Because I do not want to spend one more minute thinking about it, and I will only use 60 second of your valuable time. Here is yours truly, courtesy of TheSubstream, speaking of failed meta-film experiment constructed with behind-the-scenes footage of James Franco at General Hospital and goofy voice-over to do…something. The result is a steaming pile of meta-mush.
With Avengers set to clean up at the Box Office this weekend, trotting out and agenda of colourful, mindless fun and popcorn, it is no surprise that Christopher Nolan and company put out the grimmest, moodiest, downer of a trailer possible for The Dark Knight Rises. *Spoilers Ahoy* in this trailer below. Enjoy the silence. Enjoy the mayhem of the last few seconds.
Director: Frédéric Jardin
Writers: Frédéric Jardin, Nicolas Saada, Olivier Douyère
Producers: Marco Cherqui, David Grumbach, Jean-Jacques Neira
Starring: Tomer Sisley, Serge Riaboukine, Julien Boisselier, Joey Starr, Laurent Stocker
Country of Origin: France
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 89 min.
During an early morning drug robbery, the culprits make off with a dozens of kilograms of cocaine, but one unlucky fellow, Vincent, gets tagged with a stab wound, and even worse, has his face spotted by the dealers he is stealing from. But wait a minute. Vincent and his partner are cops who have plotted a rogue, and quite illegal heist for some much needed cash. Vincent, all ready at odds with ex-wife gets in trouble when the owner of the drugs, Jose – a snappily dressed middle-man who operates out of a Paris night club the size of a small airport – kidnaps his son Thomas in exchange for Vincent returning the drugs. During a packed night, the hand-off at the club gets royally messed up as two more branches of the police, Vincent’s partner, the Turks who are trying to buy the drugs from Jose and at probably a couple of other interested parties join the chase as Vincent’s changes of getting his son back dwindle and his changes of getting beaten, shot, stabbed, busted, or simply bleeding death on the floor increase – exponentially. As far as I can tell, the entire film takes place within 24 hours, but the pacing is so relentless, that at times, it feels like a single whirlwind take.
Either Mads Brügger has balls the size of grapefruits or there is mondo chicanery going on in The Ambassador. Well, it’s a given that there is trickery happening, so the thing to figure out is who the trick is on: The Central African Republic (a former French colony smack-dab in the middle of the contient), shady European dealers of grey-market diplomatic credentials, helpful local guide-advisers or us the viewers. The result is a thoroughly captivating, often hilarious bit of guerrilla filmmaking that is subversive both to its subject matter, and its medium of choice.
Lets start at the beginning. Mads Brügger Cortzen is a Danish media personality that is kind of an amalgamation of Michael Moore and the Borat side of Sasha-Baron Cohen. His previous TV documentary/comedies, Danes for Bush and Red Chapel explored the political and social landscapes of the United States during the 2004 election and the social and propaganda mores of North Korea, respectively, both by on-the-ground insertion in a particular form of misdirection of intent. I’ve not seen either of these films (nor his TV Talk Show, The Eleventh Hour) but I want to see them all based on the brains and brawn exhibited in The Ambassador. Here, Brügger goes to the Central African Republic to set up a (blood) diamond smuggling operation fronted by building a match factory. He gets his contacts and credentials by spending $30,000 to some rich European brokers who have a side-business in selling diplomatic papers from one African country (here, Liberia) to another (CAR). Then, donning an expensive tan suit, mirror shades and polished burgundy riding boots, the new diplomat-entrepreneur is ready to get some old-school colonial exploitation happening. Over the course of the film, Brügger, with his ‘trusty’ adviser Paul (a CAR local), and his beautiful white secretary, dispense many ‘envelopes of happiness’ to people on the political and business scene in Bangui. He tours parts of the country, visits other diplomats for advice, and eventually works his way up to meetings with the ministers of defense and security. The latter being the son of the president of CAR, François Bozizé. What is crazy about the whole thing is that our consul-in-training is going by his real name, something that anyone in the Central African Republic could have found with a simple Google search in five minutes. Why Brügger is not dead in a ditch somewhere is beyond me. Either that or the joke is on me. It is a joke told with enough chutzpah and style that it perhaps does not even matter.
The international trailer for Prometheus is very *spoiler laden* and really (really, really) gives you the story and alien designs. Beware.
I am doing a series of one-minute video reviews for The Substream on the various Hot Docs films that I flit in and out of during the festival. Below is a one of them: the solid and informative documentary how pranksterism and trolling on the interwebs eventually morphs into high-stakes political and social activism. The hacker group Anonymous is outlined and examined in We Are Legion: The Story of the Hactivists.
You really cannot go wrong marketing your film with the picture of a naked lady on the poster. Nice pull-quote.
The trailer for this 2010 French film, about a woman who thinks she is the living re-incarnation of Marilyn Munroe, is really good too. It is tucked under the seat.
“This is mayhem. This is India. Isn’t it beautiful?”
This observation to the camera, uttered by a crew member at one point during a bit of down-time during the shooting of Bollywood horror-fantasy HISSS, nearly encapsulates things in a single thought. A rare US/India co-production involving an indie director Jennifer Lynch, and collaborating with significant Bollywood stars Mallika Sherawat and Irrfan Kahn, featured a six million dollar budget an and heavy media spotlight. Chaos and confusion is nothing new to film sets (or any creative process) but Lynch seems ill prepared for the trial-by-fire culmination the language barrier with her Indian crew, a producer who is the Bollywood super-star’s brother, and the seemingly never-ending battle with nature, cities and the culture. To top things off Lynch, who is a single mom, has her 13 year old daughter Sydney in tow for the ride. The movie begins with the director taking up smoking again, just for kicks. Penny Vozniak was asked to stay on by her friend, the producer Govind Menon, to help Lynch look after Sydney and also to shoot some EPK (behind-the-scenes electronic press kit) stuff for the eventual DVD release. As the production both drags on and spirals out of control with clashing ideals – the crew and producer want speed, the director wants care – Vozniak ended up sticking around for the entire 8 months (only 3 of them were ‘scheduled’) of shooting and the result is Despite The Gods, a very candid look at the experience of an seasoned and pedigreed director (Surveillance took the top prize at Sitges’ in 2008) slowly losing her grip on the production and burning out in the process.
A common phrase on the internet, particularly in social media circles is “Pictures, or it didn’t happen.” This certainly treads close enough to the general ethos of documentary film-making to make Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry about the most appropriate film to kick off a documentary film festival in some time. Maybe of all time. And It certainly does not hurt that the film is quite excellent.
Artist cum political activist Ai Wei Wei has been giving the middle figure (both figuratively and literally) to the Chinese government for many years, and is considered by many to be the most blunt (and maybe the most effective) artist/intellectual ‘actively working’ – a euphemism for not incarcerated by the state – in modern China. His high international reputation is perhaps acting as a shield. Ai Wei Wei played a large role in the design of the 2008 Olympic Beijing National Stadium (“The Birds Nest”) before actively coming out against the Olympics in China on the grounds of hypocrisy of the government for forcibly evicting the poor out of the area to put on a face for the rest of the world during the games. Wei Wei looks like a big cuddly teddy bear, and carries himself in a humble, slightly aloof yet completely engaging, fashion that can hyper-shift to emboldened critic if the subject of the transparency of the Government of the People’s Republic of China is raised. And it is always raised, here. He is never without a concise sound-bite (“There is no sport more graceful than throwing stones at authority.”) and his political art is both interesting and easily accessible.
I‘m quite excited to see Quentin Tarantino do his Blaxploitation/Spaghetti Western mashup, Django Unchained. It has been somewhat obvious that he has been working towards this point for years and while the hoity-toity of film critics lament that Tarantino is not the ‘populist art-house’ filmmaker they wanted him to be after the one-two punch of Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, I am pretty happy that he finds ways to make arty-genre films (my personal sweet spot). There isn’t quite a trailer to be seen at the moment, but Entertainment Weekly has a few stills to give you a hint of what the picture is going to look like. Jamie Foxx is looking charmingly grizzled and bad-ass. And Christoph Waltz in a duster! In a word: Awesome.
I missed that the folks behind I Declare War put out a trailer pretty much on my drive back from ActionFest. This would have been right after the North Carolina ‘festival with a body count’ awarded the film with the Best Film prize. It was also a movie I very much loved.
“Everyday after school, two groups of thirteen-year old friends play ‘war’ in a local forest. They make their own guns out of sticks, old toys, anything they can find. They play to have fun. One afternoon, the game gets a little out of hand.”
While the trailer could perhaps use a bit of tightening and a snazzier bit of style, it is a pretty honest representation of what the film actually is. I Declare War is currently without distribution, and that is a damn shame, folks.
This continent’s largest showcase of documentary films, HotDocs2012 is upon Toronto as of tomorrow and once again the festival oneheckuva a beast to get a rope around and wrassle to the ground. Over my half-decade or so attending the festival the number of screenings I attend as been steadily increasing. This is not only a function of ever-increasing size of the festival, but also the overall quality ratio being on the rise as well. The medium has really come into its own in the past dozen or so years! I will be giving 1 minute video segments to The Substream and print reviews will appear both here and at Twitch.
But here, at the starting gate, is my list of highly anticipated HotDocs titles. It should be noted that I tend to avoid the plethora of music documentaries, and I also tend to avoid the multitude of global issue driven stuff in favour of character-based documentaries. Of course when you get the intersection of issue-of-the-day and character (see The Ambassador and We Are Legion, below) is a particular sweet spot. I’m also always enthusiastic about documentaries that play with the form – in particular, the ‘make your doc play like a genre-film’ style that was pioneered by Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line in the late 80s and brought into prominence with Man on Wire, King of Kong and The Cove. Seems like there are more than a few that fit that bill in this year’s line-up (Francophrenia).
Here are ten titles that I’m making a point to see, and bonus: This year there is not one, but two documentaries featuring sex with robots!
