messy meze fest begins

the busyness of the week began with another brilliant LOOSE gig. up first was FORMER UTOPIA, a man with a guitar who sounded like SMOG without it being too obvious and being from london helped with that. we really enjoyed his set and even more so when we got to the merch stall and discovered that he was selling his single for £4 with a bonus 20 (yes, twenty!) track cd. ace! there were not many people there but then most people are idiots, it gives us more space but i did worry about the jollity of the bands that have come here from canada to tour to 6 people. next up was the lo fi CONSTRUCTION DESTRUCTION. they were shy grungey types and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, she was great at singingand drums, he was good on guitar but they kept swapping instruments and so the quality ebbed and flowed. i really liked their songs though, some of them sort of like grungey lo fi indie disco. julie doiron came on stage and although i was not aware of her before she acted like the most comfortable, famous person in the room. she trawled through her melancholic songs with a sort of powerful ease and played for ages and ages, playing for over an hour. her between song banter made me very homesick, she was from the same part of the world as my beloved alison black and i had a chat with them afterwards about the weird and wonderful month i spent seeing in the millennium in the backwoods of nova scotia. i wanted to call miss black up straight away and force her to move in with us.

wednesday my matinee was the new judd apatow movie FUNNY PEOPLE. i think i knew what to expect even if my oldies audience didn't. i'm not sure if people really read the programme notes sometimes. my oldies went in expecting an old fashioned funny movie but this was more like a noughties THE KING OF COMEDY than anything else. calling in a few favours with old room mate adam sandler and trading on his insider knowledge of the business this film was at times quite dark exploration of what it means to be a huge comedy star of stupid movies watching the new generation bite you on the arse. adam sandler's character george simmons was pretty much what adam sandler would have become had he not got domesticated and found some humility. he is lonely and selfish and rich. his doctor tells him he has leukaemia and not much time to live and he keeps it quiet, hiring a new PA ira (the ubiquitous seth rogan) and trying to keep his head down, taking an experimental course of prescription drugs before popping his clogs. he and ira slowly become friends and ira takes it upon himself to try and pull george out of his funk by being a sort of mentor to his mentor, a moral compass and a reminder of the joy of friendship and comerarderie that he has been missing for the last few years. although this sounds predictible, it isn't. apatow manages to make this story, that could have very easily become a gross out joke fest with no soul, believable and moving. he draws it out slowly and carefully. although the film did feel a bit overlong (it clocks in at a "dances with wolves" style 2 and a half hours) he keeps the pace inkeeping. the only time it seemed to lack direction was in the extended subplot with laura, his big ex-love who he may have a chance with again. however, since this allowed for a surprising and very welcome cameo from eric bana as her new husband i forgave him this. ah eric bana, last week you made me weep for your career and pray that one day soon that i would re-watch CHOPPER and pretend you had just died or something and that you never embarrassed yourself so. here he is allowed to be funny and play on that dumb / not so dumb australian charm. he is a funny man, for gods' sake someone put him in a funny movie or at least a drama where he doesn't just have to look around bemused. please? the likelihood of a hollywood exec reading this is decidedly slim but i have to ask. anyway, sorry for the tangent but i really quite enjoyed funny people. it surprised me, as 40 year old virgin did before it. it wasn't stupid, it wasn't cliched, it featured some great cameos from some comedians i'd forgotten all about (another great exploitation of apatow's new hollywood crudentials). after getting a bit sick of seeing apatow's name attached to everything labelled "comedy" in the last couple of years it reminded me that he is the real deal, an interesting and fresh eye in mainstream hollywood films.

the next film i ushered that day was a very different kettle of fish (ha! see what i did there?! ....sorry) the new andrea arnold film FISH TANK, but after the hollywood stylings of funny people this could not have been more different. set in an essex high rise estate we find mia, a skinny hoodie teen looking out of one of the high rise window contemplatively but who from the outset is shown in a number of acts that to be confrontational and dangerous. she is the type of teen the daily mail pants out headlines about every day to scare its readers into submission. we quickly realise that we're stuck with her, she may be unlikeable but she's going to be how we view the world and we are going to have to view hers. this initial recoil from our narrator in the first scene stands us in good stead for the rest of the film as rather than making us comfortable it immediately makes us wary and questioning. this is a tough world. i saw people walk out quite quickly after this first beginning, presumably offended by the language, the violence, the basic brutality of the state of things in mia's life. her family's affectionate terms alone would be enough to shunt the film well past the watershed. the estate is the fish tank in question, its inhabitants swimming around listless and unable to escape. as with her previous film RED ROAD, arnold tries to show the humanity behind the stereotype of the estate being a hive of scum and villainy. thanks to a wonderful performance from newcomer kate jarvis as well as a brilliant supporting cast (none of whom you doubt the authenticity of) we truly discover who mia is. she is a young woman who is not stupid, just trapped and longing to escape. she clings to anyone who offers hope of a different view of life, the traveller teen she meets when she tries to free his family's ailing horse and more dangerously, her mothers' charming new boyfriend connor. the attraction they have for each other is queasily and tragically played out but as sleazy as the attraction is, you never get the impression that connor is a predatory peado, played with great power by michael fassbender he is oozing with sexual energy and seems to be seduced by a different set of rules in an unnatural landscape. from the first outing where he takes them to a wild land and tells mia's incredulous little sister that the fish squirming in his hands is in essence where her fish fingers come from we know he is different from them, he is the wild salmon in this fairground goldfish bowl and when we finally see his house we realise he himself is trapped in a fancier kind of aquarium.

the next day will and i had off together, not that you'd guess since i had to go to a couple of important meetings. we finally reunited to go and see AFTERSCHOOL in the afternoon. this impressive first feature from antonio campo plays upon his previous short film theme of the pervasive impact of the internet in young people's lives. in a posh boarding school in the east coast of america robert is an introverted lad who doesn't really have any friends and not considered cool but not angsty enough to be a counterculture outsider, he is still at that stage where he wants to be cool and fit in. he listlessly watches clips on youtube of fellow teens in school beating up other pupils, doing stunts, the odd porn film. his brain is saturated with these real/unreal images. he joins the afterschool video club to get close to a girl he likes and finds himself again the watcher, able to control the image rather than just passively watching. but we find that he chooses not to control the image, their given assignment is to do establishing shots of the school and the camera statically sits on banal images of a corridor until a shocking event finds its way in front of robert's camera. the film is shot carefully, pulled back and inobtrusive and occasionally willfully badly framed. it feels like you're watching the events, a persistent voyeur in this boy's life. it is a film that sucks you in and makes you a little afraid for the next generation's ease with camera phones, cctv and the knowledge that whatever you do it will probably in some way (whether viewed by some camera somewhere or mentioned on facebook) become public knowledge.

in the evening we headed off for the first day of the glorious MEZE FEST! curated by will's joy collective boss jonny it is a formidable and ambitious project where there is at least 4 bands every night every day of the month (except for mondays) for the whole of october. my head hurts just thinking about it. october is going to be a very busy month for me, with the reopening of chapter and swn / mylit festivals as well as more theatre work coming up (really strong programme this autumn) i am planning to do as much meze-ing as possible but have the foreknowledge that it is not going to ever be enough for my liking. we discoverd happily that newport is only £3.60 away and that the meze is only 2 minutes fromthe station. score! i have vague memories of being here before but very briefly, i'm not sure what its incarnation was in 1997 but that was the last time i reguarly went to newport. we had a quick stop in the merenger pub, a happy old haunt that i had mistakenly thought had closed down (it just had a little refurb and a jukebox ban from new owners sam smiths. booo!) and then ambled over to see the first band of the festival THINKING WITH SAND. i'm not sure about the name but the music was great. dreamy and droney with some great beats from a man who looked like a younger version of those science blokes who used to turn up on open university late at night. we were hanging around with the very lovely mel and graf and matt jarrett who took us under his wing and showed will the hot snack bar, the equivalent of giving charlie bucket the keys to the chocolate factory. his eyes widened. the next band were not my favourite, they were little emo indie kids who had apparently brought in their own lighting to make themselves look moody. all style no substance so i went into the empty hot snack bar to do some writing instead. will found me a bit later and pulled me back in where he'd found newpart, a group of enterprising young art students who are going around gigs getting people to draw something, anything. steen draws a picture of a steak with a rainbow coming out. i draw a bad portrait of him that he drunkenly calls genius. hmmm. next up is STRAY BORDERS who i was very very excited about seeing again. we saw their farewell gig a few months ago supporting rock of travolta and jonny had convinced them to come out of retirement for meze, for which i am duly thankful. they are so good, still sound like the soundtrack to the best bit of a angsty teen movie, that bit where the heroine falls in love and doesn't know what to do with herself. last up were a band that no-one i could find knew anything about but CASPIAN turned out to be really amazing. like sigur ros if they discovered sludge and loud in that way that can just pound you to the ground. i'd thankfully remembered my new earplugs for this gig and was glad of them as my ears were ringing right through to the next day despite them. we travelled back on the train with the mel, graf and the equally lovely businessman keith lerego (whose surname fills me with joy each time i roll it around in my mouth). we shared a much needed taxi back (it was after midnight and my energy was ebbing away with each tick of the clock. it made us very excited for the month of fun that the clever charlotte braddick has named rocktober. bring it, rocktober!