Flying Under Radar

As a big-shot gentleman of the press at Edinburgh Film Festival, which I’ll be blogging about in June, I’ve started to receive press releases detailing the pleasures in store: the Shirley Clarke and Jeanne Moreau retrospectives, and now a new strand called Under the Radar which, as the name suggests, will concentrate on those feature films of quality teetering on the brink of neglect due to their odd natures, unusual points of origins, or lack of mammoth publicity budgets.

I thought I should probably try and recycle some of these press releases as articles, since isn’t that what professional journalists do?

“From the UK, CRACK WILLOW receives its World Premiere, and is directed by local Edinburgh College of Art graduate Martin Radich. A previous EIFF Best Short Film laureate, Radich makes his feature debut with this shocking and highly original interpretation of the psychological effects of social decay.”

That doesn’t necessarily sound like something that would entice me out of the warm summer rain, but Martin is an old friend. While I never actually taught him that I recall, he graduated from E.C.A. during the time when I’ve been teaching. I well remember his documentary IN MEMORY OF DOROTHY BENNETT, in which a father and son are shown going about their domestic lives, making an extra cup of tea for their deceased wife/mother, and doing everything for each other that she used to do for them: the father washes the adult son’s hair, the son prepares the father’s insulin injection, etc. It sounds like it could easily be just a psychological freakshow, but it’s presented with great sympathy and solemnity.

Martin is a talented cinematographer as well as a unique director, and I’m eager to see what he’s cooked up. But if he PATS MY AMPLE STOMACH again, as he tends to do each time we meet, I may have to break every leg in his body.

“We haven’t got time to be sensible.”

In THE GANG’S ALL HERE there are some pretty unusual lines of dialogue. A representative smattering:

“Ah, Meester Potty!”

“You do very well what you do-do.”

“If you don’t cut that out the censor will.”

“Well, my roses aren’t any too fond of YOU.”

“I go in for no foolishness.”

“Thank you very very nice.”

“Well, old swoopy, swapping swoops at your age?”

“How about a nice mint jalopy?”

“There’s your Sgt. Crazy, and I wash my face of the whole business.”

Fiona didn’t like the film, finding the plot too diaphanous. While we’re used to the idea that musicals are not big on story, in fact most of them rely on pretty strong narrative spines – to hold the songs together if nothing else. But TGAH starts off almost like a revue, with one number after another separated only by vague comedy skits and no early sign of a central plot problem at all. It does eventually arrive, but it never actually MATTERS. I didn’t mind so much — most of the Berkeley musical acid-trips to beyond infinity are very good, and have that weirdness which is my very favourite thing about his work.

But the funniest thing of all is a scene in a car where Carmen Miranda has almost no lines but she’s in shot the whole time, so she must engage in THE ART OF LISTENING:

Every molecule of her being strains with the sheer effort of being interested what in anyone less fabulous is doing or saying.