The 2010 Raindance Film Festival

With my invitation to today's London Film Festival press launch mysteriously lost in the post, it fell to the Raindance Film Festival to provide my film-festival-press-launch needs yesterday, at a posh hotel in London which on any other occasion would have kicked me out the moment they saw my shoes.

My primary reason for going was that I was told there would be freakin' apes there, which sounded amazing. As it turned out there had been a hilarious error in pronunciation because when I arrived it transpired that the freakin' apes were in fact free canapés. But what canapés they were:

Hand model supplied by Ultra Culture. Shirt: Model's own.

Post-canapés, a man in what appeared to be a pair of 3D glasses failed to introduce himself before talking about the 18th Raindance Film Festival. I'm assuming he was someone who had something to do with it rather than a bloke who'd just stumbled out of Piranha 3D, into the hotel and read out the the press release, but he left quite quickly so we'll never know.

Raindance's opening film is Jackboots On Whitehall, a film whose trailer contains exactly no LOLs despite advertising it as a comedy. It's released on the same day as A Town Called Panic, drawing inevitable comparisons between two comedies starring crudely animated plastic figurines destined to face off against each other in a battle of the box office, which will probably be won by The Life And Death Of Charlie St Cloud, starring Zac Efron, a completely different crudely animated plastic figurine.



The festival's closing film is Son Of Babylon, a "poignant Iraqi drama" about which I have no jokes.

In between there's a skipload of "alternative" (i.e. low-budget) films I've never heard of with brilliant titles like Flooding With Love For The Kid, Hi! Otsuka Drugstore, Lummox, Ollie Kepler's Expanding Purple World, Robert Mitchum Is Dead, The Vice Guide To Liberia and Too Much Pussy.

Raindance's most news-worthy screening is a private showing of cheery laff-blast A Serbian Film, already touted as the most depraved, sick and generally unpleasant thing ever made in the history of ever. You can read a synopsis of it on Wikipedia if you haven't eaten recently, although it'll be all over the Daily Mail before long getting all the publicity it needs.

Raindance's other big draw is the fact that on its jury is none other than Lemmy from Motörhead, whose qualifications for being on a film festival jury include acting roles as diverse as 'Lemmy Von Motörhead' in Airheads, 'Bum In Park' in John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and 'Good Lemmy / Bad Lemmy' in Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.

If I get to see anything at Raindance I'll share my brains with you, but if you'd rather see them yourself than have some crap-rambling halfwit spoil them for you, pop along to the Apollo Cinema in London's Piccadilly Circus sometime at the begining of October and hope that A Serbian Film isn't on the day you're there.

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