Films seen so far this year: 136
Films seen this week: Mouth to Mouth, Then She Found Me, The Intruder, Masque of the Red Death, Wasting Away, Speed Racer, Adulthood
Edinburgh Film Festival 2008
This week saw the announcement of the line-up for the 2008 Edinburgh Film Festival, which this year makes a controversial move away from the Edinburgh Festival and runs in June instead of August. Showcasing one hundred and forty two feature-length films from twenty nine countries, the festival opens with John Maybury's Dylan Thomas romance The Edge of Love (starring Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller) on June 18 and closes on June 29 with the premiere of Faintheart, starring Eddie Marsan as a nerd with a passion for Viking re-enactments. Other highlights include: Pixar's latest outing, Wall-E (see below), Shane Meadows' new film Somers Town, Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure and edgy Brit thriller Donkey Punch. There will also be on-stage interviews with the likes of Brian Cox, Ray Harryhausen, director Errol Morris and legendary cinematographers Roger Deakins and Brian Tufano. This will be my eighth Edinburgh Film Festival in a row and I'm really looking forward to it.
Films I'm Looking Forward To: WALL-E
A new Pixar movie is always something to look forward to (well, except maybe Cars) and their latest animated extravaganza is no exception. Wall-E (who looks a lot like Number Five from Short Circuit) is a rust-battered clean-up robot who's been the only inhabitant of Earth for the past 700 years, after the humans all left. Suddenly, his world is turned upside-down by the arrival of a spaceship containing a whizzy, flying female robot named Eve. The early trailers have been both laugh-out-loud funny and utterly delightful, while the latest one hints at the larger story of the movie, with Wall-E following Eve aboard the spaceship when she's forced to leave Earth. The designs look terrific and it seems as if there'll be very little actual voicework. It opens here on July 18 after premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival next month. I can't wait.
Top 10 Films On Release This Week (as recommended by me):
Four new entries this week, with Mouth to Mouth, XXY, A Secret and Speed Racer all making it into the top 10.
1. There Will Be Blood
2. No Country For Old Men
3. Iron Man
4. Persepolis
5. [REC]
6. The Orphanage
7. Mouth to Mouth
8. XXY
9. A Secret
10. Speed Racer
DVD of the Week: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (out Monday 12th May, RRP £15.99)
This week's DVD of the Week is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which, for my money, is the funniest film of the year so far. A hilarious spoof of the already quite ridiculous rock biopic genre, it features a note-perfect performance by John C Reilly and some terrifically catchy songs. Worth seeing for the Beatles scene alone. The DVD is packed with superb features, including: a commentary with director Jake Kasdan and John C Reilly, three deleted and extended scenes (including lots more stuff with “The Beatles”), a 15 minute featurette on the music of the film, the Line-O-Rama feature (which edits together several alternate lines from improvised scenes and seems to be a mainstay of Judd Apatow-produced DVDs), full song performances and an amusing spoof featurette about “The Real Dewey Cox”, which features several musicians talking about how much they love Cox.