EIFF: Friday 25th

Kicking off with a Mitchell Leisen film again, PRACTICALLY YOURS is a comedy that sees a misinterpreted radio signal result in heroic pilot Fred MacMurray returning home from the war to find himself engaged to a woman co-worker from his office. It's been called a one-joke film and one of Leisen's weaker efforts, including by Leisen himself, but I really enjoyed it. It might not have had the highest number of laughs but it certainly kept me amused, and was helped by the ever reliable MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as the odd couple.

It was a much darker tale which followed - the documentary A CRUDE AWAKENING: THE OIL CRASH. As you'd expect from the title, this film details our reliance on oil, the effects it's having on the world and how we're running out of time to do something about it. The film is very good at hammering home the bad news but not so hot at offering up potential solutions. Nevertheless, it's an important and sobering film that everyone should see for their own education.

Walter Hill's THE DRIVER featured in the 70s retrospective in a nice print - I've seen this movie before (indeed, I wrote about it briefly in a post about Ryan O'Neal several months back) but to see it on the big screen was something else. The characters (all of whom are nameless and simply credited as The Driver, The Player, etc.) are all perfectly cast with Dern playing psycho cop, Adjani playing moody but beautiful and O'Neal doing just the right amount of nothing to be cool. It's the car chases that make the movie though, proving Hill's action credentials which he later put to good use on THE WARRIORS, and this is the main reason for seeing the movie in a cinema rather than on TV.

THE RING FINGER is a French adaptation of a Japanese novel, and perhaps it's this clash of cultures that rendered it such a bizarre film that is very difficult to get to grips with. A young woman gets a job at a place that preserve things for people and - forget it, the more I try to explain it, the more confusing it'll sound. Weird.

MIKEY AND NICKY was the first let-down of the 70s retrospective. Essentially an entire movie of Peter Falk and John Cassavetes wandering through the streets talking to each other (a lot of which was improvised, apparently) as some form of examination of male friendship with Falk trying to help the unhinged Cassavetes. It's not just dull; it's frustrating - because I could not figure out for the life of me why these two characters would still be friends when Cassavetes spends the entire movie being an insufferable prick.

Sadly it didn't get any better as I finished the day with a late night screening of THE PRODIGY, a low budget crime thriller from America that unfortunately gives a whole new definition to the word "amateur". The movie looked really cheap, which I can forgive; but there's no excuse for filming a script this bad, especially when you're going to have equally bad actors attempt to act it. I pride myself on a strange personal principle that I will never walk out of a cinema screening before the end credits roll. This film came very close to breaking that.

Just two days of EIFF coverage to go - it'll be online soon!