Next door Samuel L. Jackson is fighting those Snakes On A Plane, but right in front of me former US Vice President Al Gore is trying to save the entire planet. Decked out in a sober suit rather than a Superman costume, Gore was on hand on Sunday to introduce his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth then follow up the screening with an inspiring audience Q&A session. It brought the 60th Edinburgh International Film Festival to a rousing climax and made everyone realise that the world would be a better place if Gore were in the White House, not Cineworld Screen 7 on an August afternoon.
Stressing that climate change was a moral not political challenge, Gore went on to praise the Internet as a tool for the democratisation of power. He even went so far as to describe the web in Star Wars terms: “the rebellion is alive and well in some far-off galaxy connected to our own.” Then again, other references he made to Galileo, the Scottish Enlightenment and post-war German philosophers certainly underlined the intellectual gulf between the two candidates who contested the 2000 US Presidential Election. Not that Gore will commit to standing again, even when pressed by outgoing EIFF Artistic Director Shane Danielsen. “I appreciate the consideration,” he said, “but you can’t change the past, so there’s no use dwelling on it.”
Earlier, EIFF had begun rounding up this year’s bash by announcing its award winners. The Standard Life Audience Award went to Kevin Smith’s raucous Clerks II, while The Great Happiness Space (focusing on the staff at a Japanese male escort club) was named Best Documentary. Brothers Of The Head – a constantly inventive mock-doc about glam-rock conjoined twins by the directors of Lost In La Mancha – took the prestigious Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film. Another excellent British film, London To Brighton, won the Skillset New Directors Award for Paul Andrew Williams.
So that’s it for another year. Before I go, I should squeeze in a few name-checks for movies that don’t yet have a UK distributor. Black Sheep pushes some bad-taste buttons in its loose slacker-like selection of stories spread across modern-day Berlin, but while the ineffectual Satanists were a hoot, other episodes came over as puerile rather than defiant. From Chile, La Sagrada Familia takes its time to subvert its family get-together formula but ends up being quite scathing about the jealousies and open wounds suffered by the characters. Hilariously literate American indie The Treatment features brilliant turns by Chris Eigeman and Ian Holm as, respectively, a disillusioned teacher and his sadistic Freudian analyst. Less successful from the US indie scene is The Oh In Ohio, a middlebrow sex comedy starring Danny DeVito, Parker Posey, Paul Rudd and, in a tiny cameo, Liza Minnelli as an outrageous sex guru. Perhaps they’ll all eventually turn up in a cinema near you, perhaps not.
Alan Morrison