Film
Film news and giveaways for beautiful cineaste types
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I Mobile phone movies will soon be within all of our reaches. Pocket Shorts Scotland, a new scheme (sponsored by Scottish Screen, Scottish Enterprise and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) designed to encourage filmmakers to explore this exciting new medium, is determined to prove it. It is offering commissions for eight Scottish projects of up to 60 seconds, each with a maximum budget of £3000. Half of the films commissioned will be live action and half animated. There will be a series of free workshops to help people with their submissions, at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh, at 11am on Saturday 17 September, and at CCA, Glasgow, at 6pm on Tuesday 20 September, 6pm. Wsit www.pocketshorts.coml scotland for more information or email scotland@pocketshorts.co.uk
I The brilliant RESFEST is back and takes place in Glasgow from 13-6 October. This year's excellent programme includes screenings of Thumbsucker and Ghost in the Shell 2. There‘ll be more news closer to the time but in the mean time, visit www.resfest.com for information.
I Farewell Tonino Delli Colli, the great Italian cinematographer, who died recently at the age of 81. His spirit will live on in such irrefutable cinema classics as Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Pasolini’s Pigsty.
WIN 5X2 ON DVD
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I The List has copies of Francois Ozon’s superbly unconventional marital drama 5x2 to give away. To be in with a chance of winning one, please send an email marked ‘5x2’ to promotions@list.co.uk before 6
September. Usual List rules apply.
40 THE LIST 8- 2? Sep 200:";
Reviews
ACllON ADVENTURE
THE ADVENTURES OF ARSENE LUPIN
(15) 125min coo
Arsene Lupin (Romain Duris) is a womanising French gentleman jewel thief and master of disguise who roams high society in pre-WWI Europe. His arch enemy is Josephine. COuntess de Cagliostrio (Kristin Scott Thomas) a shape-shifting femme fatale who may or may not be the daughter of the devil. Together. Arsene and Josephine get involved with an improbany ornate Royalist plot featuring stolen cruCifixes and magical powers. each attempting to engineer the other's comeuppance while enSuring their own survival.
Very much in the retro-chic mode of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Jean-Paul Salome's The Adventures of Arsene Lupin unfolds double crosses and deceptions at the breathless speed of a 508 serial.
l explaining nothing sensibly and frequently being deliberately obtuse. Scott Thomas deals effortlessly with the sometimes lurid material. and her crueller-than~Cruella de Ville performance is the film's strongest suit. The supernatural elements of this high budget romp sit comfortably with the eccentricin of the whole exercise.
CLASSIC THRILLER VENGEANCE IS MINE (18) 140mm 0...
It’s almost criminal that the great Shohei The Ballad of Narayama lmamura’s 1979 serial killer thriller, based on lwao Enokizu’s real life murder spree, has never been released in the UK. So do not miss this chance to open you heart and mind to a compelling account of one man’s venality and utter nihilism.
Like Paul Gauguin, lwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) knew that ‘Life being what it is, one can only dream of revenge.’ One day in 1964, Enokizu decides to go on a killing spree that lasts for 78 days. He leaves his distraught Catholic parents and a wife, and his reason for the sudden blood spilling is vague but his means are violently effective - if very random. On his way Enokizu accrues funds by fleecing his victims while trying to have sex with every hooker in Japan’s central belt. Life on the run without ‘kokoro’ (‘self’ or ‘heart’ in Japanese) suits Enokizu but then he falls in with an innocent, kindly innkeeper and her perverted ex-jailbird mother.
Put together from police records and witness testimonials, Vengeance is Mine is vintage classic lmamura. By turns stunningly misogynistic, sex- obsessed, procedural and surreal, it contains the motifs that ride haphazardly through all his films - water (Warm Water Under a Red Bridge), river snakes (The Eel), degrees of perception (The Insect Woman), redemption, conformity and death (Pigs and Battleships). While the film’s influence on Belvaux, Bonzel and Poelvoorde’s Man Bites Dog or McNaughton’s Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer among others is undeniable, Vengeance is more interesting for placing lmamura in that incredibly rare bracket of filmmakers — Peckinpah and Jodorowsky amongst them — whose essays of post-war prosperity are written in blood, madness and inhumanity of breathtaking candour. Held together by simply stunning central performances by Ogata and Mayumi Ogawa, this is a most welcome, unforgettable treat from the Japan’s true crime cupboard.
(Paul Dale) I Film/rouse. Edinburgh, Fri SJ—Mon l2 Sep only and GET. Glasgow. Wed 14 and Thu 14 Sep only.
a decidedly offbeat entry into the increasingly clean-cut genre of action cinema. Dark. sexy. violent and consistently loopy. Arsene Lupin is a welcome alternative to generic comic book Hollywood action.
(Eddie Harrison)
I Film/rouse, Edinburgh from Fri 9 Sep.
ROMANCE/THRILLER ASYLUM (15) 99min 0
Closer scribe Patrick Marber has penned this adaptation of Patrick McGrath's novel. Like Closer. the plot revolves around four characters using manipulation and deceit to get the better of each other. This time it‘s three men and a lady fighting it out and David Y0ung Adam Mackenzie has decided to shoot the 1950s backdrob like a second-rate lTV drama.
The key character is a rather morbid and forlorn Stella (Natasha Richardson). Her husband Max (Hugh Bonneville) has just taken on a job at a mental asylum and. as she is the only attractive woman within a million miles. Stella attracts a lot of male attention. She embarks on an affair with a patient Edgar (Marlon Csokas) who has a penchant for painting. and things really start getting rather silly and overly melodramatic. Mackenzie plays upon the thin line that separates reality and insanity and hypothesises that the town's asylum might not just be an area confined within fOur walls. What c0uld have been an interesting horror character study along the lines of Cronenberg's Spider (also based on a McGrath novel) is destroyed by tortuously labOured dialogue and a sluggish pace. Not even a vicious turn from Ian McKellen can save this painfully dull and cold small town shenanigan. (Kaleem Aftab)
I General release from Fri 9 Sep.
BOXING BIOPIC CINDERELLA MAN (12A) 144min 000
Cinderella Man reunites the Oscar- winningnominated team — star Russell Crowe. director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman — behind the 2001 prestige picture A Beautiful Mind. The new film. another biopic about an extraordinary but overlooked figure from 20th century American history. concerns Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock. who. having been put out to gra/e by the boxing association. fought his way back into the limelight to take the world heawweight title from champ Max Baer in a bruising 15-round slugfest which lead to Braddock becoming a national folk hero way back in 1035.
It's a great story. whatever way you look at it. Even Howard and