Droming On - Year Eight-And-A-Half
After three years in the wilderness, Moviedrome returned to our screens, only this time with Edinburgh Film Festival honcho Mark Cousins at the helm.
As Quentin Tarantino is convinced the world is divided between people who like Jack Kirby’s rendering of The Silver Surfer and those who prefer Mœbius’ take on Norin Radd’s alter ego, so Planet Moviedrome consists of folk who adored the Alex Cox years and people who worship at the church of Mark Cousins.
Me? I was very much in the former camp. Indeed, while working for Neon in the late 1990s, I was always heartened when fellow contributors such as Lucy Barrick would point up the paucity of the Cousins incarnation. But as the years have ebbed away and my respect for Mark’s work away from the Drome has continued to swell, I can but say that, whether it was Messrs Cox or Cousins, you were in safe hands whenever the doors to the Moviedrome swung open.
The charismatic programmer of the Edinburgh Film Festival, Mark Cousins was - and still is - a Belfast boy whose idiosyncratic approaches to i) film criticism, and ii) speaking in general could seem really precious were it not for his obvious sincerity. Notions of the new man being a bit up himself were further encouraged by a decidedly arty credit sequence charting Cousins’ journey by tram to Amsterdam’s celebrated Pathe Tuschinski movie palace.
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