It's raining at the moment and the press screenings have temporarily halted to allow the local cinemas to let real people in to see normal movies, like The Bourne Ultimatum. I thought I'd take advantage of this lull in the proceedings to catch up with what I've seen. Yesterday, I got very excited about the brilliant In Search Of A Midnight Kiss. I met the producer Seth Caplan and director Alex Holdridge last night at the party for Control, the Ian Curtis movie. Apparently, Alex financed the film on his credit card, with a $3,000 limit, which makes this a terrific example of inventive, guerilla film making. Of course, not everything I've seen was a good as Midnight Kiss. I sat through a teeth-grindingly dull doc on Kurt Cobain, called About A Son. It uses all the interview tapes with Cobain that Michael Azzerad recorded for his Come As You Are biography. Like Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, you get the slightly eerie experience of the subject telling their own life story from beyond the grave. And it's a pretty arduous catalogue of woes, as Cobain miserably details his life. Ramdom words Cobain spoke that I jotted down include "deformed", "pain", "self-loathing", plus the phrase: "I was most likely to succeed in bringing an AK47 to school and blowing everyone away." I mean, you know, some great songs and all that, but the self-indulgent whining is pretty tiresome after, ooh, all of 5 minutes. This is played over footage of his hometown, Aberdeen in Washington State. Shot in Winter, there's equally grim footage of lumber yards, run down bars, gormless looking local yoots and ramshackle trailer parks. Enough, indeed, to drive anyone to develop a healthy smack habit. I was more impressed with Chan Park-Wook's latest, I'm A Cyborg But That's OK, which starts off in a rather whimsical tone, as a young girl, Young-goon (Lim Soo-jung), convinced she's an android, is institutionalised with an equally whacky bunch of inmates. It's kind of like Amelie coupled with One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, I guess. But Young-goon thinks eating food will damage her delicate circuitry, and the film becomes a little darker as she begins to starve to death. Maybe her rather touching friendship with another inmate, Il-sun (Jung Ji-hoon), can save her. Anyway, as you'd expect from Park-Wook, it looks fantastic -- rich, bold, vibrant colours -- and the flights of fantasy work well. It's a lot more gentle and playful that the Vengeance Trilogy, though there's one fantasy sequence where Young-goon imagines she's killing the entire medical staff of the institution that's as bloody as anything in Oldboy. I was hoping to see Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park later, but I've just heard the print didn't ship in time, which is a shame. Instead, Time Out's Dave Calhoun, a good friend of UNCUT, is doing a Q+A with director Andrew Kotting later, so I think I'll catch that. It'll keep me out of the pub, at any rate.

Okay, so the best thing about film festivals is stumbling into a film about which you know absolutely nothing and walk out, 90 minutes later, convinced you've just seen the best film of your life. So, let me tell you about In Search Of A Midnight Kiss, then. I didn't know it even existed until about 11 last night when I was in the Filmhouse bar and a 30 second clip running on a reel of trailers caught my eye. It was a black and white image of a cool-looking, fair-haired girl with unfeasibly large sunglasses, drawing on a cigarette. I'm a bit of a sucker for that kind of thing, and a friend, Jason Solomons from The Observer, mentioned he'd heard it was very good. It certainly is. It's an LA-shot indie, made for what looks like a fiver. In principle, it follows a similar pattern to Richard Linklater's film, Before Sunset (in fact, the producer Anne Walker-McBay has worked on a number of Linklater's films). Wilson, a twentysomething would-be scriptwriter, is coming out a particularly bad time after having split with his long-term girlfriend. It's New Year's Eve, and rather than face the night alone pontificating gloomily on his predicament, he posts a personal ad online for a date for the night. Which is how he meets Vivian. Wilson's a cynic, presumably burned in the wake of his recent split. But he's caring, and warm. Vivian, on the face of it, could be trouble. She "auditions" him for five minutes before decided to go out with him, chainsmoking cigarettes as she does. She's kinda kooky, kinda mysterious -- but not in a dreadful, self-conscious way. You sense she, too, is fragile, has her own set of problems. The two spend the evening walking and talking round LA. Their evening careers between moments of genuine, intimate human insight to bickering, flirting, drinking. Finally, there is a bittersweet liason of sorts. What's great about it is the way this blossoming relationship feels completely genuine. As Wilson and Vivian, Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds are both highly persuasive; you feel their relationship develop in an unhurried, believable way. The film's pretty funny, too. It opens with Wilson being caught masturbating by Jacob, his flatmate, over pictures of Jacob's girlfriend, Min. If you think this is a low budget riff on gross-out teen comedies, then fortunately this spools out into a loose, charming and engaging romantic comedy. The Festival are describing it as "the American indie discovery of the year". At time of writing, it doesn't seem to have a UK distributor, but I genuinely hope someone picks it up soon. It's honestly one of those films that, when you see it, you're hooked. You can find more information about the film here.

Last night, I went to see John Waters' latest, a part memoir/part standup act called This Filthy World, followed by a Q+A with the director. It was, as you might expect, all in pretty poor taste, as camp as a row of tents and very, very funny. Waters particular brand of shock and sleaze has, perhaps inevitably, somewhat dated. Looking back at his career -- going for over 40 years now -- you could easily be forgiven for thinking there's something quaint now about Waters' trashy, punky output. After all, is the idea of Divine eating dogshit in Pink Flamingoes any more shocking than the sight of Jason Biggs' humping an apple pie on his folks' kitchen table in American Pie? Times and taboos have moved on. For a man once hailed as "the pope of trash" by William Burroughs, here's Waters coming off the back of a Tony Award win for Hairspray: The Musical, itself recently turned into a film starring John Travolta. It says much about his trajectory, how he's gone from scatalogical provocateur and scourge of the Right to having hit Broadway musicals made of his movies. This Filthy World, shot over two nights in New York earlier this year by Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin, is basically a memoir in the guise of a standup routine. We get anecdotal snapshots from early life, then a chronological run through his movies, all manner of colourful tales, digressions and deviations delivered along the way. Of course, it's very funny. However tired Waters films may feel now, the man himself remains a wonderful character. Rake-thin and immaculately turned out in a black blazer with white piping, his balding head and pencil moustache lend resemblance to a giant, well-groomed tortoise. Sure, his spiel -- serial killers, drugs, porn -- is slightly creaky now, but Waters still has a very engaging manner about him, he's unfailing polite and charming, even when discussing the most abhorent subjects his twisted imagination can conjure up. The Q+A is good fun. He talks about his parents -- now both in their 90s -- and their response to his movies. After explaining to his mother that his last film, A Dirty Shame, was about sex addicts, she said: "Oh, well, I might die first." It's a brilliantly delivered anecdote, tossed off in a sub-Coward way, very underplayed, perfectly judged. There's some heckling from a couple of girls down the front, who clearly believe they're the world's biggest Waters fans which entitles them to shout randomly out during other questions. Waters is quick with the acerbic put downs, at least. The best story involves a guy Waters met in a bar, who sells deer meat for crack. A filthy world indeed. Anyway, off now to see the new Chan Park-Wook, I'm A Cyborg But It's OK, and later there's an American indie I want to see, In Search Of A Midnight Kiss, and Kurt Cobain: About A Son -- a doc assembled from over 25 hours of interview tapes Cobain did with writer Michael Azzerad. I'm also somewhat suffering today from Edinburgh's progressive licensing laws. It's great to know that you can engage in civilized conversation about Warren Oates at 3 in the morning over a pint. See you later.

Greetings from gusty Edinburgh, where this year's Film Festival is kicking into its first full day, and there's a few hangovers from last night's Opening Gala party. The Hallam Foe party last night was great fun -- held in the imposing Edinburgh School of Art, we were treated to a four-song acoustic set from Franz Ferdinand, including a new song, "Catherine Kiss Me". I even got introduced to Tilda Swinton, who's huge -- six foot, plus some incredible stack heels -- and sort of drifted through the proceedings like some flame-haired, Viking goddess. I have to be honest -- I did bail early from the party (an unusual occurence for me), which meant that today I was able to see some films with pretty much a clear head. One of the great pleasures of film festivals is stumbling across something new, something unexpected, that puts a big smile on your face. Which brings me to Andrew Kotting's In The Wake Of A Deadad. Kotting's basically a video artist masquerading as a film maker -- his films are kinda motion picture installations, his most famous piece being Gallivant, where he toured the coastline of Britain with his grandmother and disabled daughter. In a way, In The Wake Of A Deadad is similar to Gallivant. Kotting's father died in 2000, and by way of celerbrating his life, Kotting had built a giant inflatable effigy of his late father, the idea being to tour places of specific relevance to his and his father's lives and shoot footage there, of him with this dirigible. Their tour takes in locations in England -- the house where Kotting grew up, the beach where he lost his virginity -- then spools out for a trip to the Faroe Islands, to meet a hitherto unknown relative, and Mexico, to the Day of the Dead, so his father can be with other dead folks... It could have been interminable, self-indulgent twaddle, but there's something very warm and touching about the way Kotting leads this 20 ft effigy of father round the planet. His family -- partner, daughter, brothers and their family -- all figure, and there's a lot of genuine human engagement here. As an indication of the variety of movies here this year, I've just got back from seeing Ratatouille -- the latest, and typically brilliant movie from animation studio Pixar. Like its predecessors -- Toy Story, Monsters Inc, A Bug's Life -- Ratatouille is about the aspirational drive of an anthropomorphised character. In this case, a rural French rat called Remy who wants to be a chef, and ends up in Paris helping a lowly garbage boy become a top chef in a posh restaurant. As ever with Pixar movies, the level of detail is extraordinary. It's pretty easy to become blase about the astonishing feats you can achieve these days in animation, but here you get everything from rat fur to the texture on fruit and vegetables rendered with incredibly authenticity. It's great fun, too, particular credit to Peter O'Toole doing sterling work on the voice of the film's baddie -- food critic Aton Ego. Typically, there's so much to do here -- I'd even like to get out and see some of the acts on at the comedy festival. If you read our Latitude coverage, you might recall I'm something of a fan of Marcus Brigstock, who's doing his Morning Edition live in town every day. There's also a small matter of Nicholas Parsons' one man show which sounds brilliant. Later this evening though, I'm off to see Uncut contributor Damon Wise interview the magnificent John Waters live on stage. Should be a blast. I'll let you know what that was like in tomorrow's blog.