Mae West Has Smelly Feet While Vampire Flick is my Pick of the Film Festival

I have it on very good authority that to include the words 'Mae West' and 'Smelly Feet' into my blog and its title will ensure it thousands of hits in a matter of seconds so let's call this particular blog entry a social experiment. Now let's just skip that madness and get back to the real biscuit in hand - the very last official day

of the 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival. I say 'official' because the closing Gala film Faintheart (see previous blog) is screening tonight whereas tomorrow the awards are announced during the middle of Best of the Fest - a last chance to catch the allegedly most popular films. I'm a little stunned to see that a good handful of excellent films aren't included whereas a good handful of very disapointing and downright unpopular films are showing again. I'm basing this on critical opinion and not on public ticket sales, which are often of course two very different things.

Well, your on the ball, sharp as a tack, bright-eyed & bushy tailed, intrepid, pioneering film journalist failed spectacularly to catch up on the final two Michael Powell Award contenders. Donkey Punch wasn't available to view in the 'videotheque' at the time and I hit the snooze function on my alarm clock this morning so many times that I succesfully avoided the final press screening of Summer. However, after speaking to several other journos I've ruled Donkey Punch out as well.

It sounds like a slick, entertaining and very silly thriller along the lines of Dead Calm, Overboard and Adrift, but quite frankly I'm sick of watching sexy, violent thrillers populated by good looking but banal starlets on ocean bound yachts pursuing a 'ten little Indians' storyline.

This is of course un-PC parlance to say the cast members get killed off one by one as in most horror flicks or siege movies. With any luck I'll get a crack at Summer today. As far as I'm concerned it's between that and Better Things and my money's on Better Things. I suppose I could have slept with the entire Jury to get insider information, but after seeing what Danny Huston gets up to at night in Ivans XTC and recoiling from his carnivorous fangs in 30 Days of Night, I thought I should perhaps desist.

And speaking of vampires I've found my film of the festival. I hope it gets a special mention at the awards ceremony tomorrow afternoon - it's probably not eligible in any of the categories, but perhaps they should introduce a 'buzz film' award or 'critics choice' or 'discovery of the festival' which is picked from the entire programme and if they did this would be my choice.

This is the film that I mentioned that had been raved about by a couple of critics at the Trailblazers party earlier this week and as the days went by more and more people mentioned it. It was one of the hardest films to get hold of in the 'videotechque' once the word spread. Luckily, yesterday, I got a last minute ticket for the final late night screening of Let the Right One In (pictured above), a Swedish film directed by Tomas Alfredsson.

It's a truly unusual, highly original work that's very beautifully crafted, but in a deceptively simple and elegant way. It's not just the look of the film that's deceiving as during the first hour, although I was engaged and intrigued by the goings on I was kind of underwhelmed initially by the slow, subtle and melancholic journey that the principal characters were going through. I was thinking to myself 'this is nice but what's all the fuss about?'. But then gradually not only does it win you over, but it completely and utterly sucks you into its world with its bittersweet, moody style.

Set in a snow-bound, non-descript suburb of Stockholm, this slightly gothic fairytale revolves around Oskar, a likeable, but shy and lonely 12 year old who has a fascination with solving gory crimes. Regularly walked over and bullied by three of his school classmates and shunted between his seperated parents Oskar is in need of a good friend. 'Luckily' a father and his young daughter Eli move into the apartment next door. Every night Oskar finds Eli hanging around outside barefoot in the snow and a very unlikely friendship gradually develops. Oskar begins to fall in love wth Eli which gives him renewed confidence in his own life but of course Eli isnt quite what she seems.

This is all set against the backdrop of what appears to be a serial killer on the loose in the neighbourhood who hangs his victims upside down to drain their blood. As the story develops, Oskar realises he's more closely connected to these events than he perhaps would initially wish. But this is not really a conventional horror or a vampire flick (although I did jump ten feet out my seat in one scene), it's a subtle and gentle love story of two extremely unlikely and thoroughly mismatched companions.

I wont say anymore as I dont want to give too much away. The entire film is worth seeing not just for one scene featuring a multitude of disturbed cats (both astonishing and very very funny), but for the penultimate scene in a swimming pool which is one of the most unexpected and extraordinary scenes I've ever seen which provides a deeply satisfying payoff.

My fear now is Hollywood will get wind of this soon and make an abomination of it with an expensive remake missing the point of it. It's the subtlety of this film that makes it work, it's the turning of a popular genre on its head by making it a run of the mill real life drama and its the delicate surreal touches and observations of people's behaviour that makes this stand out as a truly original work. I look forward to seeing it again.

I also caught Werner Herzog's wonderful and witty documentary Encounters at the Edge of the World. Herzog travels to the McMurdo Research Station built next to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to find out what makes the residents and researchers there tick. What he discovers is a community of brilliant scientists who are all but crazy and slightly distrubed by their estrangement from the 'real world'. It's quite moving, eye-opening and very, very funny in places (check out the bucket-heads survival training camp) and features some gorgeous underwater and landscape photography.

Herzog cobbles all the footage together with his now infamous and inimatable dry voiceover style with the usual amount of personal honesty and irreverent impatience for those interviewees who dont quite come up to scratch in his eyes. There's a quite remarkable, initially hilarious, but eventually heart-rending scene featuring a lone penguin and recordings of the incredible sounds of underwater seals which is described by one of the researchers as Pink Floyd. The film shows again later today at 4.30pm at the Filmhouse and tomorrow Sunday 29th in Best of the Fest at 10am, again at the Filmhouse for a mere fiver.

Today, I'm going to try and mop up the remains of the festival by finally catching Summer and The Fall before bumbling off to the closing party where once again I will be enjoying myself so that you don't have to.

Tomorrow, also in Best of the Fest, is another chance to catch the wonderful and quite awe inspiring Man on Wire at 9.15pm in the Filmhouse which I reviewed in an earlier blog. I'll also be reporting from the Awards Ceremony which is open to the public at 4pm in the Filmhouse where I get to find out if my prediction for Duane Hopkins is agreed upon by the jury. Signing off for now.