Shades of Caruso

BFI LFF 2011: Two Weeks Enduring Central London’s Many Charms

It says something about a man’s life that attending a film festival just a few dozen miles from his front door is so far and away the highlight of the year that once one has finished, he starts looking forward to the next one. Just like the miserable dads you see in bad comedies who make their loved ones’ lives hell prior to the big family holiday in the middle of the year, I spent the time between the 2010 London Film Festival and the 2011 London Film Festival talking about how much I was looking forward to the London Film Festival, or talking about the previous London Film Festival.

Colleagues at work began taking sick leave just to avoid me talking about shaking John Sayles’ hand last year. My cats have heard me complaining about the BFI’s website so often that they now understand about 50 words of human English. The tattoo I got of departing festival director Sandra Hebron might have been a step too far, but what else was I going to do with the large amount of unoccupied real estate on the top of my head? It was getting out of hand, so much so that on the day that tickets went on sale and the BFI servers promptly crashed yet again, I melodramatically declared that my year was definitively ruined. I’m fortunate that Daisyhellcakes is a strong and generous enough person that she didn’t divorce me on the spot.

But it all turned out reasonably okay. We got a shitload of tickets; so many that we ended up with too many, which is a bit of a problem as there is a no refund policy on LFF tickets. Apologies to anyone who queued outside the West End Vue one afternoon in a futile effort to get tickets for Roman Polanski’s Carnage; there were two tickets you could have had but sadly the baffling no refund rule meant you missed out. Word of warning to anyone who goes to the festival next year and buys too many tickets, which is all too likely considering how badly the website crashed this year; if you get too many tickets, start hawking them on Twitter well ahead of the screening. No one else will help you.

I can imagine queuing outside the West End Vue was a particularly miserable experience. Last year I whined about the renovation work being done on the building next to that cinema, which made exiting the building doubly difficult and miserable, but that was nothing compared to this year. Thanks to the forthcoming Olympics, London is pouring literally quadzillions of pounds into sprucing itself up for all of the guests we’ll get next year, which is tough shit for anyone trying to visit this year. Leicester Square is currently being torn apart by machines to such a drastic extent that post-Decepticon-invasion Chicago in Transformers: Dark of the Moon looks easier to navigate.

It’s not just the embarrassment one feels when thinking of great filmmakers and artists (and Jude Law with his excellent hat) coming to London to help celebrate the completion of their work and being presented with a plaza that’s almost entirely filled with mesh fences and corrugated iron, though that does make a lover of London wince; it’s as if the city turned up to a premiere dressed in sweatpants and a faded Scooby-Doo t-shirt. It’s mostly because getting around the area was nigh-impossible for two weeks. Just moving from the West End Vue to the West End Odeon, or Piccadilly Circus, was pretty much like this (actual iPhone footage that I took).

So that was a bit crap (the experience, not Jude Law’s beard). The festival, on the other hand, was terrific; we both saw a number of superb movies, some not-so-great ones, and an outright bad movie classic that will end up being embraced by anyone who has ever watched Showgirls or Dreamcatcher or Glitter and screeched with astonished laughter. Over the next week or so I’ll do my usual LFF thing, comparing some of the movies in order to figure out why some worked and others didn’t, most obviously with the rather similar Shame and Rampart, though I’ll also be tackling some of the more significant movies on their own. I’ll also make a shameful admission about the realisation that I am a know-nothing when it comes to Eastern culture, try to come to terms with the terrible child of the austerity era (the new Cinema of Misery), and reveal my ignorance of psychoanalysis when I discuss David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which will happen tomorrow.

November 22, 2011 - Posted by admiralneck | Carnage, David Cronenberg, Dreamcatcher, London Film Festival 2011, Rampart, Roman Polanski, Sandra Hebron, Shame, Showgirls, Soylent Green, Transformers