The other night I snuck along to a preview screening of the new digitally remastered copy of ‘Aria’, which is new out on DVD. For those who missed this first time round, ‘Aria’ is a portmanteau film in which producer Don Boyd gathers a collection of directors and gets them each to visually interpret an operatic aria of their choice. Not the sort of thing you can imagine many financiers going for these days, but since the directors in question…

So as, with all the usual inevitable meaninglessness of numbers in a sequence, our counting system clicks ever closer to Space Year 2011, it is natural for me to take a glance over my shoulder at the verbose trail I’ve left behind me through past year; as if I were a cross between a snail and a thesaurus and this blog were my silvery single footprint charting my careful progress down the garden path. In short, I’ve had a quick…

Or at least this is the wonderfully provocative headline to an email I’ve just had from the London Short Film Festival’s Phil Ilson. Phil’s email continues… “In a time of major arts cuts and a period of recession, short films are not high on the agenda in the general scheme of things. Because of this, the traditional career paths in the film industry are no longer sustainable. It’s year zero, but it’s also a creative time for UK film; a…

There is a feeling I have come to recognise as grief. It is a stir in my guts and a leadenness in my eyes. Most of all it is restlessness in my mind. I always want to spell that word “wrestless” because in truth I don’t just feel merely without rest, I feel wrapped and wound in an unending wrestle with a nameless opposition. It is this wrestlessness that fills my mind and stops me thinking straight. As anyone who…

Lets get a few things straight. A graphic novel is vastly more complicated than a cartoon strip. Compared to the 118118 adverts in the bottom of the Metro, Alan Moore is Dostovesky. Nevertheless we should not forget that all things are relative – compared to The Idiot most graphic novels might as well just be a 3 pane strip advertising a phone directory service. The 118 strips are piece of daily visual flotsam for any Londoner using the tube. For…

The backlash has started! For everyone grinding their teeth over the over exuberance surrounding DSLRs (for the ungeeks these are digital stills cameras that shoot HD video which have in many quarters been hailed as the future of low budget filmmaking) here’s something that should bring a smile… In today’s Filmmaker’s bulletin the expertly knowledgable Andrew Doughty describes the DSLR as “…an abomination. They are a mistake…” and he was arguing with the equally sage Karel Bata who’d just called…

The odd thing about the internet is people still treat it as if reverses normal logic, rather than magnifying it. This was one of the key problems behind the dotcom boom and, like radiation lingering long after the blast, echoes of this emotion are still with us today. That’s why I warned you at the outset that I wasn’t going to come any surprising or new revelations by examining the questions posed by online distribution. Putting films online doesn’t make…

So some of the dust is settling after Tuesday’s sudden earthquake. Though not so sudden and unexpected, my brother, bless him, reminded me yesterday of his own rather tactless post-election jokes to some friends of ours who work at the Film Council. Back in May the UKFC had just reached some internal decisions about its new structure and who was to be doing what, our friends were delighted that, as they saw it, all the right people had got the…

Ah phew that was close, nearly got locked in… yes that’s right I suffer from that strange affliction that hits one in eight twenty-seven to thirty-seven year olds, Crystaline Mazititus. This is a psychological condition in which you imagine every task you take on has been placed on your shoulders in order to win cheap plastic spheres in the game show “The Crystal Maze”. Forgive me, ‘adventure game show’. Chris and I have just, in the very nick of time,…

Last night I saw “The Killer Inside Me”. Well aware of all the hoo-ha and hoopla surrounding Winterbottom’s graphic portrayal of the central character’s misogynistic violence it hadn’t been top of my ‘must-see’ list. I’m not a fan of violence and have very little wish to see Jessica Alba get her face punched in. However I was out with friends and they wanted to see it and that seemed as a good a reason as any to quieten my qualms…