official site : http://www.afff.nl/

MURDER-SET-PIECES    [1/10]
USA 2004 : Nick PALUMBO : 105 mins

NIGHT WATCH    [6/10]
Nochnoi Dozor : Russia 2004 : Timur BEKMAMBETOV : 115 mins

LORELEI - THE WITCH OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN    [5/10]
aka Lorelei : Japan 2004 (2005?) : HIGUCHI Shinji : 140 mins


Saturday, 13:53, Amsterdam

Last night's midnight-movie Murder-Set-Pieces [1/10] is the first film to which I have allotted the minimum Film Lounge rating (one mark out of a possible ten) since Red Cockroaches at Edinburgh Film Festival last August. Both films are technically accomplished but utterly repellent pieces of work, desperately trying to shock the audience with transgression of taboos but only really offensive in the sheer ineptness of their scriptwriting. In both cases, much of the acting is of the lowest calibre. Murder-Set-Pieces (rubbish title!) does boast one noteworthy turn - from young Jade Risser as sensibly-suspicious schoolgirl Jade - but this is easily outweighed by the film's obnoxious, musclebound "star" Sven Garrett ('The Photographer') who turns in what may well be the worst lead performance I have ever seen in a feature film. As he's seldom off-screen, this is a pretty much insurmountable handicap.

The real culprit, however, is writer-director Nick Palumbo. He seems to think he's being awfully bold and clever with his tale of a neo-Nazi psycho-killer photographer in modern-day Las Vegas. He's wrong. The fundamental concept isn't too bad: Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer meets Peeping Tom. But these antecedents (and boy, does Palumbo wear his influences on his sleeve, for doves to peck at) only serve to emphasise the sheer crassness of Palumbo's vision. The only reason I stayed in my seat to the end (the film began shortly after midnight) was that news of any walkout would have got back to Palumbo (one of the film's producers was present at the screening) and he would no doubt have reaped some infantile satisfaction for such a report.

On the plus side, the cinema in which the film was screened - the Cinerama, just off the Leidseplein in central Amsterdam - is a real gem, a late-sixties classic where the screen is "unveiled" before your eyes just before the projection starts. Unfortunately this cinema is going to be shortly demolished, and the festival will have to seek a new home. Sic transit gloria mundi, etc. Or rather, having seen Murder-Set-Pieces, "sick" transit... Next up: Night Watch. Surely six million Russians can't be wrong...



Sunday 10.28, Schiphol Airport

I'm ensconsed in the grandly-named "Business Center" in the basement of the Sheraton Hotel at the airport, which charges a princely rate for internet access (8 Euros for the first 15 minutes, then 6 Euros for each remaining fifteen minutes). This is apparently the only way to get internet access at or near the airport, perhaps explaining the exorbitant cost. So although I have an hour before check-in, I don't intend to linger very long here...

The two pictures I caught yesterday were, perhaps inevitably, a significant improvement on Murder-Set-Pieces (which somehow seems more insultingly terrible the more you think about it). Night Watch [6/10] kicked off more than half an hour late due to the projectionist having overslept. This for a 3.30 screening! The picture did prove worth the wait, although I much preferred the first half to the second.

"What do you care about, the ingredients or the effect?" says somebody in the first few minutes - she's referring to a magic potion, but the writer-director is also addressing the audience pretty directly. The picture's ingredients are evident throughout: principally Blade and The Matrix, with dashes of Buffy and Lord of the Rings (lots of scenes on the Moskva underground, meanwhile, reminded me of Hungary's Kontroll - both films boast scruffy-but-cool leading men).

But the effect is, of course, what matters, and for the most part that effect is rather persuasive. Convoluted, confidently-handled tale presents an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil, played out between certain humans (known as Others) endowed with supernatural powers in modern-day Moscow. Gangbusters opening reel sets it all up (mythology seems to be made up on the hoof) - what follows is uneven but frequently stirring and stylish. The 'foreign export' print was the one shown - featuring probably the most inventive subtitling I've ever seen (an area long in need of just this kind of creative approach).

Ending lets it down - this is apparently only the first of a projected trilogy, and boy does it show: director might as well flash up "to be continued" at the final fade. End credits are accompanied by flashily-edited resume of the whole picture, so you head for the exits only partially dissatisfied. Much to like about it, and, yes, those six million Russians (film was one of the biggest ever local hits) weren't too far wrong after all...

The delayed start of Night Watch meant I had to sprint from one screen of Cinerama to another in order to catch the 6pm showing of Lorelei [5/10] which began only a couple of minutes late. I missed the very beginning, but this wasn't a problem. Film was advertised as 140 minutes, which seemed rather lengthy even for a Japanese WWII movie. Turns out it clocked in at a shade less than two hours, which was still plenty long enough: at several points I had to struggle to stay awake.

Alluring synopsis: in the final days of the war, the Japanese receive a super-advanced Nazi submarine equipped with a mysteriously ahead-of-its-time sonar system known as Lorelei. Could this perhaps have some supernatural element? The answer turns out to be "sort of" - disappointingly, given that this is supposed to be a horror/science-fiction event.

The film is really a conventional patriotic battle-in-the-Pacific affair with the Lorelei stuff relegated, somewhat puzzlingly, to the sidelines for most of the duration. All the usual cliches of the submarine genre are fully present and correct, and the script seems to go out of its way to avoid doing anything especially original. That said, things do pick up in the final reel and, despite those longueurs, Lorelei did just about prove worthwhile, albeit much less of a raucous crowdpleaser than Night Watch.

It's now 10.51am. Time to pay the Sheraton piper and head for my departure gate. I'll update this page again when I land back in the UK, when I may be able to come up with a more measured assessment of the three pictures I caught in the last 36 hours here in Amsterdam. Tot ziens.

Sunday 10pm to 11pm, back in Sunderland... post script.
Further notes on the three movies, and general festival stuff.

MURDER-SET-PIECES

* Picture is full of extremely violent killings - mostly of buxom, beautiful young women (including "actual Vegas call-girls" according to a poster I saw), but also a few schoolkids. Sheer nakedness of Palumbo's desire to shock makes such scenes head-shakingly daft rather than bone-chilling or stomach--churning: once you realise you can't walk out (as that's probably Palumbo's desired reaction) the grotesque excess becomes self-defeating.  And he doesn't even have the courage of his convictions, often cutting away from the bloodshed - as during the laughable 'set of fangs' sequence in which our anti-hero fits himself with some murderous dentures.

* Worst scene is typically clunky in-joke: killer - never named, referred to in credits simply as "The Photographer" - enters adult-video store, requests (in Schwarzennegerian accent) "a snuff movie called Nutjob". Which happens to director Palumbo's previous picture. Oh, my aching sides. Scene is painfully elongated as shop-assistant isn't best pleased with The Photographer's choice of viewing.

* The assistant is played by the Candyman Tony Todd - one of a handful of smart-alec cameos including Gunnar Leatherface Hansen as 'The Mechanic' (hulking bloke who sells Photographer a gun). In the right hands such nudge-nudge cameos can be effective: true to form, with Palumbo they just stop the picture dead (no pun intended) in its tracks.

* During the interminable Nutjob scene The Photographer, who is given to spouting ludicrous Nietzschean dialogue (amid much yelping in wobbly-accented German), intones "In my mind's eye, I set fire to your cities" (if memory serves). A Dutch critic with whom I was discussing M-S-P (he hated it also) reckons this might be a quote from Charles Manson. He reckons that many of The Photographer's lines are taken from serial-killers from fact and fiction. He may well be right. Truth be told, I can't even be bothered to Google and find out for sure.

* Character-development is virtually non-existent: facile "psychology" behind the killer's escapades - in the form of clumsy flashbacks to his childhood (guilty feelings of lust towards his sexy mother), plus various mentions of his family's Nazi past (pride of place on his desk goes to pic of uniformed granddad with Hitler). It's also unsubtly conveyed that The Photographer, despite (or perhaps because of) pumping iron obsessively, may not be especially well-endowed Downstairs. His camera is suspiciously small. His knives eyecatchingly large.

* Picture peters out with rubbish, hackneyed 'teaser' of a final scene. Wouldn't be accurate to say that Palumbo "ran out of ideas" because he doesn't seem to have had any in the first place. Not that this counts for anything, but M-S-P is technically quite accomplished - Palumbo (somehow) clearly had some funds to play with. Nice Michael-Mannish images of Vegas by night, courtesy of Brendan Flynt's cinematography.

* Speaking of which: the first fifteen minutes of the screening in Amsterdam were shown in the wrong ratio, with the image-squashing results making all the characters look like hobbits. Hoots of laughter rang out around the auditorium when someone greeted youthful heroine Jade with the line "How big you've gotten". Soon after, the ratio problem was fixed - but arguably they shouldn't have bothered: Murder-Set-Pieces could perhaps only have benefitted from being shown with such distracting distortion...


NIGHT WATCH

* Director Bekmambetov has come to the attention of Hollywood thanks to the success of Night Watch - which (as far as I can remember) ranked behind only Fandorin adaptation Turkish Gambit among home-grown movies at the 2004 box-office. A Variety magazine piece even described him as potentially a "new Peter Jackson". The prologue of Night Watch is indeed decidedly Two Towers-ish, a medieval good-vs-evil clash on a suitably atmospheric bridge. Several of the 'Dark' forces even look like Orcs. Presumably we'll be seeing rather a lot more of this kind of stuff in Night Watch 2, a very brief teaser-trailer for which (featuring a Rasputin-ish figure besting a bus in a collision) is embedded within the end-titles of this first episode - many in the Amsterdam audiences had already departed when it flashed up, causing several folk to pause in the doorway. But it's over in about five seconds...

* Technical credits are well up to 'Hollywood standard' - some critics reckoned that Dmitri Kiselyov's breakneck editing was deployed to cover up the fact that Bekmambetov isn't much cop at action sequences. I don't really subscribe to this view: at certain points Bekmambetov does show a pretty confidence grasp of action-pic nuts and bolts. But his attention-span is somewhat limited and he's always impatient to get on to the next set-piece. In part this is because his script has to deliver dollops of exposition throughout - not all of which is intelligible on first viewing. Presumably he'll be able to ease off the gas a touch in the sequel.

* Despite the unashamedly derivative aspects of Night Watch, the picture does manage to create and sustain a distinctive atmosphere of its own: you can't always follow exactly what is going on, but you get enough of a gist not to worry about the details. And the resolution of this chapter is remarkably straightforward, tying together various threads that were set in motion during that rock-the-house prologue. But dotted through the narrative are glimpses of people, gangs, cultures which one presumes Bekmambetov is going to allot rather more time in forthcoming sections. (This doesn't bog things down at all, which is a promising sign...)

* Worth noting that it's based on a novel - by (I'm checking this on IMDb) Sergei Lukyanenko. IMDb informs that Night Watch 2 is scheduled for '06 and Night Watch 3 for '07. Also informs that Konstantin Khabensky plays Anton Gorodetsky, the lead in episode one (and presumably the other two). No other cast-member is especially of note, although Galina Tyunina pulls off the tricky role of Olga, a "sorceress" who we see transmute from owl into (naked) human form, then has to dress in the dowdy clothes of a deceased old woman. Long story...


LORELEI - THE WITCH OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN

* Not a great deal to add to what I wrote earlier today - though I am writing a longish piece for Impact magazine on the festival (which will be posted here a couple of weeks after publication) which will go into great detail about the picture and its background. Suppose I should note the presence of Kiyoshi Kurosawa regular Yakusho Koji (finest hour: as tormented cop in Cure) in the lead role of the sub's taciturn Captain. And also the fact that very few of the Japanese hairstyles we see look very much like the product of 1940s barbering: never mind the hyper-advanced sonar system, this is a much more jarring anachronism.



21st A.F.F.F.

A flying return-visit to the festival I attended for the first time back in 2002. Since then the event has moved its centre of gravity a short distance across the Leidseplein (then as now a party-central area thronging with beered-up Brits) to the Cinerama on Marnixstraat. AKA Calypso, AKA Bellevue, AKA Filmmuseum. AKA - shortly - a fancy new theatre once Joop van den Ende (Jan de Mol's partner in Endemol - the Big Brother company) gets his way and knocks the place down. This would, I reckon, be a major shame - the main viewing screen is one of the half-dozen best auditoria I've ever been in. Just seventies enough to be cheesy and stylish. Unique screen-reveal "curtain up" before the picture starts. Great sound system and sharp image... once the projectionist has got out of bed that is - as with Night Watch's forty minute delay (despite its many charms, punctuality is not a hallmark of AFFF).

So, getting to know Cinerama was a plus - I'd walked past the place dozens of times before, but had never been inside. Venue also has the benefit of being just across the road (and down a bit) from what is maybe my favourite Amsterdam bar, De Koe ('the cow') which is a cosy-but-not-crowded joint popular with locals (a bit too 'Dutch looking' for those roving Brit stag and hen parties) and sells a great range of beer - both on tap (Palm, though not to all tastes, seems to me a fair choice if you're having a few) and bottled - including ones you can get in Britain like Duvel and Leffe, and also some that are harder to find such as Columbus. That one's from Amsterdam but one or two are sufficient as it's nine per cent proof - not the best prologue to a confusing two-hour Russian action-fantasy, let's say.

Two nights were better than none, but staying a little longer would have been nicer (sadly my schedules didn't allow). If I'd attended more days I could finally have caught Vincenzo Natali's 2003 followup to the fine Cypher, entitled Nothing, plus Dario Argento's made-for-TV latest Do You Like Hitchcock? When I left on the Sunday poor Dario was languishing at the bottom of the votes for the 'Silver Scream' audience award - the rankings (at that precise moment) topped by Saw (which came out in Britain last year), with The Machinist not far behind. I was hoping that the dire Murder-Set-Pieces might save Dario from the Wooden Spoon - but my inside spies reckoned that in fact the audience votes for Palumbo's highly polished, blood-spattered turd were surprisingly respectable. No accounting for taste (or rather smaak), I suppose.

Speaking of which, one of the guests in attendance (alongside octogenarian Ray Harryhausen and 'Spanish Werewolf' Paul Naschy) was Jorg Buttgereit of Nekromantik "fame." After Lorelei I could have nipped over to legendary gig-venue the Melkweg ('milky way') to catch a screening of his first Nekromantik picture at the venue's upstairs cinema (Amsterdam is full of cinema screens, tucked here and there all over the place). But I was put off when I read in a review that the film features an actual on-screen killing of a rabbit. I've become more sensitive (squeamish?) about animal deaths in films over the last couple of years, and scratched Nekromantik off my schedule as a result.

But then I discovered that in fact the animal was cooked and eaten shortly after - and, as a non-vegetarian, I can't really sustain my objection under those circumstances (viz.Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad and its armadillo sequence). As it is, I got to wander around the (chilly, rain-dampened) city for a couple of hours waiting for my Dutch friends to come out of their screenings - and the bloke I know who went to Nekromantik said both the picture and Buttgereit's Q+A were most entertaining. It's most unlikely, however, that I'll ever feel similar regret my avoidance of Cannibal Holocaust which was showing later the same night - the infamous "turtle" scene seems, from all accounts, far beyond the pale...


Neil Young
12th June, 2005



with thanks to Phil Van Tongeren and Annemiek Lelyveld (still stalking the deer park... 1885???)


p.s. I'm not Scottish.

[original ratings : Night Watch 7/10, Lorelei 6/10 - re-rated after further reflection, 9th Oct 2005]