It’s been five years since director Shane Meadows and his long-term on screen collaborator Paddy Considine last worked together. That was for Dead Man’s Shoes, a violent revenge drama that took Considine’s natural, wired intensity and amped it up to an uncomfortable degree. Considine tends to specialise – for Meadows, at least – in charismatic, explosive figures and while his run of movies together with Meadows has proved thrilling and memorable, you might have cause to wonder where they could take their collaborations next. [youtube]1f-HRG-kahs[/youtube] Well, Le Donk – while a slight 70 minutes (the same length as last year's Somers Town) – certainly offers much in terms of demonstrating the adaptability of their professional relationship. It’s an improvised fake documentary, with Meadows playing himself, shooting a film about Le Donk (Considine), a former roadie who gets himself back in the game working for the Arctic Monkeys at their Old Trafford gigs in 2007. Along the way, Le Donk uses the opportunity to gain valuable exposure for genuine Nottingham rap prodigy, Dean Palinczuk, aka Scorzayzee. (It is, perhaps, perfectly reasonable that Meadows would know an 18 stone rapper called Scorzayzee). Fans of Meadows may recognise Le Donk; the character first appeared, in fact, about 8 years ago on the DVD Extras for Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (you can see it here). Apparently, both Meadows and Considine were keen to give Le Donk a proper outing. The impetus for resurrecting here came when Meadows was invited to film the Monkeys gig, but turned it down; whatever he shot would never be as good as Woodstock, he claimed. Instead, they decided to film around the gig and give Le Donk a starring role. They shot this for £30,000 in 5 days. Incidentally, it’s the first in what Meadows hopes will be a wave of five-day features designed to encourage first-time filmmakers. The result – for anyone who’s seen Saxondale – may broadly feel like pretty familiar turf. Le Donk (real name: Nicholas) is a gormless, self-delusional figure. He’s split with his girlfriend Olivia (Olivia Coleman), who’s close to giving birth to their first child. In the interim, she’s settled with a new boyfriend who’s clearly everything Le Donk isn’t: kind, compassionate and sympathetic. He kicks out at everyone he can: at Meadows at the start of the film, at Scorzayzee pretty much throughout. He is, he believes, clearly better than all of them. This being a Shane Meadows film, though, there is redemption. It’s an extremely funny 70 minutes, with Le Donk’s constant stream of malapropisms providing much of the humour. When Meadows’ sound man is trying to attach a mic to him, he bellows “I feel like Donnie Darko about to infiltrate the mob!” He refers to the "Article Monkeys". In fact, you wonder quite how he managed to charm Olivia -- seemingly a repository of endless tolerance when it comes to her ex -- so hopelessly crass and socially inept is he. The Arctic Monkeys cameo (Considine, you may remember, starred in their "Leave Before The Lights Come On" video) -- watching Scorzayzee rapping to an empty house at the Old Trafford soundcheck. Scorzayzee himself is a mountain of a lad, decked out in an over-size t-shirt and a baseball cap with "Kids need hugs not drugs" emblazoned on it. He seems withdrawn and awkward, but on stage his raps are surprisingly effective -- despite Le Donk's insistence on adding his own awful, pointless chorus ("Calm down Deirdre Barlow! Calm down Harold Shipman!"). If you want to see if yourself, here's a clip. Anyway, it's good -- if not entirely revelatory -- stuff, and a nice stop-gap before Meadows' next, proper feature. A horror film, apparently. Can't wait. OK, I'm going to go and try and see some short films now, as I've got a screening of Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank at 8. I'll be blogging about that first thing tomorrow. See you then.

Quite where American indie cinema can go next, so thoroughly has it been co-opted by the mainstream, is a big question. Writer-director Lynn Shelton offers, at least, a moderately novel solution with Humpday. A bromedy about two friends who set out to make a gay porn movie, it feels at times like a mumblecore take on a Judd Adaptow movie. Although, of course, while Apatow’s films ultimately serve to reinforce the strengths of the masculine dynamic, Shelton seems to set out to dig around in the frailties of the male ego. [youtube]tMr_LQDlYH8[/youtube] Ben and Andrew are old college friends whose lives have quite clearly diverged. Ben is now married, living in Seattle. He owns a house, has an office job, and with his wife Anna is planing to start a family. He has become, to some degree, “picket fence”; while Andrew is now “a bit Kerouac”, living as a itinerant artist everywhere from Mexico to Columbia. Andrew arrives at Ben’s house unannounced in the wee small hours, and the pair find themselves reverting, with ease, to their old college-buddy routine. But it’s more than just heterosexual one-upmanship; to some extent, Ben and Andrew are jealous of each other’s lives. Ben wishes he could have some of Andrew’s free-spirit, while for his part Andrew admires that Ben has made, at least, something solid from his life. Both men, though, have an unspoken wish to reconnect with their youth while they still can. At a splendidly entertaining party in a free-sex commune that Andrew drags Ben to, the friends drunkenly decide to enter Humpday – a local amateur porn festival. As you might expect, with the beer flowing and the joints being passed, the idea is ludicrously stupid: they decide to make a gay porn film, the USP being that both men are straight. What comes, then, is an often very funny and well observed take on the complexities and contradictions of male friendship, as Shelton makes her characters explore exactly what it means to them to have sex together on camera. What is says about them, and their relationship. And, indeed, as the film’s strongest female voice, what Anna’s own take on the extraordinary situation might be. Shelton’s unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall approach gives Humpday a certain intimacy – and, indeed, a considerable squeamishness. The film’s final half hour, with the near-naked Andrew and Ben alone in a hotel room running through the ramifications of shooting the film, is extremely funny and often quite moving. Shelton’s leads – Mark Duplass as Ben and Joshua Leonard as Andrew – are both excellent, running through testosterone-fuelled brinkmanship to quiet meditation about their own friendship. Right. Off to see Shane Meadows’ Le Donk. I’ll report back about that one later today.

For a film that opens with a woman walking through the snow, it’s perhaps apt that the subjects under scrutiny here are a collection of cold, rather wintry folks. The woman in question, Hannah (Sophie Rois), is a single mother living in a remote Alpine village, whose discover of the body of an elderly woman sets up the narrative of this excellent, slow-burning domestic drama. I’m reminded, to some degree, of Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'aime, a similarly excoriating movie about family matters in which shocking, key events are deployed with elegance and minimal fuss, entirely to its credit. The body is the mother of Georg Winter (Josef Bierbichler), the architect of the title who clearly seems more comfortable with the clean lines and soothing geometry of his job ("Dreams you can walk through," as he describes them) than he is dealing with his family. His wife, Eva (Hilde Van Mieghem), is on one hand sexually frustrated with her husband's remoteness, on the other disdainful of her husband’s upbringing in the Alpine boondocks. She is embarrassingly over-attentive towards their two late-teenage children: son, Jan (Mattias Schweighöfer), a loafer, and daughter Reh (Sandra Hüller), an over-achiever with hopes of becoming a professional violinist. There are undertows, of course. Jan and Reh’s relationship is – though I might be misreading this – possibly incestuous; Georg himself has a habit of kissing Reh on the mouth, and the pair of them go running in the snow naked. Georg is referred to as “absent” by Reh, a period that began, it seems, around the time Jan was born. Georg is a brooding father who seems to have no connection with either his family or his late mother (his speech at her wake is faltering and vague; there’s no love lost here, it seems). As the Winters arrive in the Alps for the funeral, first time writer-director Ina Weisse explores the family’s complex and dysfunctional relationships at a leisurely, but no less compelling pace. Hannah herself is key to explaining why Georg has become a distant man to his family. The scenes between Hannah and Georg – childhood friends, and perhaps more – are brilliantly handled, and an artful example of what’s not said between them having a far more significant impact than any dialogue. Out of a formidably accomplished cast, Rois is a stand out; her facial expressions, as she goes from the film’s default setting of cold-slash-distant to flashes of fire and excitement, and ultimately confusion, when she’s around Georg are superbly judged. Bierbichler – a bear of man – internalizes his many issues. He’s shut down to his family, but you sense there’s a lot roiling away beneath the surface, and the gradual revelations that emerge are delivered (as with Il Y A Longtemps Que Je T'aime) like tiny, but profoundly impactful, emotional depth charges. As the film develops, there are moments of quiet but extraordinary tension. Eva's drunken flirtations with Hannah's son threaten to turn The Architect into some kind of Sophoclean tragedy; realising Reh is missing, Jan frantically follows her footsteps in the snow into the wilderness and you wonder whether one, or both, of them might die from exposure. In fact, without flagging up spoilers, Georg's many secrets may end in at least one death. It’s perhaps the inevitability of being a first-time filmmaker that Weisse’s use of foreshadowing and telegraphing is occasionally a bit shonky. The snow-bound setting (as beautifully shot as it is) and the Winters’ surname perhaps signposts more than is necessary the family’s internal problems. All the same, this is an excellent drama. The trailer's not on Youtube, I'm afraid, but you can see a clip from the film here. Hope you enjoy. Right, off to see The September Issue, a film about magazines. Good Lord. I’ll try and get my thoughts on that posted this evening before I find a party to go to…

I'm up in Edinburgh, in case it needs some minor clarification, for this year's Film Festival. As usual, there's a satisfyingly wide array of movies to see, and I'll be blogging a couple of times a day between now and Tuesday to report back the highlights. Presently, I'm off to try and see Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker, an Iraq War drama that's got many of my peers up here in quite a lather of excitement. Meantime, here's one of the best movies I've seen so far. Turn It Loose [youtube]aGC2IbiYbd8[/youtube] One small but notable trend in documentary filmmaking that's emerged in the last few years has been the competition doc. I'm talking about films like Spellbound and Sounds Like Teen Spirit that cover the emotional gamut experienced by contestants during a competitive event; in the case of Spellbound it was the American Spelling Bee Championship, while in Sounds Like Teen Spirit, the junior Eurovision Song Contest. Turn It Loose, by first-time feature director Alastair Siddons, tracks the one-on-one "battles" between the world's best breakdancers in a disused power station in Soweto. As with Spellbound or ...Teen Spirit, your enjoyment of Turn It Loose is by no means predicated on whether or not you like, or indeed know much about the subject. It’s appeal lies, principally, in the characters themselves, but there’s also a fascinating socio-political subtext to the film that develops as Siddons and his crew travel to the contestants’ home countries. We meet French Algerian Lilou, who lives “like a battery hen” in the slums of Lyon. Lilou, a devout Muslim, wears a hidjab in one battle against American contestant RoxRite in protest against America’s ongoing incursions into the Middle East. RoxRite, for his own part, lives with his family in one of the poorest parts of northern California and complains about being singled out simply because of his nationality (he’s in fact Mexican, but there). Ben-J, from the ghettoes of Dakar, carries himself with quiet nobility, and seems profoundly aware of the pressure on him to succeed. There’s Taisuke, in Tokyo, who speaks abstractly about presumably dark family troubles, before breakdancing in Shibuya Junction; to Taisuke, as with all the competitors, breakdancing provides a focus and a relief from poverty. As more than one character notes, if it wasn’t for breakdancing, they’d be selling drugs or running with gangs. They speak of breakdancing, and battles, in either gladiatorial or spiritual terms, and there’s something incredibly positive about their attitudes that, without sounding grumpy, feels refreshing when you perhaps consider some of the less savory aspects of hip hop culture. Siddons’ film is handsomely shot. The Dakar sequences, for instance, are filmed with a bold colour palette that resembles City Of God. The bouts themselves achieve an almost Matrix-like quality, Siddons deploying image capturing techniques in the edit to freeze contestants in mid-air, speeding up or slowing down the action, splicing hip hop with classical music. It’s a formidably impressive mastery of his digital box of tricks (Siddons, for his part, has a background in promo clips for The Streets, Roots Manuva and –let’s not hold it against him – The Towers Of London). It’s interesting, perhaps, to wonder where the funding for this film came from. The tournament itself is sponsored by Red Bull, and it’s entirely possible they’ve invested money in the film; but, encouragingly, they exercise no editorial control here. Anyway, I’ll be back later to post about a German film I’ve just seen, The Architect. More soon.