Salon and Sing a Song of "Hallam Foe"

Well, despite my unhappiness over the highly bogus name change to "Mister Foe," the wonderful and original Hallam Foe film will finally be released here in the US, and is starting to get some positive notice from the main stream media. While I remain dubious over the original efforts to spread the word of Hallam via the UK bloggers, I remain hopeful word will spread now that others such as this article in Salon are starting to appear. The author included it in the 12 films to watch for in 2008. Quotage:

"This dark character drama about a peculiar Scottish runaway comes from David Mackenzie, for my money one of the most interesting among the new crop of British directors. I loved his Hitchcockian erotic gothic "Asylum," with its great performance by Natasha Richardson. This was released last year in the United Kingdom as "Hallam Foe" (title of the original novel), but evidently Americans need to know that's a guy's name. (March)."

I am heartened that publications like Salon are paying attention to movies such as this (they also picked "Red Road" as one of the best independent films of 2007). I mean Hugh and friends are great and generate the coveted google standings, so when you search for HF via blog search their postings on the film would pop up first-theoretically all good and well, but lets be honest, who REALLY gets their theoretically unbiased film news/info/suggestions from MARKETING BLOGGERS?? As well intentioned as that whole thing was, frankly just about everyone I know goes to places like the Coming Soon, Empire, aint it cool, Rotten Tomatoes, Moviefone, Underground Online, Yahoo, MSN, etc for film stuff, and frankly I think they have been a bit overlooked in this process. The loopy Kate Modern appearances had more effect with the general public I believe than the well-intentioned efforts via the UK bloggers (besides imo HF was NO Snakes on a Plane, the hype for which was spread by people other than marketers, plus as awesome as HF is, it lacked the the forceful personality of the utterly cool Samuel L Jackson. The snakes movie sucked, but that line that caught the attention of the net was hilarious)

Speaking of hyping and paying attention, I really hope the excellent soundtrack for Hallam Foe will also get some attention this go round. It got some nice write up in the UK music magazines, but am uncertain what will happen here in the states. I love how David Mackenzie used a rocktrack for the score, and it really worked surprisingly well. When I first read about this I was dubious, but the choices of music worked well for the parts that required more subtle musical backgrounds and enhancements, and I give them kudos for that. Having Franz Ferdinand on the track was just a bonus, even though the track was not their traditional "sound" if you will, I really enjoyed it as it leapt to the top of my most played on the ipod all this fall. It's a shame though because there were some killer songs used in the film that I wished had made the final CD. I need to go find that list, I have it somewhere!