It's not your dead daughter, it's a killer dwarf!

Just under a fortnight to go till Venice 2010 opens with a screening of Darren Aronofsky's twinkle-toed thriller, Black Swan, and in addition to the mounds of reviews the Indie Movies Online team are intending to send back from the watery metropolis, my blog strand hath returnedth also, to offer a more personalised perspective on shenanigans at the 67th edition of the world's oldest film festival.

Okay, so anyone who caught the Cannes edition of the blog (hello mum) will know the drill. But for those who don't, the raison d'être for this particular strand of our film festival coverage is to permit this writer to take a step back from the movies themselves – which in the case of Venice, as with Cannes before it, will be covered in oodles and oodles of detail on the main section of the festival mini-site – to instead offer what might be, slight nauseatingly, referred to as a 'sideways glance' at goings-on at Venice 2010*.

(* Note to self: good work undercutting the inherent lameness of deploying the term 'sideways glance' by making explicit your awareness of said lameness, thereby conveniently allowing you free usage of a term you have already identified as lame and are therefore obviously only wheeling out in a strictly ironic, knowing and thoroughly postmodern manner, even though in reality you can't think of a genuinely superior term to convey your intended meaning. Yay for you, for so ingeniously covering up your deficiencies of imagination/vocabulary.)

It's a means to keep tabs on any ne'er do-wells I happen to see lurking around, with Crowe, Beckinsale, Blanchett, Brain Grazer's hair and Hollywood's premier spokesperson for the frozen dairy goods industry, Benicio Del Toro, all having cropped up at Cannes. Plus it permits me to rant and rave like a crazed little cartoon squiggle man about whatever else happens to come into my line of vision during the festival period. Back in May, addressed topics included queuing to get into movies, close encounters with safety-eschewing cab drivers, more queuing to get into movies, the Sisyphean task of procuring beer as opposed to champagne at parties held in honour of films about medieval English brigands, even more queuing to get into movies and the world's finest takeaway pizza menu. Er, did I mention there was some queuing too?

Down in the south of France, you rock up kind of knowing what you're letting yourself in for, so fulsome is the media coverage given to the Cannes Film Festival. Venice, in comparison, will be something of a leap into the unknown. Yet while the movies might not be of any significant assistance in educating me about the film festival itself - Henry Jaglom's Venice/Venice, which does happen to be set during the fest has remained, thus far, obscurely out of my reach - they can at least provide a premonitory portal onto the alien environment I will be venturing into in just two weeks time. Once again, cinema will be my great educator, just as it was with college, sexual relations, clearing your name after a one-armed man murders your spouse, and the perils of city-stomping rampages by atomically-swollen beasties.

There isn't a great deal to be said for Casino Royale's wishy-washy denouement in Venice; the Royale flush if you will, when Daniel Craig battles to save the one thing which the mise en scène of that overrated movie has made eminently apparent means more to him than anything else in the world (his Sony VAIO laptop). However by condemning Eva Green to a watery grave that first instalment in the rebooted adventures of the cinematic medium's foremost magnet for venereal infection at least taps into the thanatic vein discernible as running through some of the better-known movies set in the City of Masks.

The Grim Reaper's shadow sure looms large over the Venice seen on the silver screen. It's there in what is probably the most famous motion picture title to feature the word 'Venice' – Visconti's Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde – and a macabre atmosphere is the salient feature of what are almost certainly the most famous movie scenes played out against the backdrop of the city, in Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now. That latter flick sees anonymous corpses being pulled out of the Laguna Veneta with a similarly regular frequency to that with which the English capital's fishermen find themselves hooking used prophylactics from the Thames, while the peerless shock-horror finale finds Donald Sutherland catching up with the fleet-footed redcoat he reckons is his dead daughter, only to realise – aarghh, no! It's a bloody killer dwarf! Knackers!

Now take a second to bask in memories of the magnificence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Memories of that Indiana Jones movie and that Indiana Jones movie only, mind. Don't be letting your brain sneakily tiptoe across the border into the badlands, the forbidden zone, where Indy lives a nuke-proof fridge, his long-lost son is Tarzan Brando, and luv a duck gor blimey guv'nor you facking slaaag Ray Winstone has something to do with the whole smelly endeavour.

Nope, forget that poop-storm and instead recall the Venice action from movie three. Exciting stuff, to be sure, what with the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword trying to off Indy by setting him ablaze in a rat-infested catacomb tomb, and that subsequent speedboat chase. But tombs? Attempted murders? A fully-manned speedboat going kaboom as it gets shut between two larger vessels? Yet another filmic depiction of Venice finds death emerging triumphant.

Which bony fingers of doom lead us to a movie where the icy oblivion of lifeless emptiness really and truly reigns supreme, a vista of cinematic bleakness breathtaking in its utter absence of hope and sentience. I can only be talking about Blame It on the Bellboy from 1992. The death which pervades this particular movie is a comedic death, as Dudley Moore, Bryan Brown and Richard Griffiths get their similar-sounding character names mixed up by a useless bellboy (he's foreign, don't you know) and an estate agent is sent to meet the Mafia, a hitman is sent on a blind date and a philanderer is sent to look at a house. It's a comedy to make the aforementioned Don't Look Now seem like a regular laugh riot. As it happens, being knifed in the throat by a gnarled little person is a fate preferable to watching all the way through to the end credits.

Will that be the story for this blog over the eleven-day duration of Venice 2010? The attempted transposition of British humour to the canal-strewn haunt of Casanova (who provided route to another on-screen Venetian adventure for Donald Sutherland, via the direction of Federico Fellini) merely succeeding in effecting an annihilation so in-keeping with that which befell Vesper Lynd, the extras of the Cruciform Sword and the gag-rate in Blame It on the Bellboy? Be back here in two week's time to find out if there is substantive fact in my John Baxter-like troubled premonitions of a blogging car... er, gondola crash.

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