A couple of days in Glasgow

At the same time as the Dublin International Film Festival (see previous entry) Glasgow was also hosting its latest film festival, and I managed to catch a few screenings at that too.

A patriotic sense of duty always means I always like to try and check out Scottish films whenever I can, and the first screening I took in at Glasgow's fest was the low-budget Scottish film FINDING BOB McARTHUR. It's a wistful but witty mockumentary reminiscing on the career of a fictional Scottish director who made it in Hollywood then disappeared, and is now being reluctantly brought back into the limelight to receive a lifetime achievement award.

The film mixes the memories of the man and his career, his friends and his family as we discover the toll taken on his life by his achievements and regrets. The film is full of ideas and has an admirable warmth about it, and also contains plenty for fans of old movies to admire (Michael Powell and Mitchell Leisen are clearly favourites). However...

Try as I might to find all that's good about it, there is no getting away from its shortcomings. It was made for next to nothing, which really shows. The clever integration of archive footage (from leading man Bob Edwards' own collection) is authentic enough, but the shot-on-video look ruins any chances of the reconstructed archive material coming anywhere close to it. Such scenes never look like anything other than someone at work with a camcorder in their back garden. On top of all that, the budget clearly didn't stretch to too many professional actors either - with the occasional exception (Edwards is acceptable) the acting is almost uniformly terrible, with dodgy accents and wooden delivery killing many scenes outright.

The film has to go down not so much as a flawed masterpiece but rather as an interesting failure.

Things picked up however when I left the GFT and made my way across town to the Grosvenor for a late night show of THE BOTHERSOME MAN, a dark but quirky and hilarious comedy from Iceland. A man arrives in a strange new city, where everything seems perfect... except people seem devoid of feeling, food has no taste, and no matter how much he drinks, alcohol has no effect. Then one day it all becomes too much and he decides to inflict a nasty injury on himself just to see what happens. Then it all gets weirder...

This is a terrific movie. I have no doubt that people will read all kinds of meanings into it - our obsession with trivial material objects, the importance of conforming, lack of political freedoms. It's all there if you're looking for it and if you're not, well, it's just a great fun ride.

It's not for those who want everything neatly wrapped up with one final recap of what's happened - those searching for a conventional ending or tidy explanations of what the city is will leave confounded. However, if you enter the movie not knowing what to expect and simply allow yourself to be swept up in its bizarre world, you are in for a treat. I spent the first fifteen minutes wondering what the hell was going on, but eventually I had totally bought into it (helped by likable performances from the cast). I left the cinema totally satisfied and I imagine most people will.

These two films were on the Friday night, while Saturday was taken up by horror films, as the FrightFest crew from London came into town and brought five new horror films with them. You might remember they did it for the first time last year and I wrote about that too. I'll do it again for this year's, but that may as well get an entry of its own. That'll probably be next week sometime.

In fact, I've run out of time and I'll be busy attending a bunch of other films over the next few days, so check back next week some time for the rest of my Glasgow write-up. Bye!