And more Fringe pics from Sunny Edinburgh:

Topping and Butch in the Pleasance courtyard


Mel checks out Topping and Butch's programme



And one of my favourite pics - lots and lots of sweets! This was a vendor tent at Fringe Sunday selling all sorts of colourful nougats and fudges - yummy!

Random Fringeing

Well, the Fringe, Book Fest and Film Festival are all over, although the official International Festival runs to this weekend (and ends with the annual huge fireworks display above the Castle). The city has that day after the party feeling – still a lot of tourists around (well, it is Edinburgh!) but it’s a lot quieter; I haven’t seen a single person on stilts or had to force my way past Kabuki players at all. The big entrances and displays outside Fringe venues are all being taken down and all that’s left are the thousands of fly posters for shows now finished, slowly peeling and curling from the walls in a sad way, all over for another year. Here are some random pictures from the Fringe:

MirrorMask

I finally wrote up a bit on MirrorMask and also Land of the Dead, which I’ve posted over on the FPI blog, along with a picture of Dave McKean at the Q&A after MirrorMask. It’s a little dark, but it’s hard to get a decent picture in the gloom of the cinema auditorium and most subjects were too far away for the flash to be effective, but you can still see him reasonably okay, unlike poor George Romero who is in a picture so dark he could be one of his own zombie extras.

Film Fest winner

Well, Tsotsi did indeed end up pipping Serenity at the post for the Standard Life Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and also took the Michael Powell award for best British film. Actually it was a nearly 60 year old film by Michael Powell which was my favourite movie of the entire festival. Yes, I adored MirrorMask and I really enjoyed Thumbsucker (could it be this year’s Napoleon Dynamite or Garden State?) but it was this movie from 1946 which stole my heart: A Matter of Life and Death.

Like me I suspect many of you will have caught it on the television – its one of those movies that turns up on BBC2 on a wet Saturday afternoon. An incredibly young David Niven is a Lancaster bomber pilot in a failing plane, approaching the coast after a raid. He talks to an American woman on the radio and tells her his crew are all safely out except for his Sparks who ‘bought it’. He is going to bail out himself soon – but he doesn’t have a parachute, it was shot to bits. The fall is better than staying in the plane to be burned alive though, he reasons, so after an incredibly touching chat with this young woman he knows he will never see he bails out into the swirling mist.

Except he doesn’t actually die. Waking up on the beach he thinks at first he is in the afterlife. Spotting a black Labrador he exclaims delightedly that he always hoped heaven would have dogs! He soon realises he isn’t dead – although no-one knows how he lived – and meets the radio operator. They fall instantly in love before his celestial conductor appears belatedly to take him to the afterlife – he got lost in the fog you see and missed him. Now our hero was prepared for death the day before, but now he has too much to live for and refuses to go, instead placing an appeal in a heavenly court.

The film is incredibly imaginative – the views of heaven are wonderful with separate receiving rooms at the end of vast moving staircases for different people. His Sparks is sitting in the waiting room of the reception area for flying crews, waiting on his skipper to join him, while other deceased airmen of all nationalities arrive, signing in as huge conveyors bring their wings to the reception desk. Home was never like this, remarks one young Yank flyer. Mine was, sighs another. Then the US bomber crew cheer up when they see a Coke machine and rush over! It’s such an imaginative scene, yet while it is very funny the underlying subtext is terribly sad: these are all very young men with everything to live for, but here they are, dead. Coming so soon after the war the emotional impact on the contemporary audience then must have been even more incredible.

We never find out really if the events which play out are true or the product of our young aviator’s mind. He has a neural injury we discover later on, which may be manifesting itself in this series of highly constructed hallucinations; luckily for him his new love is friends with an exceptional Doctor who realise regardless he has to help him ‘win’ his appeal for life, if he fails it could destroy him mentally even if it isn’t real. Unspoken but nevertheless very clear is the issue of survivor guilt; ‘why me?’ ‘Why did my friends die and not me?’ The terrible burden of living after a traumatic event is evident in there, something most of the 1940s audience would have understood very well I suspect. The cure is good friends and, of course, love. The film has that sweeping romance typical of many films of that period, yet despite the ‘darling, I love you’ scenes it is never truly slushy, being informed also with a certain wit and cynicism to balance it.

I’ve watched A Matter of Life and Death a number of times on TV but this was the first time I’ve ever seen it on a big screen. The mix of black and white for the afterlife and early colour for the living world is both clever and quite beautiful. The mis-en-scene, detail, use of shadow, the play of the camera with light and angle are all astonishing; they must have seemed even more amazing to the original audiences, sitting in the grey austerity of post-war Britain. Like Powell’s The Red Shoes (which we caught on Sunday) the colour sequences have that (to us) unusual quality caused by early Technicolor processes, seeming more lurid and less natural than we would expect of colour photography now. In the fantasy context of both of these films that is a strength however – the Red Shoes may be about ballet, not my favourite subject, but it is so wonderfully beautiful I can watch it again and again. Like a Matter of Life and Death it is luminous.

The man who photographed them for Powell was Jack Cardiff, a legend among cinematographers the world over. In a fabulous surprise, before A Matter of Life and Death begun a charming, little old man was brought out before us all: Jack Cardiff himself. He told us of meeting Powell in the mid 1940s, getting his first full work with him, of many famous films now timeless classics. As he wound up and invited us to enjoy the film I swear he became more spry; he had walked up to the front of the screen like and old man but he left it with a spring in his step and a huge, infectious smile on his face. It was as if this gorgeous film and the warm memories he had shared with us all in the cosy darkness of the cinema had re-invigorated him; what a delightful introduction to such a gorgeously moving film and certainly one of my highlights of my movie going life.

Council

Got a nice letter in the mail today with all sorts of nasty connotations to it from Edinburgh council demanding overdue council tax from a previous year. This despite the fact I wrote to them concerning it ages ago and never had a reply - this morning's pay or else letter doesn't even mention it. This comes on top of the two letters I've sent them asking for a new council tax book for this financial year since they still have me down as unemployed months later, despite being told twice now that I am not. Oh and the 'overdue' bill from a previous year originally came with a letter explaining that they had computer trouble and staff problems and so they think they may have overlooked something from last year...

Doesn't that instill confidence? They 'think' they may still need money form me? Don't they know for sure? Given they can't even deal with their mail who knows how accurate any of this is... No doubt at some point I will get a letter demanding more money for this financial year at the employed rate once they finally get round to dealing with that (and I'm sure they will deny ever receiving any of the letters I sent them - they once took something like 8 months to reply to a letter I sent a few years back, so fair to say they are not terribly efficient. I think they train their staff the same place Sam worked in Gilliam's Brazil).

Ah, Edinburgh City Council doing its bit to make life better for the city's citizens (and this is with the council holding a huge surplus from previous years tax in the bank - around 25 million, which is more than a justifiable 'rainy day' emergency amount I think - and still raising the tax by more than inflation each year into the bargain) - still they need to wring every penny they can get from locals to pay for teams to remove the huge chunks of gum from the pavement, left by visiting Italian teenagers and, of course, to pay those efficient people in their offices who don't reply to the mail citizens send them...

Top movie

The final weekend of the Edinburgh International Film Festival has begun and its getting pretty tense in the voting stakes for the Standard Life Audience Awards. For qualifying movies the audiences are handed a voting slip before the film which you can use and hand back afterwards, ripping off the insert for the relevant choice, eg 'excellent', 'good', 'poor', 'Michael Winner' (okay, I made the last one up, but if anyone from the EIFF is reading this it would be a good choice to add to the slips!). Good idea to rip off a tab as well - no fumbling for pens in a darkened auditorium.

Unsurprisingly Joss Whedon has commanded a lot of solid support and Serenity has been riding around the top spot a lot over this week but in the latest update it has been knocked off with South African gang-drama Tsotsi taking the number one spot while Serenity goes to number two and MirrorMask number three, so in the final two days it really is everything to play for:

1.Tsotsi
2. Serenity
3. Mirrormask
4. Mad Hot Ballroom
5. On a Clear Day
6. Land of the Dead
7. Saraband
8. Kinky Boots
9. The Beat that My Heart Skipped
10. Wah-Wah

Fringe

Well, I'm now off on my first holiday break since starting at FPI - can you believe it has been six months already? Wow, went past fast and feeling nicely settled in and, crucially, still really enjoying it (I keep seeing more graphic novels I want to read every time I add more to the site). But its still nice to have a break and as is my custom I'm taking time off to enjoy the Film Festival and a bit of Fringe going while I'm at it.

Melanie and I went to a fantastic Bach concert by the Dunedin folk at the Canongate Kirk (right down the Royal Mile, near the Parliament and the Palace) - one of her colleagues has a partner in the chorus. It was mid-evening and had been one of those weird weather days where it was bursts of sunlight then clouds all day. The kirk is very simple but elegant - very post-Reformation with its plain glass windows and white walls (if it was wood instead of stone if could pass for a New England church); halfway through and the sun suddenly re-appeared just before it dipped below the horizon. The church was flooded with warm, amber light as the ensemble sang Bach; if they had arranged the lighting it couldn't have been done better, it was as if the setting sun paused on his descent to listen to the music. Artistic beauty and the beauty of nature collided for a few precious moments of sheer wonder.

I've been off to another couple of shows since then and taken in a number of movies at the always-excellent Film Festival with a bundle more to see (Daniel Auteil and Gerry Depardieu to look forward to this Thursday, together for the first time on celluloid). MirrorMask was utterly gorgeous and we had the added delight of a Q&A from Dave McKean himself. It was very Neil Gaiman territory story-wise and visually looked like one of Dave's gorgeous mixed-media artworks come to life. I came out dancing with delight and with a grin I borrowed from my friend the Chesire Cat, it was fantastic! I'll get a decent write-up on it along with George Romero's Land of the Dead when I get a chance (and what a huge cheer George got when he appeared).

Caught Guy X today with Jason Biggs and Natascha McElhone which was great - at first it looked like it was going to be a comedy of mistaken identities in the US army in the 70s, drawing on MASH or Stripes, but actually went off in other directions much to my delight. I was even more delighted when they brought in the director and some of the cast for the Q&A aftewards (one of the delights of the Film Fest, getting to see and sometimes even meet the folk behind the films). So today I found myself only a few feet away from Natascha McElhone who looks even slimmer and more gorgeous in person and her eyes are as luminous. Probably the closest I'll ever get to her, but hey! On the way out who did I see on the red carpet but Mr Frodo himself, Elijah Wood going in for his new movie premiere (I think he plays a football hooligan), waving to a big crowd of fans.

I also had a kind invite from Mainstream to attend the launch of their new book, the Literary Traveller in Edinburgh by Allan Foster in the Scottish Writer's Museum just off the High Street (and a very nice spot for anyone visiting the city). Its an excellent book lover's guide to the World City of Literature, arranged by area so the reader can use it for a little tour of the city, from tombs of poets to the spot where J K was writing the early Harry Potter drafts, pubs where Stevenson hung out to what bookstores are where (nice mention for the Edinburgh branch of the Planet in there - Allan asked for info on our specialisations, hours etc a while back which I was happy to supply and he nicely asked me to come along to the launch). I used to get asked for just such a guide back in my old job so I think they will do well with this. I was impressed enough to buy my own copy. As an extra treat I bumped into a former colleague, who was part of my team when I set up the new They Who Shall Not Be Named at Ocean Terminal the other year and who now works for Mainstream and got to catch up a little with him while snorting the complimentary wine. Pretty good day then! I'll try and write up a bit more on MirrorMask later on.