Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Last night I set the video to record a couple of movies on TV called Look Back in Anger and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (which was based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe, who I'll be seeing at the Book Festival in August). They must be doing a season on depressing British social realist films from the 1950s and 60s.

Work was the same as ever. There weren't many people in at all, which is always the way on Fridays. I left work at four to head up to the Filmhouse cinema. I went to see another one of the Film Festival films, this one being Dreams With Sharp Teeth, directed by Erik Nelson. It was a documentary film about the controversial science-fiction author Harlan Ellison. The film mostly consisted of Ellison discussing his life and career, alongside archive footage of TV interviews he'd done, Ellison reading extracts of his work against various surreal, computer-generated backdrops and comments from famous admirers and friends including actor Robin Williams and author Neil Gaiman. The film is often extremely funny as Ellison discusses his various antics (such as mailing a dead gopher to a New York publishing house, and accidentally breaking the pelvis bone of a television executive on a model of the submarine from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea during a script conference). He also shares his out-spoken opinions on almost everything. It was preceded by a very short film called Out of Print about the joys of tracking down rare, hard to find cult books, records and movies, in the days before the internet.