Eyes Squared

I was always told when I was younger that if I sat too close to the TV my eyes would turn square... I never listened. Now I'm forced to live with the consequences of my youthful ignorance, I'm Morten Wright and I'm a film and TV addict.

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Ever Decreasing Orange Circles

Digital vs Film? Until recently I couldn’t have cared less. This might sound like a fairly ignorant thing to say as a self-confessed cinema-lover, but with the ever dwindling state of my bank account post-uni all I really care about when I go to the cinema these days is that it’s cheap. If it just so happens that I get to see the film in the format the filmmaker wants me to then that’s an added benefit, but at the moment not really a priority. I’ll admit that I don’t really know a whole load about the benefits of either format beyond film/celluloid = somewhat artistic/nostalgic and digital = cheaper/easily transported and stored, so I’m probably not really in a position to judge.  In the past month or so, however, I have received something of an education in this matter. As part of my internship with Flatpack Festival I was responsible for ensuring much of the print transport. This meant I was confronted with more acronyms and abbreviations than any one brain should really be able to cope with. So with box loads of DCPS, DigiBetas and other variously shaped but always compact hard drives under my arm I was somewhat saddened when I arrived in one projection booth to see a big metal contraption with giant wheels ready to load film reels into sitting lonely and unused in the corner.  It was this moment that made me ponder whether I am part of the first truly digital generation, but then something else got me thinking…

I can still remember a night probably just over ten years ago now when I sneakily stayed up late in my room and watched the terrestrial T.V. premiere of Fight Club. Bearing in mind I could have been no more than ten or eleven years old at the time, it understandably opened my eyes and blew my mind. The thing that will stay with me forever about the film, however, is not the graphic violence or intelligent twists but one particular scene where Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden explains his job at the cinema. The moment when he informs the audience that the little orange-edged circle which pops up in the corner of the cinema screen signifies the projectionist has spliced one film reel to the next was quite possibly the first time I truly realised that people actually worked in film and that the images didn’t just magically appear on screen. If I wanted to appear extremely nostalgic I’d also pinpoint this as the moment I really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.

When I saw this contraption in the projection booth last weekend I was reminded of this scene and it dawned on me that that little circle no longer appears in the corner of the cinema screen because there are no reels to splice together. It’s all just a digital file on a charmless black box you plug into a digital projector. So maybe I’m not part of the first truly digital generation, that generation is today’s ten or eleven year olds. I’m not sure if this means I’m more nostalgic for the old days of celluloid than I might think, or if I’m simply saddened by the fact that future generations will not be inspired in the same way I was.

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Flatpack Festival Staff Picks

Here's something Ii wrote for the Flatpack Festival blog, have a read. Original posted 13th March 2013 http://www.flatpackfestival.org.uk/2013/03/staff-picks-morten/

The first of our 2013 Staff Picks comes from Morten, our Programme Assistant.

Sol Cinema:

Any film lovers familiar with holiday camps will no doubt share my memories of the moments of nervous anticipation when you first step into the caravan to see the tiny television in the corner and a stack of questionable videos underneath. What would we be subjected to when the inevitable rainy day reared its ugly head? Would my family suffer as I forced them to endure another viewing of Space Jam or would I be confused by yet more vague reasons as to why I was not allowed to watch Con Air at my age? Sol Cinema, however, promises to be a much more enjoyable mash-up of cinema and mobile accommodation, with archive gems and joyous shorts screening in the world’s smallest solar-powered cinema.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed:

Le Voyage dans la Lune. Cupid Angling. The Jazz Singer. All of these are recognised as significant moments in the history of cinema and The Adventures of Prince Achmeddeserves it place among them. Widely considered as the first animated feature length film, its influence has been both broad and long-lasting, look no further than 2011’s Tales of the Night for proof of that. This is no mere screening though, the vibrant colours and deep blacks on screen will be accompanied by a live score including the intriguingly named instrument ‘Fluid Dulcimer’, finding out what this mysterious invention is secretly forms a major part of why I’m so looking forward to this event.

Bicycle Dreams:

I can’t actually ride a bike, so don’t expect to see me attempting Bike Polo as part of Cyclomania, but even I realise that the Race Across America is the kind of event that would send Lance Armstrong scurrying away to the nearest medicine cabinet. Stephen Auerbach’s Bicycle Dreams documents the epic 3000 mile race providing a visually charming glimpse at every possible landscape the US can offer and an in-depth insight into the riders as they are forced to confront the entire range of human emotion as they strive to reach the finish line. While it would of course be ridiculous for me to even think of attempting this race, Auerbach’s film might at least persuade me to ditch the stabilisers.

Vanishing Waves:

A twisted tale of love acted out as a scientist explores the labyrinthine mind of a comatose woman? Vanishing Waves had me at hello. With a plot that is set to make Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind feel like Coronation Street and the kind of mind-melting visuals that the word “trippy” was invented for, this low-budget Lithuanian sci-fi really punches above its weight to deliver a spectacular oddity that I expect to be one of the highlights of this year’s festival.

Ernest & Celestine:

This is increasingly becoming a way for me to indulge my increasing need to recapture my childhood and for that I apologise, however, when I was younger every breakfast would be brought to me via a spoon emblazoned with a certain bear from darkest Peru. While this animation, from the people who brought us A Town Called Panic, might not feature my beloved Paddington there is another bear in a long blue coat and Ernest & Celestine is just as charming. Set in a world populated by bears and mice that do not get along, Ernest, a bear, and Celestine, a mouse, strike up an unlikely friendship. Whether it’s a Sunday afternoon outing with the family or simply a way to occupy your inner child while your adult head deals with the hangover from the previous night’s 3D party, this is the perfect way to spend an hour or so on the last day of this year’s festival.

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Black Mirror Series 2: Series Review (Spoilers)

Stop lauding everything Charlie Brooker is responsible for as yet another masterpiece. The man is incredibly in touch with the disenfranchised, but by claiming that everything he touches turns to gold you’re actually completely missing the point of how he gained his status in the first place – by calling shit, shit.

The point I’m trying to make with this is that Black Mirror Series Two is not an example of genius television, it is in fact average storytelling that has gained greater acclaim due to the goodwill of his growing army of fans. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a high quality production in most technical ways and it’s certainly refreshing that British television is responsible for something more than costume dramas but in the end the recent new episodes were disappointingly mediocre. I want to love Black Mirror but therein lies the problem, I simply like it, and unfortunately since the first two episodes of the first series it has not been consistent enough to deserve such love.

Although it was the unfortunate victim of over-advertising I was pleasantly surprised by the first episode of series two. From the seemingly endless trails churned out by Channel 4 and the opening scenes of the episode itself I was expecting a fairly run of the mill modern retelling of Frankenstein with the eerie embodiment of social media going on a violent rampage. The end result, powered by two memorable performances from Domhnall Gleeson and Hayley Atwell, was actually an emotionally satisfying tale of how it is ultimately impossible to simulate human life which benefitted from being understated.

Episode two started out as a fairly thinly veiled but amusing satire of how our obsession with technology is turning us into over-reliant zombies. It was, however, quite obvious that some kind of twist was coming and the end result was a frustrating mess, with an even more thinly veiled nod to Derren Brown, which completely went against what Brooker has claimed is the essence of the entire series – showing glimpses of fabled futures which, while highly unlikely, are merely hinting at what could happen if certain aspects of modern life spiral out of control. If this episode had stuck with the pre-twist plot then it would have been achieving this aim, much in the same way Series One’s 15 Million Merits did (that episode incidentally was about our obsession with screens not talent shows as many perceived it to be), but pray tell me, in what world would we have the money to spend that much on punishing one prisoner?

The scenes intercut with the credits did redeem the episode somewhat in my mind as it reminded me vaguely of a live arts show I went to last year called You Me Bum Bum Train where you crawl through tunnels into various different rooms where you find yourself in different scenarios from the bizarre to the outright unnerving. I could therefore envisage a situation where this kind of prison-cum-safari park scenario could exist, but quite frankly it came too late to convince me that this was an episode of consistent quality.

The final episode fell victim to what made the first episode work so well, while Be Right Back benefited from an understated storytelling style, The Waldo Moment suffered from not fully committing to an exaggerated tone. This may just be me refusing to accept the ‘Always leave them wanting more’ moral, but in this case I feel the tale of Jamie Salter and his bright blue alter ego could have worked as a miniseries by itself. Again I refer to the scenes that came during the credits of Slater living on the streets of a dystopian future where his comic creation has seemingly gone on a journey from mild revolutionary mascot to Big Brother.  The fact that I want to see the middle stages of this story does suggest that I actually enjoyed the patchy episode more than I first thought, but really this just confirms in my mind the belief that Black Mirror Series Two is an example of disappointingly unrealised potential.

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February in Film

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January In Film

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Review: Django Unchained

As a chill wind blows through vast tundra, two men on horseback stride confidently onscreen. This shot alone shows that, with Django Unchained, Tarantino has gone epic. The multi-layered plots of Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds may have been epic in terms of story, but this is the first that the pulpy, brutal plots we are now so familiar with from the director has had the cinematography to match.

 While Robert Richardson’s cinematography has our curiosity, Tarantino has our attention with dialogue as sharp as ever, demonstrated immediately when Christoph Waltz wonders whether a slaver is pointing a gun at him with ‘lethal intention’.  This familiar sort of over-elocution continues in a rich vein with a key example being the dinner table scene at Candyland, which is by far one of two stand out moments of the film, the other being the equally slickly scripted sack/KKK debacle.

It is this fine-tuned script that facilitates some truly mesmerising performances from two actors such a way that we have never seen them before. Leonardo DiCaprio alternates between spitting lines with joyful venom and slimey charm, while Samuel L. Jackson provides a concoction of fierce loyalty, some hybrid form of snobbery and a sort of cowardliness.

Unfortunately, while all the features that make the first two thirds of Tarantino films are present in abundance, so too is the now familiar loss of confidence in the final act. Along with a laughably poor cameo and a spot of dressage, the final thirty or forty minutes of the film are severely hampered by Tarantino’s decision to prevent a tragic but ultimately satisfying conclusion.

4 Stars (Based on the merits of the first two hours)

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Review: Les Miserables

Far too frequently films are described as a “marmite movie” with the implication that it will polarise opinion to absolute extremes of either love or hate. Many people will make the mistake of labelling Les Miserables as a “marmite movie”, when in actual fact you can love, hate, like or feel completely indifferent to both the film as a whole and different elements within the film. It certainly will split opinion but to say that you have to love it or hate it would be wrong, I for one just plain liked it. Having said all of this, after the first five or ten minutes you’d be forgiven for thinking that Les Miserables is a “marmite movie”, but really it’s just an adjustment period. Much had been made before its release of the fact that all of the songs were sang live on set rather than pre-recorded and lip-synced, however, much less was made of the fact that there was no spoken dialogue in the film whatsoever. The first scene is therefore a jarring experience as not only do you have to get used to the lyrical exchanges, but also this technique is introduced by the weak link of the cast, Russell Crowe.  The decision to omit the spoken word will not sit well with some and it does make one on one confrontations feel somewhat fumbled, but on the whole I respect the bravery not to conform to the typical movie musical format.

Once this awkward initiation is dealt with the film ticks along at an enjoyable pace for the first hour or so with enough of a mixture of peril, amusement, pity and pride to fill most average features. After the initial redemption of Jean Valjean and his second fall the film starts to meander and this is when you may well start to lose confidence that the second half of the film will not be able to sustain the vigour and enjoyment of the first act, and for a time it doesn’t. The final third, during the revolution, does improve on this middle section but because of this brief dip the conclusion constantly struggles to match the opening hour or so.

My main problem is the debate over whether this film lives up to stage show. The stage version of Les Miserables was the first West End show I saw but to be perfectly honest that was quite a while ago and while I enjoyed the experience it is that which I remember, not the ins and outs of the story and the songs. This however works to my advantage as really the two should be judged on their own merits as, although very closely connected, they are separate entities. It is at this point that I feel I must apologise, it is very rare that I use another review to direct mine, however, in this instance I feel compelled to. Before writing this I listened to Kermode and Mayo’s podcast which featured their review of Les Miserables, in which Mark Kermode made the point that when you watch a stage show, for the most part, it is pretty much restricted to what is effectively a mid-shot.  He then went on to seemingly praise director Tom Hooper’s commitment to close-ups, and to a lesser extent, his sweeping set-ups, but for me this is by far the films weakness as Hooper seemingly decides to completely forgo any use of mid-shots whatsoever in fear of being compared to its stage predecessor. The beauty of film is that it does not have the restrictions of theatre and can therefore experiment with different shots and angles in order to provide a varied but unique experience. The overuse of the close-ups on the actors faces as they belted out each tune, for me felt as though Hooper was trying to distinguish his production from the midshots of the stage show as much as possible while at the same time trying to capture the same intensity and connection with the players that the show does so well. This for me is why Hooper has not received a Best Director nomination at the Oscars, because rather than embracing the opportunities cinema offers and make a great film in its own right he has instead set out to make the stylistic opposite of the stage show.

3 Stars

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Just in case you missed the BAFTA and Oscar nominations over the past couple of days you can find them all in here.

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Flop!

Tom Daley is not God. I do not mean to belittle his incredible achievement of last summer but this weekend ITV learnt the hard way that not everything the young diver touches turns to bronze. Whoever commissioned Splash! clearly saw it as the light entertainment equivalent of a thirst-quenching oasis in the increasingly barren wasteland that Saturday night television has become, but the end result is a programme of such poor quality that it makes Take Me Out look like a Werner Herzog documentary.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think that prolonging the positive effects of London 2012 is an admirable endeavour but every single minute of Splash! was cheesier  than the one that preceded it.  If you add up the amount of time where something borderline worthwhile happened the programme should really have lasted about half an hour at most, instead we got an hour extra of pointless filler from dramatic VTs about training setbacks to each celeb dancing like the had a gun to their head as they made their way to the platforms. 

Other necessary features of your average reality/contest show came in the shape of a studio audience whose enthusiasm was so blatantly false they may well have been threatened along with the jiving C-listers, and Jo Brand in the role of the token nice judge who doesn’t have a bloody clue about what’s going on. Most depressing of all though was that presenters Vernon Kay and Gabby Logan couldn’t even disguise the fact that they knew they were dying a slow and painful death live on air.

Apparently this is a tried and tested format that has had much success overseas but for me the main problem is that diving is an incredibly difficult sport to bluff, let alone master, as the mistakes can so clearly be spotted by the untrained eye, unlike ballroom dancing. You are therefore forced to sit through endless hype and painful false praise, but don’t worry there’s only four more weeks to go before it’s all over.

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Alphabetising my DVDs has thrown together two of the best films of all time.

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How To Make The Best Shit Christmas TV Movie Ever

Any Christmas spirit I possessed has been pummelled into the ground like an unsuspecting retail assistant caught in the Boxing Day Sale stampede. The reason for this? Yesterday I watched the monstrosity that is Home Alone: The Holiday Heist, think an awful version of the original mixed with Panic Room. It’s not just this latest instalment to a franchise that should have ended years ago that can put a dampener on the festivities though, there are whole channels devoted to the horrendously cheap and tacky Christmas TV movies. The onslaught of these atrocities has reached a stage where I am ready to admit defeat, there is no getting rid of them, but in defeat I aim to launch an attack from within and ape all of the miserable efforts that have gone before. My new life goal is to make the best shit Christmas TV movie ever, and this is how I’m going to do it…

Assembling a Cast… Or… The Differing Fortunes of Harry and Marv

The efforts that are out there already all have at least one former star that has lost all their dignity and will pretty much dance for money. The latest Home Alone has Malcolm McDowell as one of the crooks and the other week I saw a cheap knock-off of the already cheap Deck the Halls starring Marv from Home Alone pulling one face after another while Joe Pesci polishes his Oscar. I’m going to take this to the next level and assemble the ultimate who’s who of has beens.

If I decide to go down the Santa route then I will again learn from the example that has been set and cast pretty much any bloke over the age of 60 with the ability to grow a beard. He need not bare any physical resemblance to the big old fella, just an up to date CRB check.

Finally as far of the cast goes I’m not going to expect too much from them, but I won’t mock them for their lack of any acting skills whatsoever, instead I will embrace it and provide them with the worst script ever.

The Basic Concept… Or… Santa’s Crashed the Sodding Sleigh Again

Every one of these films are pretty much made up of a few plot points selected from a master list resulting in hundreds of borderline identical films with the only difference being that they’re set in a slightly different but equally anonymous backwater American town that nobody cares about. I will instead use every single one of these plot points so that the resulting mega-movie makes absolutely no sense.

First there is a family. One parent is too involved with their work and therefore neglecting their children and the holiday season, the other is having an affair. Meanwhile through the use of awful child stars I will patronise the older generation by making it seem like these kids are technological wizzes when really they just have the ability to operate a sodding mobile phone. There will be two children one will be young, annoying, obsessed with Christmas and really in need of a punch in the face. The older one will be the stereotypical angsty teenage who hates the younger sibling.

Halfway through the Dad will die for no reason, the mother will therefore be left alone at Christmas time. Suddenly a new man arrives in the town and is all at once a charming businessman that it is trying to reconnect with his human side and either an ex-con trying to start afresh or a fugitive.We now skip ahead a year to the next Christmas, the Mom has married this new man but they both still dislike Christmas and the kids are more annoying than ever.

In amongst all this various members of the Claus clan will find themselves in peril in the town. One will have been kidnapped, one will have crashed the sleigh, one will have amnesia and one will be pondering the existential mysteries of themselves and the world. These people will all be taken in by the family earlier mentioned because it’ll be the only way to shut the younger little brat up. Meanwhile, the reindeer will be somehow incapacitated and played by donkeys with coat hangers celotaped to their heads.

While the ex-con/fugitive in town is trying to make amends there will of course be a sidekick trying to tempt them into one last crime which will of course involve ruining Christmas for all the dear little orphan children in town, however at no point will it be explained how so many parents have snuffed it.

The Final Act… Or… And They All Lived Happily Ever After (Except a Week Later Mom’s Hitting the Bottle Again, Dad’s Boffing the Secretary and Santa’s on the Bread Line)

The main lesson I’ve learnt from the existing TV movies is that they must have a happy ending on Christmas morning, ignore the fact that the family will hate each other again come Boxing Day, because if it doesn’t end happily then the people watching it will look upon me as though I had shot a puppy in the face live on air. So how will all these strands be tied into one neat happy ending?

 First off the Claus family members escape from their captors and regain their memory but the sleigh still isn’t fixed so the family have to join together to save Christmas. In the process the older sibling will become best friends with the younger sibling and the parents will put their work on the back burner and pretend to like their children.

 The ex-con sidekick is still determined to succeed in one last crime, stealing the money that will pay for the toys for the orphans. It will not however be explained why these toys have not yet been bought when it’s Christmas Eve.

The ex-con has somehow forgotten what his sidekick is getting up to and when the family are rushing about town to find the mysterious bit of the sleigh that is missing, but will ultimately be in the back corner of the B&Q, Santa spots the sidekick stealing the money. Through the power of Christmas good old Saint Nick reforms the criminal and promises to take him to the North Pole to be his head elf.

Christmas for the orphans is saved but for the rest of the world it is still at risk because the reindeer/donkey creatures cannot fly. What will Santa do? Unexplained magic! The donkeys will turn into real reindeer for the final scene and fly off into the distance with the worst CGI ever.

Marketing the Final Product… Or… More Nauseating Festive Clichés Than You Can Shake a Candy Cane At

It is not enough to have a horrendously clichéd plot, the title must be equally cringe-worthy. Just to prove this point I’ve mixed in a few of my fake suggestions with real TV movie titles: The Night Before the Night Before Christmas; Jingle Hell; Christmas Eve (Where the mother’s name is actually Eve); A Very Mary Christmas; Three Wise Women and The Christmas Conundrum.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

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Review: Sightseers

Ben Wheatley has established himself as one of the British directors to watch out for in the space of just a couple of years. His debut Down Terrace has received much critical praise and with his follow-up, Kill List, he treated audiences to a 21st century Wicker Man. This year he has brought Steve Oram and Alice Lowe’s twisted creations to the big screen with Sightseers and the result is a black comedy that is largely enjoyable.

The tale of a couple of misfits giving the people around them a holiday from hell could have turned out to be a hideous mess that failed to garner a single laugh. The fact that it succeeds and is actually bizarrely charming rather than sinister is mainly due to the relatable and accomplished performances of Oram and Lowe. It is however unsurprising that the pair are the stand-out quality of the film considering they have been developing the characters for years.

Performances can only go so far though, and the unfortunately the film itself is a bit of a one trick pony. Once the bodies start piling up after the accidental first death the film simply becomes a series of set pieces that are connected only by the fact that they occur on the same holiday. So while the middle act is pretty much an extended version of the trailer it does pick up for the confrontations in the final few scenes, culminating in an extremely powerful closing shot.

While Sightseers has the potential to induce a number of belly-laughs it needs to be watched as part of a fairly large audience because like most comedies playing for a only a handful of people, unfortunately the way I saw it, it suffers somewhat if you can’t hear laughter when you should do.

3 Stars

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New Logo!

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Review: Seven Psychopaths

Before its general release tomorrow Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges follow up Seven Psychopaths has been the subject of severely mixed reviews. I was lucky enough to be at an advanced screening a few weeks back, at least I considered myself lucky before I saw it. After the lights went up I left the screening confused how something that looked so promising could have failed so completely. It would be wrong to describe Seven Psychopaths as hit and miss because for the most part it is lacking in the prior and as a result challenges Prometheus for the title of biggest cinematic disappointment of the year.

The film opens with a scene that is promising but at the same time tired and far too familiar, unfortunately it pretty much goes downhill from there. The vague semblance of a plot about a struggling writer and a dog-kidnapping gone wrong is littered with the occasional genuinely funny moment but for the most part is a collection of unfunny set-pieces that are dragged further down by initially mildly amusing performances that quickly become extremely grating.

The main problem with Seven Psychopaths is that for the duration of the entire film it operates under the assumption that it is a lot cleverer than it actually is. The only people who will be fooled by the painfully obvious set-ups are those who venture to their local cinema only a handful of times each year and as a result will laud this disaster as genius filmmaking.

Perhaps the biggest let down of all is that when the director of In Bruges calls a film Seven Psychopaths you can not help but be disappointed when none of the titular characters can event claim to come close to Ralph "It’s like a fucking fairytale” Fiennes.

2 Stars (And that's being generous)

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Review: The Master

With its artistic posters, powerful trailers and the sheer number of positive early reviews, The Master could have been the worst film ever made and still been regarded as a masterpiece. Fortunately, the quality of filmmaking on show matches expectations, but the story that plays out on screen might not be the one that many audiences thought they were going to see. Don’t go in expecting answers to questions such as ‘Was life on earth really sparked by an alien meddling in a volcano?’ or ‘Why does Tom Cruise dance about on sofas?’ The Master is not the shocking exposé of Scientology some people were waiting for, although I would suggest you read a bit about Hubbard’s earlier Dianetics movement before watching, instead it is the story of two deeply flawed men and their effects on each other.

Long before its release The Master had been touted as a serious awards contender, and now that it has been seen by millions there is no doubt that it certainly deserves some kind of recognition. A problem could, however, arise when it comes to dishing out the acting gongs as while initially you would say that Joaquin Phoenix’s hauntingly lost sailor is the lead performance, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s enigmatic Lancaster Dodd is hardly a supporting role. Amy Adams’ is equally magnificent, albeit in a much more understated manner, providing the best female performance in any film I’ve seen so far this year.

It is not just the performances that deserve praise. The cinematography is so unbelievably gorgeous that it is hard to find a metaphor that does it justice. It is neither the performances nor the visuals, however, that I wish to focus on. For me the most admirable feature of the film is the bravery of its setting. Forgive me if I am wrong but I do not believe I have seen a modern film that so entirely devotes itself to the early 1950s. Cinema is overflowing with victorious films set during the closing of WW2 or the glamour of the 1960s once the world was back on its feet, but never the years of struggle and recovery immediately after the war. This might seem like an odd observation as this was of course when Scientology originated so would therefore be when the film was set, but the fact that no attempts have been made to falsely glamorise this period is both noteworthy and admirable.

5 Stars

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Soundtrack 2012: Festival Highlights

Last weekend saw the fourth outing of Soundtrack International Film and Music Festival in Cardiff and Newport, and as you can probably tell from the picture above, I got the chance to go to rather a lot of it. Five days of screenings, panel discussions and more time spent in front of big screens than was probably healthy, here are my highlights…

As soon as the programme was announced I was eagerly awaiting the opening night film, an advanced screening of Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges follow-up Seven Psychopaths. I won’t go into much detail about the film itself as it is yet to be released but what I will say is that when the lights went up while there might have been polite applause it was clear to see that opinion was severely split. While many people thoroughly enjoyed it, along with a number of others I was disappointed. There were some genuinely funny moments but for the most part it thought it was a lot cleverer than it actually was.

Friday at Newport University included an interesting and insightful panel on adapting novel to screen, followed by a few hours of music documentaries, from the story behind David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to Soundtrack’s first ever Mini Music Documentary competition. The real highlight, however, was a screening of the absolutely of its rocker The Legend of Kaspar Hauser, playing out like an extended music video with one scene featuring a kitten being massaged with washing powder. A week and some hours of background reading later and I still can not properly explain what I saw, but it was entertaining.

Despite a full programme of events, Saturday belonged to one man, Vincent Moon. In a rare festival by the Parisian music video director, who four years ago packed a bag with a few cameras and clothes and started to travel the world filming various musical cultures as he goes, the audience was treated to an intimate and frequently intense screening of a number of pieces from his work as part of La Blogothèque and a glimpse at his current project Petites Planètes. Magical would be clichéd and mesmerising would be an understatement, but it was certainly a wonderful experience.

After another packed programme, the final day belonged to one event alone. The closing night screening of Suspiria with a live rescore by Fake Blood was incredible. At first I was worried that the sheer volume of the DJ’s antics might overpower the film but within ten or so minutes the modern score settled into the film to provide an excitingly unique viewing experience. 

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Trailblazers: World War Z vs Warm Bodies

You know how it is, you’re running away from a mass of slowly moving zombies dragging their feet when you realise that you can actually survive by jogging at a reasonable pace. Wait. You don’t know? That’s probably because you’ve just sat down and watched the trailer for World War Z expecting to see a glimpse of the film adaptation of Max Brooks’ marvellous docu-novel and instead been confronted by a tidal wave of the bloody undead bastards. Let’s face it, a 100% faithful interpretation of the book was never going to happen but we were at least hoping for a zombie film that at least embodied the same sophistication and perfectly formed world and rules. Instead it looks like director Marc Forster and more writers than one sentence can possibly contain have taken the book’s name and slapped it on a film where the world is overrun by CGI the undead.

So what are the positives, if any? The film, at this point I refuse to refer to it as World War Z, looks set to be a zombie flick on a scale we have not seen before. It looks like the film I Am Legend should have been (don’t ask me if that’s meant to be a compliment as I’m really not sure) with some admirable set pieces and enough undead to create some peril. While you can’t really get a firm notion of what the film will turn out like from a trailer it’s also all we can use as a benchmark to guess from at this point, and honestly it looks like the detailed character driven plots and grounded believability of the book have been ripped apart and feasted upon leaving it unrecognisable.

World War Z is not the only zombie trailer that has shambled towards us today. First came Shaun of the Dead, then the zom-(rom)-com genre got a bigger budget and along came Zombieland, now the trend is set to continue with Warm Bodies. I must admit I have not read the book that it is based on so I am judging this trailer purely on its own merits. With some admirable acting talent and a tone that looks to pitched somewhere between straight comedy and outright spoof the tale of a zombie with a heart looks set to be an enjoyable big-screen outing. If the film, like the trailer, ends up being narrated by Nicholas Hoult’s R then it could take some getting used to the idea that the mindless horde is not so mindless but it looks like it could be justified in its own right with the presence of ‘Boneys’.

So while it looks like World War Z might fail to breathe some life into a genre that has been struggling on the big screen in recent years in comparison to the heights reached by a certain effort on the smaller screen, Warm Bodies might at least offer an antidote to this disappointment.

But please, judge for yourself. For the disappointment of World War Z go here, or for the cautious optimism of Warm Bodies try here.