray Scott provides a nicely ambiguous performance as the man who may or may not be the bad guy of the piece. But in the end it's Bill Forsyth's script that holds it all together: it makes some interesting points about how we perceive the world and interact with it, it provides the offbeat romantic subplots we'd expect from a Forsyth movie, and it has loads of great funny lines, including one during an interrogation scene that caused such an outburst of hysteria in the audience that you couldn't hear the next sixty seconds of dialogue. You'll know it when you hear it. It's a great reason to be proud of Scottish cinema again, a pride that extends as far as the Coming Attractions board at the UCI cinema where the premiere took place: according to that, the new James Bond movie stars Robert Carlyle and Pearce Brosnan, in that order.
Sadly, Gregory's Two Girls overran long enough to mean I missed the screening of Hitchcock's The Lodger, with a live score composed by Joby Talbot. As a replacement, Jon and I catch a late-night screening of Redball, an Australian cop thriller made for virtually no money in ten days on yet another one of those digital video cameras that have become rather hip these days. It follows a number of detectives in the Homicide division of the Victoria Police. The real Victoria Police have been trying to suppress the movie, and it's easy to see why: it depicts them all as being crazy, evil, corrupt, or any combination of the three. Suspects are brutally beaten up, bribes are taken, girls walking the street are liberally abused. In the middle of all this, detective JJ Wilson (Belinda McClory) is trying to investigate a number of child murders in the city, and reaching disturbing conclusions about who's responsible.
The feel of Redball is highly reminiscent of the TV series Homicide: Life On The Street, except that this is Homicide on... er... whatever drug it is that makes you louder, more violent and more frantically edited. It takes all the elements familiar from that show - the whiteboard listing outstanding cases, the use of montages with rock music, the non-naturalistic jump-cut editing - but pumps them up way beyond what's possible on telly. The violent moments, in particular, gain ferocious power from the editing: one crucial gunshot is repeated five or six times in the space of a second. Writer/director Jon Hewitt has put a lot of thought into the business of transferring the footage from digital video to film: whereas the Dogme films wear their degraded image quality on their sleeve, Hewitt has worked within the camera's limitations to ensure the pictures look as good as they can throughout, and used the flexibility of DV to shoot huge amounts of material and create staggering effects in the cutting room. The performances are great, especially McClory (the other girl from The Matrix) in the lead, who got on so well with the director that she married him. Aaah. Catch this movie before the police stop you from seeing it.
Notes From Spank's Pals
Jon - In Bare, a two hander from New Zealand, 32 characters are played by the two stars (one male, one female), usually delivering monologues spoken to an imaginary second person. It passed an enjoyable hour with a mixture of humour and pathos.
Lesley - Harmon Leon at The Stand. An intimate venue, and a nice line of jokes. My favourite was the shopping mall bonny baby competition. I would go and see this guy again (and again?).
Jon - Lovepuke came highly recommended by my travelling companions who had seen it earlier. Written by Duncan Sarkies, who co-wrote Scarfies, it's an interesting and highly amusing variation on the boy meets girl theme. It concerns three couples who get together with startlingly different results. Its strength comes from its humour and the staccato interchanges between the three different couples.
Rob G - The Lodger: the world premiere of a new film soundtrack by Joby Talbot for this renovated copy of Hitchcock's 1926 original. The composer is the other half of the Divine Comedy alongside the higher profile Neil Hannon. Eight players, with woodwind, brass, strings, keyboard/piano and percussion, were led by the conductor throughout the film: they were present but never became obtrusive over the film. For an avowed non-viewer of horror, the film gained and held my attention: it shows up well after 73 years. There were some unexpected laughs, particuarly at the facial expressions of the heroine, the lodger and the policeman in their love triangle. The music led to moments of tension, particularly at the last crescendo: would it all end happily after all? Try to get to see this new combination.
Jon - The fact that I had reached the point in the day where the moment I sat down in a slightly stuffy theatre, I started to drift off to sleep, didn't help my appreciation of Often I Find Myself Naked. I did enjoy it, and it was often amusing. However, its attempt at profundity through the use of borrowed quotes seemed to be somewhat hit and miss.
Lesley - The Juju Girl at the Traverse. Parallel storylines in Zimbabwe. Grandmother Catherine was a daughter and wife of Scottish missionaries in Africa, with a better rapport with the "natives" than her menfolk. Grand-daughter Kate has brought Catherine's ashes from Scotland to scatter on the site of the old Mission, and finds her own way with contemporary Zimbabwean society. Excellent, excellent, excellent. If it transfers to London I will take everyone.
Jon - Gregory's Two Girls is Bill Forsyth and John Gordon Sinclair at their best. A humourous tale of mixed emotions and misunderstandings intertwined with a serious tale of international skullduggery. It includes one hilarious moment where our audience was in fits of laughter for over a minute. I can only recommend everyone should see it.
Old Lag - Stirling Castle was incredibly fantastic, but I was told off for drinking alcohol on Stirling station.
Jon - Redball, an Australian police drama set in the Melbourne police force, was made with a very low budget. Shot in 10 days on a standard digital video camera, it portrays the antics of a set of detectives "off the leash". It's a not very flattering picture of the Melbourne police, a fact that caused a lot of controversy in Australia. It's a gripping if bleak portrayal of life: it's not harmed by its low quality looks, but the dialogue is occasionally hard to follow.
Christine [now back in London again - Spank] - so it's goodbye Edinburgh nights and hello Edgware Road mornings. Good old Annie Nightingale performed well. I was at the Byrds Hove Town Hall concert she mentioned. What she didn't say was that supporting were The Pretty Things and Them. My time in Edinburgh finished in true Scottish fashion by my getting soaked.
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