for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘Scary Monsters, Super Creeps’ : some notes from the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival’
After a full decade attending the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) as a journalist, this “poacher” belatedly turned gamekeeper last autumn when I was asked to provide my services in a programming capacity – which involves recommending new films I catch elsewhere on the “circuit”, describing the ones that make the cut in the festival’s catalogue and then introducing them and conducting post-screening Q+As in the presence of attending film-makers. This transition puts me in a ‘Caesar’s wife’ situation, thus preventing me from making any general comments about the 64th EIFF – or from discussing any of the selections I had any hand in programming (including Pietro Marcello’s Genoa documentary The Wolf’s Mouth, previously mentioned on these pages in my dispatch from Berlin back in February.)
I can, however, pick out several noteworthy new features that I saw for the first time at this year’s renewal (which ran from 16th-27th June) giving a “heads-up” to a select handful which should be appearing on cinema screens near you – either on release or at other festivals – over the upcoming few months. You’ll have to wait until November to catch what I – along with many others – regard as the big breakout ‘find’ of EIFF LXIV, namely Gareth Edwards’ Monsters: a movie about which the only bland and forgettable thing is the title (which must not be confused with Oscar-bait trio Monsters Inc., Monster’s Ball and Monster.)
Edwards, a thirtyish Brit with a background in special effects, wrote and directed Monsters – which lazy critics will no doubt label as “this year’s District 9“. It does indeed have quite a lot in common with Neill Blomkamp’s high-octane science-fiction minor-masterpiece – including a high-concept back-story involving the inadvertent arrival of aliens on planet Earth several years back, forcing the natives to make room for their unexpected new neighbours.
Instead of South Africa, the action unfolds in backwater Mexico, a northern swathe of which has been colonised by the aliens: gigantic squid-type amphibians, accidentally deposited when a space-probe crash-landed. In order to get back home to the States, a newspaper photographer (Scoot McNairy) and his boss’s daughter (Whitney Able) must trek through the zona infectada: “very difficult journey, very risky, very dangerous,” the bickering non-couple are duly warned.
And the main danger may not even from be the tentacled beasties – rather from the gung-ho US military whose pyrotechnic “defensive” actions, we gradually realise, are responsible for many more deaths than the marauding – but evidently non-aggressive – ‘visitors.’ “Who are the monsters?” asks a plaintive graffiti in Spanish – a sentence untranslated by the subtitles, but whose import is unmistakeable. The metaphors and real-world parallels of Monsters are actually rather more subtle, complex and troubling than those in the straightforwardly apartheid-referencing District 9.
But while Edwards’ grasp of storytelling perhaps isn’t as irresistibly vigorous as Blomkamp’s (no prizes for guessing that our protagonists start off feuding and end up embracing) he’s nevertheless crafted – on what was evidently a minimal budget – a notably good-looking, thought-provoking tale whose beautiful and disarmingly poignant structure only becomes apparent in the very final moments.
The result, which looks certain to propel Edwards, Blomkamp-like, to the forefront of Hollywood’s attentions – he was responsible for all of his picture’s sparingly-used but notably effective FX – is most certainly one of the most impressive debuts from British film-maker in the last half-decade or so – alongside Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated (2007) and Paul Andrew Williams’ London To Brighton (2006).
Coincidentally enough, the latter was present at EIFF with his third feature, Cherry Tree Lane, a heartening return to form after his sophomore mis-step with 2008’s (flawed but unfairly maligned) comedy/horror The Cottage. Half Funny Games, half Shane Meadows/Noel Clarke-ish chronicle of disastrously misguided urban youth, it’s a tense home-invasion drama (taking its quaint title, but absolutely nothing else, from Mary Poppins) told in something very close to real time over the course of less than 80 minutes, in which a London suburban couple are held hostage by a mixed-race gang seeking vengeance on their teenage son.
Due for UK release on September 3rd, Cherry Tree Lane is an audacious and largely successful attempt to portray potentially sensational material in “realistic” terms – including some convincingly banal dialogue among the blade-wielding teenagers. Some rough edges here, but overall most encouraging to see Williams back on track.
A rather more benign view of wayward youth was provided by John Stalberg’s deceptively smart stoner comedy HIGH School, in which a straight-A student takes desperate measures in order to avoid failing a random drug-test – resulting in the entire institution, both staff and pupils, becoming high as kites on “augmented” cookies.
Featuring an incongruously starry cast – including the latest discombobulatingly off-the-wall career-move by Oscar winner Adrien Brody (as an elaborately tattooed, wild-eyed, bizarrely clad kingpin drug-dealer) – supporting a pair of main actors who, unusually for this genre, actually look young enough to be high-school students, Stalberg’s debut may not quite hit the inspired ‘heights’ of, say, Dude Where’s My Car? (the most underrated picture of the 2000s?), but yields many more laughs than the vast majority of “straight” comedies emanating from the Hollywood production line right now.
Hailing from a spot much further down American cinema’s “independent” spectrum, writer-directors Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm’s The Red Machine is a bold attempt to make a period movie on a sub-shoestring budget. Set in the Washington DC of 1935 – period detail evoked is with minimal fuss – it’s a larkish jeu d’esprit in which the US Navy, in the personage of straight-arrow F Ellis Coburn (a suitably ramrod-erect Lee Perkins), recruits the services of a pro safecracker (appealing newcomer Donal Thoms-Cappello, channelling John Garfield) to steal certain secrets from the city’s Japanese consulate. Imaginative shenanigans duly ensue in a droll, digitally-shot affair that plays like a cross between Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Michael Apted’s Enigma, albeit with a vein of gritty humour all its own. Catch it if, and when, you can.
Neil Young
29th June 2010
written for the 14th July edition of Tribune magazine
. CHERRY TREE LANE : [7/10] : UK 2010 : Paul Andrew WILLIAMS : 72m (timed) : seen 24th June at Cameo cinema, Edinburgh (press show) : {20/28}
. HIGH SCHOOL : [7/10] : aka HIGH School : USA 2010 (copyright-dated 2009) : John STALBERG : 93m (EIFF) : seen 22nd June at Cineworld cinema, Edinburgh (public show – complimentary ticket) : {18/28}
. MONSTERS : [8/10] : UK 2010 : Gareth EDWARDS : 90m (EIFF) : seen 25th June at Filmhouse cinema, Edinburgh (press show) : {22/28}
. THE RED MACHINE : [7/10] : USA 2009 : Alec BOEHM & Stephanie ARGY : 84m (EIFF) : seen on DVD 17th June at film-festival videotheque, Edinburgh : {18/28}
also : six reviews of films from the After the Wave sidebar of neglected British cinema 1967-79
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EIFF website
