So if I press this button, does it really copy everything over to Posterous?

Edinburgh Fringe 2009: So many artists, so much talent, so little sunshine.

I have no idea how exactly you tune two saucepans so that hitting things with them sounds a perfect fifth, but that’s why I was in the audience and these guys were on the stage.

They are Zic Zazou, and they kept this up for a full hour.

I want them at every kids birthday party I ever organize. And I suddenly want to watch Delicatessen again.

In 1909 he completed the first flight across a large body of water in a heavier-than-air craft when he crossed the English Channel, receiving a prize of 1000 British pounds for doing so.

The prize for this feat of progressive engineering and Anglo-French bridge-building came from the Daily Mail, which is the kind of irony that can make a historian’s day.

Robert Delaunay, Homage to Blériot from 1914:

They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Happy 40th, Apollo.

Edinburgh Film Festival wrap-up is online over yonder: Antichrist and Antipasto.

Edinburgh footnotes: Last year I saw  The Fall and when I came out it felt like Earth’s magnetism had reversed while I was in there – I may have mentioned this before. This year people emerged from Antichrist on their hands and knees looking for someone to surrender to. Different year, different world.

I have seen detective films hinge on sex, drugs, science, sorcery and every type of unseen glowing whatsit in a suitcase. Until The Missing Person, I had never seen one hinge on the power of art to heal America after 9/11. So a marketing challenge there. If “Awesome use of that Edward Hopper painting” is of any use on the poster, then you’re welcome.

The Hurt Locker is not for everyone, but made me yelp like a small child on occasion and I’m taking that as a good thing. Kathryn Bigelow is still the best antidote available to stupidity in action films; so no more duff Lamborghini commercials now, please.

I yelped  during the wonderful Modern Love Is Automatic too. I did it quietly every time its deadpan nurse-dominatrix threw a look of withering disdain at the world in general, which was about half the movie, and did it again whenever she switched to bottomless apathy, which was the other half. I laughed out loud when the festival programmer called it ‘pure punk’, which made me think one of us had been hitting the whisky a bit early and watched the wrong film. But in the end I had to stop: Melodie Sisk’s four-minute voice-cracking bittersweet karaoke at the end was just too much. If she doesn’t get you deep in the chest then you’re made of stone. Or disdainfully apathetic, which works here too.

Discussion of films at the Edinburgh Film Festival is starting to turn up at my usual sluggish pace over at Critic’s Notebook. A discussion of the sweet tingly feeling caused by Melodie Sisk in Modern Love Is Automatic will probably be involved.

Like that’s never happened before.

Antichrist has been given an 18 certificate by the British Board Of Film Classification (BBFC) and remains completely uncut.

Showing at Edinburgh too. Mind those scissors dear.

Not extended after she cemented her alcove in Hollywood as the generation’s shagging coat of arms, a heaps of people started surmising in all directions from Jolie’s crucial statistics.

This.

(Full disclosure: Marquis Fetish Blog and I already have some mutual promotional history.)

The condensed Cannes:

Inglourious Basterds:  Diverting.

Bright Star:  Emotional.

Taking Woodstock:  Flat.

Antichrist:  Holy hell on a stick surely not with the drill but that’s sweet jesus don’t do that and the busted leg with the talking fox and the deer’s afterbirth and I think the person next to me has been ill and christ alive Charlotte surely you’re not going to cut that off help I feel faint.

Pretty much everything else that happened to me at Cannes 2009:  Merde.

I’ll send postcards.