Film Reviews: July 2006 Archives

This was the first of the short film collections of this festival sadly we could only vote for one film as our favourite and of the 12 we were shown it was almost impossible to choose between them:

Burning Love: This was a quirky, dialog-less, but slightly slow moving short about a young lady (who apparently could not afford trousers, and was played by one of the clumpettes) who upsets one of her domestic appliances.

Living Room: A dark and harrowing tale of domestic abuse by Alan Seiglow. Difficult to watch, and sadly, despite being initially intriguing, lacking any cinematic inventiveness. The short did pack a lot of emotion into a short time.

Socially Denying Helen: A one-trick film, where the trick essentially involves a trumpeter blasting out tunes on the London Underground. This film wins due to its sheer novelty, simplicity, and the added value of seeing normally frosty Londoners reacting well to this intrusion.

JA05TBO: An experimental short starring the famous Joosy Pidgeon. Filmed in Super-8 and using a clever technique it is a surprisingly enjoyable film of this type.

Interchange: Unlike the above, this film was not intriguing, the exploration of train travel and memory seemed to wipe my mind of any recollection about it. I seem to remember that it was shot in black and white.

Silvertown: An interesting insight into junkyard and dredger life in London, unfortunately marred by corrupt projection.

Apathy or Activism?: This was the film I voted for, it was an understated yet thought provoking voyage into the general public’s input into political process.

Invisible: A well produced short about a subject that we hear too much about in Cambridge, homelessness.

Stuffed: A joyful and entertaining piece about getting “it” out of your system.

Myth 821 How Man Got Fire: Adam Proctors work nearly got my vote, sorry Adam! It was a lo-fi animated short and an amusing visual fabrication, but then it could be true!

De Sul: A higher budget short and a slow moving insight into why the language of the Cornish folk is dying out.

Perfect Day: A very high budget (when compared to the shoestrings that the other films were probably made with) and overly emotional piece about a single father sharing a day with his daughter. Good acting.

This was the first official screening of the 2006 Cambridge Film Festival, and a good choice for getting a sell-out performance, so what was the film like?

Disney studios hoist the spinnaker once more for Captain Jack Sparrow’s second adventure. Has it really been three years since the first one? Fans of the first film will not be disappointed and there is no requirement to have seen the first instalment beforehand as the few ‘in-jokes’ are quite easy to spot and the continuation of the plot is easy to pick up.

Once again Johnny Depp swaggers onto his newly acquired pirate ship and sounding more like a shipwrecked Withnail than ever before. This time the main problem that Sparrow has is that he discovers that he owes a debt to the fearsome Davy Jones, played in this case by the excellent Bill Nighy – who is initially difficult to spot since he has an octopus for a face!

In the meantime the clean-cut Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) is also searching for Sparrow, Turner is beholden to the evil Cutler Beckett (of the East India Company) as he has managed to prevent Turner from marrying Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) and has her incarcerated his dungeons.

When you consider the various other sub plots, cameo characters, and side-gimmicks, you have a film that is comparable to an instalment of Lord of the Rings. In fact “Pirates 2” does seem to borrow some of the essence of the film version of the Tolkien story, there are many more dark scenes and there is much more in the way of a gothic influence about the whole setting. Of course the film is also hilarious, there are many goofs and gags, the “Sparrow kebab” (I won’t spoil it) being one my particular favourites.

Is it really a suitable family film? This is one of the main questions in my mind. There is a large amount of horror for a 12A and there were certainly some much younger children in the audience (accompanied by adults). Should an 8-year-old really see an eye being pecked out by a crow? Even if the clever editing takes away most of the graphic realisation of the action? Fortunately these are questions that need only be answered by society and the film censors board, certainly the film pushes the bounds of a family film to the limit.

We were privileged at the Picturehouse to witness this film being projected on the flashy 2K projector, having read up a little about this it appears that this is a Christie 2K projector, which uses 3 DMD chips (digital micro-mirror device), one chip for each of the primary colours. Certainly from the back of the theatre I could not see any pixels and the clarity of the picture was amazing.

All credit to Gore Verbinski, director of this soon-to-be trilogy that combines an amazing cast and crew with incredible CGI effects and some really inventive sequences. I was pleased to discover that Verbinski was the creator of the ‘Budweiser Frog’ commercials, mighty oaks from acorns once again…

***** (out of 5)