quiet trickster

Encounters with two very different geek icons today:

First was the live event with Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, or ‘Dynamation’ as he called it in his heyday. It was pretty much a whistle-stop tour of his life and work, a little over-zealously directed by his biographer(?)/co-author, Tony Dalton.

There were a few nice moments, and of course lots of great clips, if no particularly great revelations. But remarkable to hear that Harryhausen did the bulk of his work alone, given the painstaking, time-consuming nature of stop-frame animation. We’re so used to watching DVD extras full of CG effects animators, each working on tiny aspects of massive effects sequences, that it doesn’t seem possible that one man could produce such an elaborate sequence as the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts:

It might be tempting to say that these old special effects, all Harryhausen’s old ‘creatures’, show their age, or that it’s easy to see the join between live action and miniature animation, but so often with modern CG effects, a similar complaint can be made. What CG very often lacks is the ability to make us overlook the technical shortcomings for the sake of the story, while Harryhausen’s creatures are good little actors (admittedly, they’re often up against very bad actors…) that let you stay involved.

I have to admit I was surprised, when they announced the Festival programme, to find that Harryhausen was still alive - he’s 88 this Saturday. So, good to see the man still going, of no longer working, with a spark in his eye. There were also a few special guests, including one of the skeletons (still posable) from Jason and the Argonauts.

I had to duck out of the final Q&A session to dash over to the Filmhouse for Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Just made it time, and I’m glad I did, because this was probably one of the highlights of the festival so far.

A portrait of the controversial, opinionated SF author Harlan Ellison - a very different presence from the genial Harryhausen. Ellison, who has been writing since the fifties, and baiting controversy for most of the time since, is clearly still very much a firebrand.

But a heartfelt firebrand - Incensed at the idiots he encounters, whether publishers, producers, fanboys, Republicans, fundamentalist or aspiring writers, he’s at least partly frustrated at people’s failure to be as good - as intelligent - as they are capable of.

It’s a highly entertaining film, if always on Ellison’s side, regardless of how explosive he becomes, and it does cover, without sentimentality, some of the childhood trauma that may drive him even now. There are talking heads, ranging from Neil Gaiman to Robin Williams, but Ellison is the true focus throughout. As one of the talking heads (Josh Olsen, sriter of) says: ‘Harlan doesn’t have an off switch; he doesn’t have a censor button. He is simply incapable of sugar-coating it for you.’

The film is interspersed with excerpts from some of his work, of which, I should also probably admit, I have read very little. So, note to self: I must look up some of his work once I’ve escaped Edinburgh (and pay for it - the guy is notoriously litigious).

Bananaz are good.

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…))

Gorillaz ‘Clint Eastwood’:

A charming, funny, moving documentary about the very reason I’m spending my holiday commuting all hours of the day to Edinburgh - cinema. Specifically, it looks at the lives of 4 sets of cinema owner/operators in small towns in the USA, rural India, Burkina Faso and, most surreally, in North Korea.

In fact, the cinemas are really the nominal subject of the film - it’s the lives of the people involved, each in a different stage in their life, that forms the focus. The young Indian on the verge of an arranged marriage (sweetly shy and serious), the three friends in Burkina Faso whose wives complain that they spend too much time at the cinema and not enough at home (cheerfully hustling tickets for the next show “You’ve got no money? You’d better go home then.”) The middle-aged Korean woman, heroine of the revolution, whose husband is far away, elected by the commune to help restore the late leader’s birthplace (fiercely patriotic, in a cinema where films are chosen to increase the community’s productivity). And finally the late middle-aged divorcee in small town USA (Big Piney, Wyoming, to be precise), working 3 jobs to keep busy “So you don’t have time to feel lonely”.

There’s an extended riff on the film ‘Titanic’: The Indian explaining that his audiences want something thay can relate to, and retell to others - “A big ship splits in two and sinks - what’s that?” - it has no relevance to land-locked rural India. While in Burkina Faso and the States, they’re obviously hopeless romantics - “I’ve only seen it on video” “It’s not possible!” / “And then Jack just froze! It was so sad…”

In North Korea, for obvious reasons, ‘Titanic’ doesn’t feature - but the final shot has the Korean woman standing in the prow of a ferryboat…