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Showing posts with the label Film - Review

I Am Weekender

Glasgow Film Theatre,  11 March, 9pm; 2 March, 12.45pm. Four stars When Camden Town indie-dance tearaways Flowered Up released Weekender in 1992, this snarling thirteen-minute dance culture anthem caused all sorts of bother. The just shy of twenty-minute film accompanying the record’s urgent paean to 24/7 working-class hedonism probably didn’t help. Only Channel 4 had the bottle to show it, as the gutter press frothed with predictably sensationalist ire.    An early outing from video director WIZ, aka Andrew Whiston, Weekender charted a big night out for likely lad Joe, played by TV actor Lee Whitlock, with all the highs, lows, pills, thrills and bellyaches that ensued. Some of the film’s mix of social-realist grit and chemically enhanced dreamscape may resemble the bleakness of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, with whom WIZ studied, but it also set the tone for a million mad-for-it movies to come. Danny Boyle apparently said there would have been no Trainspotting film without it.

Luke Fowler – Patrick

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2020 until October 11 th , 2020 Luke Fowler is no stranger to remixing the lives of crucial counter-cultural figures on film. Experimental and electronic music too has long fired Fowler’s oeuvre, from nights at Glasgow club, Optimo, to his own adventures in disco with the band, AMOR. Fowler’s new 21-minute study of Hi-NRG disco pioneer Patrick Cowley combines both strands, and follows Fowler’s 2017 study of American electronic composer Martin Bartlett, Electro-Pythagorus.   Premiering as part of the 2020 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, which this year has moved its 53-film programme online, Fowler’s film continues follows his 2018 BFAMAF commission, Enceindre. That film was made with sound recordist Chris Watson, who opened this year’s festival with Dark Cinema, a sonic companion piece recorded in and around Berwick, and available in podcast form as part of the programme.   While seemingly worlds apart from Enceindre’s parallel images of Berwi

Ghost Light - Edinburgh International Festival 2020

Edinburgh International Festival Five stars Dark times require enlightened responses. So it is with Edinburgh International Festival’s reaction to the enforced cancellation of the annual arts extravaganza due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. With no live events possible, as with so many endeavours over the last few months, EIF has turned to digital evocations of its assorted splendours to make up its My Light Shines On programme.   Hope Dickson Leach’s thirty-minute film for the National Theatre of Scotland takes its cue from the theatrical tradition of leaving a solitary light on in theatre buildings when they’re closed. Conceived with NTS artistic director Jackie Wylie and dramaturg/director Philip Howard, the result is a slow-burning cinematic love letter to those that breathe life into them when you’re not looking.    On the one hand, as the camera leads us on a back-stage tour of Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, we get a bite-size collage of NTS greatest hits past, present and po