London Film Festival: the hot news is, fuck the London Film Festival. It’s a kind of test case for reception theory: I used to think, sponsors be damned, here is an opportunity to watch lots of skill films. But such is the intensity of branding and general Murdoch fannydangle that my old position is no longer tenable. I’m not going to play the viral game and say what the ‘hot’ films are. I saw some good films and some bad, but I would have seen them eventually, in my own time, and without pressure at some point anyway. No film is ‘discovered’ at the London Film Festival: most of them have been bought for distribution already. This is true of the Cambridge Film Festival, which I boosted here. But that had charm, and an enthusiastic audience: this has awful non-fans. Last night I overheard a conversation along the lines of ‘I kind of got confused between [Faye Wong] and [Gong Li]’ — from someeone who had seen ‘2046’ already at Cannes, ie who was likely High Up in the film world. Possibly I like going for days out (ie to Cambridge) more than to films. I dunno. Martin Luther was right.