Monday musing

So The Wrestler won the Golden Lion and earned a rave from Variety's Todd McCarthy. Shame I wasn't still in Venice to see it. I was however tickled by the fact that Gianfranco Rosi's Below Sea Level won the Orizzonti Documentary Prize. A moving, melancholic and wryly funny look at a group of displaced individuals living in a community of buses, cars, vans and mobile homes in the Californian desert, I saw it on my last day on the Lido and it jumped right to the top of my list of favourites. (I'm aware I still have yet to post my final review round up. Again, sorry for my tardiness.) Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker also found much favour from the remaining attendees and I hope to catch up with both at the forthcoming London Film Festival where, I presume, they will be showing — although I won't know for sure until Wednesday morning when the line up is officially announced — and for which Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire has now been chosen as the closing night gala.

Elsewhere the US box office spluttered into September with a piss poor weekend, the box office charts led by the Nicolas Cage-starrer Bangkok Dangerous which didn't even make $8million. I thought the Pang brothers' original was stylish and empty but screaming horses wouldn't drag me to this remake. What the heck happened to Cage? Oh yes, terrible choices, I almost forgot.

In the UK, The Duchess duked it out with Rocknrolla both of which pulled out the PR/marketing stops with Keira's lovely visage adorning many a magazine cover and Guy Ritchie's latest gangsta outing, equally, hard to miss, although, thus far, I've managed it. Still, even without my money, the cockney geezers outgunned the period patter...