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I probably still won't attend
Jul. 6th, 2008 12:32 pmIts almost film festival time. It used to be that I would throw myself into this event with great abandon. You know the drill, take time off and watch a whole pile of films. But these days I've pretty much given up on it. My interest started to decline when my eyesight started to go and I couldn't read the subtitles so easily. I got contact lenses and was able to go again, but found that I had lost interest. However I am slightly interested in a couple of films this year.
1) A Turkish film called Three Monkeys for tediously obvious reasons although it is the sort of thing I used to seek actively.
2) A Swedish film called Let the Right One In. Why? Because I have just read the book it is based on by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also wrote the screenplay). It isn't coincidence. The book only turned up on the local booksellers shelves because the film was coming to the festival. I bought it because I'm still looking for good modern fantasy and of the vast numbers of Vampire books around, it looked the most interesting.
Actually, it is a pretty interesting and readable book even if I never really got totally enthralled by it. It is a Vampire book and it has creature with a fairly standard set of superpowered characteristics and weaknesses and a bunch of the expected sexual associations. But it does not really read like the usual novels. I think, in broad style terms, it is because it has not been approached as the usual fantasy/horror combined with romance genre production. Instead it is more a modern literature work with touches of crime thriller writing in it. That means a focus on the miniature of life to set the scene and tell the story - its an approach that works well here. If only the multi-threaded approach had achieved greater consistency, it would have been very good indeed. As it was, one thread was much more engaging than the others and that makes reading a bit frustrating.
There is also a comparison to be made with the Lukyanenko books I read recently to try to fill the same need for modern fantasy. The Russian books had a sense of strangeness about them that came from the alien nature of Russia. Even though Let The Right One In is every bit as Swedish as the *Watch books are Russian, it does not feel as alien. It probably is that Sweden isn't as different from here as Russia, or it could be that the members of my flist resident in Sweden help me keep in touch with the place, but I have to think that a big factor in the feeling of familiarity is all those Swedish films I have seen at film festivals over the years.
1) A Turkish film called Three Monkeys for tediously obvious reasons although it is the sort of thing I used to seek actively.
2) A Swedish film called Let the Right One In. Why? Because I have just read the book it is based on by John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also wrote the screenplay). It isn't coincidence. The book only turned up on the local booksellers shelves because the film was coming to the festival. I bought it because I'm still looking for good modern fantasy and of the vast numbers of Vampire books around, it looked the most interesting.
Actually, it is a pretty interesting and readable book even if I never really got totally enthralled by it. It is a Vampire book and it has creature with a fairly standard set of superpowered characteristics and weaknesses and a bunch of the expected sexual associations. But it does not really read like the usual novels. I think, in broad style terms, it is because it has not been approached as the usual fantasy/horror combined with romance genre production. Instead it is more a modern literature work with touches of crime thriller writing in it. That means a focus on the miniature of life to set the scene and tell the story - its an approach that works well here. If only the multi-threaded approach had achieved greater consistency, it would have been very good indeed. As it was, one thread was much more engaging than the others and that makes reading a bit frustrating.
There is also a comparison to be made with the Lukyanenko books I read recently to try to fill the same need for modern fantasy. The Russian books had a sense of strangeness about them that came from the alien nature of Russia. Even though Let The Right One In is every bit as Swedish as the *Watch books are Russian, it does not feel as alien. It probably is that Sweden isn't as different from here as Russia, or it could be that the members of my flist resident in Sweden help me keep in touch with the place, but I have to think that a big factor in the feeling of familiarity is all those Swedish films I have seen at film festivals over the years.