Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

  • 07 Nov

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    DVD Review: The Kate Logan Affair

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    The Kate Logan Affair DVD

    Director: Noël Mitrani (On the Trail of Igor Rizzi)
    Screenplay: Noël Mitrani
    Producer: Ian Whitehead
    Starring: Alexis Bledel, Laurent Lucas, Noémie Godin-Vigneau
    MPAA Rating: 14A
    Running time: 82 min.

    (2/5)

    Noël Mitrani’s The Kate Logan Affair starts off on a promising foot. A rookie cop wrongfully arrests a man who fits the description of a serial rapist on the lose in the area. She gets as far as handcuffing the man until she checks his identification and realizes his name is Benoit Gando, a French national in town for a conference. She apologises profusely and lets the man go on his way. Later that night, as Officer Kate Logan is headed home, she spots Benoit rummaging around in his car in the parking lot of the motel he’s staying at. She approaches, apologises again and offers to take the distinguished older man out for a drink, an official apology for her earlier mistake. He agrees and the two head off for a drink.

    The Kate Logan Affair StillWith few details on either Benoit or Logan, the opening few scenes of Mitrani’s film plays with viewer expectation and as we wait for Benoit, the potential rapist, to strike, it soon becomes apparent that he’s not the one with troubled tendencies. On their third evening together, Kate shows Benoit her gun. At first he refuses but pushed by Kate and curious, he follows her lead, points and squeezes the trigger. The firing takes the two by surprise but immediately Kate starts to freak out, explaining that she’s going to lose her job if it’s discovered that the bullet was fired from her gun, a gun she’s not supposed to be carrying while off-duty.

    After trying and failing to dig out the bullet, the two escape out the back window on foot before eventually hotwiring a car and heading down the road. Benoit is beside himself in terror. He’s realized that running off from such a minor issue is likely to get him into more trouble than just admitting the truth but Kate holds their affair over his head, threatening to end his marriage if he runs off. She wants time to figure out how to get out of the situation with her job intact and with each passing moment, the hole she’s dug gets deeper and more difficult to climb out of but when Benoit arrives with the local newspaper which states that Kate has been kidnapped, she sees her way out and it doesn’t include Benoit.
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  • 07 Nov

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    Review: Straw Dogs (2011)

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    Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy DVD Cover

    Director: Rod Lurie (The Contender, The Last Castle, Resurrecting the Champ )
    Producers: Rod Lurie, Marc Frydman
    Starring: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, James Woods, Dominic Purcell, Rhys Cairo, Drew Powell, Billy Lush, Laz Alonso, Walton Goggins
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 110 min

    (2/5)

    Sam Peckinpah’s original Straw Dogs caused massive controversy in the UK when it came out in 1971. Alongside Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Peckinpah’s tale of survival and man’s inner animal didn’t sit well with the British Board of Film Classification, leading to cuts (particularly to the notorious rape scene) and even banning in the mid 1980s. It’s now a classic that remains controversial and a genuinely tough watch to this day.

    Jump forward 40 years and we have writer/director Rod Lurie’s redundant, pointless, and almost entirely ineffective remake that takes the interesting jagged edges of the original and smoothes them out to make a predictably polished Hollywood version.

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  • 06 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2011: Extraterrestrial

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    (4/5)

    Nacho Vigalondo’s previous film Timecrimes was a refreshing take on the very common sci-fi sub-genre of time travel, and this time he throws his hat in the ring of another very common sci-fi sub-genre, the alien invasion film. But as you might expect if you’ve seen Timecrimes, there’s not much about this film that’s common. And that’s a very good thing.

    A man awakens naked in a strange apartment, figures out there’s a girl there and he probably just slept with her, but can’t remember much more than that. Must’ve been a good night of partying, he figures, and prepares to leave after an extremely awkward conversation with her that reveals she doesn’t remember much either – not even that their names are the cutesy Julio and Julia. Then the power cuts out, they look out the window, and see a gigantic spaceship hovering over the city, and all the streets nearby seem deserted. Turns out the ship turned up the night before and everyone evacuated except the two of them and a neighbor who clearly has a thing for Julia, so they kind of stick together by default. Then Julia’s boyfriend Carlos shows up.

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  • 03 Nov

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    Review: In Time

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    Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy DVD Cover

    Director: Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne, Lord of War)
    Producers: Andrew Niccol, Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Debra James
    Starring: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Vincent Kartheiser, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde, Johnny Galecki.
    MPAA Rating: PG-13
    Running time: 109 min.

    (3/5)

    In Time is one of those movies where the premise is a lot cooler and more interesting than the execution. The idea of a world where time is the currency, where people only live to 25 years old and thereafter work for and spend time (with the government controlling the supply of time to the population) is fascinating. A real hook if ever there was one.

    However, that idea only carries the film so far and by about half way through you can feel that it’s running of steam. It doesn’t really know where to take the idea past a certain point and feels underwritten and almost unfinished in a way.

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  • 02 Nov

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    Toronto After Dark 2011: The Innkeepers Review

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    There is a scene, perhaps midway through Ti West’s most recent film of spooky interiors and patient tracking-shots, where an underpaid employee struggles to get a bag of garbage in to the rear alley bin. It is as good of a touchstone for what he has been managed thus far with his career, going against the grain of mainstream horror trends (torture, found footage, etc.) by making more patient, measured films which rely exclusively on atmosphere and tension. Making a horror film in this day and age that eschews gimmickry and/or mounds of bad CGI (and worse dialogue) while actually getting it out into the marketplace is a herculean task in and of itself. Alas, for all the chatter (and wonderful key art) posted on the internet about The House of the Devil, the film is only a success within the select niche of genre aficionados. Notwithstanding some very minor issues with its digitally-flat (and rather abrupt) ending, it is one of the great horror pictures of the past 10 years. I have little reservation in calling it a master-work in terms of generating both tension and anticipation, which when you boil things down is damn near everything in the horror genre. Yet, suspense seems seems to be dying off with each new re-invention of horror-formula with only a few notable exceptions.

    Back to the bag of garbage.

    The employee is Claire and she is one of only two remaining staff serving a meagre three guests living at the The Yankee Pedlar Inn until the business shutters at the end of the week. The bag is leaking some sort of fluid as she drags it haltingly across the uneven cracked asphalt. She makes several Sisyphean attempts to heave the hulking sack into the bin whose lid seems close just a millisecond too soon. The whole scene plays out as a charming bit of physical comedy, a levity that rests purely on the comic timing and chummy vibe of Ms. Sara Paxton which, more than a bit, reminds me of Anna Faris’ endearing goofiness in Smiley Face. And so goes The Innkeepers, a haunted hotel story that trafficks in the gentle, snarky comedy of its pair of underpaid and unambitious wage-slaves before breaking out the Shining and the ghosties and turn-of-the-screw tension to become one of most effective horror films of 2011. One of the smartest, too. An early gag in the movie, which threatens to echo/resonate in the films final shot, is one hell of a deconstruction of the jump-scare and its often gross misuse in the genre. This is a good sign that West has his brain and his talent laser focused on the nature and the possibility of this type of filmmaking. The syntax similar to The House of the Devil, but the tone could not be more different. Gone is the late 70s early 80s setting, although it retains a feel of classic, vintage filmmaking that outside of a few laptop computers, and a latte bar across the street, could place the film anywhere in the 20th century. Horror and comedy are rarely mixed well, but resulting cocktail here is shaken and stirred. Hell, it is downright effervescent. The icing on the cake is that the ending here feels far more organic to the themes brought out in the storytelling than House of the Devil. In its own fashion The Innkeepers turns the rules of this sort of film inside out while still managing to follow them. It’s a neat trick, and a welcome one.

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  • 31 Oct

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    Toronto After Dark 2011: Father’s Day Review

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    Father’s Day is pretty much the perfect exploitation film. It will offend many with its graphic images and content (both bloody and sexual) while it embraces the anything-goes aesthetics of many of the films from the 1970s that range from impressively realistic gore to ridiculous use of stock footage. Its plot begins with a search for a serial killer and from there mutates with a speed and force rarely seen outside the viruses found in bad sci-fi movies. Strippers, priests, male prostitutes, bears, chainsaws, hallucinogens, demons, a visit to Hell and probably even a kitchen sink or two are smashed together, blended until each has been reduced to gooey chunks and then splattered back up on screen with a joyful exuberance. It’s sick, gory, disgustingly gross and very, very funny.

    However, let me be very clear up front: The opening 10 minutes of the film is extremely nasty stuff and enough to thoroughly repulse just about anyone but the purest of gorehounds. A rapist of fathers (it’s explained that he doesn’t like woman, but never stated why he only goes after the Dads) is on the loose and we join him in the middle of a particularly, um, gruesome violation of another human. Having seen the faux-trailer for the film last year (which led the Canadian filmmaking team Astron-6 to make a full version of the film for the folks at Troma), it wasn’t really a surprise – that trailer is full-on Grindhouse at its ickiest – but that first section began to validate my fears that the movie was going to be completely in that same vein. A strange thing happens after a few minutes of this type of gore though – it’s pitched so way over the top that you can’t actually take any of it seriously and it becomes more of a parody than anything else (though a disgustingly Lurid one).

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  • 31 Oct

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    DVD Review: Tabloid

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    What a joy it is to see certain absurdities in life and perspective and truth as filtered through the vision of Errol Morris. The documentarian is well known for his particular style of filmmaking, the kind that mixes interviews and information with a distinct cinematic style. If he can keep his subjects talking, they are bound to say just about anything, as was the case in The Thin Blue Line when a murderer who got away with his crime eventually confesses to the director in an interview. I also have a particular fondness for the types of things he obsesses on, such as a 15000 word essay on two photos of cannon balls on a roadway from the Crimean war. Then there is his documentary on a Pet Cemetery and its customers. The man has range, which brings us to… Bondage, Beauty Queens, Kidnapping, Mormons and Dog Cloning – how do they all connect? Through the British Tabloid rags of course and the longevity of one particular story back in the late 1970s about a North Carolina girl named Joyce McKinney who allegedly raped her boyfriend.

    At one point during the peak of the “Manacled Mormon Sex Slave” paparazzi-explosion, two competing papers ran opposite stories: The first painted Joyce as an innocent woman desperate to get her cult brain-washed boyfriend back to her, while the other proudly pasted nude pictures on the front cover and elaborated on the sex and bondage operation she ran under the alias “Joey,” several years before the kidnapping. The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle, yet impossible to fully get considering the time passed, egos involved, and just a little bit of craziness on Joyce’s part. Nevertheless, it is the journey, not the destination that is such a wonderful dollop of entertainment in Tabloid.

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  • 31 Oct

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    Review: The Skin I Live In

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    Director: Pedro Almodóvar (Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Emraces)
    Producers: Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García
    Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet
    MPAA Rating: R
    Running time: 117 min.

    (5/5)

    Pedro Almodóvar clearly has issues. These issues have been evident for many many years and have shown their fantastic colors in film after film in a career spanning almost 40 years. But as far as I know, from the films of his I’ve seen, these issues have never been as dark and twisted as the ones depicted in La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In). And quite honestly, never has one of his films captivated me so intensely.

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  • 27 Oct

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    Celluloid Screams 2011

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    As plugged here a few weeks ago, Celluloid Screams is a horror film festival based in Sheffield that took place between 21-23rd October this year. With a lovingly selected mixture of horror films of all kinds – old, new, gory, scary or downright disturbing, there was something for everyone. I caught pretty much every minute of the festival in all it’s blood-drenched glory, only skipping a late night showing of Re-Animator because I was knackered and had seen it before not so long ago. Below is a full round up of reviews from the weekend. There were a whole load of quality shorts too, so I’m going to devote a separate post to those a little later.

    Friday Night

    Inbred

    Director: Alex Chandon
    Screenplay: Alex Chandon, Paul Shrimpton
    Starring: Jo Hartley, Seamus O’Neill and James Doherty
    Year: 2011
    Country: UK
    Duration: 95 min

    (3.5/5)

    A locally produced film, celebrating it’s Yorkshire premiere at the festival, Inbred is an ultra-gory horror-comedy that gives a blackly humorous spin on the Deliverance ‘city folk trapped in the wilderness’ formula. A group of misfit teenagers travel to the Yorkshire dales for a team-building holiday with two social-workers, but get treated to a type of ‘Northern Hospitality’ they weren’t expecting. It’s a gleefully offensive, silly, yet occasionally rather nasty film that balances it’s humour, drama and horror effectively to deliver a fast paced and entertaining 95 minutes. It’s also got some very impressive make-up and special effects for such a low budget release. Unfortunately, none of the core elements are quite strong enough to raise the film above the level of ‘decent’. The performances are merely serviceable and the presentation of the ‘locals’ pushes silliness to it’s limits with their joke shop teeth etc. As a whole package it’s fun and worth a watch though, so long as you’ve a taste for it’s humour and gore. It was refreshing to see such a professionally produced and original feature coming from so close to home too.

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  • 27 Oct

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    Toronto After Dark 2011: The Woman Review

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    After watching a movie that takes place in such a strange headspace such as Lucky McKee’s The Woman, it is probably best to let the thing percolate a bit before even attempting to articulate a reaction. The prime example of this visceral reaction is a youtube video that went around Sundance after the films premiere featuring a guy who wanted the film destroyed from existence. *Deep Breath* Here goes. The Woman boldly defies any attempts to slot it into any sort of easy niche. It is simultaneously a blunt gender provocation, a deadpan satire and a gory torture movie. I suppose if a filmmaker elicits a visceral reaction in your audience, you have made a successful horror picture, but I am not sure that the film has anything new or interesting to say, and I am not exactly enamoured with how it goes about saying it. There are a fair number of of leaps and contortions to be made to get into the the film. You not only have to swallow that there is a super-psychotic family that is well integrated into the polite rural society of back-yard BBQs and supermarket chit-chat, but also that there is a feral woman who has lived her life out in the back forty thus far unnoticed. But let us proceed with an open mind, nevertheless.

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  • 26 Oct

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    Toronto After Dark 2011: Absentia Review

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    If there was one piece of hype that was circulating during this year’s Toronto After Dark festival, it was that the relatively low-budget horror film Absentia would shake us all, was easily the scariest thing we would see all week, possibly all year and that we should prepare ourselves…And if there was one thing that the crowd (at least those that I talked to afterwards) mostly agreed on after seeing the film was that the hype had improperly set everyone’s expectations. The film didn’t actually scare the pants off anyone or make them jump out of their seats to the rafters as advertised (except for one early scare that was executed brilliantly and made several people actually cry out). However, it did end up being the kind of real horror movie that lets its concepts sit and stew with you and provide fodder for the deep dark corners of your mind to pick up and play with when you aren’t paying attention. This applies not only to the specific horror on screen but to a larger thematic look at the idea of being abandoned. So though there was a great deal of consensus that the film wasn’t as outright scary as expected, there also seemed to be almost as much agreement that it was an excellent dramatic depiction of deeply felt horror.

    The title comes from the decision to call someone dead after they have been “in absentia” for a period of time. Essentially, if after 7 years (in this case) a missing person hasn’t shown up anywhere and it’s just like they dropped off the face of the Earth, then they can be declared legally dead. The film opens as Tricia struggles with just such a decision so she can close the final chapter of her husband’s own disappearance 7 years ago. Her younger sister Callie has come to visit in order to help her with the final “death in absentia” paperwork and some packing before she moves out of the house to start a new life. Considering Tricia is pregnant, she should really be ready to move on, but the final submission of the papers and acceptance of her husband’s death (even if their marriage wasn’t completely successful) is a big step. So big, in fact, that she begins to see a ghostly version of him at almost every turn – his hollowed out eye sockets still fixing on her in an accusatory manner. Are these simple manifestations of her attempts at closure or is his spirit really trying to break through back to her? The answer might lie in a nearby walkway tunnel that seems to be a focal point for several disappearances.

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  • 26 Oct

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    Toronto After Dark 2011: The Divide Review

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    Not a moment is given before the gorgeously apocalyptic opening of Xavier Gens new film sees its cast of characters barricaded in the basement bunker of a New York City high-rise. Then the few survivors have all the time in the world, stuck with each other after the world end. Such is the premise of The Divide, a film that is more icky than it is beautiful, as if someone decided to make a less-parable, less-arty version of Fernando Meirelles and José Saramago’s Blindness with video-game aesthetics as book-ends. The Divide is not so much about anything, but much like the directors previous, and quite furious film, Frontier(s), it plays out the situation that leaves little to the imagination, and more than a fair bit of wincing from this viewer. For the film takes its little neo-society of under a dozen and puts them through a hell that one character foreshadows, “but you are going to be swimming through a whole lotta godawful shit before you get out.” Yea, that about sounds right.

    The actor who utters this phrase, is none other than Michael Biehn, who James Cameron endeared to science fiction geeks everywhere with the soldier-of-fortune 3-punch: The troubled freedom figher Kyle Reese in The Terminator, stalwart and reliable Cpl. Hicks in Aliens and hair-trigger nutter Lt. Coffey in The Abyss. To say the dude has INTENSE down pat is an understatement, and that Gens has more than a little worship of the actor doing his thing onscreen is apparent. Case in point, Biehn’s first line of dialogue is “Let there be light.” So that kind of says everything we need to know. Biehn plays Mickey, a retired NYC Firefighter turned superintendent – maybe a tad racist – and tightly wound-up nutter, but one that good sense to have a fully stocked bunker in the basement just in case New York takes another pounding from, his words, those towelheads. He is stand-offish and intimidating towards his new found roommates: Josh, a gay man (ex-Heroes star Milo Ventimiglia) his lover Bobby (Michael Eklund) and younger brother (Ashton Holmes), an older mom (Rosanna Arquette) and her pre-teen daughter, a black guy (Courtney B. Vance), a lawyer (Iván González) and his wife Eva (Lauren German) who looks enough like Milla Jovovich that one suspects she be start kicking some ass later on. I list the characters as ‘types’ here and there is a reason for it. The film is not so much interested in developing character as it is tightening the panic-screws on the trapped souls. Initially there are guys in Hazmat suits that have lots of plastic and lab equipment, but little interest in helping anyone. When they take the daughter out of the equation, this is a an act of mercy for the audience considering the five rings of hell the film descends into from there on out.

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