Glasgow Film Festival: Whisky Mit Vodka and Pere Ubu

If you live in, or around, Glasgow and like cinema, you may well be aware that the Glasgow Film Festival is on.

There's usually something interesting being shown, and certainly plenty of stuff that may not get a great deal of attention (often unfairly). This being the case, I'm trying to catch some films over the next couple of weeks.

WHISKY MIT VODKA

So, on Friday, Stripey Baz asks me what I'm up to Saturday afternoon. "Not much!" The wife was off to see The Sound of Music in Edinburgh, you see (apparently it was very good).

So, "wanna see Whisky Mit Vodka?" Why not...as noted, nothing much else happening that afternoon. Anyway, the arrangement was we'd grab some lunch before heading off to the cinema. Oh dear. Baz was out for his kid sister's birthday on Friday (you can read all about that on his blog)...given the start time of the film, there was the distinct possibility that our carefully laid plans could all go to arse.

Saturday 13.20: "Where are you?"

"In the Cineworld queue. Will I score tickets?"

"Cineworld? I'm on my way to the GFT!" Ahaha...fail, my friend, it's on at the Cineworld. Mind you I had also trekked up to the GFT, only to see that it wasn't on there. Although this isn't quite so bad as the time that we turned up at Cineworld a month early for Spartacus (and the fault there was entirely mine).

The film was starting at 13.45, so lunch was a non-starter. "OK, will I get us sandwiches? What would you like?" Obviously, as anybody that has made a telephone call in public knows, unless you are the least self-conscious person ever, it's not a lot of fun. I, anyway, have a tendency to mumble so that I don't look like one of those idiots that likes to broadcast the minutiae of their life to all and sundry (he says, writing a blog post...Oh. The. Irony!)

Anyway, this led to an exasperated and expletive laden explanation of what a ploughman's sandwich is.

Old lady with grand-kids in the queue behind me? Check!

Tickets safely stowed in my wallet, I go out to get Baz...of course, both being basically incompetent at life, we walk past each other. This, however was the last fail of the afternoon (we were late for Ubu Roi...but that was in the evening).

So, all this nonsense done with, we settled down for the Whisky Mit Vodka (Germany, 2009). If you've read the blurb on the GFF's website, you'll be aware that it's a melancholy black comedy about film, actor's and acting.

I enjoyed it - if you like black comedy it's well worth a punt.

In it, famous actor Otto Kullberg is involved in a film about a real-life love triangle in Weimar Germany, involving his character and a mother and daughter (who has a fiancee, whose actor points out that, strictly speaking, it isn't a triangle). Although Kullberg is a well-respected actor (the female lead who had been involved with him in the past pushed for him too get the gig - she is married to the director, further complicating matters) who everybody on set has respect for, there is also a sense that he is a liability. As he puts it "I drink." This had led to a previous project he was involved in folding.

When he turns up for shooting drunk at the start of the film, the backers get uppity and decide that they should take the unprecedented step of hiring an unknown to understudy him so that they have a weapon against Kullberg. For this they hire Arno Runge, a relatively unknown stage actor. He, as the rest of the cast and crew do, has a great deal of respect for Kullberg (although not extending to refusing the job!)

This leads to tension, as well as many humourous moments, although very seldom are any of the characters actually hostile to each other. There is more of a sense, by everyone, that they are being ill-used. The director for example (whom, we are given to believe, has a higher regard for the film than perhaps it deserves...) repeats the phrase "I am not a bucket for people to shit in!" several times.

We also get some kind of feel for the compromises made in films when the budgets aren't perhaps as lavish as you may find in Hollywood - the film is being made on the Baltic coast, rather than the Black Forest, where the real story happened, simply because of who was willing to fund them.

It used the (admittedly obvious) trick of using a sepia tinted filter to show when they showing scenes from the film. In general, the cinematography was good, without being breath-taking...it is, however, always pleasant to see a movie that isn't shot and edited as if it's intended for the Ritalin-dependent.

If you get a chance to see it, I'd recommend you do. It's not a life-changing piece of cinema, but it's entertaining and sympathetic.

PERE UBU

That evening, I went to the Classic Grand to see Pere Ubu performing Long Live Pere Ubu! The Spectacle with Craig.

It's hard to know what to say about this: I enjoyed it, but I basically had no idea what the hell was going on. As their intermission card said "you have 20 minutes, drink more and it'll make sense."

Speaking factually, it's an adaption of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (that's where Pere Ubu got their name from) featuring music by Pere Ubu and animation by the The Brothers Quay.

The music was enjoyable enough (I must confess I do still prefer their "classic" era), and the animation and acting pleasantly bonkers. There is some of this available on their website: check it out if you get a chance: Ubu Projex.

So: good, but I think I'd like to see it again....