Edinburgh International Film Festival

Well, as we begin the final weekend of this year’s Film Fest here in Edinburgh I can say it has been another stand-out year for bringing excellent and varied movies to Festival goers. We’ve had films from first-time directors and return visits from well-beloved auteurs, from micro-budget indies from home and overseas to mainstream French police thrillers. Science Fiction, Fantasy and horror have been well represented – unlike other sectors of the Festivals (I won’t be petty by naming them, we know who they are!) the EIFF has been very open to all genres, including our fantastical favourites – here are a couple of screenings which I managed to catch:

The great George Romero, Godfather of the Undead, had the fourth in his landmark zombie series, Land of the Dead, in show. While not all fans were impressed – Adele of the excellent Dead By Dawn horror film fest in Edinburgh thought it was dreadful – I have to say I really enjoyed it. I would agree with one of Adele’s criticisms that the film is certainly far more commercial than his previous entries, but I don’t feel Romero sacrificed too much in this direction – and, after all, he needs to appeal not only to old, hardcore fans like myself but to a wider audience if he wants to generate enough bums on seats to persuade the money men to back further work. Making a movie purely for fans is fine for the direct to DVD market, but for theatrical release you need to make it more accessible – as long as this is done without compromising the film too much I have no problem with it, but obviously it is an individual taste matter.

Set an unspecified number of years after Day of the Dead, Land is less claustrophobic than (the largely bunker-set) Day or its predecessors (which involved much hunkering down in remote homes or abandoned malls under zombie siege). In Land the remaining humans have adapted to the zombie threat; they are still under siege but in place of small enclaves they now live in entire cities, protected by walls, rivers and bridges, like some city-state from Classical Greece or ancient Persia, surrounded by zombies (taking the place of the ‘barbarians’ beyond the walls of those ancient cities, always a lurking threat to order and ‘civilization’). Small towns nearby are totally occupied by the walking undead and raided by mercenary teams from the city for supplies, the mercenaries using fireworks to distract the shambling zombies and reckless, thoughtless violence.

The movie cleverly plays with an old horror chestnut – countryside versus the city dwellers – while also drawing on history, both ancient (the uneducated, barbarian hordes threatening the order of civilised societies) and more recent (Dennis Hopper’s right-wing, Republican leader of the city exploiting people’s greed and fear to suit his own agenda and his declaration of ‘not treating with terrorists’ makes obvious parallels to Bush’s contemporary America). Romero has always drawn on contemporary events over the decades his zombie films have been made in and it is this sociological and political observation and commentary (civil rights, racism, consumerism, Cold War paranoia and more) which set his films far above the mass of other zombie flicks (including the faster-paced but shallow remake of Dawn of the Dead last year).

The undead are now slowly starting to make fumbling attempts at using tools and working out problems (a zombie butcher trying to use his cleaver to smash a barrier reminded me of the apes trying to use the bones as tools in 2001) and obviously beginning to form a rudimentary feeling of community (seen especially when fellows are slaughtered by raiders – the lesson being that its easy for soldiers to treat the enemy as mindless and inhuman so its easier to kill them, but really, who does that ultimately dehumanise? And what does it say about that ‘civilized’ society?). Obviously this increasing use of basic intelligence makes them far more of a threat to the remaining humans, who sit inside their city, with the rich gathered around Hopper’s right-wing leader while the poor who do the work are ‘allowed’ to live in ruined, ghetto-like sections of the city, like Medieval peasants in hovels gathered around their lord’s tower.

Gore is present, of course, but it was more subdued than previous films, sometimes using cutaways with shadows on the wall depicting the ghoulish end to some characters (I found this quite effective), but there is enough action in there to keep old hands entertained (especially in the shape of the raider’s armoured wagon which is straight out of a combination of Damnation Alley and Mad Max). There are also some nice nods to the previous movies – humans having to raid shops in zombie towns is almost an inverse of the plot for Dawn of the Dead’s mall-set tale and you should watch out for a cameo by effects guru Tom Savini in his biker costume and make-up from that film. Land of the Dead is another good entry in Romero’s canon in my opinion but accessible to newer viewers as well. Room has been left for further entries, which George has said he would like to do, if money and time allow him. And judging by the huge cheer he got when he made a personal appearance before the movie to talk to the audience, he’s still got a lot of respect and admiration in his audience.

MirrorMask

One of the top highlights of the Film Fest here for me was the UK premiere of MirrorMask. Neil Gaiman writing it and Dave McKean directing it with backing from Hensons – doesn’t this just sound like a dream project for we fans? Well, folks, I’m really delighted to tell you that MirrorMask does not disappoint – it’s a ravishing fantasy suitable for both younger and older viewers and is magical enough for those who don’t know Neil or Dave’s work will still be enchanted. For those of us who have adored their collaborations in the past, however, it is an even bigger treat; the tale of hidden worlds shadowing our own and a girl traversing both is a very Neil-type tale while the luscious visuals are unmistakably Dave McKean – in fact it often looks like one of Dave’s mixed-media artworks brought to life, ready to walk into.

If you thought the astonishing comic-to-film visuals in Sin City were brilliant (which they were) then you ain’t seen nothing yet. Like Sin City and Sky Captain, much of MirrorMask was shot against green screen, demanding the actors perform using their own imagination (which I personally think means a better performance because you need very good actors to achieve this). We had the utterly delightful surprise of an appearance by Dave himself, speaking before and after the film to a rapt audience. Young actress Stephanie Leonidas, playing Helena, gave a performance which belies her lack of year; Dave singled her out for (deserved) special praise and also remarked that she had thoroughly immersed herself into this imaginative world – when the cinematographer asked her which hanging light she was looking at so he could gauge her eyeline for the tall creatures to be CGI-ed in afterwards she answered she wasn’t looking at a studio light, she was looking at the creature; her performance spoke very much of her accepting this world as real and helps to convince the viewer.

As with Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Narnia Chronicles and numerous other works (including Neil’s own Coraline), mirrors, drawings, window frames and mysterious doors can all potentially lead to different realities and realms from our own mundane world, like ideas in our neurons sparking into their neighbours and setting off unexpected ideas. Gina McKee and Rob Brydon (Marion and Geoff) play Helena’s mother and father who run a travelling circus, which the poutingly teen-angst ridden Helena has come to resent – most kids (as her mother points out) dream of running away to live with the circus, but if you do live in one perhaps you’d yearn for a ‘normal’ life, whatever that is.

Always busy doodling new pictures, when Helena is drawn (pun intended) into this other realm she finds that although her mother may be correct about her being unsuited to ‘normal’ life she is well equipped to deal with a rich fantasy world, especially one which seems to be at least partly based on her artwork, while McKee and Brydon appear in this magical realm as other figures, such as the Prime Minister and the White Queen (like Snowhite, trapped in an enchanted slumber). Like all the best fantasies there is a quest to be fulfilled and lessons on growing up to be learned, traps to be avoided and temptations to be faced, which in Neil and Dave’s skilled hands go beyond their generic roots to utterly draw in the viewers, young and old, into a magical world.

(Dave in full flow at the Q&A - apologies for the murkiness - it is a trifle dark in the auditorium!)

It’s astonishing to think all of this was crafted for less than four million pounds – the production appears far too lush and beautiful. It’s a triumph of imagination and clever improvisation over scant resources and budget – the mirror image (another bad pun, sorry) of the typical effects-heavy Hollywood film where big-budget and effects predominate over acting or writing or story-telling. Dave told us how he eschewed the normal CGI movie practise of having teams working on individual areas of each scene – framing, rendering, lighting etc – and instead allowed his small, young team of animators to each be responsible for an entire piece themselves, so one could do the Sphinxes (wonderfully creepy cat-like beasts forever asking riddles) and another the floating giants (like Giacometti statues which have been binge-eating). This approach may not be suitable for huge films, but works very well here giving recognisable characteristic to specific scenes and, as Dave said, allowing the animators to look a the movie and be able to say ‘I did that’ to friends (isn’t it nice to see them encouraging new talent this way?).

MirrorMask shockingly still doesn’t have a UK release date scheduled, although it is now looking like some form of release will happen in the US later this autumn, but apart from festival screenings British audiences are going to have to wait for this luscious fantasy I’m afraid, so if you hear of it in a festival near you, go and grab the opportunity. You may not get to hear Dave speak, but believe me you will still want to see this magical movie (I came out dancing with delight; it was simply wonderful, with an emphasis on wonder).

Oh, and one other gleaming nugget which came out of Dave’s Q&A at the screening (apart from his story about working in the late Jim Henson’s home with Neil and Terry Gilliam dropping by – doesn’t that sound like a great scene for a short story itself?) was when someone asked what movie project Dave wanted to work on next; his answer got me even more excited than I already was because he wants to take one of the earliest collaboration he and Neil produced and rework it as a film, one of my all-time favourite graphic novels, Signal To Noise. We may have to wait a good while for that to happen, but looking at the dizzying delights of MirrorMask I really can’t wait to see what they will make of the sadly beautiful Signal to Noise, which is number five in my top ten of graphic novels on our Recommended page.