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Episode 48 - The Killing Joke

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The Dark Knight

It’s the year’s most anticipated film, so accordingly we’ve got an extended look at The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s latest Bat-opus. We’re going to look in-depth at Nolan’s work on the series, as well as getting into the nitty-gritty on the film itself, both in spoiler and non-spoiler segments. If you haven’t seen it yet (and why not?) come for the first part, then stay and join the cool kids for the spoiler section once you’ve had the pleasure. Same Bat-time…you get the picture.

Episode 47 - Tokyo Shock, Japanese Rock part 2

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When it comes to madness and mayhem, nobody can deliver it quite like the Japanese, and we’ve recently been exposed to a series of hyperactive Japanese flicks so action-packed (though not, of course, always actually good) that we’ve put together a follow-up to our previous Japanese spotlight. This time, we’re tackling “Machine Girl,” Takashi Miike’s spaghetti western throwback “Sukiyaki Western Django,” and the much-touted splatterfest “Tokyo Gore Police.”

Episode 46 - Bloody Radical part 2

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U.S. horror has taken a beating oer the last few years, with most of the most prominent genre films coming out of Asia - principally Japan and Korea. At this year’s Fantasia, however, several new U.S. films are being touted as part of a new U.S. rennaisance - Jonathan Devine’s teen-angst thriller “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane,” actor Christopher Denham’s directorial debut “Home Movie,” and Stuart Gordon’s latest work, “Stuck.” But do any of them actually deliver the goods?

Fantasia Film Festival - Diary, Part II

First Features and Unheralded Returns

Debut films were a strong motif during this stretch of the fest, and the best of these was Christopher Denham’s Home Movie, from which I expected very little of interest. The film (which, along with [rec] and the unseen-by-me Korean torture flick The Butcher makes up a verit-themed program entitled Payback in Black) concerns Lutheran pastor David, his psychoanalyst wife Clare, and most crucially their twin children (Jack and Emily, played by real-life siblings Austin and Amber Joy Williams), whose behavior grows increasingly manipulative and psychotic, as documented by a video camera originally meant to document Clare’s sessions. The film is astute in the way it spends seemingly interminable amounts of time detailing the minutiae of Clare and David’s relationship, showing, not telling us that these two are less involved with their children’s habits than thy should be. The performances are uniformly solid, and even when the film takes a turn for the ludicrously improbable in its third act, it maintains interest because the film’s sense of integrity and craft remain.

Tokyo Gore Police was a considerably less auspicious debut for director Yoshihiro Nishimura, previously known for his effects work. The film stars Audition’s Eihi Shinna, who based on her work here simply isn’t charismatic enough to carry a lead role. Perhaps that’s because she’s not meant to be the focus, but instead the effects work, makeup and choreography, but those end up falling largely flat as well. The “plot,” such as it is, concerns “engineers,” criminals who sprout weapons from lost limbs and injuries; an arm gets ripped out and a chainsaw grows out from the socket, for instance. If that concept alone is enough to propel a two-hour film for you, then you’ll derive some enjoyment from the film, but it doesn’t stop the film from feeling like a joyless rehash of many better films like Versus or Miike’s Dead or Alive films. It also wholeheartedly rips off the propagandistic advertising featured in Paul Verhoeven’s brilliant Starship Troopers. Unlike that film, however, Nishimura doesn’t have the good sense to keep the satirical elements out of the film’s actual plot developments, turning the final act into a shallow exploration of “rebellion.” It doesn’t work.

Another disappointing debut came courtesy of thriller novelist Eric Shapiro. His Rule of Three was propped by glowing press quotes, but they’re not supported by the film, which turns out to be a complete shaggy dog story. Ostensibly a meditation on violence against women, as filtered through the experiences of three sets of people in three different incidents taking place in the same motel room, Three shows promise in its mature treatment of a serious theme, but badly bungles the execution and payoff. I was at first intrigued by the intertwined narrative strains, but gradually disappointed as its numerous plot threads went nowhere and led to the most ridiculous anticlimax of any film I’ve seen this year. A major letdown.

Meanwhile, while roughly no one was waiting with baited breath for Kenta Fukasaku’s X-Cross, but it bests Tokyo Gore Police in the J-horror funstakes. Fukasaku is best known as the son of revered director Kinji Fukasaku, helmer of the cult hit Battle Royale, among many others. When the elder Fukasaku died on the first day of filming Battle Royale 2, Kenta took over, and the resulting mess is often unfairly pinned on him. Nevertheless, X-Cross is a kinetic, senseless and thoroughly enjoyable thriller, despite a hugely strained first half-hour. Midway through the film was a sequence far more exciting than any of the overcooked setpieces in Tokyo, in which two characters face off against one another - one with a chainsaw, and the other with a giant pair of scissors. It’s a masterfully staged sequence, and combined with a deliriously over-the-top climax in which we discover that not all of the evil forces at work are necessarily allied, X-Cross feels cut from the same manic cloth as Royale, even if it’s not as emotionally compelling.

It’s also doubtful that many people were expecting a return from long-dormant cult splatter maestro Frank Henenlotter, but nevertheless his first film in 16 years, Bad Biology, arrived, complete with some of the most perverse imagery on offer this year from any film. The film is at its best by a considerable distance when detailing the trials of Jennifer, who opens the film with the most memorable set-up for a film in recent memory: “I was born with seven clits.” In fact, Jennifer is by far the film’s greatest asset; her struggle for sexual fulfillment could have been sufficient to fuel the film by itself, and been a refreshing antidote to the testosterone-fueled fare that makes up a fair chunk of the fest. Instead, we must also contend with subplot featuring a young man with his own grotesque, sentient genitalia. Since Jennifer seeks to satisfy her body’s strange urges rather than try to control or combat them (as the male, never named, does) she becomes a much more personable character despite her odder characteristics - whenever she has unprotected sex, she gives birth within two hours to something that can almost be described as a child. She’s even come up with a reason for her ailments: “God must want to fuck me,” she insists. Unfortunately, the movie never follows up on that line of thinking (save for one cursory, passing segment near the end of the film), instead focusing most of its energy on the phallus-on-the-loose.

Changes of Pace

Meanwhile, Korea and Japan each offered a character-based drama amidst all the splattery shenanigans. Beautiful Sunday, a sort of Korean hybrid of Todd Solondz perversion and Fight Club pseudo-intellectualism, failed as a film but did offer some arresting moments in its first half. Like Bad Biology, the film suffers because it piggybacks a lackluster plot onto a far superior one, only for both to fail when they become linked. Here’s we have a rote bad-cops-and-bad-robbers story, which I would like to have seen entirely dispensed with, and the much more bracing plot, involving a disturbed young man who rapes a woman, only to pursue her romantically afterwards, having managed to hide his face during the incident. This aspect of the film works wonders in making your skin crawl, but the film itself seems ill-equipped to handle the emotional firestorm it’s dredged up, preferring to rely on its duller plot. In the end, the film settles for a cheap resolution that’s both nonsensical and played out.

Much better was Japan’s Adrift In Toyko, which served as a kind of Japanese response to Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, depicting Japanese characters rather than American passers-by getting lost in the titular metropolis. Here, a down-and-out youngster, Takemura (Jo Odagiri) is pursued by a less-than-kindly debt collector named Fukuhara (Tomokazu Miura), to whom Takemura owes a considerable debt. Eventually, Fukuhara offers him a million yen in exchange for Takemura’s company on a seires of walks through Tokyo, as he unintentionally killed his wife and is preparing to turn himself in. As they walk, they recount the more notable aspects of their lives, and reminiscing about old neighborhoods. In the midst of the insanity on offer from many films at the fest, Adrift was a breath of fresh air, but I suspect it’ll play out in just as charming a fashion as in any other context.

Finally, Accuracy of Death, despite its ominous title, worked splendidly as a refreshingly light-hearted take on the usually ponderous “grim reaper” genre. Chiba, one of many grim reapers, must weigh the worth of the lives of his subjects, and decide whether or not they have yet “served their purpose.” As Chiba goes from subject to subject forever followed by the rain that always falls with his presence, he attempts to discern how death fits into the grand scheme of the universe. None of this would be worth a toss, though, were it not for the wonderful work of Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers), who cannily milks his character’s all-encompassing aloofness in a refreshingly low-key manner that best brings out the humor inherent in his position. One of the few PG-13 equivalent films to play at the fest this year (along with the excellent Substitute), Accuracy will be a tad too cute and light for some, but works as a fine comic showcase for Kaneshiro.

Simon Howell

 

Episode 44: The Spanish Inquisition

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Episode 44: The Spanish Inquisition

In a nice bit of synchronicity, Fantasia has offered us a slate of new Spanish fantasy and horror films – specifically, the much-hyped “verité” thriller [rec], silent throwback La Antena, apocalyptic thriller Before the Fall, and the time-travel black comedy Timecrimes. Meanwhile, over in Hollywood, Spanish wizard Guillermo del Toro is finally ready to unleash his latest opus, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Lucky for you, we were able to catch all of these films over the past week, and we’re going to tell you which to seek out and which to ignore, not forgetting to take a quick look back at the first Hellboy.

Watch our interview with Jason Eisener and Rob Cotterill, the team that brought you Hobo with A Shotgun & Treevenge!

 

Episode 45 – Fantasia 2008

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Our coverage on the Fantasia Film Festival continues. In this broadcast we are pleased to be among the first to review several films here in North America. To kick things off is the new film from director Ole Bornedal entitled The Substitute, a stellar teen coming-of-age story and a ripping sci-fi adventure. We will also focus on two films from Canada. One is the new film from the same team that brought us Hobo with A Shotgun. The second is Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer starring the one and only Robert Englund.

To wrap it all up is “Rule of Three”, a feature debut from mulitple award winning cult author Eric Shapiro (Days of Allison) along with an interview with the director himself.

 

Episode 43 - Bloody Radical Part 1

Tune in as we begin our month long look into The Fantasia Film Festival. Our first review will focus on what Sic Ric is calling the must see film of the year, “Let The Right One In.” This Swedish vampire film is without a doubt, stunning. A vampire film that follows the rules of the vampire mythology while mixing in a rare coming of age story that is both powerful and touching. Dare we say Masterpiece?

Also a look back at last year’s festival and a complete break down on what not to miss.

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Movies Reviewed

LEt The Right One In

Mulberry Street

The Tripper

Hatchet

The Signal

13 Beloved

 

Fanatsia diary, Part I…

With a program encompassing over 100 genre films from nearly every corner of the world, this year’s Fantasia Film Festival promises to be the most ambitious yet. Famous for helping to disseminate foreign horror films – particularly, through hardly exclusively, Japanese and Korean - in North American markets, Fantasia has always been a film lover’s dream, even if its quality levels can’t possibly stay consistently high with such a densely packed schedule.

The Asian Contingent

It’s obligatory that Takashi Miike must make an appearance in some form at a genre film fest that relies heavily on foreign titles – since Miike has a massive following and makes several films each year – and appropriately enough, his Sukiyaki Western Django graced the fest’s opening night, along with Quebec fantasy film Truffe, which was not screened in English. Django is Miike’s love letter to the spaghetti western complete with an all-Asian cast speaking phonetic English. Actually, that should read almost all-Asian, since Quentin Tarantino makes a fairly irritating appearance as a fighting master (!) with a taste for the titular dish. The film is complete fluff, but it’s artfully crafted fluff – even the silliest scenes are artfully staged, and the film’s senseless momentum never lets up. Expect left turns – including a schizophrenic ex-sheriff, at least one explicitly anachronistic reference, transvestitism, and a gatling gun, among others – but also expect a gentler sensibility reminiscent of Stephen Chow’s genial kung-fu films. While it’s fair to miss the psychosexual antics that mark Miike’s best work, Django manages to entertain without pretense, and does so in style.

Other Asian frivolities didn’t fare as well; Negative Happy Chain Saw Edge gets off to a rollicking start, with a teenaged girl fighting a giant hooded figure who falls from the sky with a chainsaw, and quickly devolves into rigidly typical Japanese preteen fare, complete with an awkwardly long music video sequence and a forced “tragic” backstory for its underwritten characters. Similarly perfunctory was the Korean melodrama A Love, whose plot – boy swears to protect girl, boy and girl are forcibly separated, boy must right what’s wrong – rings hollow with familiarity. The festival organizers lost their “official” copy of the film shortly before the screening, so it was saddled with the least comprehensible subtitles – courtesy of an Altavista rush-job, apparently – that I’ve ever witnessed. A sample: “girl” became “bead,” “shake hands” became “pull hook,” and many mentions were made of a character or concept named “turnip” but it never became clear who or what it denoted. Most left the screening within the first five minutes when it became clear that the dialogue (if not the plot) would be hopelessly cryptic, but I derived a kind of absurdist pleasure from trying to wring out meaning from the Dadaist poetry that flashed onscreen. “BE a knife,” indeed.

On a more substantial note, the best Asian film of the fest so far is likely Yang Hea-Hoon’s directorial debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door. The film, which revolves around the lasting effects of high-school bullying, suffers from a lack of strong characterization, but gamely makes up for it with a sense of unpredictability that’s been missing from many of the films that have been showcased at the fest so far. It careens past its expectedly violent climax to deliver a poetic dénouement that includes a sly bit of dream-logic / magic realism. It also contains two scenes that are likely to stay with the viewer – a tortured shuffle across a frozen lake, and a love scene accompanied by incandescent Christmas colors and a quiet guitar – besting many Western efforts at beautifying youthful romance without robbing the scene of its intimacy. It’s far from a perfect film but it’s certainly a noteworthy debut for Hea-Hoon.

Bullies and Outcasts

Bullying also factors into the fest’s best film so far, the Swedish horror-drama Let the Right One In, which is already being optioned for a U.S. remake by J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot. That’s a shame, because Thomas Alfredson’s original is a simple, quiet story about the preadolescent love of one shy outcast for another – it just happens to feature bucketfuls of blood and gore. The film may be too quiet and slow for the fest’s die-hard horror contingent, but I found it to be thoughtful and resonant, particularly when developing the burgeoning relationship between its sickly, brooding protagonist Oskar and his new friend of dubious origin (and ambiguous gender), Eli. Oskar lives in constant fear of their peers, as schoolyard activities are fraught with danger thanks to his outlandish, quiet nature. Eli may provide an escape. I found myself longing for more of Oskar and Eli’s interactions whenever the film spent more than a few minutes with the town’s concerned adults. It might not be the masterpiece some have hailed it as, but it’s certainly not hyperbole to label it the best vampire film in years – especially since there haven’t been any decent ones in a very long time.

Also on the Scandinavian tip, The Substitute, which revolves around a group of young teens who struggle to combat their evil alien teacher, hearkens back to American family films of the 80’s like The Goonies or The Dark Crystal in its refusal to shy away from scary or violent material while still maintaining a sense of fun and wonder – it might be the fest’s most flat-out enjoyable film, providing you’re willing to put up with a rating lower than “R.” Like Negative Happy, it revolves around a young protagonist with a tragic history, but here it feels appropriate and maturely handled. Better yet - even as the film’s sense of danger escalates, with its titular villain (fiendishly rendered by Paprika Steen) revealing her very Dark City-esque motives, its sense of humor and fun remains, never letting itself get too grim or too self-serious. The effects are convincing and effective, and it’s refreshing to see a kid-appropriate film with a sense of barbed wit and black humor.

From real children to overgrown ones, one of this year’s major docs is Second Skin, a surprisingly inclusive look at the world of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, like World of Warcraft or EverQuest) addicts. When I say inclusive, I mean that the film doesn’t seek to mock its subjects mercilessly – although that would have been easy to do – but instead seeks to understand their addiction and place it in a greater societal context, as well as examining its greater implications. The most striking example of this approach is the inclusion of a segment on China’s “gold farmers,” who number around 100,000, and who work tirelessly in poor conditions to earn as much digital currency within the games as possible in order to sell it back for real money to a principally North American population of gamers – it’s a striking example of outsourcing, and an illustration of the way these “artificial realms” reflect and interact with our own. In examining the individual gamers who spend the majority of their time engaged with their avatars, the film is eager to draw a line between those who stay addicted and risk losing everything, and those who accept responsibility in their “first” lives when it eventually beckons. The film runs a bit too long, and belabors a few of the same points a little too often, but for a first feature doc it is well-balanced and never feels cheap or exploitative.

The Festival Bubble

One of the unfortunate realities of film festivals is that not all of the glowing writeups that appear in your program can possibly be true – and indeed, two films in particular turned out to be crushing disappointments. The first was What We Do Is Secret, a shockingly conventional biopic about seminal L.A. punk band The Germs whose lead singer Darby Crash became one of rock’s least noted burnouts since his deliberate heroin overdose was taken on the same day as John Lennon’s murder. The film does manage to wrangle some grim irony out of that particular circumstance, but that’s the only part of the film that connects with the viewer on a human level – the rest is out-and-out idol worship. In terms of approach, it splits the difference between the two Manchester-based biopics, 24 Hour Party People (in its relentless namechecking and depiction of the L.A. scene’s other bands) and Control (in its retracing the steps of a self-destructive young man), but without the charm of either.

It also shares with Control fact that its actors also perform the music, although here that’s far from difficult, given their deliberately amateurish approach. Control had the advantage of being based on a source that was not necessarily kind to its subject – his widow’s memoir – but here everyone involved seems desperate to do little but eulogize and fawn. Shane West, as Crash, comes across petulant and whiny for much of the film’s second half, but he can’t be faulted for it, because that’s likely exactly how Crash was, given his young age and the need for attention that (relative) stardom can foster. Nevertheless, his often irritating behavior makes it more difficult to tolerate the way the film lionizes his memory. It doesn’t help that in the few intimate glimpses we get with Darby – most of them with obsessive fan Robbie – are quickly scurried off the screen, probably due to gay panic in the editing room (they certainly don’t hesitate to showcase us a female extra’s full-frontal nudity late in the film). This squeamishness epitomizes the film’s safe, “made-for-TV” aesthetic – a descriptor that is entirely unbefitting for any film covering such volatile, provocative territory.

Meanwhile, Dario Argento’s final film in his “Mother” trilogy, Mother of Tears, is by some distance the flat-out worst thing I’ve seen here, a film so colossally awful that many festival-goers were howling during its supposedly-gravest scenes. I don’t want to harp on this for too long, so I’ll just say this: it might be true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but when he starts to forget the old ones (in this case, pacing, atmosphere, thrills…) it might be time to put the damn thing down.

Also disappointing, although not on the same scale, was Spanish thriller Before the Fall, which started out with grim promise and ended up somewhere deeply regrettable. There are too few films where the apocalypse is not only a threat but a pressing inevitability, but for now I’ll settle for Don McKellar’s Last Night. Fall gets a lot of initial mileage out of the doomed atmosphere that scenario brings, but its plot hinges on far too many unlikely character quirks for the plot to remain in any way tenable. Meanwhile the film’s feel shifts abruptly from a doomed slow burn to a ludicrous serial-killer chase-fest, which feels like a waste of time given the greater events at work. I was interested to see a rural Spanish take on the end of the world – as opposed to the universally American spectacles we’re regaled with every summer - but Before the Fall’s tonal inconsistency and gimmicky characterization destroyed it long before any asteroid could.

The festival hype did herald one worthy Spanish film, however: [rec] is indeed the year’s scariest film to date. It gives the already-tired “verité horror” genre a swift kick in the pants while providing just enough wit and humanity to keep the proceedings from getting too grim. To discuss the film’s plot would practically be a disservice to it – mostly because the film is largely plotless, as most great horror films are. It’s a tightly wound house of horrors, with the viewer planted in its center, unable to escape. The only recent film of comparable intensity would be 28 Weeks Later, but even that can’t match this film’s fever-pitch final reel, in which both claustrophobia and energy are ramped up in obscene amounts. The film is aided greatly by a sterling lead performance by Manuela Velasco as the TV host who is pushy at first by trade, and then by necessity. Try to catch this one before the already-filmed U.S. remake can spoil the fun.

More as the fest continues.

 

Two more weeks left of our Naked Lunch midnight special and what better idea than to take you all on a trip to France.

France has long been a gathering spot for artists from across Europe and the world. For this reason French cinema is sometimes intertwined with the cinema of foreign nations. We have thus brought you specials on some of the Directors who have crossed over to France to make films. Including Poland`s Krzysztof Kieslowski and Austria`s Michael Heneke.

It`s the country that brought you Jean Luc Godart, Jean Pierre Melville, Francois Truffault and many other great directors. Now in the 21<sup>st</sup> century they take from the pages of Italian film makers of the 70`s and bring us the most gruesome, gut wrenching, blood splattering, sick and twisted horror films of the past decade. It’s pure, unadulterated carnage and we intend on reviewing every frame, every drop of blood, every scream while spinning the best of Frnech Indie rock!

 

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