I have to admit, rather pathetically, that my cumulative knowledge of claymation is limited to the exploits of Morph on Tony Hart’s TV shows and, of course, Wallace And Gromit. Profoundly ill-equipped as I am, I nonetheless caught up with Mary And Max this afternoon. I will report now that this is some clear distance away from the cosy world of Aardman. Oh, yep. [youtube]MgRjB8PEDkM[/youtube] Narrated by Barry Humphries, Mary And Max is a idiosyncratic story about the 20-year, long distance pen-friendship between the two protagonists. Mary Daisy Dinkle is an 8 year-old girl living in Australia. Her favourite colour is brown and she has a pet rooster. She has a birth mark on her forehead “the colour of poo” that she detests. Her mother chain-smokes and drinks sherry – “tea for grown-ups” which needs to be constantly drunk “to check the temperature”. Mary learns from her grandfather that babies are found by daddies at the bottom of their beer glasses. With typical child-like curiosity, she decides to find out where babies come from in America and pulls out Max’s details at random from the New York phone book. Max Horowitz, an obese 44 year-old Asperger’s sufferer, lives in Manhattan with a collection of animals, including a succession of goldfish, all called Henry (at the start of the film, we find him consigning the recently departed Henry VIII to a watery grave down the toilet). He is, you might quickly ascertain, an unlikely friend for Mary. But they’re both fans of chocolate and, crucially, an animated TV show called The Noblets. It strikes me, reading this back, that there’s something saccharine sounding about the story, written and directed by Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Elliot shapes a strong narrative about these two seemingly incompatible friends that visits some very dark places – particularly Max’s horrific anxiety attacks and the other distressing aspects of his Syndrome. It is a film about profoundly lonely and isolated people, and the astonishing connection they make. As the grown-up Mary, Toni Collette finds much sweetness in her character, but it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman as Max who dominates the film. He brings a vivid sense of despair to the character. Visually, the film is fantastic, as you might expect. Mary’s scenes in Australia are shot in a brown/rusty palette, the New York segments in cold, grim grey. Both characters are weird and freakish to look at, which to some degree I suppose is deliberately designed to emphasise their otherness, their outsider status. Elliot does a good job of articulating the tenderness of their growing relationship through their letters, and how, in turn, they grow as people through the correspondence. It is, I guess, a more mature experience than we might be used to with Wallace And Gromit (or even Tim Burton’s animation work). Big points, too, for using the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on the soundtrack. Right, off -- finally! -- to see The September Issue. I'll blog about that in the morning, sitting on a train back to London...

As films go, it’s hard to ignore a movie where the top-line talent is Christopher Walken, William H Macy and Morgan Freeman – three actors, it hardly needs saying, who are pretty much UNCUT incarnate. It’s a shame, though, that this fortuitous convergence of talent isn’t given a better vehicle. That’s not say The Maiden Heist is a bad film – it certainly isn’t – but it perhaps lacks the oomph you’d think they’d merit. Directed by Brit Peter Hewitt – he who made Sliding Doors – it’s an amiable, if lightweight caper movie, where the three leads play veteran museum security guards who decide to rob their favourite exhibits when a new curator plans to change the collection. The pleasure, inevitably, is watching the three of them play off each other. Walken is quietly intense, Freeman laid back and amiable, Macy borderline neurotic. To some degree, they’re all playing to type: in the opening sequence, Walken’s Roger drifts in a fantasy whereby the museum is invaded by armed robbers, whom he dispatches with both guns blazing – exactly as you’d imagine Walken would do in pretty much any film he’s appeared in with a vowel in the title. There’s plenty of fun watching them bicker and fanny around conducting midnight dry runs of the heist dressed in balaclavas. There’s great support, too, from Marcia Gay Harden as Roger’s awful, crass (but kind-hearted) wife. It’s all very sweet, good-natured fare. But, like I said, you can’t really stop wishing these three dudes had been working with meatier, more substantial material.

It says much, perhaps, about the enduring appeal of James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice that it’s been adapted three times already for cinema and, astonishingly, even once as an opera. This year, you can add two more adaptations - Vasilis Douvlis' The Homecoming and Jerichow, from writer-director Christian Petzold. [youtube]mRO_3aCVuMs[/youtube] Jerichow is a small town to the west of Berlin. As the film opens, ex-soldier Thomas (Benno Fuermann) has returned home for his mother’s funeral. He’s met, grave-side, by two men to whom he owes money. There is a sudden, shocking moment of violence and Thomas is left for dead. In a way, these opening 10 minutes set the tone. Full of stately Stedicam shots and passages of brooding silence, they build an atmosphere of unease that runs through the film like slow-acting poison. Thomas, serendipitously, meets Ali (Hilmi Sozer), the owner of a chain of local stores, and after Ali loses his license he offers Thomas a job as his driver. Ali has a wife, the graceful but distant Laura (Nina Hoss). She and Thomas – as fans of Cain’s novel will know – soon start an affair. Things do not end well. Although one of the key filmmakers in the New German Cinema, Petzold’s previous films – Yella and The State I Am In – both doffed their cap to American movies. Yella borrowed from Herk Harvey’s 1962 b-horror movie, Carnival Of Souls, while The State I Am In in many ways played out as a homage to Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty. But while in those movies Petzold filtered his influences via observations on present-day Germany, this riff on Cain’s novel seems to have no such subtext. He seems happy here to let it play as a tightly constructed psychological thriller. There’s much to admire here – not least the performances from Fuermann and Hoss. Their blankness and inscrutability make it hard to determine quite what they’re thinking, which adds conspicuously to the tension. By the end, you're forced to wonder quite how complicit Ali, even, was in the unfolding of events, or whether Laura had perhaps more ambivalent feelings towards Thomas than you might have imagined.

I first met film maker Andrea Arnold at the Sundance festival in 2003, when she was premiering her short film, Wasp. An eventual Oscar winner, Wasp was a bleak but compelling slice of socio-realist cinema about a single mother trying to raise her kids on a claustrophobic London council estate. Arnold revisits, to some degree, the themes of Wasp for Fish Tank, her second full-length feature. Already highly praised in Cannes – it was one of only three British films in competition – it’s certainly the best film I’ve seen since arriving in Edinburgh. A lot of this is down to Katie Jarvis, Arnold’s 17 year-old novice lead who the director spotted, on a train station, rowing with her boyfriend. As Mia, the main character in Fish Tank, she’s in every scene; it’s a phenomenal undertaking for a debuting actress. 15 year-old Mia lives with her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) in an Essex council estate. Mia has been expelled from school, and she spends most of her time rowing with other girls on the estate or sinking bottles of cheap supermarket booze. Joanne, you suspect, has rarely shown her children much in the way of affection, and Mia and Tyler mask any disappointment or hurt at such neglect with bloody-minded scorn and almost perpetual anger, lashing out at anyone and anything given half a chance. Mia, though, does harbour dreams of being a dancer; she breaks into a disused flat on the estate and, with music playing on her tiny portable iPod speakers, practises her moves. Things change when Joanne takes up with the charming, handsome Conor (Michael Fassbinder), who acts like a real father to the girls – even taking the family on trips into the Essex countryside. He is supportive, too, of Mia, as she confides in him that she has an audition as a dancer in a local nightclub. Mia, unused to receiving anything remotely resembling encouragement, is uncertain how to respond, alternating between suspicion and gratitude. It’s not giving much away to reveal that there is something looming with Conor and events take a particularly unpleasant turn. Jarvis and Fassbinder are superb -- their performances fizz with energy and chemistry. Arnold, meanwhile, finds incredible flashes of beauty in the urban sprawl, whether it be a skyline or, in a scene that touches on magic realism, the sudden appearance of a horse. I'll revisit Fish Tank in more depth when I review for its theatrical release in September. And you can see some clips here.

It’s been five years since director Shane Meadows and his long-term on screen collaborator Paddy Considine last worked together. That was for Dead Man’s Shoes, a violent revenge drama that took Considine’s natural, wired intensity and amped it up to an uncomfortable degree. Considine tends to specialise – for Meadows, at least – in charismatic, explosive figures and while his run of movies together with Meadows has proved thrilling and memorable, you might have cause to wonder where they could take their collaborations next. [youtube]1f-HRG-kahs[/youtube] Well, Le Donk – while a slight 70 minutes (the same length as last year's Somers Town) – certainly offers much in terms of demonstrating the adaptability of their professional relationship. It’s an improvised fake documentary, with Meadows playing himself, shooting a film about Le Donk (Considine), a former roadie who gets himself back in the game working for the Arctic Monkeys at their Old Trafford gigs in 2007. Along the way, Le Donk uses the opportunity to gain valuable exposure for genuine Nottingham rap prodigy, Dean Palinczuk, aka Scorzayzee. (It is, perhaps, perfectly reasonable that Meadows would know an 18 stone rapper called Scorzayzee). Fans of Meadows may recognise Le Donk; the character first appeared, in fact, about 8 years ago on the DVD Extras for Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (you can see it here). Apparently, both Meadows and Considine were keen to give Le Donk a proper outing. The impetus for resurrecting here came when Meadows was invited to film the Monkeys gig, but turned it down; whatever he shot would never be as good as Woodstock, he claimed. Instead, they decided to film around the gig and give Le Donk a starring role. They shot this for £30,000 in 5 days. Incidentally, it’s the first in what Meadows hopes will be a wave of five-day features designed to encourage first-time filmmakers. The result – for anyone who’s seen Saxondale – may broadly feel like pretty familiar turf. Le Donk (real name: Nicholas) is a gormless, self-delusional figure. He’s split with his girlfriend Olivia (Olivia Coleman), who’s close to giving birth to their first child. In the interim, she’s settled with a new boyfriend who’s clearly everything Le Donk isn’t: kind, compassionate and sympathetic. He kicks out at everyone he can: at Meadows at the start of the film, at Scorzayzee pretty much throughout. He is, he believes, clearly better than all of them. This being a Shane Meadows film, though, there is redemption. It’s an extremely funny 70 minutes, with Le Donk’s constant stream of malapropisms providing much of the humour. When Meadows’ sound man is trying to attach a mic to him, he bellows “I feel like Donnie Darko about to infiltrate the mob!” He refers to the "Article Monkeys". In fact, you wonder quite how he managed to charm Olivia -- seemingly a repository of endless tolerance when it comes to her ex -- so hopelessly crass and socially inept is he. The Arctic Monkeys cameo (Considine, you may remember, starred in their "Leave Before The Lights Come On" video) -- watching Scorzayzee rapping to an empty house at the Old Trafford soundcheck. Scorzayzee himself is a mountain of a lad, decked out in an over-size t-shirt and a baseball cap with "Kids need hugs not drugs" emblazoned on it. He seems withdrawn and awkward, but on stage his raps are surprisingly effective -- despite Le Donk's insistence on adding his own awful, pointless chorus ("Calm down Deirdre Barlow! Calm down Harold Shipman!"). If you want to see if yourself, here's a clip. Anyway, it's good -- if not entirely revelatory -- stuff, and a nice stop-gap before Meadows' next, proper feature. A horror film, apparently. Can't wait. OK, I'm going to go and try and see some short films now, as I've got a screening of Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank at 8. I'll be blogging about that first thing tomorrow. See you then.

Quite where American indie cinema can go next, so thoroughly has it been co-opted by the mainstream, is a big question. Writer-director Lynn Shelton offers, at least, a moderately novel solution with Humpday. A bromedy about two friends who set out to make a gay porn movie, it feels at times like a mumblecore take on a Judd Adaptow movie. Although, of course, while Apatow’s films ultimately serve to reinforce the strengths of the masculine dynamic, Shelton seems to set out to dig around in the frailties of the male ego. [youtube]tMr_LQDlYH8[/youtube] Ben and Andrew are old college friends whose lives have quite clearly diverged. Ben is now married, living in Seattle. He owns a house, has an office job, and with his wife Anna is planing to start a family. He has become, to some degree, “picket fence”; while Andrew is now “a bit Kerouac”, living as a itinerant artist everywhere from Mexico to Columbia. Andrew arrives at Ben’s house unannounced in the wee small hours, and the pair find themselves reverting, with ease, to their old college-buddy routine. But it’s more than just heterosexual one-upmanship; to some extent, Ben and Andrew are jealous of each other’s lives. Ben wishes he could have some of Andrew’s free-spirit, while for his part Andrew admires that Ben has made, at least, something solid from his life. Both men, though, have an unspoken wish to reconnect with their youth while they still can. At a splendidly entertaining party in a free-sex commune that Andrew drags Ben to, the friends drunkenly decide to enter Humpday – a local amateur porn festival. As you might expect, with the beer flowing and the joints being passed, the idea is ludicrously stupid: they decide to make a gay porn film, the USP being that both men are straight. What comes, then, is an often very funny and well observed take on the complexities and contradictions of male friendship, as Shelton makes her characters explore exactly what it means to them to have sex together on camera. What is says about them, and their relationship. And, indeed, as the film’s strongest female voice, what Anna’s own take on the extraordinary situation might be. Shelton’s unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall approach gives Humpday a certain intimacy – and, indeed, a considerable squeamishness. The film’s final half hour, with the near-naked Andrew and Ben alone in a hotel room running through the ramifications of shooting the film, is extremely funny and often quite moving. Shelton’s leads – Mark Duplass as Ben and Joshua Leonard as Andrew – are both excellent, running through testosterone-fuelled brinkmanship to quiet meditation about their own friendship. Right. Off to see Shane Meadows’ Le Donk. I’ll report back about that one later today.

For a film that opens with a woman walking through the snow, it’s perhaps apt that the subjects under scrutiny here are a collection of cold, rather wintry folks. The woman in question, Hannah (Sophie Rois), is a single mother living in a remote Alpine village, whose discover of the body of an elderly woman sets up the narrative of this excellent, slow-burning domestic drama. I’m reminded, to some degree, of Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'aime, a similarly excoriating movie about family matters in which shocking, key events are deployed with elegance and minimal fuss, entirely to its credit. The body is the mother of Georg Winter (Josef Bierbichler), the architect of the title who clearly seems more comfortable with the clean lines and soothing geometry of his job ("Dreams you can walk through," as he describes them) than he is dealing with his family. His wife, Eva (Hilde Van Mieghem), is on one hand sexually frustrated with her husband's remoteness, on the other disdainful of her husband’s upbringing in the Alpine boondocks. She is embarrassingly over-attentive towards their two late-teenage children: son, Jan (Mattias Schweighöfer), a loafer, and daughter Reh (Sandra Hüller), an over-achiever with hopes of becoming a professional violinist. There are undertows, of course. Jan and Reh’s relationship is – though I might be misreading this – possibly incestuous; Georg himself has a habit of kissing Reh on the mouth, and the pair of them go running in the snow naked. Georg is referred to as “absent” by Reh, a period that began, it seems, around the time Jan was born. Georg is a brooding father who seems to have no connection with either his family or his late mother (his speech at her wake is faltering and vague; there’s no love lost here, it seems). As the Winters arrive in the Alps for the funeral, first time writer-director Ina Weisse explores the family’s complex and dysfunctional relationships at a leisurely, but no less compelling pace. Hannah herself is key to explaining why Georg has become a distant man to his family. The scenes between Hannah and Georg – childhood friends, and perhaps more – are brilliantly handled, and an artful example of what’s not said between them having a far more significant impact than any dialogue. Out of a formidably accomplished cast, Rois is a stand out; her facial expressions, as she goes from the film’s default setting of cold-slash-distant to flashes of fire and excitement, and ultimately confusion, when she’s around Georg are superbly judged. Bierbichler – a bear of man – internalizes his many issues. He’s shut down to his family, but you sense there’s a lot roiling away beneath the surface, and the gradual revelations that emerge are delivered (as with Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'aime) like tiny, but profoundly impactful, emotional depth charges. As the film develops, there are moments of quiet but extraordinary tension. Eva's drunken flirtations with Hannah's son threaten to turn The Architect into some kind of Sophoclean tragedy; realising Reh is missing, Jan frantically follows her footsteps in the snow into the wilderness and you wonder whether one, or both, of them might die from exposure. In fact, without flagging up spoilers, Georg's many secrets may end in at least one death. It’s perhaps the inevitability of being a first-time filmmaker that Weisse’s use of foreshadowing and telegraphing is occasionally a bit shonky. The snow-bound setting (as beautifully shot as it is) and the Winters’ surname perhaps signposts more than is necessary the family’s internal problems. All the same, this is an excellent drama. The trailer's not on Youtube, I'm afraid, but you can see a clip from the film here. Hope you enjoy. Right, off to see The September Issue, a film about magazines. Good Lord. I’ll try and get my thoughts on that posted this evening before I find a party to go to…

I'm up in Edinburgh, in case it needs some minor clarification, for this year's Film Festival. As usual, there's a satisfyingly wide array of movies to see, and I'll be blogging a couple of times a day between now and Tuesday to report back the highlights. Presently, I'm off to try and see Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker, an Iraq War drama that's got many of my peers up here in quite a lather of excitement. Meantime, here's one of the best movies I've seen so far. Turn It Loose [youtube]aGC2IbiYbd8[/youtube] One small but notable trend in documentary filmmaking that's emerged in the last few years has been the competition doc. I'm talking about films like Spellbound and Sounds Like Teen Spirit that cover the emotional gamut experienced by contestants during a competitive event; in the case of Spellbound it was the American Spelling Bee Championship, while in Sounds Like Teen Spirit, the junior Eurovision Song Contest. Turn It Loose, by first-time feature director Alastair Siddons, tracks the one-on-one "battles" between the world's best breakdancers in a disused power station in Soweto. As with Spellbound or ...Teen Spirit, your enjoyment of Turn It Loose is by no means predicated on whether or not you like, or indeed know much about the subject. It’s appeal lies, principally, in the characters themselves, but there’s also a fascinating socio-political subtext to the film that develops as Siddons and his crew travel to the contestants’ home countries. We meet French Algerian Lilou, who lives “like a battery hen” in the slums of Lyon. Lilou, a devout Muslim, wears a hidjab in one battle against American contestant RoxRite in protest against America’s ongoing incursions into the Middle East. RoxRite, for his own part, lives with his family in one of the poorest parts of northern California and complains about being singled out simply because of his nationality (he’s in fact Mexican, but there). Ben-J, from the ghettoes of Dakar, carries himself with quiet nobility, and seems profoundly aware of the pressure on him to succeed. There’s Taisuke, in Tokyo, who speaks abstractly about presumably dark family troubles, before breakdancing in Shibuya Junction; to Taisuke, as with all the competitors, breakdancing provides a focus and a relief from poverty. As more than one character notes, if it wasn’t for breakdancing, they’d be selling drugs or running with gangs. They speak of breakdancing, and battles, in either gladiatorial or spiritual terms, and there’s something incredibly positive about their attitudes that, without sounding grumpy, feels refreshing when you perhaps consider some of the less savory aspects of hip hop culture. Siddons’ film is handsomely shot. The Dakar sequences, for instance, are filmed with a bold colour palette that resembles City Of God. The bouts themselves achieve an almost Matrix-like quality, Siddons deploying image capturing techniques in the edit to freeze contestants in mid-air, speeding up or slowing down the action, splicing hip hop with classical music. It’s a formidably impressive mastery of his digital box of tricks (Siddons, for his part, has a background in promo clips for The Streets, Roots Manuva and –let’s not hold it against him – The Towers Of London). It’s interesting, perhaps, to wonder where the funding for this film came from. The tournament itself is sponsored by Red Bull, and it’s entirely possible they’ve invested money in the film; but, encouragingly, they exercise no editorial control here. Anyway, I’ll be back later to post about a German film I’ve just seen, The Architect. More soon.