Archive for February, 2008

  • 03 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    A Third Funny Games One Sheet

    2
    New Funny Games Poster

    I feel too crappy with a cold to anything other than post the new one sheet (via IMPA). I like it more than the second but less than the first. I’m now heading back to sleep more.

  • 02 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    One Other February DVD Title…Nightmare Detective

    3

    Nightmare Detective One SheetOne DVD release in February that Andrew missed in his post down below (yes it looks like an expensive month for those interested in the under appreciated gems from last year) was the Region 1 DVD release of Shinya Tsukamoto‘s Nightmare Detective. Indeed, this film is great enough to deserve its own post. It is highly misleading to assume from the trailer (below) that this is just another J-Horror cell-phone type horror movie. With Tsukamoto at the helm, even a straight-up genre flick delves deep into strange and dark corners. The three of us here at rowthree that caught the film (in the third row no less) during Toronto After Dark were split on the film. Andrew was luke-warm on it (hence his omission below!), but John and I loved this film. Pay no attention to Dimension’s extremely crappy DVD-Cover, and give this one a shot, in the dark, with the covers pulled up to your eyes.
    My full review of Nightmare Detective is over at Twitch. John’s is at Film Grotto. Nightmare Detective is set for a February 19th release date.

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    Hidden Treasures – Week of February 3rd

    6

    Here’s this week’s Hidden Treasures, with three films I’m sure you’ll enjoy

    The Day of the Jackal (1973)
    The Day of the Jackal, a police thriller directed by Fred Zinnemann, is downright obsessed with the particulars. The O.S.S., an organization bent on assassinating French President Charles DeGaulle, has thus far been unsuccessful in every attempt on the leader’s life. In one last-ditch effort, they bring in an outsider, a British assassin known only as the Jackal (Edward Fox), to finish the job. A pure professional, the Jackal’s extreme level of secrecy has caused mass confusion within the ranks of the French police, who have thus far been unable to learn either the would-be assassin’s true identity or his current whereabouts. Enter Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale), considered the best detective on the French force. With time ticking away, Lebel must stoop to extreme measures to locate the elusive Jackal and prevent him from carrying out his murderous plan. In relating this tense story of political wrangling, The Day of the Jackal essentially explores two separate, yet equally intriguing plotlines. On the one hand, we follow the Jackal as he sets his plan in motion, from acquiring an assumed identity to the purchase of his weapon, a specialized rifle that is virtually untraceable. We also tag along with the police, specifically with Lebel and his partner, Caron (Derek Jacobi), who must request assistance from outside organizations such as Scotland Yard in order to piece together the identity of this mysterious assassin. This is where the film truly sets itself apart. So often, in a movie of this nature, we spend most of our time following one plotline, while the ‘other side of the coin’, so to speak, is either completely ignored or, at the very best, under-explored. In The Day of the Jackal, both sides garner equal attention, and we the audience are treated to a real bargain when watching this well-crafted thriller. After all, it isn’t often one’s given an opportunity to see two films for the price of one.

    Exotica (1994)
    “I wanted to structure the film like a striptease, gradually revealing an emotionally loaded history”. This is how director Atom Egoyan described his stylistic approach to 1994’s Exotica, a film that’s main setting is a high-end gentlemen’s club, where women take off their clothes for a wealthy clientele. Much like a striptease, director Egoyan moves Exotica along slowly, peeling away one layer of an emotionally charged story at a time, all the while luring us in with a singularly enticing tone. The Club Exotica, a sophisticated gentlemen’s nightclub, offers adult entertainment to men of discerning tastes. Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a professional accountant with a tragic past, is one of the Club’s many regulars. Every night, Francis requests that the same dancer perform at his table. That dancer is Christina (Mia Kirshner), beautiful and alluring, whose act is to dress like a schoolgirl. Christina was once romantically involved with the club’s DJ, Eric (Elias Koteas), and over time, Eric has grown jealous of Francis and Christina’s ‘professional’ relationship. What none of them realize, however, is that they share a very special bond, one that, once revealed, will force each of them to re-examine their lives. At the heart of Exotica lies a complex tale of betrayal and loss, yet we remain in the dark to most of it for quite some time. The film reveals its intentions gradually, circling the outermost boundaries of its story in wide motions before gradually narrowing itself, coming closer and closer to the tragedy that serves as the film’s center. We are tantalized, teased and excited in much the same way the dancers work on their patrons at the Club Exotica, and, like them, we’re more than willing to wait for the payoff.

    Ratcatcher (1999)
    Director Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature, Ratcatcher is the story of James (William Eadie), a twelve-year-old Scottish boy who faces a number of problems in his life, not the least of which is the knowledge that he was personally responsible for the death of a friend. That friend was a neighbor named Ryan (Thomas McTaggart), also twelve years old, and the tragedy occurred near a dirty canal as the two jostled back and forth in the murky water. James gave Ryan a playful shove, and Ryan fell into the canal, never to resurface. Scared and confused, James ran off. Ryan’s body was eventually discovered, yet with no witnesses as to what actually happened, James keeps silent about the whole ordeal. He will spend the next few weeks hanging out with older kids, falling in love with a fourteen-year-old named Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), and dreaming of the day he and his family will move into a house in the suburbs and escape their meager environment once and for all. Set in the slums of Glasgow, at a time when a garbage collector’s strike left trash piling up in the streets, you might conclude that this film is a real downer. Yet for all its tragic trappings, the main thrust of Ratcatcher is seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Like Morvern Callar, Ramsay’s sophomore effort, Ratcatcher opens with a tragedy, but where Morvern Callar was a study of how its tragedy changed one woman’s life forever, this film is about overcoming misfortune, moving beyond reality to a place where a child’s dreams can run wild. Through the darkness of the world it has created, Ratcatcher provides a glimmer of hope in an endless sea of despair.

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    February DVD Releases of Note

    19

    Not a list of every DVD that is being released this month. Just a list of DVDs I found noteworthy or might be of interest to someone. If you have more, by all means post ‘em in the comments section…


    February 5:

    The Assassinationof Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford The Brave One Across the Universe
    2 Days in Paris Elizabeth: The Golden Age Midnight Express
    The Aristocats Feast of Love The Jane Austen Book Club
    The Apartment (SE) Descent Godard Boxset

    see the rest of the month…
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    Finite Focus: The Not-So-Secret Life of Ammunition (Lord of War)

    2

    Lord of War OneSheetOpening credits. For the bulk of cinema history, up to and including The Godfather, the artistic and technical credits of a movie used to be shown up front, right down to the hairstylist. When films went from the early days where there would only be a few people working on a film to many, many more folks involved in a production, there came a point where you needed an extended sequence just to get all the credits displayed before the movie could start. This was unless you wanted the text to potentially interfere with the set up of the drama/story/what-have-you. Think of the great wavily-unsettling optical effects at the beginning of John Frankenheimer‘s Seconds, the iconic freeze-frames of Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch, the animated silliness of The Pink Panther, the meta-craziness of Monty Python‘s Quest for the Holy Grail or the foreboding chicken-scratches of David Fincher‘s Seven. There are certainly no shortage of great opening credits sequences, even in the day and age where most of the increasingly longer credit lists (in some cases nearly 10 minutes) are pushed to the back of the film. Even in the 21st century, the remake of Dawn of the Dead managed one of the most visceral opening credits sequences, a sequence which trumps the actual film by such a wide margin it is kind of staggering.

    While the film here is actually pretty darn good, it is hard not to single out this tour de force opening of Andrew Niccol‘s LORD OF WAR. While the technical aspects of compositing everything from a bullets point of view is at times a bit clunky, there is absolutely no denying the emotional effect and ethical poser in the final seconds. In fact this scene and the overall global scope of something as complicated as arms dealing, has something in line with a film such as Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s Babel in terms of its butterfly effect message. A small quantity of explosive powder is assembled in a 7.62 mm metal casing in Odessa and results in a death in Sierra Leone within a few days. The moral and political messages are underscored by using the iconic late 1960′s Buffalo Springfield tune ”For What It’s Worth” – a song which aims for the knowledge divide from the powers that be to the powerless distracted masses. Obvious? Maybe. Appropriate? Wholeheartedly.

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    After the Credits Episode 9 – February Preview

    0


    After the Credits Episode 09 - February Preview [ 36:46 | 33.66 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup

    Dale, Colleen, Marina and special guest host John look ahead to the films opening in February!

    Please Note: I had some nasty technical difficulties and in the process lost a chunk of audio (basically the entire weeks of February 15th to 22nd). I’ve included links to the trailers for those films but please note that they lack time codes because they are not included in the audio. Apologies for the problem!

    Row Three:

    RSS Feeds:

    Subscribe to ALL the RowThree Podcasts on one feed
    Subscribe to all posts and discussion

    Check out the iTunes link in the sidebar!

    We can also be contacted via email – marina@rowthree.com!

    Show Notes:

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    Depp and Norton In Donkey Kong Adaptation?

    0

    Fillion Versus DeppThis should probably be filed under “Wishful Thinking” but a couple of guys (and a few girls) can hope.

    Colleen and I loved last year’s unlikely heart warming and laughter inducing documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (our review). We’d also heard some rumblings from the interverse that a second film was on the way, this time a fictional account of the epic rivalry between then Donkey Kong challenger Steve Wiebe (now the World Champion) and then world champion Billy Mitchell. Shortly after I found out about the fictionalized version in the works, I put in my two cents about casting and though I couldn’t think of someone to play Billy Mitchell, I had Nathan Fillion pegged as Wiebe’s spitting image and looks like I’m not alone.

    Colleen sent me a link to a news story from last August in which director Seth Gordon and producer Ed Cunningham talked a little about their proposed feature adaptation including what they’d like to include and who they’d like to see in the lead roles and I’m getting excited just thinking at the possibility

    “My first idea for Billy was Johnny Depp,” Gordon said of the famously mullet-ed arcade legend. “Ed Norton I thought would be good. It’s really not about the hair, it’s about the eyes. It’s got to be a real actor.” For Wiebe, Cunningham said he’s “partial to Greg Kinnear.” Gordon suggested Nathan Fillion from the movie “Waitress.”

    BRING IT ON.

    I was already excited about the possibility of seeing these two characters come to life again but this is even more exciting than I could have hoped for. Again, this is all speculation and no one’s been cast but we can all cross our fingers and hope for the best. I’m even OK with Kinnear (though he’s a bit on the older side to play Wiebe) but rotting for Fillion the whole way.

    In the meantime, we’ll have to be satisfied with the great documentary on DVD. I can’t wait to dig into the extras.

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    Review: Blindness

    8

    Blindness Review Captioned StillRegular reader Michael Sloan, known around these parts as simply ‘rot’ chimes in with an excellent take on City of God director Fernando Meirelles‘ latest film, Blindness. Now this screening (which I now strongly regret missing) was a rough cut of the Brazilian/Japanese/Canadian co-production, so things may be tweaked around before the August 2008 release date. Read on for Mike’s thoughts and summary of this fascinating science-fiction drama:

    Last night I had the opportunity to catch a first glimpse of Fernando Meirelles‘ rough cut of Blindness, a film adapted from the best-selling novel of Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago, and starring such heavies as Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Danny Glover. It is a film whose pedigree clearly precedes it, a perfect storm of talent that bodes perilously high expectations. Having not read the book, my interest was quelled by the high-concept premise: imagine a dystopic scenario where all of a sudden and quite inexplicably the people around you start going blind and, like a virus, this blindness spreads in every direction leaving a society crippled and in frantic want of quarantine; yet you keep your vision and bear witness to the theatre of the absurd that occurs in the absence of that so vital sense in others.

    The premise is rich in philosophical implications: how much of our identity, moral code, and civil decency is dependent upon the reaffirmed belief that there is a visible world in which we all inhabit? When the familiar fabric of that world is denied the characters which populate Blindness, a reorientation takes place both individually and socially whereby the vestiges of the old world are undone and, as is poignantly noted in voice-over, people assume a kind of invisibility in their blindness, regressing to a supreme egoism and undaunted exhibitionism they would not have participated in otherwise. Julianne Moore plays a doctor’s wife, a stowaway to the quarantine where her husband has been sent, and the only person untouched by the disease. Through her eyes we watch the escalation of violence that manifests as the quarantined victims come to terms with what entirely is lost along with their sight.

    Cinema is fond of stories about moral depravity in the face of exceptional situations where the everyday external checks of society no longer apply, from The Invisible Man, Lord of the Flies, to the recent, Das Experiment. A large segment of Blindness operates within this grand tradition as the newly blind come to recognize the absence of a ‘moral gaze’ in the quarantine, and bit by bit relinquish their inhibitions to the whims and fantasies of their minds. Meirelles, to his credit, does not shy away from the depths of human cruelty this story warrants. Prolonged sequences (yes plural) of rape had many women walking out of my theater. I am worried that these harsher aspects of the film will end up on the cutting room floor after the focus groups get their say, and while I felt there were some pacing issues throughout the film, the ugliness that Meirelles lingers on in this cut of the film feels entirely justified and makes the question of the innate worth of ‘dignity’ that much more profound. The moral ambiguity of the film, not merely of character actions, is pivotal for my recommendation of it. There is something sublime in the manner in which the story temporarily veers out of control removing from the equation, at least momentarily, the trite notions of good and evil. I contrast this sort of excess with a film familiar in concept, Das Experiment, where although both films deal with people regressing within confines that film never lets you forget who is the hero, and with Blindness, when it goes dark all bets are off and I applaud it for this lack of restraint.

    Just as valuable is the manner in which the story claws back out of the inferno of its Dantesque journey to some beatific end point. The most poignant moments of the film occur in this last wayward struggle for healing among the survivors, and it constantly surprises me how well it achieves this. The subplot of Danny Glover‘s character, a character who intermittently provides the voice-over throughout the film, and who has very little to do throughout the bulk of the quarantine scenes, becomes the real saving grace for me, and gets to the very heart of the spiritual aspects of the story that unfortunately are not as well conveyed through Julianne Moore‘s story arc. I imagine Danny Glover‘s character had a much more prominent role in the novel, and I was left wanting to have so much more time to follow his arc, at the expense of much of the arcs dealing with the child, Don McKellar‘s thief, or the Asian couple which fell entirely flat. It is worth noting also that Blindness is a parable, a purpose culminating beautifully in the final minutes of the film (at least that’s my interpretation). As per the novel, the city and the characters remain nameless, and even the quarantine and those imposing it are largely overlooked in the storytelling; the point is always the struggle and what it alludes to.

    Now my complaints. It is a film full of moments of greatness, and is a rather subdued effort considering it is from the director of City of God, yet not subdued enough to really soak up the existential subtleties bereft of the subject matter. Meirelles endlessly tries to convey cinematically the experience of blindness and while in several of these instances this pays off there is a tipping point where I felt the director was far too concerned with embodying the sensory experience and far less concerned with studying human frailty. The quarantine scenes were highly reminiscent both in subject matter and in setting of Michael Haneke‘s Time of the Wolf, except Haneke‘s restraint with the camera and his patient eye for benign-yet-telling observations of human behaviour were noticeably absent. The voice-overs, at times ponderous, at times obtrusive, always felt like the novel wedged inside the film to do the work of the spiritual theme that the story couldn’t be bothered to pursue.

    But in the end I just do not care enough about these flaws, and as a subject for review, Blindness is hard to categorize. It is a film I at no one point could concede to genuinely enjoying yet as each moment led to the next and as the revelations of the final minutes seeped into me I came to reinterpret what had come before, discovering a story delightfully cleverer and more nuanced than I had originally given it credit for. It is a bonafide story which unfolds in a way that I had not anticipated and I was won over by the roundabout insight it afforded. The execution is sometimes clumsy and story threads occasionally fumble about but the sheer determination to go further with the premise, pushing beyond the barricades of mediocrity and aspire for at least some of the weightiness of the source material, that kind of relentlessness ultimately made it a success. Certain credit is perhaps owed the screenwriter Don McKellar for not surrendering entirely the heart of the story to the more obvious gimmicky genre tropes that could have been capitalized upon. While still a compromised work, Blindness puts the work in to make you feel. In the current cut it feels like a great film shone through the wrong lens, but until Haneke does a remake, this will suffice.

  • 01 Feb

    Posted by


    Category

    Cage Is Bankok Dangerous In Pang Brothers Trailer

    2

    Bangkok Dangerous Remake Movie StillLooks like Michael Haneke is not alone in his American remake of his own film; the Pang brothers are getting in on the action as well.

    The brothers are noted for their style and though I’ve only heard of them in passing (I have a copy of Re-Cycle which I still haven’t seen), the discussion always tends to be pretty positive. Although their upcoming remake is not a shot for shot re-telling, it is an English language remake of their 1999 film Bangkok Dangerous about a hitman who is in Bangkok to pull off a series of jobs and who falls for a local woman. I’m assuming all sorts of craziness ensues.

    To bring in the big box office numbers, they’ve called on Nicolas Cage to play the hitman and as much as I dislike the guy, I must admit I like the way this trailer looks, if only because it doesn’t appear like the movie is taking itself too seriously.

    At the moment, Bangkok Dangerous does not have a North American release date which scares me a little but again, the trailer suggests this could be fun. I doubt that they’ll completely bury a film with a big name star like Cage (because as much as we may dislike him, he still equals box office numbers) but it may suffer a fate like Pacino’s upcoming 88 Minutes and be buried for a year or two.

    Thanks to RoS for the lead on the Spanish language trailer which has popped up online and there’s a load of really great looking movie stills at Beyond Hollywood.

Page 12 of 12« First...«89101112