And very loud, too. Charting 6 years of the progress of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon band Gorillaz, it’s amusing enough, if all rather ‘Britpop is dead. Long live Britpop’. This is a shame in a way, because what I’ve always liked about Gorillaz is that it took Albarn a little apart from that. Here, he comes across as something of a rock’n'roll Jamie Oliver - you get what he’s doing, it tastes good, but you suspect he might get a little slappable after a while.
The film has a similar tone - all lads together - that would be tiresome over a longer period than the film’s 90 minutes.
The music - of course - is the film’s strong suit, and you do get a sense of the sound (as multi-faceted as it is) coming together, particularly in the earlier stages. And the immediacy of recording the music is neatly set off against the slower process of animating the band (and Hewlett’s attendant frustation with the same).
There are lots of nice little moments - Hewlett messing with the American press, Albarn listening to Dennis Hopper record his spoken section for ‘Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head‘, Albarn bluffing madly with an African-American choirmistress over the lyrics her children are singing (from ‘Dirty Harry’: “I need a gun to keep myself from harm” -”No, it’s ‘to keep myself amongst’”)
(I was trying to work out who Jamie Hewlett reminded me of, and it struck me - in the feature film version, he’d be played by Andy Serkis, while Albarn would be played by Jude Law (which doesn’t seem fair, somehow…))
The Edinburgh International Film Festival opened it’s box office today, so I spent my lunch booking my summer holiday. 22 films, fairly miscellaneous - I’m now going to spend the next month paranoid that I’ve made the wrong choices.
That’s partly a consequence of always trying to book at the earliest possible moment, in order to get tickets for the films I know I want to see (after the trauma of failing to see Serenity at the EIFF in 2005) - this year, the latest Pixar, WALL-E (Yay!). And unlike the last few years, booking online wasn’t even slightly traumatic (their server didn’t crash, and I got all the tickets I aimed for)
So, the 22 - actually 18 films, two of their animated short film collections and two real-live people events:
19/06/08, 17:15: McLaren Animation 1
19/06/08, 20:15: The Song of Sparrows
21/06/08, 15:00: Tiramisu
21/06/08, 18:45: Stone of Destiny
22/06/08, 14:00: Roger Deakins & Seamus McGarvey: In Conversation
22/06/08, 17:30: Standard Operating Procedure
22/06/08, 20:00: Strange Girls
23/06/08, 14:00: International Animation 1
23/06/08, 17:15: Bananaz
23/06/08, 19:15: Warsaw Dark
24/06/08, 19:00: The Surprise Movie
25/06/08, 17:30: Ray Harryhausen: In Person
25/06/08, 19:40: Dreams with Sharp Teeth
26/06/08, 15:00: Milky Way Liberation Front
26/06/08, 17:15: Sleep Dealer
26/06/08, 20:00: Idiots and Angels
27/06/08, 14:30: The Bride Wore Black
27/06/08, 17:15: Fear(s) of the Dark
27/06/08, 19:05: Encounters at the End of the World
28/06/08, 14:15: WALL-E
28/06/08, 16:45: The Fall
28/06/08, 21:30: Faintheart
Fewer than last year (there’s even a day I’m missing completely - but I’ve realised that I really can’t watch four films in one day). And the move from August to June means that, with my daily commute to the festival, I can’t see any of the later films, as the last train out is at 11.30pm. The only film that risks leaving me stranded in Edinburgh at midnight if the closing film, Faintheart, but it’s about battle re-enactors, so how could I resist?
I’ll go through my rationale for my choices nearer the time (or, not now), but did I mention WALL-E? Yay! (Pixar-induced glee…)
