Monday musing

Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK, typically a time for DIY, but I'm useless at that stuff. Thankfully.

Friday night was spent the BFI Southbank, hosting a special BFI/BAFTA Craft Event that also fell under the umbrella of the Comic Book Movies Season — a talk by two members from leading London visual effects house Double Negative — animation supervisor Eamonn Butler (Hellboy II: The Golden Army) and Paul Franklin, VFX supervisor on The Dark Knight — followed by a Q&A. Twas very interesting with tons of before and after clips. The Dark Knight footage was particularly illuminating, seeing quite how much VFX went into making a film look realistic. The Batpod, for instance, was almost all CGI.

Saturday night included a visit to FrightFest to see the Clive Barker short story adaptation The Midnight Meat Train which got several whoops of delight from the gorehounds in the audience although I found it rather disappointing. Barker's original was set on the New York subway, this was shot in LA, although I wasn't sure what city it was meant to be taking place in. And they couldn't even be bothered to shoot the cold storage scenes either in a real cold storage facility or, failing that, CGI some fake breathe in after. Stuff like that bothers me. Candyman is still the benchmark for Barker Books Of Blood adaptations.

Tomorrow I'm heading off to Italy for the 65th Venice Film Festival and have already got a list of 16/17 titles I'd definitely like to see, including the Coens' Burn After Reading, the new Takeshi Kitano, Archilles And The Tortoise, Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea, and Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's directorial debut The Burning Plain. Alas Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, Aronofsky's The Wrestler and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker are all screening after I leave, which is a bummer, but you can't see everything.

I'll be posting as often as I can while I'm in Venice with reviews, musings, and (hopefully) some photos.