Film
Film news and giveaways for beautiful cineaste types
I Don’t miss an early chance to see new Edinburgh-based feature film Night People. The film is actually not released until 3 November, but there will be a screening at Filmhouse, Edinburgh on Tuesday 31 October as part of the Reel 2006 season of recent Scottish and Irish cinema. Set on a cold October night, Night People takes a journey across the city, introducing a cast of five characters for whom there will be no sleep. According to The List’s beloved former editor Alan Morrison, Night People is something of a gem.
I It all seems to be happening in Edinburgh this fortnight with Reel 2006 and the superb Africa in Motion season (www.africa-in- motion.org.uk), but don’t forget that this is also Black History Month and there are screenings at the GFT of the brilliant but deeply worrying documentary Empire of Africa detailing the many atrocities of Sierra Leone's recent civil war and a blinding Josephine Baker double bill. Check www.gft.org.uk and www.blackhistorymonthuk.co.uk
WIN ARTHOUSE DVD COLLECTIONS!
Rough Cuts is going absolutely prize crazy this issue with three box sets to give away. Artificial Eye has just released The Michael Haneke Collection, Eric Rohmer‘s Tales of Four Seasons box set and The Japanese Master Collection (featuring Ozu‘s Floating ~ A Weeds and ' 9 " Mizoguchi‘s The Lady of Musashino). To be in with a chance of winning any of these lovely sets. simply send an email marked ARTHOUSE to promotions@list.co.uk stating which box set you want. y0ur name. address and daytime telephone number by no later than 2 November. Usual List rules apply.
40 THE LIST 19 Oct—2 Nov
Reviews
COMEDY DRAMA A GOOD YEAR (12A) 188min ooo
. ‘.“
On the page it sounds like a bloody cheek. Knackered from directing his Moroccan medieval epic. Kingdom of Heaven. Ridley Scott takes a paid holiday in the south of France (where he has a house) and tosses off a film adapted from a novel penned by an
old mate from his pre-filmmaking days (15) 102mm .
Well. because the film he knocked off is a bit of a comic delight. Scott's Gladiator, Russell Crowe (also apparently enjoying a rest). plays Max Skinner. a London stockbroker who inherits his uncle‘s chateau and failing ' vinyard and begrudgingly discovers
happiness in a slower pace of life.
Crowe’s a very physical actor, and his attention to detail here impresses. Ditto Scott's eye for visuals and feel for pace — his coup de grace is to reverse conventional pacing so that the film bolts out of the gate and finally comes to a complete halt without losing the viewer's interest. Jaunty. cheeky and
colourful, A Good Year has a good nose. even if it fails to linger on the palate. (Miles Fielder)
HORROR : THE cnuooe 2
similar Japanese horror hit Ringu. 2000's Ju-On (aka Curse Grudge) was at the outset pretty derivative. Six years on and as many sequels later one wonders what's left to do with this repetitive and underwhelming series. Well. turn it into an American horror franchise appears to be the answer on the evidence of Shimizu's second stab at Hollywood-backed filmmaking. This garbled mess picks up after the previous film. which starred teen
in the London advertising business. Peter Mayle. Mayle's book is a reworking of his bestseller, A Year in Provence. based on an idea dreamed up by Pete‘n'Rid after the latter read a newspaper article about scandalously high prices being paid for ‘garage wines' (those without chateau or pedigree). Why. you ask. should I pay for rich old Ridley's holiday?
GLASGOW THRILLER RED ROA (18) 113min 00000
With four Japanese Ju-On: The Grudge films under his belt. a fifth in the works and now a pair of US remakes to his name, writer-director
Takashi Shimizu has rung a lucrative
. career out of his simple idea of a malign ghost that haunts one victim after another like an ectoplasmic virus. Arriving five years after the all too
What’s the perfect job for a lonely person? CCTV operator of course. You can follow people’s lives as if you know them, play God and stop bad things from happening to them. But sometimes the bad things happen anyway, and you’re powerless. Jackie (Kate Dickie) sees schoolgirls stabbing people and urban foxes flashing in front of cars as she guards the dizzying, doomed high rises at Red Road. One day, she zooms in on someone from her past, Clyde - that bad things have happened, and are going to happen again, isn’t in doubt. Don’t expect a straight thriller; the inexorable build of threat and dread is more subtle than that. The story constantly mutates as Jackie’s motivation confounds expectation. Voyeurism flirts with intimacy then tips into stalking as she trains her camera on Clyde (the excellent Tony Curran), sparking all sorts of moral complexities along the way. Yes, the film is gritty, in that there’s a sex scene that’s realistic rather than romantic, and it features real Glaswegians as extras. But it’s also absolutely stunning. Glasgow is rendered alien then sharply intimate as it shifts in and out of focus. Screens are always more vivid than real life for Jackie, except
scream queen Sarah Michelle Gellar. with Gellar's little sister Amber Tamblyn (a Buffy alumni) taking a trip to Tokyo to find out why her big sis ended up in the loony ward of a hospital after burning down a house. Thereafter. the film bounces incoherently back and forth between Japan and New York and parallel spooky events that blatantly serve to shift the action (and
when dazzling flashes of skies and landscapes hint at escape, and maybe redemption.
Kate Dickie, in her feature debut, quietly dominates the film, drifting between scenes looking like a female - and much more handsome - Bobby Gillespie. It’s a mesmerising performance, delivered with the precision of a medieval craftsman’s masterpiece. The same goes for director Andrea Arnold. Her grip doesn’t slacken for an instant - one particular plot strand could have turned out very dodgin indeed for feminists, but viewed as a whole the film offers a trenchant critique of gender issues in Scotland. Arnold can even use a sick dog without it turning mawkish, for heaven’s sake! And although there’s a neatness to the ultimate pay off, Red Road asks far more questions than it answers.
Watching the film reminded me of going to the OFT as a teenager to see my first arthouse movies. It reawakened that same invigorating feeling of discovering that film can do more than tell a story, it can take you startling places you never thought you could go, places that are fictional but completely authentic. It was like discovering a wonderful, compelling novel by a writer who somehow gets to the root of everything you always knew was important but couldn’t articulate. That’s the highest praise I can give. (206 Strachan)
I Selected release from Fri 27 Oct.