BFI London Film Festival
The programme for this year's LFF has just been announced, and I have the usual encyclopaedic booklet on my desk, just waiting to be pored over and scribbled on. High profile productions, such as Frost/Nixon and Oliver Stone's film about Dubya, simply entitled 'W', sit alongside smaller productions from all over the world. Sandra Hebron, artistic director of the festival, said that downbeat reports from the recent Venice Film Festival did not mean that we were looking at a lean year. Hebron claimed that the fact that awards aren't the focus of the LFF gave the programmers more scope to look at films released throughout the year and allowed them to choose what they thought were the strongest works. Her summary of the main themes emerging from this year's festival was "Politics, History, Memory", although she was quick to assure us that there was plenty of variety on offer. It's difficult to form an opinion about a film from a brief sequence in a 30-minute showreel, but I suppose it's worth mentioning what caught my eye. Michael Winterbottom's new film stars Colin Firth as a man who moves to Genova with his daughters after the death of his wife; Palme D'Or winner The Class, set in a school in Paris, looks like the rebellious, sparky older sister of documentary hit Etre et Avoir; and Steve McQueen's Hunger promises to be one of the festival highlights. Other British films which were given a place on the showreel were band drama 1234, futuristic tale Franklyn (which features a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to Watchmen's Rorschach), and Shifty, a story of young men with criminal connections living on the outskirts of London. Let us know what's going on your wishlist ahead of tickets becoming available.
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Comments
I went through my programme last night with a highlighter. I've deliberately ignored the blockbusters - they're expensive and I know I'll see them eventually anyway. Anywhere USA looks interestingly odd.
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"The semiotics of the moustache can unravel any mystery from an Islamic affair and the tooth fairy to the inadequacies of race relations in this satire of American values." I read the synopsis of the film and wondered why I was finding it so confusing; then I looked at some of the notices from Sundance... The film got a positive write-up on the Filmmaker blog, although the fact that the blogger said that the viewer would need "extreme patients" doesn’t fill me with confidence in their judgement. The Variety review includes the claim that, "Euro fests may book this Sundance special jury prize-winner as a supposedly clever piece of new Americana, but auds everywhere will ignore it." Auds?! I don’t think that I’m going to be able to rely on that review either. I'm going to sit down for my LFF planning session this weekend. It may take a while.
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Unfamiliar with 'auds'? You obviously don't know your 'put pilots' from your 'terpers' either. Here's the the guide to Variety slanguage at their website.
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Hmmm, perhaps they force their writers to use it. Some of it adds colour, but the rest is like a horrible fusion of Nadsat and Mitford slang eg "hotsy - strong performance at the box office; "The Devil's Advocate" made a hotsy bow last weekend.""
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