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Celeb Spotting: Kevin Smith, Charlize Theron (sortof: there was a big crush of people outside of the cinema as we left, we saw some people walking down the red carpet and many photographers elbowing each other out of the way. We mostly ignored it and went into the pub next door. Shortly afterwards two of the photographers came in and sat at the next table, told us who they were there for and then started futzing about on their laptops to upload the shots they’d got. So we really only ‘saw’ her by peering at their screens as they messed about in Photoshop.)

Film: The Host

Crazy Korean gubbins which was apparently one of the really hot tickets at Cannes this year. I’ll admit I’m not totally sure why. The director appeared before the showing and mentioned how he thought of it as a family drama, which got a chuckle from the audience but I sort of think he might have meant it. It’s true in that there is a dysfunctional family in it, but that’s about as far as it goes; most of the film is split between the classic Far Eastern tropes of ‘laugh at the fat dim guy’, ‘jump as the monster rushes on screen’ and ‘be confused about what the point was and why everyone was so mean to each other’.

The giant fish monster was well done, and will fuel many vagina-dentate nightmares, and the rest of it was sort of silly and occasionally amusing, but it’s not exactly essential viewing.

Film: Clerks 2

The trailer for this looked absolutely terrible, so I didn’t have high hopes for it, but I actually really enjoyed it. You basically already know whether or not you’re ever going to go and see this film - the only potential criticisms of it are that it’s low-brow, offensive and dumb, but that’s kind of the whole point and also the exact reasons that you will or won’t go to see it. It’s fun to disengage your brain and just laugh at stuff every now and then, and this is the perfect film for that. The Q&A session with Kevin Smith afterwards was a lot of fun too, and sort of reinforced that his films are in lot of ways just direct manifestations of his personality.

Film: Hoodwinked

I kind of got a last minute ticket for this without knowing much about it. It turns out it’s a CGI animated retelling of Red Riding Hood, where everything is modern and urban and features extreme sports. Yes: it is exactly as bad as that sounds.

The twitchy squirrel character was fun, but other than that the movie doesn’t have anything good to offer. All of the characters are clichés, the story is completely rudimentary, the animation is never great but is occasionally horrifically bad, and there are the occasional glitches that make you wonder if an editor ever saw it. (Polygon tearing, weird glitches in the spring simulation for grass and cloth etc, etc.)

The standard defence seems to be that ‘it’s for children’, but that’s not really any excuse. There’s nothing stopping ‘For children’ and ‘good’ being mutually exclusive, and it would be a shame if any kid had to miss anything genuinely interesting in order to see this instead. I’m not saying every fairy tale has to receive the ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ treatment, but a cartoon retelling of this story is automatically in competition with Red Hot Riding Hood, and that’s a pretty tough act to follow.

Pubs: McGowan’s (Generic chain-ish pub, ok food, detergent-y/unidentifiable taste on their draught beers); The Spiegel Garden (The most shockingly expensive way to spend a few hours sitting outside on damp grass. Good draught Hoegaarden though); Centraal (Old favourite. Lots of nice beers, but with the expected ‘It’s festival time!’ price hike that appears in all Edinburgh pubs come August.)

Food: Pub food in McGowan’s, Nice scrambled eggs & bacon from Peckhams, silly, large burger from the Spiegel Garden.

Of Special Note: Saturday was a very strange day-in-reverse. I woke up (scaring Ian’s flatmate, who didn’t know I was going to be appropriating their couch for the night,) and went to watch a movie. A group of us then headed into a café for the only big meal of the day, fragmented and headed off to met people for coffee. After that we headed out in the sunshine to sit on the grass and witter about random things for a few hours. (At this point the day-in-reverse hypothesis breaks down, because the grassy area was George Square Garden at the back of the Spiegel Garden, where the wittering became alcoholically directed and increasingly chilly as the day wore on. We eventually moved into a pub because it was warm, and because there’s only so often you can go up to a packed bar with an increasingly damp backside from sitting on the grass without starting to feel a bit silly.)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under Edinburgh, The Big Room. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.