7.25am Friday
He's alive! Jeff Goldblum lives! Long live Jeff Goldblum!
   A giveaway was the supposed "fact" that JG had tumbled off cliffs to his death in New Zealand - the downfall of height, to paraphrase John Cleese on the subtext that lay beneath Fawlty Towers... Anyway, right now Billy Walsh, I think, speaks for us all:
   This death hoax has made me realise how much I love Jeff's work. I'm going to watch as many of his movies as I can so I can appreciate him now, rather than once he is dead.


Dispatch #9, 11.40pm Thursday
News started breaking about Michael Jackson about an hour ago, when I was driving back from Hamilton to Edinburgh: reports of heart attack on BBC Radio 5 Live, then that he had died. There's still no official confirmation, but now that I have got back to my hotel room I've put BBC TV on and they followed Question Time with a 'News Report' (never understood why they stopped using the term "News Flash") and it seems overwhelming likely that he has indeed passed away. 
   I've a 9am start in the morning (two British films: The Calling followed by Wasted at the Cineworld), and have booked a 7.30am breakfast - which means a 7am wake-up. So I won't be staying up too long. Just time for a quick roundup of the last couple of days.
   Film-wise, pick of the two days - and one of the best of the festival as a whole - was yesterday morning's opener, the Canadian horror-comedy Pontypool. Showcasing a terrific turn from veteran character-actor Stephen McHattie (perhaps best known as the Older Gangster from the start of A History of Violence), it's an admirably economic take on zombie-type tropes, nearly all of it unfolding within a small-town radio station. As the station's star DJ (McHattie) is hosting his latest breakfast show, news starts filtering in of strange events in the locality - turns out to be an infection spread by a manner which is so strikingly inventive and unusual that it doesn't really matter that it doesn't quite hang together or make convincingly plausible sense.
   To say more would be unfair, as part of the fun of the picture - and it is an awful lot of fun, right up to the amusingly weird coda at the end of the credits - depends on knowing a minimal amount beforehand. Overall it reminded me of early David Cronenberg - and not just because it's from north of the 49th parallel, or McHattie's History of Violence turn. Rather it recalled the way Cronenberg's high concepts in movies like Shivers transcended budgetary limitations, even though the films often fell apart somewhat (or, as Danny Peary said about Videodrome, "lost their mind") in the final act. Ideal midnight-movie fare, and actually pretty spiffing just after breakfast.
   I high-tailed it from the Cameo after the end of Pontypool (and, just to reiterate, you must stay until the lights come up) and along to the Cineworld (how familiar one becomes with every yard of that 20-minute fast walk!) for Baraboo, the directorial debut by Mary Sweeney which is world-premiering here. It's unfair to bring too much biographical background to bear when considering a work of creative art, but the film is chiefly of interest due to Sweeney's background as David Lynch's longtime editor and romantic partner. She left him during the making of INLAND EMPIRE - just after they'd gotten married, as it happens - which meant he had to edit the thing himself. With somewhat unfortunate results.
   Baraboo takes place in one of those "ordinary", quite old-fashioned tiny towns that often crop up in Lynch's work - located in the sweetcorn-producing part of rural Wisconsin (it's a bit like a fictional version of Thomas Bender's terrific documentary Hoopeston, sans the outre witchy elements). Sweeney seems to take particular care to treat the characters simply as ordinary folks living ordinary lives - without Lynch's trademark subcurrents of sinister phantasmagoriana. Instead, she's tried to craft a quiet paean to neighbourliness - but what she ended up with is rather like a pilot for a TV series you'd never actually want to watch.
   Shot on digital - which looks just fine during the daytime scenes but produces notably underlit images during the numerous nocturnal sequences - and with the occasional "artistic" crossfade, this is a low-key, bittersweet, gentle enterprise that's so unassuming that it barely seems to occupy the screen at all. I can imagine many viewers falling for its understated charms, but at a dozen or so junctures I seriously considered walking out, so un-engaged was I by Sweeney's in-your-face humanism. Overlong at 100+ minutes, what the picture really needs is the editing attentions of a "Mary Sweeney" - not the actual Ms Sweeney: this is yet another illustration of why writer-directors, especially debutant(e)s, shouldn't serve as their own cutters.
   What else? Ah yes, a couple of Cormans. Add LSD extravaganza The Trip to biker-melodrama The Wild Angels and you've essentially got Easy Rider: and not just because the latter's Peter Fonda is in both of the Corman enterprises, joined in The Trip by Dennis Hopper, with the script by none other than Jack Nicholson. It can't have been a very long screenplay, of course, as hardly anything "happens" in this audaciously non-narrative "story" of an adverts director who dabbles in acid under the guidance of a helpful, more experienced pal (Bruce Dern, as usual compelling in a nothing sort of role.) The bulk of the picture consists of Fonda's hallucinations - some of which see him stumble into what suspiciously like Corman's old Poe sets and costumes, though there's an extended sequence that resembles nothing so much as the a children's TV studio. Of course, any criticism of the movie's limited imagination can be defended by saying that it's the Fonda character whose creative limitations are being exposed rather than Corman and Nicholson. But in the end, despite numerous diverting moments - and countless pleasurably disorienting edits - The Trip confirms the old adage that there's nothing quite so dull as watching somebody else get high.
   Whatever its faults, however, there's no doubt that Fonda is convincing as a hip, slightly conceited, somewhat square ad-man. Casting him as the leader of a Hell's Angels pack takes rather more swallowing - especially given his glossy, just-shampooed locks and Chelsea/SoHo fashionable attire that makes him look like he's just stepped off the set of Antonioni's Blow-Up. His character in The Wild Angels, Blues, is also supposedly a real tough-guy - as displayed during a brawl with one of his underlings, 'Dear John' (played by old Westerns hand Buck Taylor.)
   Problem is, the scruffy, beefy Taylor looks like he could have Fonda on toast for breakfast - just one of myriad implausibilities that contribute to The Wild Angels feeling essentially like an ersatz cash-in more than any kind of authentic glimpse into the biker scene (despite the much-trumpeted presence of real Angels in the cast.) The story, such as it is, revolves around the travails of 'The Loser' (Bruce Dern spends most of the movie offscreen, unconscious or dead), though as we never really get to know this character it's hard to care much about his plight. Corman's The Intruder and Masque of the Red Death hold up pretty well - but pictures like The Trip and The Wild Angels, while fascinating as time-capsules, suggest his skills primarily lay in savvy opportunism. Not that this is intended as a criticism - indeed, it's part of Corman's charm that he's always been so upfront about his motivations, limitations and techniques.
   There's page after (superbly entertaining) page about it in his autobiography, and during his on-stage talk with Kim Newman yesterday there was more of the same. Though now well into his eighties, his recall of his crazily prolific career is impressively sharp, and if you get the chance to see him in such a setting you'd be well advised to do so. Bit of a pity that the first question in the post-chat Q+A (illustrated with some rather overlong clips) was essentially "What do you think of Fight Club?" - to which Corman's response was a somewhat baffling "I never saw it, but I did like Million Dollar Baby."
   Am I missing a film? Yes! Spread. Which I saw just over 24 hours ago, but have already largely forgotten. Ashton Kutcher is a gigolo in Los Angeles. But we're a long way from American Gigolo, Shampoo or Midnight Cowboy. Director David Mackenzie (a Scot, but conspicuously absent from the festival) has a tricky task: how to make a non-vacuous film about a vacuous, shallow character - a solipsistic dreamboat, in fact. He doesn't quite pull it off - what should ideally have been a kind of Bret Easton Ellis universe ("we'll slide down the surface of things" - Glamorama) brought to the screen with a Michael Mann digital-neon vibe is instead an episodic, only fitfully involving affair that gives Kutcher rather less to play with than, say, The Butterfly Effect.
   Los Angeles looks pretty good in the background, it has to be said, especially the hilltop house which supposedly once "belonged to Peter Bogdanovich" - an amusing aside that goes absolutely nowhere. Then again, what can you expect from a movie that doesn't even seem to know how to spell its own lead character's name? He scribbles a note and signs it Nikki, but this has become "Niki" in the end credits. The EIFF catalogue, meanwhile, reckons it's "Nicki". A sly commentary on the fickleness identity? Or just old-fashioned sloppiness?
   Balls. It's 00.20 and I'm overdue my kip. No time to relate how I took a £20 bet (at 6/4 on Fish Tank) for the Powell prize from a prominent London-based American film-critic. Nor to reveal how I reckoned a bottle of bio-organic Beetroot juice would be an ideal preamble to my viewing of The Trip - which Corman introduced (he was much chattier today than yesterday for The Wild Angels) and which was shown not off a print but via a digital projection. When I come to do my festival round-up at the weekend, this will be in my shortlist as disappointment of EIFF 2009: not the movie, but the projection. This is a film festival, for Bruce Dern's sweet sake.
   Anyway, revised odds on the Powell after today's "monster gamble" are as follows:
       4-6 Fish Tank
       4-1 Moon
       11-1 Unmade Beds
       14-1 The Calling   AND   Crying With Laughter
       25-1 Kicks  AND  Mad Sad & Bad    
       28-1 A Boy Called Dad   AND    Running In Traffic
       33-1 My Last Five Girlfriends   AND   Boogie Woogie
   I'm seeing The Calling, Wasted and Crying With Laughter tomorrow and have highest hopes for the latter - even those who aren't enthusiastic about it are raving about the central performance by Stephen McCole. And from the clips I've seen, we might well have discovered the Next Brian Cox. Not that the old one shows any signs of slowing down or going away any time soon.
   00.25am. Latest breaking "news" is that Jeff Goldblum has died following a fall on a movie-set in New Zealand. Hoax? Or, after Farrah Fawcett and M.J., speedy proof of the old "death knocks three times" superstition - if the latter, rather lousy timing from Jeff, you'd have to say...

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3.10pm, Thursday
Seen just now : The Trip [6/10]. Screening once again introduced by Corman himself: twinklingly avuncular, but still, one senses, very business-like (and business-oriented underneath.) Dispatch no.9 upcoming.

9.45am, Thursday
Seen last night : Spread [5/10] A Midnight-Shampoo-Gigolo for the C21st? They wish.
Elsewhere in the same cinema (Cineworld) around the same time, Antichrist - no evident evidence of any "disturbances" before or after. My two pieces on the film (which I saw in K'havn {but, sadly, not with Khavn} a couple of weeks back are findable here and here.)

5.10pm, Wednesday
     Films seen today
Pontypool : [7/10] amusing, inventive Canadian horror-comedy. Mais oui!
Baraboo : [5/10] underwhelming chronicle of small-town US neighbourliness. On balance, THEINLANDEMPIRES was preferable.
The Wild Angels : [6/10] Corman biker picture hasn't aged too well, but does have its moments. Screening semi-unexpectedly introduced by Corman himself.
    proper "dispatch" (#9) to follow later 
    
     Latest Powell odds
       6-4 Fish Tank
       11-4 Moon
       8-1 Unmade Beds
       12-1 The Calling   AND   Crying With Laughter
       16-1 Kicks  AND  Mad Sad & Bad    AND    Running In Traffic
       22-1 A Boy Called Dad
       25-1 My Last Five Girlfriends
       28-1 Boogie Woogie

BARABOO : [5/10] : USA 2009 : Mary SWEENEY : 105m : 24th June, Cineworld (press)
PONTYPOOL : [7/10] : Canada 2009 : Bruce McDONALD : 96m : seen 24th June, Cameo (press)
SPREAD : [5/10] : USA 2009 : David MACKENZIE : 97m  (BBFC) : 24th June, Cineworld (public - complimentary)
THE TRIP : [6/10] : USA 1967 : Roger CORMAN : 80m approx (BBFC) : 25th June, Filmhouse (public - complimentary) digital projection
THE WILD ANGELS : [6/10] : USA 1966 : Roger CORMAN : 93m : 24th June, Filmhouse (public - complimentary)

Neil Young

Jigsaw Lounge Edinburgh 2009 index page