Sam Shepard himself takes a rare lead in Blackthorn, which expands on the theories that Butch Cassidy somehow survived the shoot out at San Vicente, Bolivia in 1908. “I woke up and found myself alone,” he explains. “Seemed like everybody I knew was either dead or in jail. And they thought I was dead, too. So I did what any good dead person would do. I went off and raised me some horses. 20 years. That’s a big change. Quiet times.” Cassidy, in his twilight years, decides to return to America, to be reunited with family.
This comes in a cute Dansette-style box stuffed with ten albums of antique Kinkorama and Meet the Kinks!, a fab 1960s style booklet with rare fab pix. For complete retro-authenticity, everything is in mono, this being how the original records were released back in those sacred days (so sacred that “Days” itself is now the theme tune for a car advert).
The eclectic mix of Latitude's tents and stages provided a perfect setting for the theatricality of Brighton's The Mummers, whose early Friday afternoon set lit up the Uncut Arena, but would have been equally at home almost anywhere on the site.
I first met film maker Andrea Arnold at the Sundance festival in 2003, when she was premiering her short film, Wasp. An eventual Oscar winner, Wasp was a bleak but compelling slice of socio-realist cinema about a single mother trying to raise her kids on a claustrophobic London council estate. Arnold revisits, to some degree, the themes of Wasp for Fish Tank, her second full-length feature. Already highly praised in Cannes – it was one of only three British films in competition – it’s certainly the best film I’ve seen since arriving in Edinburgh.
A brief dispatch, since I'm fending off hordes of enraged Smashing Pumpkins fans, some of them Argentinian. My crimes are many, but involve bad grammar, liking Zwan and, OK, disrespecting the the untouchable genius of Billy Corgan.
Talk about narrow fucking escapes. Halfway through one of the interviews with Brian De Palma that make up the raft of extras on this special edition of his lavish gangster epic, the director mentions that Paramount's first choice for the central part of Eliot Ness was Mel Gibson. It's an appalling thought. I mean, imagine Mel hamming it up here, his narcissistic gurning turning De Palma's operatic vision into mugging farce. Fortunately, Mel had other commitments, and the role of Ness, as De Palma had always intended, went to the then relatively unknown Kevin Costner.
Using dodgy reconstructions, minimal footage and recently released FBI files, conspiracy theorist Alex Constantine suggests that Hendrix may have been taken down to Brian Jones' swimming pool and force-fed red wine by Elvis till he croaked. No, not really, but the theories aired in this sensationalist barrel-scraping pile of docu-dross are no less preposterous.
With the final series of Buffy over (and how could they kill off Anya so glibly? But don't get me started...), all that's left to console us sad (in both ways) fanatics is the music from the show, here slickly marketed with sleevenotes by Joss Whedon. Kicking off with The Breeders' blast at the theme tune, it rolls through the Dandy Warhols, Dashboard Prophets, Aimee Mann, The Devics and Laika. There are score fragments, too, notably Christophe Beck's "Dead Guys With Bombs".
