"We sleep together, among the boxes..."

Though there's not been much on the EIFF Twitter feed it reminded me today of a free screening at noon of a shortish documentaryette called Painting with Light, concerning the activities of a cinematographer whose name wasn't familiar (Jack Cardiff), associated with films I'd heard of but never seen (Black Narcissus) but which looked reasonable (given the money) and should at least have been interesting for the cinematography aspect. It turned out to be a DVD extra (which the production values very much reflected) though it had some interesting historical insight and anecdote, particularly concerning the sheer bulk of early Technicolor® cameras when their sound-dampening hood was in place. Not sure about the look of the film, though... though the many film-clips were obviously Technicolor®esque with nothing being quite grey or white when it could be tinged slightly I definitely prefer things which look slightly more natural even if they're obviously not due to being shot in a studio. Very good background mattes, though.

Similarly booked in an attempt to compare what things were like with what things are like now was Pit and the Pendulum shortly afterwards from a series of Corman/Price type things. Whilst I very much like the extra filminess of seeing things in the cinema I think that things like this are more at home being watched on a simple smallish television screen fairly late at night, as I originally saw this and a few things like it at home-from-pub time when I was small and things would be watched half-asleep on a small black-and-white screen. It's not that any of the effects or sets or photography are particularly bad, just that when it's all twenty feet tall and thirty-five feet wide (and very slightly squished as if imperfectly converted from Cinemascope®) it's very easy to be distracted by the appallingly un-naturalistic acting (whereas the fifties-style B-movie feel applied by watching on a small monochrome television makes that sort of acting appropriate) and the large quantities of ham oozing out of Vincent Price's starched ruff.

Un chat un chat (translated for no discernible reason into Pardon my French) had that strange quality of seeming to start half-way through and not bothering to do anything properly like introduce characters and so on but was still reasonably watchable though not really worth rushing to see if it comes round on normal release; the sort of thing it's worth remembering the name of in case the film you wanted isn't visible in the DVD-rental shop and you can't immediately see anything else on your to-watch list. Nothing spectacular about any aspect of it but pleasant enough.

Several orders of magnitude superior was Mary and Max, the excellent stop-motion plasticine animation from the same people who made Harvie Krumpet which was as funny if not quite as detailed, animation-wise. The basic story is that a lonely Australian girl accidentally writes to a lonely American bloke but much of the humour (as with the forerunner and the "that reminds me of that time" bits from Family Guy) comes from the barely-connected non-sequitur apropos-of-nothing comic asides as well as the sight gags and usual observational fun-poking. Very much worth seeing in the cinema if it gets a buyer and distributor. I only became aware of Harvie Krumpet when I caught it in a bunch of animated shorts earlier this year so don't know without checking LoveFilm or Amazon exactly how available that is. If there's any justice in the world then this will get a proper release and Harvie can be included on the DVD.

Exam had stuck out enough to be noticed in the programme and turned out to be the World Prémière featuring a rowful of distrubingly skinny acting-people, the director and a bouncer-looking bloke who was rather amateurishly using the pop-up flash on his mini-SLR who turned out to be the co-producer in the row in front of me. I assume they'd been in some sort of party-related environment as they all smelt a bit funny. I was mildly worried that they would be turning to speak to each other during the screening but they behaved perfectly, unlike the stupid oaf-woman behind me who kept kicking my seat and not responding to glares. The film itself was a sort of mix between the Saws, Battle Royale, The Condemned, the various Cubes but especially the original, Severance and High Noon (and nicked the title sequence idea from Alien) but was quite watchable and nicely-shot in most places though the director's initial comments indicated him to be a bit of a tit.