Archive for September, 2009

  • 21 Sep

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    Why you should be at Sitges ’09

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    sitgesWhile I am still recovering from the Toronto Film Festival experience (45 films, 16 reviews, 4am walks, 3 parties, 2 interviews, no sleep!) I cannot but think that I wish I was planning a trip to the sunny coast of spain for the worlds biggest and most comprehensive genre film festival: Sitges. Now in its 42nd year, the line up is to die for.

    Here are some of the highlights (links to Row Three Reviews):

    Enter The Void (R3 Review) – The Best film Experience of the year! Seriously.

    Grace (R3 Review) – Motherhood, biology and the parasitic infant. “He requires special food!”

    Splice (R3 Review) – sexy and scary genetic experimentation with Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody.

    Pontypool (R3 Review) – Semiotics! Zombies! Talk Radio!

    Black Dynamite (R3 Review) – Blaxploitation Spoof. Badassery. You Dig, MuthaFucka!

    Thirst (R3 Podcast Discussion) – Chan-wook Park does vampires in his own majestic and unpredictable fashion.

    Mr. Nobody (R3 Review) – Donnie Darko meets Primer meets Sliding Doors. Rinse. Repeat.

    [Rec]2 (R3 Review) – Just like [Rec] only more guns. And more crosses. (As [Rec] was to Alien, [Rec]2 is to Aliens.)

    Genius Party Beyond – The best of strange animation from 4oC studios. Animation without boundaries.

    Best Worst Movie – A doc on Troll 2 (a contender for worst film ever made) and its fandom. And Sitges is double billing it with Troll 2 for the complete package.

    The Hole – 3D (R3 Review) – A great kids story of fears in the dark with astoundingly good 3D technology.

    The Loved Ones (R3 Review) – John Hughes meets Carrie with a dollop of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Drag Me to Hell. This Down Under horror film won the TIFF midnight madness award.

    Nymph (R3 Review) – Nature is Satan’s Church.

    Deliver Us From Evil – A stylish revisit of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. With bonus added nail gun.

    Danse Macabre – Drop Dead Gorgeous reverie on the final moments before a body is interred into the ground.

    The Bad Lieutenant: Port of call New Orleans (R3 Review) – Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing. God Bless Herzog goofing on genre cinema and creating amusing, highly quotable, entertainment.

    The Forbidden Door – Indonesian ‘mind-fuck’ of a successful artist discovering how badly things can go when you peer behind the red curtain of your own psyche. Stay until after the credits for more information.

    Valhalla Rising – Vikings! Sergio Leone framing! Terrence Malick tonal poetry! Blood Eagling! Mads Mikklesen!

    Vengeance – Johnnie To in fine form makes an urban western with French superstar Johnny Hallyday.

    Moon (R3 Review) – Sam Rockwell in a stunningly designed hard science fiction film.

    Some that I personally wish to see:

    Stanislaw Lem’s “1″
    Yatterman
    Dogtooth
    O Lucky Malcolm!
    The Countess
    Bronson
    Metropia
    Heartless
    The Bullet Man (Tetsuo 3)
    Paranormal Activity
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    Loft
    Chaw
    White Lightin’
    Cold Souls (R3 Review)

    …And a word of warning (i.e. best to skip out) on these:

    Les derniers jours du monde (Happiness at the End of the World) – Sexual confusion and promiscuity as Apocalypse metaphor could have been done in 10 minutes instead of 130 agonizing minutes! Unless you want to see Sergei Lopez and Mathieu Almalric graphically make out, avoid like the plague!

    George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead – He’s lost it with this one, blunt, directionless and looking more like a bad Romero imitation than anything else.

    The Children (R3 Review) – A handsome and well shot ‘Children Slasher Film’ that seems to please the genre-crowd, but is braindead and blunt without being very scary.

  • 21 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: The Hole

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    the_hole-TIFF09

    Has it really be six years since a theatrical feature film has been directed by Joe Dante? One of the masters of blending horror and comedy, or making edgy childrens films that tend to appeal to lovers of horror and fantasy, he has been making TV episodes (Masters of Horror), contributing to the odd anthology (Trapped Ashes) and being an all around expert ‘talking head’ on various film geek documentaries. So, with his latest movie, The Hole, it is nice to have him back in the directors chair putting his distinctive stamp on the recent wave of 3D features. On a personal note, Dante is already ahead of game in that this is the first 3D feature I have watched since the trend started that did not give me a migraine headache. The extra dimension, despite being technically impressive, does quite little for the film (beyond the usual gimmickry of ‘show off’ moments,’ particularly in POV shots from inside the titular orifice as things are dropped down or light shone inward. While the story is little beyond the average R.L. Stein romp, fans of the director may delight in the individual set-pieces (Much like Sam Raimi’s recent Drag Me To Hell) which have a fun little bit of sadism lurking below the conventional exterior.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 21 Sep

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    Extended Thoughts (TIFF 09): The Road

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    John Hillcoat's The Road

    When it was announced that Australian director John Hillcoat would be taking up the challenge of bringing the bleak and difficult novel, The Road, to the screen it seemed liked the absolute perfect match of director and material. After all, his gritty and fly-coated outback western The Proposition had that right mix of apocalyptic and tender that is the essence of Cormac McCarthy’s prose (the crisp non-nonsense sentences are as sparsely worded as any book that I have read, yet finds power and poetry in its repetition). And are not many post-apocalypse survival movies similar in tone and execution to the modern anti-western? Make no mistake, this is a handsome, consistent and harrowing adaptation of the work, but it is not quite a filmic masterpiece because I fear the novel as it is, is not translatable from the written page to the screen. There is something about letting the immediacy of each small sentence in the book sink in slowly, whereas Hillcoat and co. have only 2 short hours with with to pain their gray portrait of a world in ruin. It is a faithful adaptation of the book to be sure, many of the “Day After Tomorrow” images in the gawd-awful trailer cut by the Weinstein Company are (thankfully) not in the in the film, and any scars or signs of its length (and likely troubled) production history are not evident on screen. Rest assured that The Road is the quiet and intimate drama, and very likely to be the bleakest multiplex movie of 2009 (should the distributor finally stop shuffling it back in the calender again and again) as it should be; yet, nevertheless between book and screenplay, something of the soul was lost in translation.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 21 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Soul Kitchen

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    SoulKitchenMovieStill

    Opening to funkadelic beats and high gloss cinematography, Soul Kitchen may confuse fans of German/Turkish director Fatih Akin, who is perhaps best known for the energetic and raw drama Head On (Gegen die Wand).

    Piling on pratfalls, meet-cutes, wacky neighbors and an abundance of ‘Fox Searchlight’-isms (think of the plots and tone of films from that company: The Full Monty, Saving Grace, Juno) and the old stand by of good food equating to good sex, Akin does not reinvent the wheel, but he does deliver one of the better comedies stuffed to bursting with living-in-the-margins characters out there. When all the elements come together this well, you’ve got to surrender to the pleasure well made simple dish (Ratatouille if you will).

    Zinos is having a bad day. He owes the tax-lady a whack of cash, his girlfriend is leaving him for a journalism career in China, and his gambling prone criminal brother is just getting out of jail. To top it off, his dishwasher dies and moving in the new one, he threw out his back, badly, and has no medical coverage (or cash) to even see what is wrong. Who is going to cook the frozen fish-sticks and wiener schnitzel that pay the bills by giving his restaurants few clientel something to munch alongside their beer. Amongst the wreckage of his current situation he is given a godsend, one of the best chefs in town, played ferociously by Head Ons protagonist Biron Unel, is fired at the very moment he is at his girlfriends farewell dinner at a fancy restaurant. The chef is one of those John Cleese (or Tony Shaloub in Big Night) type crazies that freak out if a customer wants extra salt or pepper added to the food. He is the best kind of chef, a fascist and a perfectionist that will not on principle fill his customers bellies “full of shit.” And once given the guarantee that Zinos will not get in his way (with a set budget) he sets out to have Soul Kitchen live up to its name.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 21 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Face

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    FaceMovieStill

    Cinema is as close to immortality as anyone will achieve. It lives along with beautiful facsimiles (when preserved on celluloid, DVD, digital drives, etc.) long after the actors and directors are gone. We can see Greta Garbo or Charlie Chaplin or Jean-Pierre Leaud as a confused and passionate child and make friends with them, love them even. Tsai Ming-Liang’s latest move literalizes that love on screen in interesting ways. Fanny Ardant eats an apple while a reflection of her in a nearby aquarium is that of Yu Li-Ching (one of the directors staple actresses). The take hangs for so long that it almost appears a picture of Yu Li-Ching starts to smile. An optical illusion perhaps, but that is what cinema is in the first place.

    The plot (as much as any film by the Taiwanese auteur has one) is that of Lee Kang-Sheng making a film on Salome in France (in the basement of the Louvre no less) using French actors (Fanny Ardant, Jean Pierre Leaud and Laetitia Casto). One of the key props, a magnificent stag, goes missing during shooting. But really, who watches Tsai Ming-Liang for plot. No, the film revels in the sensual, familiar motifs that grace many of his previous films, but here in French locations. The images are tactile enough that you can physically connect to: a small finch stepping between fingers, a burst of a kitchen faucet that almost turns Chaplin-esque. But nothing so much as the signature scene in which Casto and two nude back-up dancers perform the Dance of the Seven Veils to the director who is covered in plastic and tomato sauce. Never to take things literal, but always sensual, the song is done without music, but rather the loud rattle of the metal hangers used by the dancer and the translucent plastic and a magnificent dress.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 21 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Enter the Void

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    Enter The Void. The title can pretty much describe Gaspar Noe as a director. His previous films have been dark, wet places where bad things happen, things that stare back at you and darken up your soul for having watched them. Take the infamous Irreversible, which took the current biggest actors-in-their-prime in France (Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci in France, who happened to be married in real life) and had the former commit one of the most graphic onscreen murders I have ever seen (a fire extinguisher to the head of a prone man) and the other raped in long take for about nine single-take painful minutes. So yes, his ‘audacious credentials’ are well established and we are used to grimy, ugly and difficult to watch cinematography.

    So colour me surprised to see him make a beautiful, gliding, movie that never puts off the viewer, but invites them along for the ride. As it stand this is my favourite film caught at the Toronto Film Festival, and perhaps my favourite of the year. It not only offers a unique view of Tokyo, but also tells one of those mega-sized ambitious stories that Stanly Kubrick chews on. Call it the fusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut served up as the biggest ‘bread and circus’ act of arthouse cinema I’ve ever witnessed.

    You don’t watch this movie, you experience it; playing the ultimate in cinematic voyeur, looking out of the main characters eyes, getting high in his apartment and then ambling out to do a drug deal. The POV camera is complete with ‘blinking’ (a very convenient, even elegant, way for Noe to hide his cuts. After all this would also be his version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, a film made to look like a single unbroken cut. Except here the film is nearly 3 hours long and when our main character is shot, it is his ‘spirit journey.’ This is not an interpretation or even subtle, it is indicated specifically by the Tibetan book on the afterlife the central character is reading before he starts his drug-trip and subsequence shedding of his mortal coil. With the camera now ‘attached’ to the liberated ghost, it allows for not only strange and unusual places for the movie to go: inside of light sources, up through the sky into an airplane then back down into a taxi, or even into other peoples heads, but it also allows for a connect the dots narrative which illustrates the karma of how our ‘guide’ got offed in the first place. Ladies and gents, here is another facile (and incomplete) pitch-quote for the film: Rope meets Waking Life.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 21 Sep

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    Film on TV: September 21-27

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    2001: A Space Odyssey, playing on TCM at 2:00am on the 22nd

    There are several newly featured films worthy of highlight this week. TCM is playing a double-feature of Buster Keaton silents on Monday night, starting with Sherlock Jr.. They’re also throwing out some noirs that are new to our listing – the Raymond Chandler-based Murder, My Sweet on Wednesday and the Bogart-Bacall Key Largo Sunday. And don’t miss a couple of really great romances – Two for the Road Friday on the Fox Movie Channel, and Brief Encounter Saturday on TCM. Something for everyone this week, as well as the usual crop of repeats in case you missed something in earlier weeks.

    Monday, September 21

    6:30am – IFC – Howl’s Moving Castle
    Hayao Miyazaki has been a leader in the world of kid-friendly anime films for several years now, and while many would point to Spirited Away as his best film, I actually enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle the most of all his films. Japanese animation takes some getting used to, but Miyazaki’s films are well worth it, and serve as a wonderful antidote to the current stagnation going on in American animation (always excepting Pixar).
    2004 Japan. Director: Hayao Miyazaki. Starring (dubbed voices): Christian Bale, Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons, Lauren Bacall
    (repeats at 12:20pm)

    3:45pm – TCM – The Window
    Young boy Bobby Driscoll is a chronic liar, which makes it very difficult to make his family and other adults believe him when he claims he saw a murder being committed. But when the murderer finds out what he knows… A solid little thriller told from a child’s point of view.
    1949 USA. Director: Ted Tetzlaff. Starring: Bobby Driscoll, Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy, Paul Stewart, Ruth Roman.

    8:00pm – TCM – Sherlock, Jr.
    Buster Keaton is a film projectionist who longs to be a detective so much that he dreams himself into a film he’s projecting so he can become the detective hero of the story. The scene of him entering the film is justly famous, though it’s a smaller portion of the film than its fame leads you to believe.
    1924 USA. Director: Buster Keaton. Starring: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Ward Crane.
    Must See
    Newly Featured!

    9:00pm – TCM – Steamboat Bill, Jr.
    One of Buster Keaton’s best-known films has him as the city-boy son of a steamboat captain who goes to learn his father’s trade. Many mishaps later, he’s left to rescue his father from a tremendous hurricane – that scene is one of Keaton’s absolute best set-pieces, as he remains implacable while buildings literally fall around him.
    1928 USA. Director: Charles Reisner. Starring: Buster Keaton, Ernest Torrence.
    Newly Featured!

    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 19 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Mr Nobody

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    Director: Jaco van Dormael (The Eighth Day, Totò the Hero)
    Writer: Jaco van Dormael
    Editors: Matyas Veress, Susan Shipton
    Producer: Philippe Godeau
    Starring: Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Toby Regbo, Juno Temple, Diane Kruger, Rhys Ifans, Natasha Little
    MPAA Rating: 14A
    Running time: 138 min.

    One of the oddest, most thoughtful and certainly ambitious film screening at this year’s Toronto Film Festival is certainly Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody. But this is also one of the most intelligent scripts I’ve yet to see this year. Mixing hard science fact, hypothesis and theories with classic philosophy and drama, Mr. Nobody dives into all manner of possibilities wrapped around quite an enigmatic tale of love, choice and opportunities seized and lost.

    To attempt a synopsis in under 1000 words seems almost futile, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. The film starts in the future of 2092. The oldest man in the world, Nemo Nobody, has captured the attention of the world as the last man that will ever die of old age since automatic cell regeneration has been achieved. Nemo sits in a hospital of sorts and recounts his life first to a sort of doctor/hypnotist, then later to a journalist. The tale weaved starts before Nemo’s birth as he tells the process a soul goes through before choosing its parents. The story then moves through adolescence and into manhood but in a nonlinear fashion. We see several versions of Nemo’s life had he made one choice over another and we move back and forth in time to get different perspectives of different events and indeed different and sometimes intersecting lifetimes. As I said, not the easiest of plots to explain in words, but if you were to combine Abre los Ojos (Vanilla Sky) with Gwynneth Paltrow’s Sliding Doors, you have a rough idea the style in which the narrative is told. Add some elements and the influence of such films as Slaughterhouse 5, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the warm hearted drama and tone of Amélie (just to name a few) into the mix and you understand the ambitiousness that the film strives for. Unbelievably, it succeeds beyond expectations and then some!
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 18 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Last Ride

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    Director: Glendyn Ivin
    Screenplay: Mac Gudgeon
    Producers: Antonia Barnard, Nicholas Cole, Nick Cole
    Starring: Hugo Weaving, Tom Russell, Anita Hegh, John Brumpton
    MPAA Rating: NYR
    Running time: 90 min.

    Looking for the perfect companion piece to Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road (our review)? Then look no further as Glendyn Ivin’s Last Ride is just the ticket you’re looking for. Not set in a post-apocalyptic world, but rather in a desolate and sparsely populated Australian Outback, a rugged, middle-aged man (Kev) and young son (Chook) struggle to survive while quite obviously on the run from a troubled recent past.

    The film is maybe more comparable to Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World starring Kevin Costner with the only major detail change being that the boy in Last Ride is our anti-hero’s son. But the comparison still sticks as the two outlaws cross the gorgeous Aussie Outback sleeping wherever and stealing whatever they can; causing a substantial amount of intentional and unintentional amount of understated mayhem in their wake. What differentiates this film from Eastwood’s is the difference in expectations that our main characters have and wish for. While young Chook wants nothing more than a good family structure and a warm bed in his very own home, Kev wants nothing of it and would rather his son learn the ways of the world in the harshness of said world.
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  • 18 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: [Rec] 2

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    Directors: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza ([Rec])
    Writers: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
    Producer: Julio Fernández
    Starring: Manuela Velasco, Jonathan Mellor, Ariel Casas, Alejandro Casaseca, Pep Molina
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 85 min.

    Two years ago, Spanish directors Balagueró and Plaza gave audiences a unique look into the zombie sub-genre with a handheld, first person perspective film taking place within a single building which bore witness to a zombie outbreak that spread like wildfire. Due to the quarantine lock down of said building, the film also gave us a claustrophobic and dark tone which helped in creating one of the scariest films of all time which quickly became a cult phenomena that even gave birth to an American remake within a year of its original release. Here we are just two years later and Balagueró and Plaza are back to up the ante with [Rec] 2. And up the ante they did!

    [Rec] 2 begins mere minutes after part one’s credits have rolled so it’s a good idea to make sure you’ve seen the original installment before preceding onward. A special ops team has been called in to quell whatever sort of viral outbreak is causing “the disturbance” inside the building. This cocky bunch of cowboys are told that tenants infected inside the building are “aggressive,” but what becomes quickly obvious is that these boys are ill informed and ill prepared; for once inside the building, the “infestation” is more than they can handle and has grown to much larger proportions than they had originally presumed. On top of this, there is something more than meets the eyes with these infected people than just a mere “illness” or “virus.” If [Rec] was Alien, then [Rec] 2 is Aliens; in terms of structure, plot points and sheer intensity.
    » Read the rest of the entry..

  • 18 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Life During Wartime

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    LifeDuringWartime

    Todd Solondz goes back to the Happiness well with his latest feature. Life During Wartime is a direct sequel to the controversial 1998 film featuring a family of three sisters, the various men connected to them (a misogynist freeloader and thief, a pedophile and a loathsome crank-calling pervert), their kids, and their parents. But the director has recast every single role (echoes of his lead actress switching in his last film, Palindromes) and pushed the films setting to Florida during current times. He has also scaled back the ‘extreme’ tone of the film. There are no white body fluids, or lengthy attempts to seduce young boys against their will. This is the Solondz film you can show your grandmother. That does not mean his deadpan and droll sense of humour is not in full effect however. The sisters continue to seek some kind of satisfaction or at least solace (while always pretending to be happy), the tone of this film is more one of forgiveness.

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  • 18 Sep

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    TIFF 09 Review: Kamui

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    kamuimoviestill

    A ninja epic without a story, Yoichi Sai’s adaptation of the 40 year old manga source material limps onto screen with hollow characters, bad CGI and way, way too much run-time. For enthusiasts of mythology of the ninja there is something on offer, and its ambitious attempt at an unfocused narrative (for those who make it to the end of the film this spelled out as obvious as it can be) is intriguing on paper, but actual execution – particularly in the pacing department – is sorely lacking (even by Japanese fantasy epic standards; Gojoe, Casshern I am looking at you).

    Outcast from his vile and villainous ninja clan, despite being potentially the most talented of the next generation, Kamui ends up walking the earth alone and hunted at a very young age. He unwittingly joins forces with boisterous and amusing Hanbei (the only character in the movie with any spark in him) after Hanbei kills the horse of a local (evil) lord. Ending up in Habei’s anonymous fishing village and essentially moving in with the fisherman’s family, Kamui attempts to find a life there, but his past keeps creeping back up, endangering his chances at peace and family.

    » Read the rest of the entry..

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