Openreel, the open movie forum in Plymouth, opens its doors again tomorrow (Monday). The event will take place between 6pm and 9pm in the basement of Fuel, on North Hill, Plymouth.
Organisers Sarah and Chris advised D+CFilm to note the new address and offered this call out to would be participants ‘Whether you want to screen last year’s final piece or show a work in progress or just sit back and be entertained we would love to see you downstairs in Fuel.’
You take your films along, they show the films - if only all of life were that simple.
Music - pop promos, live events, interviews, exclusives.
Plymouth - a view of the city, either fictional or documentary.
Open category - factual.
Open category - fiction.
The festival’s highlight should be the swanky awards ceremony in Plymouth’s new Roland Levinsky art centre, where winning filmmakers will finally get their mitts on a prestigious Frankie gong.
To get you in the mood, let’s have another look at one of last year’s winning Motionplymouth entries. It’s called Across The Universe and it’s an intergalactic pop video made in filmmaker Kevin Jarvis’s front room in Paignton. Pete Waterman is, no doubt, on the blower to Kevin ‘as we speak’.
We all know the Cornwall Film Festival is pretty rad - focussing, as it does, on Cornish filmmaking, local and national premieres, masterclasses, workshops, discussions, parties, yada yada yada.
So, any self-respecting D+Cineastes would leap at the chance to get involved, wouldn’t they? Which is lucky cos the festival needs enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers to help assist in the office two to three days a week.
Applicants should be a dab hand at using various computer packages, marketing, advertising and have a good telephone manner.
If you’re interested, send yer CV to director@cornwallfilmfestival.com and the festival bods will give you a shout if they like the cut of your jib.
Oh, and if you do get the job thanks to us, don’t forget to give us a wave at
the festival…
Julie Taymor’s ambitious musical Across The Universe is released on Friday, and we have to say we’re intrigued.
Co-written by Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais (famous for, as if you need reminding, TV’s Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet), the flick imagines a love story in Sixties America set to the music of The Beatles. Well, obviously.
We’re intrigued because, like Moulin Rouge, Across The Universe appears to have split critics down the middle (not literally - that’d be disgusting).
Empire magazine calls it ‘wonderful’ and insists the movie will ‘reconfirm your faith that film can provide comfort and solace’. Premiere mag, however, describes it as ‘mortifyingly soft-headed’.
Decide for yourself when it hits cinemas in Devon and Cornwall on Friday. In the meantime, here’s a taster of what to expect. We like the bit before foghorn lady starts barking along to Helter Skelter. Blee!
Who’d have thought that artistic and creative endeavour helps generate tourist pulling power?! That’s, like, one of the things we’ve been going on about for ages - and it seems it’s especially true of TV and film.
Just check out the report by Olsberg|SPI called Stately Attraction - How Film and Television Programmes Promote Tourism in the UK.
One example is Port Isaac in Cornwall, which ‘has seen tourism levels rise thanks to Doc Martin, the series starring Martin Clunes as a doctor who’s relocated to Cornwall from London’.
We mentioned it yesterday, but London’s Raindance Film Festival is kicking off today (Tuesday) with Allan Moyle’s satanists-versus-stoners wheeze Weirdsville (click below to watch the trailer).
D+CFilm asked festival founder Elliot Grove how he came up with the whole Raindance thang. We were taking feverish notes, of course, in anticipation of D+CFree @ Two Short Nights.
What made you start Raindance?
Elliot Grove: I had worked as a scenic artist and set designer on over 68 feature films and 700 commercials, both at BBC’s Shepherd’s Bush 1974-77, and in my native Toronto in the early Eighties. When I moved to London in 1986 with my family, I entertained a fantasy of becoming a property magnate, and went bust in the 1990 recession. After a year of wallowing in self-pity, my neighbour, an elderly retired farmer said to me: ‘Elliot, as long as you are feeling sorry for yourself, no doctor in the world can help you’. He was right, of course, but I no longer had any film contacts here or back in Toronto. So I hatched a plan of imported so-called gurus from Hollywood to give seminars and workshops enabling me to learn, make contacts and survive until something concrete kicked in. After a few months, mates of mine started making films, and back then, in 92/93, there wasn’t really anywhere special to show British films. So I started the festival, in Leicester Square, to showcase the work of British filmmakers.
What was the reaction of British filmmakers, and the British film industry when you started Raindance?
Raindance was pretty much ignored by the Brits until about six years ago. It was the Japanese, French, German and American filmmakers who discovered Raindance well before the Brits.
So why did you chose the name Raindance? Surely it creates confusion with Sundance.
Because of the ‘dance’ you need to do to make your film, and because it rains a lot in London!
Is it harder or easier to get people interested in the Raindance Film Festival?
It’s actually a lot easier now to get people interested in Raindance for several reasons. Firstly, we have a reputation for showing really excellent films. And films often never seen before in Europe. Distributors regularly come to Raindance to find new films, especially the Asian films. Secondly, people are getting pretty tired of Hollywood fare, and thirdly, independent cinema, by its very nature, is about topics told by deeply passionate people. Generally, these topics and stories are stories so raw and visceral that Hollyood doesn’t dare touch them.
What makes Raindance different?
Raindance is unique because we rely on films submitted to us by filmmakers, we who work at Raindance are filmmakers, and most of our films are by debut filmmakers.
How would you describe a Raindance movie?
Off-Hollywood!
So there you go. Here’s the Weirdsville trailer - featuring the fantastic Peter Dinklage. Look out for more Raindance stuff on D+CFilm over the next few days.
To tie in with last week’s opening of Tarantino’s Death Proof, Nucleus Films
has released Grindhouse Trailer Classics - a two-hour DVD compilation of cheesy, sleazy and violent movie promos and trailers from the golden
age of exploitation cinema.
Click here to get an idea of what to expect. It’s the trailer for They Call Her One Eye. That’s not very politically correct, is it, viewers? The movie should be named They Call Her Visually Impaired. That’s a lot nicer.
The Raindance Film Festival begins tomorrow (Tuesday) in London, featuring, as always, an eclectic menu of indie fare from around the globe.
The UK’s largest independent film festival celebrates its 15th birthday this year, and kicks off with Allan Moyle’s satanists-versus-stoners wheeze Weirdsville.
Raindance has also done a deal with Tiscali to make some of its films available via the web at the same time as they premiere in London.
Elliot Grove, who founded the festival, said online distribution would allow filmmakers to find an audience without having to go through the traditional Hollywood system.
He said: “With the advent of online films and services such as Joost and Babelgum, all film festivals, including Raindance, have to constantly evaluate their programme to ensure an attractive off-line presence.
“Some film festivals will fail to do so, and I suppose will fail. Any film festival without a online strategy is, in my opinion, doomed.”
A sobering thought, eh viewers?! But let’s not worry about that too much now. Let’s have a look at one of the other flicks showing at Raindance this year - Mamoru Oshii’s Amazing Lives Of The Fast Food Grifters. Click below to watch the trailer. It’s shot in ‘Superlivemation’, doncha know!
You only have a week left to submit your film/tape/mobile opus for this year’s Motionplymouth festival (November 12-17).
Yup, entries must be in by October 1, so you really need to get a move on. The compo has the following categories. We’ll bold bits up to highlight just how bloody important the information is.
Music - pop promos, live events, interviews, exclusives.
Plymouth - a view of the city, either fictional or documentary.
Open category - factual.
Open category - fiction.
The festival’s highlight should be the swanky awards ceremony in Plymouth’s new Roland Levinsky art centre, where winning filmmakers will finally get their mitts on a prestigious Frankie gong.
To get you in the mood, let’s take a look at one of last year’s winning Motionplymouth entries. It’s called The Extra-ordinary Light-bulb (yes, the title does have all those hyphens - Oxford English Dictionary be damned!) and it’s by Finbar Mallow. Crazy guy, crazy hyphens.
Everything about Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull depresses us. Its unwieldy title (there’s two ‘the’s in it, for chuff’s sake), its barrel-chested and grizzled star, its wrongheaded producer (remember what happened last time George Lucas revisited films he made zonks ago?). Ach, it’s enough to make you sit and slap your head for about an hour.
That said, rather than Jar Jar Binks we’re getting the likeable Shia LaBeouf playing Indy’s long-lost son and it’ll be great to see the still quite sexy (in an Eighties Margot Kidder-nicotined-teeth kinda way) Karen Allen back in action as his mom.
There’s also Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone and John Hurt in there somewhere too, so perhaps it won’t be all bad. Oh, and there’s that theme tune…
But really - Harrison Ford looks like bloody Bogart in African Queen these days! Jeez.
Still, you can keep up with all the comings and goings of IJATKOTCS (hey, catchy!) on the official website, should you so wish. In the meantime, here’s the cast playing kissy kissy at Comic-Con a couple months back. It was before the title was announced and grandad Spielberg is dressed like Clive Dunn. They don’t like it up em!
Jacques Tati (that’s French for potato) is making an appearance in Combeinteignhead on Sunday (September 23) from 5pm.
The Alliance Française and Outdoor Ciné Club are screening Mon Oncle featuring the famous French funnyman. And it’s free, so head on down to Hearn Field, Combeinteignhead (think Coombe Cellars between Shaldon and Newton Abbot).
Future Shorts, those funksters committed to making short film a thing of the future (have you checked out the D+CFree competition for short film?), are popping along to the Exeter Phoenix again tonight for their monthly showing of all that is internationally cool in shorts.
And if that isn’t enough, the Creative Collective are meeting on Thursday in the Exeter Phoenix media centre to have a look at anything that’s brought along, basically.
Check out the future of shorts this week, and check out this Future Short trailer.
There’s yet more bad news for the team behind One Plymouth TV.
Regular readers will remember we reported that the city’s very-own telly station had put back its start date from this month to sometime next year (click here to refresh your memory).
Now it appears the media business run by its founder has ceased trading.
Automatic TV And Media, based on the Hoe, has been officially wound up, and
is insolvent.
The firm, run by One Plymouth TV’s David Orton, specialised in corporate video and design and broadcast programming.
Philip White, operations manager at One Plymouth TV, told the Plymouth Herald that the channel was still holding talks with Sky and planned to start broadcasting early next year.
Mr White said he did not think the death of Automatic would impact on investor confidence in One Plymouth TV, and that the total amount owed was “small handfuls of thousands of pounds”, with Mr Orton the main creditor.
Plymouth’s Twofour may wish to disagree - it’s seeking the return of more than £10,000 owed for using its “services”. Oh dear.
We still have our fingers crossed for the One Plymouth project, especially given the wealth of talent poached from local schools, universities and colleges involved in the thing, but things aren’t looking good.
What do you think? Send your views to info@dandcfilm.co.uk or simply post a comment below.
