The 13 film review challenge
The second Branchage film festival kicks off next weekend from 01-04 October and there are dozens of films and events happening over the four days.
From the opening night gala at the Opera House – Werner Hertzog’s Encounters at the End of the World on Thursday night, through films in unusual places like castles, schools, barns and courts to the closing night gala – Moon on Sunday also at the Opera House.
Over the weekend I will be running from one place to another watching a total of 13 films (well 12 films plus a demonstration of model making) where most will have music and some a Q&A.
Part of the charm of Branchage is that the films are being shown in unusual venues, places where you wouldn’t normally expect to see a film.
So when you take the fact that the film is in an unsual venue, the Q&A and the musical element into account – you’re moving into event territory.
With that in mind I’ve decided to set myself a challenge – write a review of every event I go to – so the review will have to look at the venue, the film, the Q&A and/or the music.
I also want each review to be able to exist as an article on its own and I’m basing this on the basic article structure of a BBC Local page – which is four paragraphs and a minimum of about 300 words.
Actually the minimum is 100 words but that’s far too easy and wouldn’t give me scope to tell the story properly – so I’m setting a goal of 300 to make it a challenge (this article is 375 words to give you an idea of the legnth I’m aiming at).
These are the films I’m seeing and will link each one to the review as it is published.
THURSDAY
Encounters at the End of the World
FRIDAY
Animagica Night (more)
Short Films: London Short Film Festival presents Music & Video
Burma VJ
The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life
SATURDAY
Shaun The Sheep + Q&A (not a film but live demo of making models for the show)
Across The Pond
Documentary Double-Bill: A World Without Women
The End of the Line
The Yes Men Fix the World
SUNDAY
Unrelated
Sounds Like Teen Spirit
British Sea Power perform live to Man Of Aran
Closing Night Gala: Moon
Confessions of a lunchtime gamer
When I was a teenager at school in Hertfordshire, England there was a little bait shop just around the corner from the school grounds.
There was nothing particularly distinctive about the shop – it sold bait, fishing tackle, rods – everything a fisherman would need to … well – fish.
But every lunchtime there would be a queue of boys outside the shop waiting to go in, desperate to get there before the end of the 45 minute lunch break and the start of the afternoon school time tedium.
I was among that number and I had, and still don’t have, any interest in fishing.
The reason so many of us flocked to the little bait shop was because it had a Street Fighter 2 machine in the corner.
We would get to the shops from school, head straight to the bait shop and put our 50p on the machine before joining the back of the line.
Two people would then play at a time with the winner staying on – it got pretty competitive at times.
We all had games consoles at home and most of us had Street Fighter 2 at home as well. In fact we would regularly play each other – at home.
But there was nothing like the battle in the bait shop. Playing while others watch over your shoulder – watching your every move – live combat in a virtual world.
Except it wasn’t – most of the time I’d last about two minutes, die very quickly and then slump off to get something painfully unhealthy to eat.
I’ve never been much of a gamer.
The King of Kong
So why am I telling you this? Why have I just written 271 words confessing to being a rubbish gamer, geek and unhealthy eater? Because of ‘The King of Kong’.
The Branchage Jersey International Film Festival organisers have brought over an impressive and diverse range of films – from the beautiful, touching and annoying to the hard hitting, thought provoking and weird.
One film that touched almost all of those (beautiful if you’re a geek that loves the look of retro games) was The King of Kong.
It tells the tale of a science teacher and hot sauce mogul – both hoping to gain a place in the Guinness book of World Records. There record – highest score on the arcade classic Donkey Kong.
The two main protagonists are Billy Mitchell, 1982 Donkey Kong Champion (score 874,300) and Steve Wiebe, the man trying to take Billy’s long held crown.
This is one of the most infuriating, irritating and down right hilarious films I’ve seen in a very long time.
There were points where the small but dedicated audience were clearly and audibly muttering ‘oh my god’, ‘noooo’ and I’m sure I even heard a boo at one point.
Or maybe it happened in my head – who knows – Billy Mitchell is such a great character, an archetypal bad guy – somebody who doesn’t seem to have a single redeeming feature – if I didn’t know this was a documentary I would suggest he was written straight out of a textbook.
On the flipside though – Steve Wiebe is almost the opposite. A dedicated family man, a teacher, a nice guy that does everything to prove himself to his peers.
He goes to the events to show his skills in a live arena (something Billy Mitchell is shown on camera to be extolling the virtues of) while Billy stays at home and sends in a tape of his achievements.
It’s a film of obsession, dedication, passion and … OCD. It’s funny, heart warming and frustrating all at the same time. A documentary that could be a perfectly scripted drama with strong characters, a great plot and some nice twists.
Oh and some brilliant retro gaming video action. So much so that I think I’m going to look online for a SNES and get myself a copy of Street Fighter 2 – maybe my five year old will play me? Surely I can beat him?
Your school lunchtime confessions
So I’ve confessed to spending my school lunch breaks playing, or at least loosing at video games – what about you?
Where there any similar gaming meccas in shops around Jersey’s schools? How did you while away the 45 minutes between lessons – or even the lessons themselves?
Writing reviews of TV
Do you read reviews of television shows before/after they’ve been on air? Either to find out what they’re going to be like or whether others agreed with you? Do you go to the pros or the enthusiasts?
Read more
They like me, they really like me
It’s not often I get an e-mail that gives me a real buzz, it’s also not often people tell me they really like what I do – unless they’re spamming me and trying to get me to link to them – but they don’t count. Read more
Mind Wrestling
DISCLAIMER: I have NOT been paid to write the review below – however I was sent the laptop to review by Talk Toshiba at no cost to myself.
A couple of months ago, before I went on holiday in July I recieved an e-mail from Toshiba offering to lend me a laptop for a week to review – now this got me all excited as I’ve always wanted to live the reviewers lifestyle – something new to play with every week and this would afford me a little taste of that experience.
However I like to consider myself and this blog free from commercial bollocks and open to say what I like about anything that takes my fancy – something I wasn’t sure I could do in a review of a product somebody had gone to the trouble of shipping over to Jersey for me – not something that is overly cheap.
So I got on with my holiday and spent a bit of time thinking about it – eventually, as you might have guessed from a couple of previous posts – I decided to give it a go.
Well on 23 August 2007 a Toshiba Tecra A8 arrived on my doorstep – I didn’t get to touch until for a few hours as I was at work but I jumped straight on when I got home.
Unfortunately, before I’d really had any chance to play with it properly – I’d done little more than install the operating system, load office, slap a couple of games on and browse the web – my parents arrived for a suprise visit.
I only get to see them a couple of times a year so it’s great when they come over – unfortunately the week they came over was also the week running up to Jersey Live – often one of the bussiest weeks of the year for me as I need to organise and pre-produce BBC Jersey’s coverage of the festival.
So I decided to e-mail Toshiba and ask to hang on to the laptop for a couple of days over the pre-planned week and it paid off – it meant I was able to take the laptop to Jersey Live with me and actually use it in anger at an event where it functioning properly was essential.
My first impression was that, although the screen is large and extremely sharp it also suffers horrificly from glare unless you jack the brightness to max – which kills the battery in minutes.
Also the keyboard is odd – yes the keys are comfortable to type on and make a nice crisp sound that lets you know something is happening BUT they’re all moved about three centimetres to the right because of a couple of TOSHIBA buttons places in a panel on the left hand side – buttons that normally go at the top.
This isn’t a big deal but as someone prone to touch typing it meant I had to adjust myself by three or four centimetres to the right – which meant typing felt a bit odd and uncomfortable – something I’m sure I’d get used to after more time with the laptop.
It came with a selection of pre-loaded software – things like a hard drive monitor that checks to see whether things have wobbled about or not and corrects them – this is a nice little tool but I don’t need it to tell me what its doing I want it to get on with it in the background and play the silent partner – something it’s happy to do when you actually get around to telling it to shut up.
Other bits of software included are the usual toss you get pre-loaded with any new computer – the manufacturers only bits and bobs, anti-virus software from their partner companies and other bits of crap I ignore.
They’re easily enough to delete though.
Anyway – the laptop itself was pretty impressive although the keyboard thing is probably enough of a reason for me not to get one. My real review started when I got to use it under stress at Jersey Live.
The laptop is extremely light for one of that size and functioned brilliantly under stress – often having to handle Photoshop, Dreamweaver, WS_FTP, Adobe Audition, Firefox and Windows XP at the same time – it handled it brilliantly.
However the battery life is utter turd – the first day of the festival I had the battery fully charged before I left but didn’t bother to take a power cable as I wasn’t sure there would be power – there was free WiFi but I didn’t think electricity would be available – it was.
So I had to last on battery power alone – nwo this was set to be a 12 hour day – so I was working on the assumption that, if I used the laptop for about 15 minutes in every hour – which is only about three hours I would be fine.
By three hours into the festival the battery was already half empty – thats after just 45 minutes of active use – so to make sure it lasted all day I switched to 10 minutes every three hours and dropped the brightness to about 50% – meaning I could barely see the screen BUT it JUST about managed to survive until the end.
The next day I had the power cable and the laptop performed fantastically – comfortably taking me to the end of the day with the screen at 100% with having to re-boot once – not a crash in sight.
So will I be buying a Tecra A8? Probably not as it’s an older model and one designed for business but this certainly hasn’t put me off going Toshiba – in my hunt for a new laptop.
Up until this point I’ve been leaning towards Dell and Apple – Dell because I’ve had one before and it just got on with its job and worked – Apple because they look beautiful, the operating system is miles better than Windows and I can still run Windows if I really need to.
However, now I will be considering other alternatives – I want something light but with at least a 15″ screen, a good graphics processor, a massive chunck of ram and a screen that doesn’t suffer too badly from glare.
Will I go Tosh? Maybe but it depends on price, a better screen and the keyboard being in the right place. Something that the Satellite Pro A200GE seems to have cracked.
It’s got a great spec, is a little heavy but no more than other laptops with a 15″ screen and is around £750 so a fairly good price as well but it doesn’t stand out head and shoulders enough for me to shout – buy it now!
There are still other laptops in the running and my heart is till on a MacBook which I can get in a similar spec to the Satellite Pro for about the same price.
Rating for the Tecra A8: 3 out of 5