"...all just mud, cows and rubber boots.&quot

Pleasingly, today's first shortfilm-grouping was good, a pleasing rebuttal to Tuesday's disappointment. Today's set was concerned with youths and their activities including a Germa mini-thriller-comedy called Eiko, an unpolished but well-kicked thing about oppressive parenting in The Eighteenth Birthday Party, one about childs in some sort of short-term unbalanced-youth life-coping-aid centre featuring the bloke who played Denny in Choke and the man in the van who attempted to get Miles to not go on the freighter (and who never have him a replacement fish taco) in Lost, one about the apparent aphrodisiac effects of people buried in peat and one about a kid who makes dioramas in shoeboxes.

I technically had time to go home before going out again to the next showing but attempted to get some backblipping done and typed about half of Monday's entry before Terribly Happy at the Cineworld. The opening blurb contained a "based on true events" but that could just mean that a shopkeeper in a small community in South Jutland really does detain shoplifters in a cupboard. The most recent Danish film I remember seeing was Next Door a couple of years ago but don't remember noticing how extremely similar the language seems in places... there's a combination of similarities in grammar and similar word-root-bases (and possible shared ancestry with German) which made some surprisingly large chunks of dialogue understandable even without the subtitles, though when the subtitles are there it's easy to work backwards to being able to see where what you know is being said is being said without necessarily meaning that I'd have anything but the faintest idea what they were on about without the subtitles. It does perhaps indicate that it might be one worth having a poke at learning, especially when Denmark is on the would-like-to-visit-again list seeing as I haven't been since I was too small to appreciate much when I was taken there as a small. Entertaining film, too. From the standard locals v newcomer set-up it proceeds reasonably blackly-comically-thrillerifically against some nice, understated, dull, flat landscape and unspectacular buildings which reminded me a little of home in Lincolnshire.

The Missing Person (also at the Cineworld, though I again would have had enough time to get home then back but settled for more typing) started out looking like a stereotypical film noir provate-detective cliché but quickly mutated into a spoof-looking private detective cliché-parody where the stock behaviours of private detectives in films were shown to be incompatible with the modern real world. It later mutated again into that above but with a mildly serious point to make. Michael Shannon is the apparent name of the principal actor (it also features Beadie from The Wire) but it's easiest to think of him as the bloke who has a face which looks as if it's based on Ray Liotta's face but kept in a smoke-filled environment for a few years, lightly scrubbed with acid then punched for a prolonged period with fists made from really bad-smelling farts; it's the sort of face which appears when reading Douglas Adam's "looks like he'd never been gruntled" line. Although the smoking and drinking isn't quite up to Mad Men standards it's still slightly unpleasant to watch despite the films pleasing amusingness. Ends with a nicely-framed shot, too.

If I'd been the first out of the cinema, hadn't popped to the bog and had walked at sweating full speed I could have again made it home in time to leave to get to the Filmhouse in time for some Mexican Shorts but didn't as Nicky would have already left the flat and I wouldn't have pleasingly intercepted her at the corner of Lothian Road and Morrison Street. She claims it was her turning round with a finger against the lips which got the people behind us to shut up though I was convinced it was my less polite hissed request; at least in the Filmhouse's smallest third screen it's almost impossible for anyone making a noise to be out of range of glaring and shushing, though similarly difficult to be out of range of anyone who decides they have to speak or shuffle or rustle. More shorts which highlighted just how bad Tuesday's were, anyway.