Festival walk-outs

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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25 September

Last night was a mistake - I had intended to see Leviathan (2012), and only realized, too late, that it was not a short prefacing it, but Roland Klick's Deadlock, which had few takers.

Not in itself indicative of anything, but it was not the film that I had wanted to watch, I didn't want to go into the other film after the beginning and catch up, and I was not engaging or in the mood to engage with a dubbed film.

This afternoon, the staginess of Absolute Beginners (1986) was the turn-off, a film that I had always thought would prove, as I had gathered, to have relatively little to say and say it with scant subtlety. The enforced cheeky jollity of a Soho on a stage-set did not chime with my mood, and Patsy Kensit dancing sexily did not persuade me that I wanted to see more of a film with an Alfie-type voiceover, but none of the charm, that I could see, of how Michael Caine plays it : compared with his world, this seemed naive when pretending to be knowing, so I walked at around 30 minutes.

And, yesterday again, the Estonian shorts - I had been compelled by Maggot Feeder (2012) and My Condolences (2013), but Olga, in her car-park, did not have that effect. Even though I knew that it was building slowly to something, coffee called, and, as I guessed, I was not back before the end. It meant that I missed the beginning of the next shown, which had in fact been intended to be The Birthday (2011), but what was shown (and this explained a lot) was Happy Birthday, an animated skits on Jesus and robots.

That's all so far...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)