Father Geek posting another report from this years Edinburgh Film Fest. This report is from a keyboard fiend, CharteredStreets. Man I wish everyone sent in columns this detailed. There's alot here sooooo I'll just step aside and turn you over to our man at The Filmhouse Bar...

Okay, CharteredStreets here (I sent in a "Lost in La Mancha" review about a
month ago? Remember? What do ya mean no?), and here I am in the Filmhouse
bar, sipping a vodka martini, and writing my reviews of all the movies I saw
at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Well, that is not entirely true. The last bit is, but I am at home,
drinking semi-skimmed milk. Anyway:

I have been attending the film festival for three years now (in that this is
the fourth time I have gone to films there). The first movie I saw there
was the premier of the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair". Being a mere 12
years old, you can imagine my delight at seeing not only an excellent film,
but Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, walking within reaching of distance of me
(I never touched them though. Honest.) Of course, we don't go to film
festivals to see stars (although it is a bonus). We go to see the movies.
So here are reviews for the nine movies I saw at the 56th Edinburgh
International Film Festival (NB: half of these movies are already out in
America. Tough, you're getting the reviews anyway):

MY FAVOURITE MOVIE OF THIS YEAR'S FESTIVAL WAS THE FIRST ONE I SAW, MIKE
LEIGH'S "ALL OR NOTHING". MY REVIEW:

Phil Bassett (Timothy Spall) is a sad, lonely middle-aged man. He is a taxi
driver, and some of his best conversations are with the people he picks up.
He tries to talk to people, he philosophises about fate and destiny, but
there is no one around to listen to him. He is poor, as well; so much so
that he resorts to borrowing money off his family when he needs it.

His wife is Penny (Lesley Manville), who is as unconnected and lonely as
Phil. Phil talks to her at the dinner table and she seems totally
uninterested. Even when she is out with her friends and neighbours, the
alcoholic Carol (Marion Bailey) and Maureen (Ruth Sheen), she looks out of
place.

They have two children, Rachel (Alison Garland) and Rory (James Corden).
Rachel appears to be the most intelligent person in the entire family. She
has a job as a cleaner at a nursing home. Rory is rude to his mother - which
upsets her mother immensely - and lazy. He has no job, and lies on the sofa
watching TV most of the time. At night he sneaks out to smoke cigarettes.

The Bassetts live in a housing estate in London, and their neighbours seem
as lonely as they are. Carol is too drunk most of the time to have any idea
of what is going on, and her daughter, Samantha (Sally Hawkins), just hangs
around the flat, teasing a teenager who has a crush on her.

Maureen has no husband. When her daughter, Donna (Helen Coker), asks her how
long she knew Donna's father, she says "about five minutes". Donna is in a
relationship with a guy she dislikes almost as much as he dislikes her.

The loneliness of these characters is emphasised by the conversations and
interactions they have. Take, for example, the scene where Samantha and
Donna talk to each other in a café. They do not seem to be talking as much
as playing a game. Each has had so much practice that they have comebacks
for each thing the other one says. Their conversations are like games of
chess, but sometimes the comebacks are too hurtful - sometimes the game goes
too far.

Another scene - having arrived home from work, Phil goes into the kitchen
clutching a pack of burger buns. Penny asks what they are for, and Phil says
he got them as a tip. A guy bought them, he explains, for a barbecue (Penny
is no longer listening), but no one turned up. A simple but oddly profound
scene.

"All or Nothing" is written and directed by the British director Mike Leigh,
whose other works have included "Secrets & Lies" and "Topsy-Turvy". He is a
consistently good director who does not care about storyline as much as he
cares about his characters. He experiments with them, he puts them into
situations and see how they react, but like Travis Bickle from "Taxi
Driver", the photographer from "Blowup" and Charles Foster Kane from
"Citizen Kane", the characters come first, story second.

There are those who argue that in a movie story is always the most important
thing. I do not agree. I think that for different movies different elements
are more important - sometimes it's the visuals, sometimes it's the humour.
In a film like "All or Nothing" the characters take up centre stage, and the
story evolves out of them. To complain that the story is not very good is
like complaining of "Twelve Angry Men" that the special effects are not very
good.

Not a character in "All or Nothing" is less than believable. Almost every
single character seems just as lonely when standing alone as when being with
friends and family. Mike Leigh has proven once again that he is one of the
most important directors in Britain with what may well be one of the best
movies of the year.

OKAY, THE NEXT MOVIE I SAW WAS THE COMEDY "THE GURU". IT WAS THE WORLD
PREMIER, BY THE WAY. HEATHER GRAHAM WAS THERE. JUST THOUGHT YOU'D LIKE TO
KNOW.

Comedy and sympathy go hand in hand. We laugh at comedy when there is a
victim of the comedy; someone we can sympathise with. "The Guru" starts off
far funnier than it ends, because at the start we can sympathise with the
main character - Ramu Gupta (Jimi Mistri), and towards the end his character
becomes less likeable.

In his hometown, Ramu is popular, he teaches dance classes there and is
highly thought of by his female students. He goes to America to be a star,
but the only job he can find (and soon after, lose) is as a waiter in an
Indian restaurant.

He goes to an audition for a movie, in what is the funniest scene in the
entire film. The director doing the auditions is Dwain (Michael McKean,
hilarious as ever). This scene works so well because we the audience quickly
pick up that he is a director of porn movies, but Ramu has no idea. I will
not spoil the scene, but it is almost worth the price of admission alone. He
eventually gets a job in a porn movie, acting along side (or rather, on top
of) Sharonna (Heather Graham). Unfortunately, he cannot achieve the one
thing that a male actor in a porn movie needs to achieve most of all, and is
thrown out.

We meet Lexi (Marisa Tomei). She is a spoiled rich kid, who does not like
her parents much and is obsessed with Indian culture. Her mother, Chantal
(Christine Baranski) hires her an Indian philosopher, but he passes out from
drinking too much in the kitchen and Ramu, being in the right place at the
right time, takes his place. Not much of a philosopher, he talks about only
two things: dance, which he knows well, and sex, which he learned from
Sharonna. Lexi beds him before telling all of her friends he is the "Guru of
sex". He realises, then, that he could go from being a nobody to being a
somebody, and could fool people into thinking he is, in fact, the "Guru of
sex", but first he needs to learn more about sex from Sharonna. She is
getting married and Ramu promises her that if she tells him all she knows
about sex, he will buy her the $800 wedding cake she covets. She agrees,
providing he does not tell anyone what she tells him. Of course, he does
tell people what she tells him, and makes a lot of money out of it.

At this point I was trying to guess which way the movie would go - would he
end up with Lexi? Or perhaps with Sharonna, who is engaged? I was unsure,
but when it became clear what was going to happen, I found that the movie
started to lose my interest a little. Unfortunately it all becomes a little
predictable and it ends with what is, essentially, the ending from "The
Graduate". I am still recommending "The Guru" though, because of its sense
of fun and its humour, most of which lies in its first half (Ramu's
transition from nobody to somebody seemed to happen too fast for my liking).
The thing about the first half that I liked so much is its sense of realism,
lost in its latter scenes. The basic premise of an Indian going to America
to become famous in movies and ending up making porn, but some other little
things - like when Ramu and his flatmates celebrate his coming to America
with a toast, a moment which seems perhaps too sentimental until, a saving
grace, the neighbour bangs on the wall and says "shut the f--- up!".

"The Guru" is basically trying to bring the Bollywood movies more to the
attention of the average English-speaking viewer. The mix is almost
successful, if the movie relies more on the type of humour suited best to
Hollywood movies than the colourful, musical style of Bollywood, which is
just touches upon.

Any attempts at sentimentality fall flat on their face, though "The Guru" is
still worth seeing, if only for its first half.

NEXT I SAW "TADPOLE":

"This is all so. The Graduate," says Stanley Grubman, father to the central
character in "Tadpole". And oh, how right he is.

The central character in question is Oscar, played by twenty-five year old
Aaron Stanford. He is fifteen, we are told, although he looks about, oh,
twenty-five (why do so many movies resist casting teenagers as teenagers?)
Oscar has a crush on his stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), because she is,
like Oscar, intelligent and grown-up, yet the movie manages not once to use
the word "incest". He is so much in love with her, in fact, that he
daydreams about her with one of those white cloud things round the edge of
the frame, just to tell the audience "HEY! THIS IS A DREAM!" Oscar, you see,
is way beyond his peers, mentally speaking, and he does not want a
girlfriend of inferior intelligence. He gets drunk one night and ends up
sleeping with his stepmother's friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth), because she is
wearing Eve's scarf. He immediately (well, the next morning, when he is
sober) regrets the decision, and is even more worried when he learns Diane
is coming to dinner with Oscar, Eve and Oscar's father Stanley (John
Ritter).

The whole movie to this point is basically setting up for this scene. Oscar
is afraid that Diane will tell Eve of their night together. The scene is
supposed to be funny, because we are supposed to feel sorry for Oscar. We
are supposed to worry about Diane blabbing, and this is where the comedy
should come from. There is a fundamental problem though:
Oscar is immensely irritating. He is arrogant. He is a snob. He looks down
on everyone else of his own age. And therefore how can we feel sympathy for
him? I actually found myself wanting Diane to tell Eve about them sleeping
together.

Back to the "The Graduate" reference - basically, this is the same story.
Watching "The Graduate" today, it still has some brilliant humour, although
Benjamin is not as rebellious as he may have seemed in the '60s. In fact, he
is somewhat un-likeable; I find Mrs Robinson a far more sympathetic
character. "Tadpole" has the same problem, but it does not have that
rebellious quality "The Graduate" may once have had, it just has a
frustrating character having a relationship with an older woman. There is a
scene where we see Diane's friends all fall to the feet of Oscar, admiring
his intellect and, in one case, giving him her telephone number. I may not
be an expert on what women look for in men, but I found it difficult to
believe that women would be so attracted to a character I would happily
punch across the face.

But, like "The Graduate", the woman is more interesting than the teenager.
Diane is not nearly as un-likeable as Oscar, and because she did not
irritate me I found that she was, indeed, a funny character, and I did laugh
in a number if scenes she was in. I kept wishing the camera would go back to
her when it was lingering on Oscar. Eve is also far more likeable. I am not
suggesting that Bebe Neuwirth and Sigourney Weaver are better actors than
Aaron Stanford, but I do think that Diane and Eve are better characters than
Oscar.

Another problem - why was this movie filmed on digital cameras? I can
understand a movie like "Tape" being filmed this way - indeed, the use of
digital cameras enhanced "Tape" - but here it just created a wall between
the audience and the characters. Its graininess and blurriness seemed
unnecessary and distracting. Okay, I understand this was shot on a very
tight budget, so perhaps it was unavoidable, but I found it difficult to
completely ignore it.

I still did find many moments of "Tadpole" funny, and at the end Oscar was a
far more likeable guy than during the rest of the movie, and hell, I may
have given it a positive review, but I had to knock an extra half star off,
for a pretty simple reason: I saw "Lovely & Amazing" a couple of weeks ago.
If you have not seen it, there is a thread of story in it where a main
female character is having an affair with a teenage boy and is arrested for
statutory rape. This was refreshing, to me, having seen so many movies with
the sexist idea that an older woman with a younger boy is a comic idea, but
if the genders are switched, it is very serious indeed.

I saw "Tadpole" at the first screening outside of the United States, and the
director, Gary Winick, attended. He took questions at the end, but I could
not stay because I had to rush off to another movie. If I did stay, though,
I may have asked him either:

1) If "The Graduate" is one of his favourite films.

2) Why he felt it necessary to shoot on digital film.

3) If Oscar was based on someone he severely disliked.

THAT WAS, BY THE WAY, THE ONLY MOVIE I SAW AT THE FESTIVAL THAT I REALLY
DISLIKED. THE NEXT FILM I SAW, "FRAILTY", WAS ONE OF THE BEST:

I imagine that, in 1968, people walked out of "2001: A Space Odyssey", went
into cafés and talked and talked about its meaning. More recently, this was
the case with "The Usual Suspects". I walked out of "Frailty" desperate to
talk to my companions about its technicalities, question the characters'
sanity and try to understand exactly what was and what was not real. At the
start of the film, Matthew McConaughey walks into a police station, and asks
to talk to Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe). He claims to know who the
"God's hand" killer is, someone Doyle has been after for some time.

Flashback to 1979. We see McConaughey as a child, with his brother walking
home from school. The children are called Fenton (older brother) and Adam
(younger). They live with their father, who is played by Bill Paxton. He
cares about his children, and they trust and respect him. One night he wakes
them up and tells them he has had a vision: an angel sent down from God,
telling him that the end of the world is near, and demons are walking
amongst them, and it is his job to kill them. Adam, young and easy to
manipulate, trusts his dad completely. Fenton, on the other hand, is older
and thinks that his dad has gone insane. One of the things I admired about
"Frailty" is that it doesn't tell us whether he has or not.

He finds a weapon, an axe, and a pair of gloves. He thinks that these have
been sent down from God, to kill the demons with. He writes a list of
people's names, which he says are demons. Fenton knows, though, that they
are people and that if his dad killed them it would be murder.

And it would be, by definition, murder, and yet, the movie adds a level of
intrigue by not telling us if they are terrible sinners or not - it only
hints. This is the type of film that - like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
and "Halloween" - you may remember as being more violent than they actually
are. Most of the violence happens offscreen, but the way it is filmed makes
it scarier than any excessive gore could have.

"Frailty" not only stars Bill Paxton, but it is also his directorial debut,
and what an impressive debut it is. Not only does he prove his acting talent
onscreen, but he directs with the skill and craft of someone who has been
doing it for years. His use of light and sound is often ingenious.

The two lead performances are very memorable here. McConaughey looks
melancholy and tortured telling the truth about his father to the agent, but
the performance that will really stick with you is that of Paxton. He is a
very sympathetic villain. We know that he believes every word he is saying
about his visions, and we know that he loves his sons. It is difficult to
think of religious fanatics without thinking back to last September. There
really are people like the father in "Frailty" - people who think they know
so much about religion and the afterlife that they can kill people that they
believe have sinned; that they believe deserve to die.

"Frailty" is the best horror movie in years, yes, but it is more than just a
horror movie. It questions our morals. It does not follow the typical
Hollywood horror slasher because it creates characters we care about and
worry about, not the mundane, black-and-white, paint-by-numbers characters
of movies like "Jason X", killed for entertainment. "Frailty" has, we feel,
real characters, and real situations. It is unsettling and disturbing, but
not disgusting or shocking. Was I on the edge of my seat? I was practically
clinging onto the person beside me.

NEXT UP, "THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING":

"What do you want?" asks Patricia (Amy Irving) to Walker (John Turturro).

"What everyone wants," he replies. "To experience life. To wake up enthused.
To be happy." And happiness is the "one thing" of the title - how we try to
be happy, how easy it is to make others unhappy, and how quickly happiness
comes and goes.

Patricia and Walker are just two of a host of colourful characters. Among
the others are Gene (Alan Arkin), Troy (Matthew McConaughey) and Beatrice
(Clea DuVall).

Gene is a claims adjuster for a big firm. He is a hard worker, but he is
also unhappy. His wife left him, and his son, whom he rarely talks to, is
constantly being thrown into jail. One of his workers at the firm, Wade,
annoys him, because Wade is always happy. He has a smile on his face no
matter what the circumstances, and is always able to find the bright side of
things. Gene finds this attitude very suspicious.

Walker is a teacher of physics at a school. He too has left his wife (Amy
Irving), and is trying to get his life worked out. He has no idea how to do
this, though. He has become bored of his scheduled, predictable life, and
wants to try and live life spontaneously; to experience all the things that
he wished he had before.

Troy is a hotshot lawyer, very good at his job, and very determined. In the
movie's opening scene he sees Gene at a bar, sees how unhappy he is, and
attempts to cheer him up. He is young and ambitious, and does not realise
that when he leaves the bar and drives off, something will happen that will
drain the happiness out of him like water from a sponge.

He drives around that corner, having drunk a little too much, and knocks a
pedestrian down. The pedestrian is Beatrice (see how this all ties
together?), and he is smart enough to know that his career - and lifestyle -
could be seriously jeopardised if it was found out what he did. He drives
off, thinking he has killed an innocent. He has done something that he would
have previously been glad to send someone to jail for, and he spends much of
the movie saddened and feeling guilty.

Beatrice is not killed. For the second time in her life, she survives an
accident against the odds. She is a very lucky girl. We see her, in
flashback, before the accident. She is as cheery and optimistic as Gene's
co-worker, Wade. She is a maid for an architect that she has a crush on, and
she cheers up the maid she works with no end. And then, as quick as it takes
for a car to hit someone at a normal speed, her happiness is knocked out of
her.

"Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" is about luck, and most of all,
about happiness. Happiness leaps from character to character like some kind
of energy. Through conversations and interactions, happiness can leave one
person and find another, unexpectedly for both.

It is directed by Jill Sprecher, and written by her and her sister, Karen.
Their last movie they worked on, "Clockwatchers", was a critically acclaimed
satire about office workers, and this is like an expansion. It studies
office workers, with Gene and his co-workers, but makes them only part of an
elaborate web of fascinating characters, that anyone can sympathise with. At
the end of the movie, everyone finds some amount of happiness, if only a
shred for some. Most of them find, though, that it did not take a great
event to give them happiness (one of Gene's co-workers wins the lottery,
quits his job, and comes back a year later with his tail between his legs).
They discover that they find the greatest happiness and satisfaction from
making others happy. The happiness did not have to find them, they were able
to find it.

Unfair things happen. Good people sometimes do not get the life they deserve
and the same goes for the bad ones. The world is not an entirely logical
place, and justice is not always served, just ask McConaughey's character,
Troy. If you dream too much, you will only find disappointment, and if you
do not dream at all, you have no hope. Yet we can all find happiness, though
we can only be truly happy when those around us are too. Cheering people up
is one of the greatest satisfactions you can find, and you may be surprised
to know that the happiness was in you all along. Sometimes it just gets
knocked out of the limelight.

NOW THE NEXT MOVIE WAS TOTALLY UNIQUE. I SEEM TO REMEMBER MR. KNOWLES
SAYING HOW GOOD THIS LOOKED AND BOY, WAS HE RIGHT. "INTACTO":

It is almost impossible to classify "Intacto". On its genre label at
www.imdb.com it is listed as merely a thriller, but that is a bit of a lame
excuse for a genre. I am thrilled by all good movies, but you would not call
"The Wizard of Oz" a thriller, would you? It borders upon science fiction
and fantasy, but since there is nothing in the movie that is not
theoretically impossible, that does not seem fair either. It is set on Earth
and its characters are all merely human. The only genre it fits is the crime
genre. "Intacto" is, you see, about thieves. Not thieves of money, or
thieves of power. These people steal something far more personal - your
luck.

Leonardo Sbaraglia is Tomás. He is the sole survivor of an airplane crash.
What luck he has. He is discovered by Frederico (Eusebio Poncela), who
thinks he might be the person he is looking for. Frederico, you see, used to
be a very lucky man. He worked at a casino for an old friend of his, Sam
(Max von Sydow), who is described as the "god of chance" - he is the
luckiest man in the world. He plays a version of Russian roulette that makes
the regular version seem easy-peasy.

How can these people be so lucky? The answer is ingenious. They steal other
people's luck. They gamble for other people's luck (and you ought to see
some of the games they play). People with "the Gift", as it is called, can
make other people's luck theirs. Sam, his gift far more powerful than
Frederico's, touches him when Frederico says he wants to leave the casino
and this causes Frederico's luck to travel into Sam. Now if anyone touches
Frederico they get bad luck.

Luck travels by touch, but also by photos - give someone with the Gift a
photograph of another and the luck from the photographed person is taken by
the holder of the photograph. Sound complicated? It is. There are two other
characters I should mention. Mónica López plays Sara, a cop on the search of
Tomás (he was being questioned by police in hospital when Frederico got him
out). Her character, like Sam, seems simple but, like Sam, she has emotional
depth, as we learn about a tragic event in her life. Another character is
Alejandro (Antonio Dechent). He is a bullfighter. I say no more.

I have yet to entirely grasp the story of "Intacto". I am desperate to see
it again, to confirm what I think I know and to figure out all of the plot's
intricacies. At no point does the movie patronise you; the movie is aware of
its characters and situations, and forgets about the audience. We are left
to look on and try our best to understand exactly what is going on.

The film is in Spanish, mainly (Max von Sydow's scenes are in English), and
is directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who directed the Oscar-nominated
short "Esposados" ("Linked") in 1996. As far as I am concerned, he is one of
the most promising directors around - I eagerly await his next film.
"Intacto" has outstanding cinematography and is beautifully shot throughout
- its brilliant visuals carry a moody, melancholy feel. It cries out to be
remade by Hollywood (although I doubt Hollywood would have the guts to make
a movie like this in the first place), so make sure you see this version
first, as I expect a remake would patronise its audience and spend too much
time explaining the plot.

I should mention what was, for me, the high-point of the film: its climax. I
found myself gripping onto the armrest of my chair - it's so exciting and
suspenseful. I will say nothing of the scene, except that it is set in the
casino. It is a stunning climax to a movie quite unlike any other I have
seen before.

FOLLOWED BY THE UK PREMIER OF "CHANGING LANES". NOW I KNOW THIS MOVIE CAME
OUT AGES AGO IN THE STATES, SO WHY THE HECK DID IT TAKE THIS LONG TO COME
OUT HERE (ACTUALLY, IT STILL ISN'T OUT HERE). I DOUBT IT WAS WAITING
ESPECIALLY FOR THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL.

This could have been a much worse movie. It could have been a
two-dimensional revenge film about an incident where a good guy is trying to
settle the score with a bad guy. But, luckily for the viewers who are tired
of payback action thrillers, "Changing Lanes" is far smarter.

It is the story of how two people, who were running lifestyles which would
suggest they would never have reason to meet, crash into each other while
driving along a freeway. One of them is Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck). The other
is Doyle Gibson (Samuel L. Jackson). Doyle's car is immovable, but Gavin's
is okay. They are both in a rush to get to court - Banek for his job and
Gibson for his family. Gavin can't be bothered running through the proper
procedures, and he writes Doyle a blank cheque. Doyle wants to do this the
right way, though, and rejects it, asking Gavin to get his insurance card
out. Gavin, losing patient, gets in his car and drives off. "Better luck
next time!" he shouts to Doyle, stranded in the middle of the road.

Gavin is a lawyer who was trying to settle a case, which involved a dying
old man signing his money over to Gavin's law firm. He gets to court (late)
and starts unpacking his papers. He knows he will win the case with these
papers, which prove that the millions signed over by the dying man belong to
the law firm, but it is only when he gets to court he realises his mistake:
he accidentally left a crucial file with Doyle Gibson, a man Gavin would be
happy never to meet again.

Doyle was trying to get to court because of a divorce lawsuit that he and
his wife were trying to settle. Without his car, he arrives twenty minutes
late. The case is over, and his wife has his two boys. They are moving to
Oregon. This, of course, upsets Doyle immensely, especially since he just
bought a flat in Queens for them all, even if he were to live separately.
The judge tells Gavin that he needs to get the file back by the end of the
day. He finds Doyle, and asks him for it but Doyle is in no mood to talk to
him. Gavin offers him money for the file. "You think I want money?" Doyle
replies. "What I want is my morning back. I need my TIME back. Can you give
me my time back?"

What follows is, essentially, a war between the two men. Gavin needs the
file, and Doyle has no intention of giving him it, after the way Gavin
treated him. This is where the movie could have gone the wrong way, but it
doesn't. It is not just about the action as they try to settle the score, or
the fights, or whatever. We see the two men wonder how far they can go to
hurt the other person, but they also face moral dilemmas, which I will get
back to.

They are both flawed, and the flaw is the same: both have a very short fuse.
They go from attempting to do the right thing, and be nice, to exploding and
hurting the other person as much as they can. The thing that complicates
this is that every time one is trying to do the right thing, the other - not
realising - does something to hurt him. For example, Gavin meets a computer
hacker (Dylan Baker), who hacks into Gibson's bank account and renders him
bankrupt, just after he has bought the flat for his family and needs the
money. Gavin leaves a message on Doyle's telephone, which he gets just at
the moment when he was about to send the file back to him.

Going back to the moral dilemmas. Gavin works at the company for his
stepfather, Stephen Delano (Sidney Pollack), who suggests that they forge
another file using another version of the old man's signature. Gavin wonders
at this point whether or not what he is doing is right - was it fair to get
the dying man's signature for the money, or was he conning him, abusing
their friendship and his illness. He is married to Stephen's daughter,
Cynthia (Amanda Peet), but he is having a relationship with Michelle (Toni
Collette), another worker at his firm.

Doyle is a recovering alcoholic. We see him at an AA meeting, near the
film's start, talking about how happy he is now that he has not been
drinking. The Sponsor of the group is played by William Hurt, who Doyle
phones after walking into a bar at the movie's midpoint. He orders a drink,
does not drink it, and eventually gets into a fight with two other drinkers
at the bar. William Hurt says to him "you know, alcohol isn't your drug of
choice: you're addicted to chaos." We understand that he loves his two sons,
and he loves his wife. She left him because she could not stand his bad
temper.

Gavin and Doyle would not have confronted these issues had they not met.
These are issues they were turning a blind eye to in the past, but now they
are looking at themselves and trying to see if they are doing what they
ought to be doing.

The trailers for "Changing Lanes" suggest it is a different movie. They show
the movie's action sequences, and the fight sequences, without suggesting
anything about the characters questioning their morality. Those who see the
trailer and seek an action thriller will be disappointed, and those who see
the trailer and are put off may discover, as I did, that the movie has more
depth than it lets on in its advertising campaign. It contains the two best
performances to date from both Affleck and Jackson, which is reason enough
for seeing it.

THIS NEXT MOVIE, DAVID CRONENBERG'S "SPIDER", WAS PERHAPS NOT QUITE AS GOOD
AS I HAD HOPED, BUT WAS NONETHELESS THRILLING AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING:

I can't believe it happened again. How could I be so stupid? I watched the
new David Cronenberg film thinking "well, I ain't looking forward to giving
this a negative review". I walked out the cinema, thinking how it could
have been better. Then I sit down for five minutes, think about it, and
realise that is was actually very good.

I do not know if it is just me, but this happens when I watch almost any
Cronenberg film. He makes movies you want to watch again, but not until
you're well away from the cinema. I felt this with "Crash", "eXistenZ" and
"Videodrome" - all movies that grow on you over time.

The main character's real name is Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), but because
of his ability to spin 'webs' out of string, and because of his obsession
with creatures of the eight-legged kind, his mother calls him "Spider". At
the start of the film he has just left a mental institution. He gets off a
train and makes his way to a home for ex-asylum patients, which is run by
the less-than-professional Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave). Among the other
patients is Terrence, played by the ever-good John Neville. He wanders
around mumbling to himself and writes in a notepad in bizarre figures that
have only a very small similarity to the alphabet.

We discover that Spider was brought up in this area. He wonders around the
streets right into flashbacks of his childhood. As a child he was a cold,
seemingly emotionless boy. His father, Bill (Gabriel Byrne) goes out for
drinks a lot. When he pays attention to him, Spider just ignores him. He
loves his mother, and does not care for his father. His mother is played by
Miranda Richardson, who also plays Yvonne, a "thick tart" who hangs around
the pub Bill often goes to, and tempts him to betray his wife. The old
Spider remembers his youth, and even, as it is played out before him, takes
notes on it.

The end is the bit that will get you talking. As I was watching it, I still
could not make one hundred percent certain what was going on, but had a
reasonably good idea. It is not really a twist as much as it emphasising
what has been there all along.

The movie takes you on a journey with Spider, and his insanity starts to
make perfect sense. We accept his bizarre logic, which is an achievement
for Cronenberg, Fiennes, and Patrick McGrath, the screenwriter (and author
of the book it is based on). He occupies almost every scene, even when we
see flashbacks not concerning him as a child. Ralph Fiennes was attached to
this project for five years, and we can see how hard he has prepared for the
role. The moment he steps off the train at the beginning he has an amazing
presence. You give him your full attention immediately. His mutter, as he
talks to himself, his walk and movement, his nervous eyes and his bizarre
handwriting are perfect. If there is one thing I am sure you will admire of
this movie, it is Fiennes's performance.

It is not a perfect movie, though. It has one flaw. It is not, as you may
expect, that it is overly complicated, it is - surprisingly - that it is
overly simple. When you figure it out, it is very easy to reduce the entire
movie into a single sentence of summary (I am not going to, of course).
It's a complex telling of a relatively straightforward story, but given its
subject matter, that is maybe the way it ought to be told.

Still, it is an intelligent movie that does not patronise its audience. It
is not up there with Cronenberg's best work (the three films I mentioned
earlier), but it is still atmospheric, moody, melancholy and memorable. And
if you're sitting in the cinema thinking it is poor, prepare to change your
mind half an hour later.

AND FINALLY (YES, I'M RUNNING OUT OF INTRODUCTIONS), "ONE HOUR PHOTO":

Loneliness often leads to obsession. Lonely people need something to do
with their time. If you have no friends and no family, you need to do
something to keep your mind busy, right?

In "One Hour Photo" Robin Williams plays Seymour "Sy" Parrish. He has
greying hair and wears big spectacles. He works at a one hour photo stand
for a supermarket. He is a good worker, determined about his job. In the
voiceover, he talks us through the "art" of developing pictures, and how
careful and precise you must be to be good at it.

He says of photograph development "like most things, it's more than meets
the eye" - he is referring to himself as well. He seems like a nice guy,
but he is also very lonely. We get the impression that if he left the
supermarket and walked in front of a moving bus, few people would take much
notice. He has an obsession: the Yorkin family. The Yorkins are, to Sy, a
seemingly perfect family: there is the pretty wife, Nina (Connie Nielsen),
the hard-working husband, Will (Michael Vartan), and their son, little Jake
(Dylan Smith). They take their photographs to Sy, who calls Nina one of
their "best customers". When he learns it is Jake's birthday he gives him a
free disposable camera. Soon, though, we learn just how far Sy's obsession
goes.

He makes an extra set of photos from the Yorkins' negatives. Not for the
Yorkins: for himself. He does this with every single one of the photos he
develops for them, takes them home, and sticks them onto his massive wall
display of Yorkin pictures.

We learn Sy has no real friends. He lives alone. He does not even have any
family that we are told of. His dream is to be a friend of the Yorkins. He
says to Nina that he has known them for so long he "feels like Uncle Sy".
He really wishes he was.

If Sy is a 'baddie', then he is one of the most sympathetic I have seen.
We, the audience, care about him while no one else seems to. How often do
you speak to the guy who develops your photos?

Robin Williams gives an extraordinary, haunting performance as Sy. Usually
when Robin Williams is given a role, he gets to know the character, gets
into the characters shoes, tries to get us to laugh, tries to get us to cry,
and usually makes us want to run to the nearest bathroom. Patch Adams, in
the movie of the same name. Professor Philip Brainard in "Flubber". Dale
Putley in "Fathers' Day". Jack Powell in "Jack". All played by the
Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams, and all disposable rubbish, unfunny at
best, sickly sentimental at worst. With Sy as well as killer Walter Finch
in "Insomnia" in his recent filmography, is it possible that Robin Williams
has finally grown up? One thing's for sure: he's trying to change his
image, and the way he is thought of. This is certainly a wise choice.

"One Hour Photo" is suspenseful, but not a thriller. It is horrific, but
not a horror. While hardly flawless, it works so well because of its
central character, and because of Williams's devastating performance.
Remember the tagline on the old "Taxi Driver" posters? It read:

"On every street there's a nobody who dreams of being somebody. He's a
lonely forgotten man desperate to prove he's alive."

****

Phew. Well there you have it: nine movies, and only one bad one amongst
them (although I hear a lot of people liked "Tadpole", so maybe it was just
me). I am going to an interview with Christopher Nolan tomorrow (the
British premier of "Insomnia" is on tomorrow but, darnit, I never got a
ticket in time). After that I will go to my bedroom and sit in seclusion
for another year until EIFF 57.

Catchya later,


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