LFF 2016: Have You Seen My Movie?

If there's one thing the movies love, it's the movies. Movie maker Paul Anton Smith loves the movies' love of the movies, so he's made a movie about it from bits of movies set at the movies, and it's a real movies movie. Raiding hundreds of films from An Affair To Remember to Zodiac for their cinema-based scenes, Smith has constructed an almost-narrative built entirely from breathtakingly edited clips, and it's the perfect film to be showing at a film festival.

The whole experience of going to the flicks, as seen on screen, is represented here: there's Alvy Singer waiting in line trying not to have a stroke; there's Tyler Durden splicing frames of cocks into kids' films; there's Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey watching a trailer for Flames Of Passion. Once the main feature starts, people make out, people watch people making out, people break up and Mickey Rourke sticks his dick through the bottom of a popcorn carton. Meanwhile horror and comedy rub shoulders as Max Cady laughs too loud and Danny Zuko cops a feel of Sandy's norks.

On the one hand it's a chance to watch a seamlessly dovetailed sequence of film clips, but on the other Have You Seen My Movie? shows us that all human life is here, gathered in the darkness beneath a flickering beam of magic for a couple of hours at a time. It's a celebration of the act of moviegoing, a prompt to recall some of your own memories (that trip to the Shrewsbury Empire for a Star Wars / The Empire Strikes Back double bill in 1982 has a lot to answer for) and a surprising indicator of just how often the movies go to the movies. Its premise wears a little thin before its 139 minutes are up, but you can't deny the power of a film that teaches you to never, ever accept popcorn from Mickey Rourke.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

Incredible that something which contains so much naked Eva Green could be an unpleasant experience, but there you go.

Full review here.

The Iron Man 2 Manifesto

Hi! I'm Iron Man. Of all the films coming up in the blockbuster season of 2010, I'm here to tell you why you should watch Iron Man 2 rather than anything else, with my 7-point Iron Manifesto:

1. I pledge to get rid of my friend Rhodey from the first film because he was too interesting and a bit fat. My new Rhodey will be a slimline version who can easily fit into one of my spare suits, will immediately know how to operate the suit even though it took me about an hour of screen time in the first film, and will be entirely devoid of character so as not to show me up.

2. In fact I pledge that all my fellow characters will be as weak as possible so that I'm the only one anybody remembers. I'll waste Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell as rubbish one-dimensional villains, I'll give Scarlett Johansson a figure-hugging suit and one fight scene but nothing else and I promise to use the mighty Samuel L Jackson to turn up, deliver expository dialogue and bugger off again.

3. Despite having the most technologically advanced and downright incredible suit ever made, I pledge to resort to punch-ups in most of my fight scenes. If I do suddenly reveal a very cool laser that you've never seen before as - inexplicably - a last resort, I pledge to explain why I don't just use it all the time by muttering something about how it can only be used once. I also promise not to bore you with why that's the case.

4. I pledge to introduce an irrelevant subplot about how that thing on my chest that keeps me alive is also killing me, and furthermore I pledge to solve this problem with a further pointless subplot about my Dad which will be one of the most ridiculous contrivances in modern cinema.

5. Remember that cute scene from the trailer where Pepper Potts kisses my helmet (fnerk) and I jump out of a plane saying "you complete me"? Well I pledge not to include that in the film. I do, however, pledge to kiss her in a scene that is supposed to carry some emotional weight but is in fact about as emotionally charged as a tin can kissing a stick can be.

6. I pledge to include an obligatory final scene after the credits that means nothing to anyone except the most hardcore Marvel Comics fan.

7. Finally, I pledge to do absolutely nothing for the superhero genre, despite recent envelope-pushers like The Dark Knight and Kick-Ass, and I promise to do it with as vague a story and script as possible so as not to confuse the kiddlywinks.

So that's the Iron Man 2 Manifesto. I hope you'll choose my film as the one to spend a tenner on because we need all the cash we can to parp out another one of these in a couple of years.

Thanks!
Iron Man
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