October 25, 2005
Today we've posted our first report (of three) from the 1st annual International Horror/Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ, presented by the Phoenix Film Festival. Inside you'll find a lengthy review of Lions Gate Films' Three... Extremes, which hits select theaters this Friday. Click here to read a synopsis for each of the three featured short films and then read on for the review...
International Horror/Sci-Fi Film Festival 2005
Evening 1 of 3: (Phoenix, AZ)
By: Michael Tank
Hey, B-D people! I was able to attend the three main event screenings at the 1st annual International Horror/Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix, AZ, presented by the Phoenix Film Festival.
Evening 1- ‘Three…Extremes”
The 1st main attraction on Friday night was a screening of “Three…Extremes”, a horror anthology (of sorts) featuring 3 short films by 3 of Asia’s top filmmakers. The title of the film, and the pedigree of the talent behind it, would seem to suggest that these stories are going to push the limits of what you can take as far as the intensity and violence of the content therein. And, uh, make no mistake, it has its share of ultra-queasy, how-much-can-you-take moments (particularly in the 1st segment), but really the title refers to a common theme running throughout the films: the extremes that people push themselves to for their individual obsessions, whether it be fear of aging, envy of someone else’s success, or a bad case of sibling rivalry.
The 1st of the trio is “Dumplings”, directed by Fruit Chan, a filmmaker whose work I’m not familiar with, and after looking him up on IMDB, I now know why: this is his first venture into the horror genre. “Dumplings” is the story of aging TV actress Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) who, tired of feeling unwanted by her wealthy, adulterous husband (Tony Leung), seeks out one Aunt Mei (the gorgeous Bai Ling of “The Crow”), famous (or infamous) for her special brand of dumplings, the recipe of which contains a most unpleasant crucial ingredient, but is said to have miraculous rejuvenating qualities. It works rather well for Mrs. Li, once she gets past the initial chore of trying not to think about what exactly she’s ingesting. Indeed, her first meal at Aunt Mei’s is a wonderfully queasy scene, with particularly effective sound effects as she puts mind over matter and just chows down, crunching and grimacing, as Aunt Mei, always the good host, cheerfully sings an old Asian traditional for her to mark the occasion.
There are quite a few not-for-the-weak-of-stomach moments in this segment, especially when the tone of the film takes a serious turn involving a mother who brings her very young daughter to see Aunt Mei to provide for her, after a nauseating “medical” procedure, another crucial “ingredient” for her next batch of dumplings. A scene later involving a man taking the wrong seat on a bus is also effectively gruesome, and ends in a tragically moving way. The final set piece of the short, involving Mrs. Lei in a bathtub improvising, in a very personal manner, her own take on the title meal, is a delicious (sorry, but it’s true) scene. Try not to get a wicked laugh from her last look. This opening segment works very well, and based on this piece alone, I look forward to anything else coming from Fruit (it’s fun to call him that), horror or no.
Advance word from audiences around the globe who have seen this trio is that “Dumplings” is the only one worth a damn in this set, to which I say, “Excuse me?! Did you all even stick around for the next film?” Because, for my money, Park Chan-Wook’s “Cut” was, hands down (again, sorry for the bad joke), the best of the three. And I’m not just saying that as a result of bias for absolutely loving his “Oldboy” from last year. (Honestly, I’m not. But I’ll get to that later.)
“Cut” opens with an exhilarating scene involving what looks like the opening to a wonderfully operatic Asian vampire tale, only to dizzyingly (and hilariously) reveal itself as the opening of a tale about a massively popular film director (Lee Byung-hun) and his crew hard at work on his latest masterwork. The director heads home for the day to his exquisite home (which the set of the vampire film has been meticulously modeled after), only to be confronted and knocked unconscious (via aerosol fire!) by a disgruntled extra (Lim Won-hee) who has worked in the background scenes of most of his films, and has decided to punish the director, not for his excessive wealth and notoriety, but because the young auteur has (seemingly) legitimately earned his standing by being just plain decent. His plan, which takes place entirely on the film set that is the exact replica of the director’s lavish main living room, involves the filmmaker’s young wife intricately tied to her beloved grand piano, across the room from a young girl tied to the couch, with the director tethered to the opposite wall and being told by the hilariously smug “commoner” extra that he must commit a heinous, horrible act, (i.e. strangle the life from the young helpless child on the couch) in order to “equalize” the two men. Otherwise, his pretty young wife will lose her fingers, one by one, to the rather sharp axe the extra has been brandishing (effectively ending her beloved piano-playing activities).
This segment is all deliriously funny, bordering on camp (especially during my favorite shot of the extra, the wife, and the child all watching as the director debases himself after being ordered to do “something funny!”), but is reigned in nicely in the closing, turning serious and disturbing once the director makes up his mind to “solve” this hideous dilemma, during which the actual identity of one of the principals in this room is revealed. I was really wrapped up in this one, easily the fastest moving of the three (which was soon to be proven), and the most outwardly, exuberantly, entertaining. What can I say? Park Chan-wook is the real deal.
As I said before, the pace of the trilogy up until now was moving nicely. Then Takashi Miike’s effort “Box” came up. Which brings me to my comment before about which segment I was looking forward to the most. As much as I wanted to see “Cut”, THIS was actually the 1 I was anticipating (as in gleefully dreading) the greatest. When I saw Miike’s “Audition” a few years ago, it seriously took me about a week to get my jaw off the floor. That was 1 unforgettable pay-off to a (admittedly, by Miike himself) deliberately slooow build-up. Just when you thought you would soon be finished with a, yeah, interesting, but mostly ho-hum Japanese version of “Fatal Attraction”, the scene with the mailbag shows up. Followed by the “vomit supper”. And, I swear, I could not get that last 10 excruciating minutes out of my head for quite some time, with that young girl’s malevolent smile as she administered her little special brand of emasculation, all the while quietly muttering “Kiti! Kiti! Kiti!” in her singsong voice.
In other words, Takashi’s “Box” was the one to beat going in, for my money. “Box” tells the story of a young author who keeps having dreams of her past as a child circus performer, a career that ended in a tragic accident involving her twin sister and their mentor/stepfather (who bears a remarkably suspect resemblance to the young writer’s editor). These dreams always end with her suffocating in plastic, trapped inside a box, seemingly being buried alive by an unknown person. To cause even more duress, the ghost of her dead sister has been appearing in the downstairs hallway.
To say “Box” was more than a little under whelming is to do it a bit of an injustice. I mean, to be fair, like I said before, Miike is all about the long purposeful exposition. The effect of his build-up factors in later, when the pieces of the puzzle have been put together to form the whole, or rather, in the case of this artist, when the canvas has been filled and the painting completed. (Excuse me while I slap myself for slipping into pretension). Anyway, as the 1st half of this segment unfolded, I watched attentively, soaking in the details, waiting for some sort of horrific denouement, one that will hopefully have just (or at least half) as much of an impact as I expected from him. And, unfortunately, other than one very unsettling shot of one of the characters peering out from a certain titular object, and another quick shot of a character towards the end that startlingly reveals the truth of their physical makeup, the segment is more tone poem (it’s definitely the most beautifully shot of the 3) than horror story, making it (as it is the last of the 3 “Extremes”), borderline anti-climactic, and more than a little out of place with the previous two, even as artfully done as they were. Still, I was still thinking of this one after it was over. Just not in the same vein as the first two. It stands too far apart from the content of the rest of the film, a little too languid, especially after the rush of “Cut”.
In all, “Three…Extremes” is an incredibly interesting, if wildly uneven, example of some of the better, more highbrow, elements of Asian horror, made by three of the arguably brightest and most exciting talents in that particular industry.
And, yeah, afterwards, in honor of “Dumplings”, we all went out for Chinese.
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September 22, 2009
While I personally only cover the horror films that play at the Toronto International Film Festival, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of other films playing at my favorite fest. This year Simon Barrett joined Bloody Disgusting for several days of no sleep, drinks, train rides and MOVIES! Below you'll find "Film Festival Follies: Toronto International Film Festival - Day 1", the second of his ongoing travel journal covering A Serious Man, Enter the Void, Solomon Kane and Daybreakers.
Film Festival Follies: Toronto International Film Festival - Day 1Read Day 0
Click here for all ongoing TIFF coverage
A Serious Man, Enter the Void, Solomon Kane and Daybreakers
Friday was the day that the Toronto International Film Festival began in earnest, at least for me. After going to sleep around 3:30 a.m. after Jennifer's Body, I was up at 7:30 to shower and rush out to see A Serious Man, the new Coen Brothers film. Exhausted and more than a little confused, Mr. Disgusting and I raced to the theater, convinced that the first festival screening of this high profile release would likely fill up, only to find ourselves tenth in a very short line with about 45 minutes to spare. I stared at the wall while Mr. Disgusting went and got a coffee.
Several people have asked me to describe the plot of A Serious Man, as the excellent trailer for the film gives little away. All I could come up with is, "A Jewish guy in the 1960s has, like, a really bad month, causing him to examine his faith. And maybe he's cursed." That may not sound particularly engrossing, but the end result is fairly riveting. Like all Coen Brothers films, A Serious Man is beautifully crafted; in terms of sheer technical filmmaking, I doubt there's anyone more talented working within the Hollywood system, even though their films are rarely flashy or epic in scope. Also, like all of the Coen Brothers' recent output, there is a cold undercurrent of cynical misanthropy running throughout. Sometimes their ostensible lack of empathy for their characters bothers me, but in A Serious Man, the suffering of the protagonist seems to be the entire point.
After A Serious Man, I decided to do myself a favor and not see the new Harmony Korine film, Trash Humpers, and instead took a rare break in which to eat. Then I headed to one of my most anticipated films of the festival, Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void. I found Noe's last feature, the Memento-esque rape-revenge deconstruction Irreversible, to be one of the most exciting pieces of cinema made during the past decade, and I couldn't wait to see how he would try to top it.
Enter the Void is often brilliant, and Noe is doing some things in terms of cinematography and sound design in the film that should and probably will be studied in film schools for decades to come. A great deal of the film, particularly its first hour, is a jolting, exhilarating, emotionally exhausting experience. But it's also long. It's really fucking long, and after awhile, exceedingly redundant. And at two hours and 35 minutes, Enter the Void ended up exhausting a lot more than my emotions.
Enter the Void isn't really a narrative-driven film, but essentially it tells the story of a small-time drug dealer in Tokyo, his sister and their friends. Seedy and depressing, and structured within the philosophical context of the Buddhist cycle of rebirth, the film almost challenges the viewer to stay with it. I loved most of it, but a good portion was entirely unnecessary. And for a film so technically innovative, the story ends on a surprisingly trite and familiar note.
Hilariously, the version of Enter the Void that screened at Toronto is ten minutes shorter than the cut that screened earlier at Cannes, down from its original running length of 165 minutes. All I can say is, keep cutting, dude. Seriously. If Enter the Void were 40 minutes shorter the film would be a masterpiece. And probably the greatest statement I can make about the film's flaws is that I honestly feel like I could cut more than 40 minutes out of Enter the Void without negatively affecting anything that it's doing.
After the intellectual endurance test of Enter the Void, I was ready for some mindless entertainment, and Solomon Kane seemed like the best bet. All the ingredients were in place: an action star, James Purefoy, who was great on Rome, working with director Michael J. Bassett (whose last film, Wilderness, I found to be excellent) to do an adaptation of Robert E. Howard's short stories of a Puritan soldier in the 15th century. With a reported budget of $40 million, I knew I was in for some blockbuster fun, right?
Yeah. Not so much.
I don't want to write a detailed review of Solomon Kane because it's part of the TIFF Midnight Madness series, which I love with all my heart, and reviewers with more knowledge of the source materials will no doubt extensively debate the film's strengths and weaknesses upon its release. So all I will say is that I thought Solomon Kane was not good. Really not good. So not good that I spent a good portion of the film gaping at the screen, in awe of how badly the movie in front of me was sucking. A monumental waste of money and energy, basically Solomon Kane is the story of a murderous jerk who discovers that his soul is damned due to his crimes. He then repents entirely out of self-interest and becomes a boring pacifist, until he is forced to kill some more people, and then he has to go rescue a kidnapped young girl (Rachel Hurd-Wood, with whom he has a kind of creepily flirtatious relationship given their age difference) so his soul will be saved again. So basically the entire movie is about a self-righteous asshole trying to avoid the punishment he richly deserves. Any of which would be fine if the film was fun, but... well, you get the idea.
All that said, I regretted my choice to not wait and view Solomon Kane with the Midnight Madness audience, whose reaction to the film would no doubt enhance its mindless appeal. Watching Solomon Kane sober at a silent P&I screening following Enter the Void is definitely not the way to see it.
The double feature bludgeoning of Enter the Void and Solomon Kane, both painful theatrical experiences for different reasons, left Mr. Disgusting and I stupefied, so we took a break to eat dinner at a terrible Japanese restaurant with some friends before the Midnight Madness premiere of Daybreakers, the long-shelved vampire film by the Spierig Brothers, the Australian auteurs behind the 2002 zombie film Undead. I liked very little about Undead, but am happy to report that Daybreakers is a far superior film. A fun B-movie with a terrific concept, Daybreakers is set in a future in which a virus has transformed the vast majority of the world's population into vampires, to the extent that humans are nearly extinct. The vampire world therefore faces a hunger epidemic due to this blood shortage, as starving vampires begin to turn on each other. Ethan Hawke plays a vampire scientist committed to developing a synthetic form of blood before both humans and vampires alike die out. However, a group of humans he unexpectedly comes across may have found another solution.
There's a lot of great stuff in Daybreakers beyond its nifty premise, but there's also a somewhat stagnant second act and subplots, especially one involving vampire boss Sam Neill and his human daughter, that add little to the proceedings. It therefore feels in many ways like the first film of a trilogy that will never come to fruition. Overall, though, it's a fun, silly action-horror film that never takes itself too seriously, and will certainly amuse horror fans. Plus, it's refreshing to see a vampire movie with some splatter in it. If the Spierig Brothers continue with this rate of improvement, I have high hopes for their next project.
Colin's Q&A with the amicable and slightly drunk Spierig Brothers, joined by cast members Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe, was fun as always, but I was so tired by the end of it that I could barely form coherent sentences and was literally poking myself in my eyes with my fingers to stay awake. I staggered out of the theater, offended the film's executive producer with some mumbled observations on the movie, then drifted back to the hotel to sleep.
A Serious Man - 8/10
Enter the Void - 8/10
Solomon Kane - 0/10
Daybreakers - 6/10
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September 30, 2009
We've got to move on, it's October and Halloween is almost here, so beyond the break you'll find the final three editions of Simon Barrett's "Film Festival Follies: Toronto International Film Festival", which cover all sorts of films including: Vengeance, Mother, The Horde, The Hole, Bitch Slap, Life During Wartime, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, My Dog Tulip, [Rec]2, Micmacs à Tire-Larigot, Soul Kitchen, and Valhalla Rising. These are greats read and I highly recommend taking some time to enjoy!
Film Festival Follies: Toronto International Film Festival - Day 4Read Day 0
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Vengeance, Mother, The Horde, The Hole and Bitch Slap
Before I attempt to clarify why I hated Vengeance more than any other film I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, it's important to say that I consider myself a serious fan of director Johnnie To and writer Wai Ka Fai. In my opinion, Johnnie To's gory cop thriller The Big Heat, released in 1988, is a masterpiece that stands alongside the best of John Woo and Ringo Lam as a stellar example of the Hong Kong crime genre. Even better, as Woo and Lam moved to Hollywood and began making more conventional action films, Johnnie To stayed in Hong Kong and got weirder. His films started to play as postmodern parodies of the "Cops vs. Triads" thrillers they were marketed as. Stoic, cynical works like The Mission, Breaking News and Election suddenly made To an international star, as cinephiles all over the world became aware of the unassuming auteur who'd been producing violent morality tales in Hong Kong for over two decades. International financing rapidly followed, and To found himself aligned with French producers who gave him free reign over his films, which were finally recognized as art films rather than generic action movie product.
Then, of course, Johnnie To stopped making good movies.
His first film financed by the French, the 2006 spaghetti western homage Exiled, was really fucking bad, but it's a goddamn masterpiece compared to the infuriatingly inane Vengeance, which made me want to rip my eyes out and fling them at the screen. At some point between Election 2 (aka Triad Election) and Exiled, Johnnie To went from making postmodern commentaries on action cinema to postmodern commentaries on his own postmodern commentaries. In other words, nobody in Vengeance ever behaves in a manner approximating that of an actual human being. They all speak in hard-boiled sentence fragments and are constantly waving guns around that they rarely use to do anything interesting. There are more Mexican standoffs in Vengeance than scenes without Mexican standoffs.
It's all deeply dull. If you've seen any other Johnnie To movie, then you will know exactly where Vengeance is headed from the opening scene, but To draws every stagnant sequence out interminably. In fact, I can't imagine Wai Ka Fai's script was longer than twenty pages. I picture a bunch of stapled together cocktail napkins with "Characters stare significantly at each other for three minutes" and "Protagonist looks sadly at gun for two minutes" written on them in Chinese characters.
Basically, the plot is that elderly French actor Johnny Hallyday's family is killed. He goes to Macau looking for their murderers, and fortuitously runs into a group of honorable hitmen led by Anthony Wong, who is always good but has little to do here. Wong and his cohorts agree to help Hallyday for basically no reason. Oh, and they happen to work for sleazy gangster Simon Yam, who is the only other recognizable actor in the film. One guess as to who the bad guy behind the deaths of Hallyday's family turns out to be. My friend Mark put it best later, when he explained his decision to walk out of the film at about the halfway mark: "I got what it was doing, and I had to check my email." (I actually walked out with him, but then walked back in because I felt like I had to see if it got better. It didn't. It got worse.)
Johnnie To has pulled this shit before, not just with Exiled, but with Fulltime Killer (2001), another idiotic film where characters do ridiculous shit just to illustrate some clichéd notion of gangster movie honor that has no basis in reality. The critics loved that movie and they're loving this one, but I think the only reason critics are rallying around Vengeance - and this happens often - is because they slept on To's earlier, more interesting work, and now they have to pretend to understand what the hell he's doing. But maybe I'm wrong. In the line to the men's restroom after the film, the guy in front of me said to his friend, "I've seen three Johnnie To films, and that was definitely the best."
I had to interrupt. "Have you seen The Mission?"
"Yes," he replied.
"And you liked Vengeance better than The Mission?"
"Yes," he said. "Did you?"
"No."
And with that, the conversation was over, although it left me pondering. The guy I'd spoken with was clearly intelligent enough to walk upright and operate a bathroom sink, and yet his opinions differed from mine.
It was very odd.
Fortunately, right after Vengeance, I saw one of the best films of the fest, the Korean murder mystery Mother, which cleansed Vengeance from my memory. Mother is the latest film by Bong Joon-ho, whose last feature, The Host, was a worldwide hit that kicked off a new fad of monster movies. The somber, engrossing Mother more resembles Bong Joon-ho's earlier work, especially his innovative procedural Memories of Murder, but in my opinion it surpasses all of his previous efforts in terms of quality.
The extraordinary Kim Hye-ja, who I guess is some kind of soap opera star in Korea, plays an impoverished woman whose mentally disabled adult son is arrested for the murder of a sexually promiscuous high school girl. Refusing to give up on the case long after the police have lost interest, Kim Hye-ja delves into the life of the victim, seeking the true identity of the killer.
Suspenseful and brilliant, Mother is reportedly going to be Korea's submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, which it stands a good chance of winning. Magnolia has acquired the film for an early release next year. When that happens, don't miss it. Even Mr. Disgusting loved it, and for a 129 minute Korean movie, that's saying something.
After Mother, I thought I had a break, but Mr. Disgusting discovered that the French horror film The Horde was having a buyer screening away from the festival that we were pretty sure we could crash. Excited to see the latest hyped French gore flick, we promptly hopped on the subway, then a trolley, racing to catch the film's 4 p.m. screening time at the great old Royal Theatre on the west side. Once we got there, we found that the screening of The Horde was indeed open only to accredited buyers.
I don't know what's going on with French horror cinema. After a run of stunning genre entries that put Hollywood and the rest of the world to shame (High Tension, Them, Inside, Martyrs), French filmmakers suddenly seem content to lazily rip off the worst of American B-movies. Possibly this is because all the brilliant French directors are promptly getting Hollywood deals, but The Horde is the second French film I've seen this year (the other being Mutants) that feels like the French dialogue is the only thing keeping it from being a generic Sci-Fi (SyFy?) Original.
The Horde has an okay premise, in which an unexplained zombie outbreak occurs while a group of cops are attempting to avenge the murder of a colleague by attacking a gang's headquarters at the top of a high rise building. Suddenly surrounded by howling zombies, the cops and criminals are forced to work together to escape the building.
The problem I had with The Horde is the same problem I have with all these bad French thrillers, which is to say, 2% of the film is awesomely gory zombie mayhem, and the other 98% is intolerable, idiotic characters screaming hysterically at each other at the top of their lungs and occasionally bursting into tears. Within the first ten minutes, The Horde has introduced enough interpersonal character conflicts to last an entire season of 90210, none of which is even remotely compelling. Imagine the first twenty minutes of Frontier(s) drawn out to an entire film, except with no political relevance, and you've basically got the idea. In most horror movies, I don't care if any of the characters live or die; in The Horde, I actively hoped for all the protagonists to die as quickly as possible, if only to silence their incessant whining.
When The Horde is concerned with zombie mayhem, it's actually pretty fun. It's the first zombie film I've seen in years where the characters actively go hand to hand with crazed zombies, and the resulting fight sequences are pretty entertaining. In fact, based on the quality of these scenes versus the rest of the film, I'm going to have to assume that the cast of The Horde was hired based solely on their martial arts abilities. Still, though, I find it difficult to believe there are no actors left in France who can both fight and act, so that's no excuse.
Overall, The Horde offers absolutely nothing new to an already exhausted genre.
We then raced to catch a public screening of the new Joe Dante film, The Hole. The inimitable Colin Geddes hosted the screening and pointed out that The Hole was the first TIFF film ever to screen in 3-D, which was cool. I didn't know quite what to expect from The Hole, but I was so enthused to see a new feature by Joe Dante that I deliberately went into the screening knowing as little as possible.
First of all, I discovered that The Hole is a family film. And it's not a subversive family film like Gremlins, it's a straight up movie for parents and kids. Like, it could get a PG rating. And I still loved it.
Plots don't get much simpler than The Hole, which almost seems to be based on the Handsome Family song "The Bottomless Hole." Two brothers (Chris Massoglia and Nathan Gamble, both far funnier here than most adolescent actors) move into a new house, only to discover a boarded up hole in their basement that seemingly has no end; objects thrown into it silently disappear. But at night, when the hole is left open, things start to get a little creepy, and the two brothers, with the assistance of a love interest neighbor girl (Haley Bennett, also delivering a more witty performance than I'd expected), begin to investigate the history of the house.
The Hole is a fun film that proves both that family entertainment can be scary and that child actors don't have to be horribly annoying. The 3-D effects are stellar (the guy next to me in the theater kept freaking out when objects would fly at the screen) and the film is simply a class act from start to finish. With the right studio behind it, it could be quite profitable.
Weirdly, I wasn't even tired after seeing four movies. I hit a couple of festival parties, then rushed to catch the Midnight Madness premiere of Bitch Slap.
I really wanted to like Bitch Slap. I had run into the filmmakers and cast at an earlier party, and they all seemed like cool, friendly people. However, in discussing my anticipation of their film, I had warned them that deliberately campy, pastiche cinema usually isn't my thing. And indeed, Bitch Slap wasn't.
Riffing on '60s exploitation cinema (particularly Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which is repeatedly referenced) but employing a green screen digital style for about half of its footage, Bitch Slap is about three tough, busty, scantily clad women who converge in the desert with a kidnapped man in their car trunk in search of a buried treasure. Through flashbacks, we see the events leading up to this scenario.
Bitch Slap has a few things going for it. The catty dialogue is often clever and the actresses are easy on the eyes (particularly America Olivo, coming off of another eye candy turn in the Friday the 13th remake, which is basically the only thing I remember about that movie). Best of all, the fight choreography by Zoe Bell is phenomenal. Catfight fetishists have a new favorite movie, as Bitch Slap is filled with terrific sequences of hot women very convincingly beating the crap out of each other. I know firsthand how difficult it can be to choreograph such sequences on a budget, and was impressed at how well these scenes held together; I didn't see a single pulled punch or unconvincingly staged strike, which is more than I can say for even Kill Bill.
Unfortunately, my praise ends there, because even with those factors in place, Bitch Slap is nothing new. Mind you, I'm pretty sure I've seen every film directed by Russ Meyer (which has a lot less to do with my appreciation of a true American auteur than it does my appreciation of big naked boobies) but even moviegoers with no knowledge of Bitch Slap's influences will likely find a good deal of it tedious.
And here's another thing: Russ Meyer's movies actually had nudity in them. Despite its marketing promises of boundless sleaze, during the entire running time of Bitch Slap, exactly two big naked boobies are shown, on a background player in a scene at a strip club. This character has no dialogue and is onscreen for perhaps ten seconds. Every other character is ogled by the camera relentlessly, but is never shown in anything more revealing than undergarments. As such, I found these leering sequences frankly somewhat soporific, especially at one in the morning. Basically, retro cheesecake fans who prefer their sleaze without, like, actual nudity will get a kick out of Bitch Slap, but I can't imagine anyone else will be thrilled. The audience around me was actively groaning during the final act of the film, especially as it continued to return to its flashback structure.
Colin's Q&A for Bitch Slap was better than the film itself, with all of the actresses on stage dazzling the audience. During this session, they announced Bitch Slap as the first part of a planned trilogy, information that left me baffled, as the ending of the film leaves absolutely no questions unanswered. In fact, the ending of Bitch Slap provided narrative resolution to subplots I'd forgotten existed. So, um... maybe the sequels will be better?
Vengeance - 0/10
Mother - 9/10
The Horde - 1/10
The Hole - 8/10
Bitch Slap - 3/10
Film Festival Follies: Toronto International Film Festival - Day 5Life During Wartime, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, My Dog Tulip and [Rec]2
I consider myself pretty aware of what movies are on the horizon, and thus I was astonished to discover that not only did Todd Solondz have a new movie at the festival, Life During Wartime, that I'd never even heard of, but that it was a sequel to his seminal 1998 indie hit Happiness. I have fond memories of seeing Happiness; I was attending film school at the time, and to me, the film was validation that the nihilistic, gross-out cinema techniques I had dedicated my adolescence to studying could be used to make legitimate, mainstream art. I even loved Solondz's compromised follow-up Storytelling, and although I couldn't defend the shallow, alienating Palindromes, I was excited to see Solondz return to his best film for a career comeback. Thus, I was awake to join my small circle of festival pals at the 9 a.m. screening of Life During Wartime, which is really a fucking ungodly hour to be awake and watching a Todd Solondz movie.
Life During Wartime, I am sorry to report, is just okay. It is a vast improvement over Palindromes, but shrinks in comparison with the bracing, original Happiness. Furthermore, the main conceit of Life During Wartime, which features all of the characters from Happiness being played by different actors, forces constant, unflattering comparisons with the original. This casting technique probably developed from necessity, as getting the entire ensemble cast of Happiness to return to these repellant characters presumably wasn't an option. Still, the new casting of these parts is distracting at best.
Life During Wartime picks up in real time from the ending of Happiness, ten years later. Bill Maplewood (previously played by Dylan Baker, now by Ciarán Hinds) has been paroled after his conviction for child molestation. His son, Timmy, has gone off to college, and his ex-wife, Trish (now played by Allison Janney), has moved on and is dating again. Her sisters are still doing the same miserable things they were basically doing in the first film. And that's the main problem with Life During Wartime: It's just more of the same, without taking any of the themes introduced by Happiness further. I mean, it's pretty good, and Solondz's brutal insights into his neurotic characters can be fascinating. But it feels like a completely unnecessary sequel. I can't shake the feeling that Solondz only made a follow-up to Happiness because it was the only project he could get financed.
We then all wandered over to see a British kidnapping thriller that had been recommended to me, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, an object lesson in how to make a small scale thriller. The movie takes place almost entirely within two adjoining rooms and features only three actors during its whole running time, but the characters, performances, and narrative twists and turns, while not wholly original, keep things moving at a good clip. It could have been a bit shorter, but The Disappearance of Alice Creed held my interest even if I mostly remember it as the screening at which I witnessed Mr. Disgusting almost get in a fight with a boorish executive in our row who wouldn't stop using his Blackberry during the film. That was awesome.
After The Disappearance of Alice Creed, it was time for another film I had high hopes for, Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. Herzog's surprisingly breezy Bad Lieutenant non-remake is one of my favorite films of the year, and Michael Shannon, the star of My Son, is an actor that I would watch in anything.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is based on the true story of a San Diego graduate student who, obsessed with playing the character of Orestes in a theatre production of Sophocles' Electra, emulated the character by stabbing his mother to death with a sword. The film basically operates as a loose collection of scenes in this character's recent life intercut with his stand-off with the police immediately following the murder. Its story basically seems to exist as an excuse for Herzog to throw together odd, seemingly improvised scenes that mostly go nowhere.
Herzog is a savvy enough filmmaker that when he makes an audience-unfriendly film like this one, I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. And there are some amazing moments in My Son, mostly featuring Michael Shannon or a scene-stealing Brad Dourif giving random, stream of consciousness monologues. Overall, however, whatever the intended effect of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was, I wasn't feeling it. I was along for the ride (unlike about two-thirds of the audience at the industry screening, who walked out), but when it ended, I was just like, "Huh. Well. Whatever." My filmmaker pal Josh has labeled this the best film of the year thus far, so I'll acknowledge that there must be something accessible within its oddness, but it didn't affect me one way or the other. As such, I'd have to label it an interesting failure.
I had some time after My Son, so I wandered around, waiting to join Mark at a screening of Hong Kong thriller Accident, only to arrive at the screening to find that the theater was full and they were no longer letting people in. Toronto is such a well-organized festival that I had frankly become spoiled and stopped showing up fifteen minutes in advance for screenings, as is advised. Cursing myself (and I heard Accident was a blast; fortunately, it has a U.S. distributor, so I'll see it eventually), I headed over to another film that had been generating festival buzz, the animated feature My Dog Tulip.
Like falling asleep during films, I don't walk out of movies no matter how much I'm hating them. I have walked out of three films in my life. The first was Small Soldiers, and that was mostly because my younger sister was falling asleep and I felt bad. The second was Woody Allen's Celebrity; again, I was with my family, but my impression was that this film utterly merited a walk out. The third was My Dog Tulip.
Admittedly, a walk-out almost shouldn't count at a film festival, when you're seeing so many movies that you begin to prioritize things differently; id est, I could watch the rest of My Dog Tulip, or I could go get dinner and maybe take a nap before [Rec]2. That said, I hated My Dog Tulip. I understand that it was a surprise festival hit, but I despised everything about it. It wasn't an incompetent film, just one I personally found deeply irritating. After I walked out of the movie after about an hour of suffering, I posted on Twitter, "I haven't read the book My Dog Tulip, but if the film is to be believed its author is a repulsive dotard and his dog should be put to sleep." Multiple people proceeded to chastise me for this post, which I'd thought to be one of my least offensive of the week. So I get that people like My Dog Tulip. But that just makes me dislike it more.
My Dog Tulip is based on the memoirs of an antisocial old man who adopted a badly behaved dog, an Alsatian named Tulip, that gave him a new lease on life. Or something. The film has no overarching plot but is structured as a series of supposedly humorous, charming anecdotes about this unpleasant old man and his dog having adventures, such as the dog shitting in front of a store and the old man feeling angry at a shopkeeper who asks him to clean it up. Oh, my sides.
My father had an Alsatian when I was growing up, a lovable, good-natured dog who passed away several years ago and is still dearly missed. In theory, this makes me the exact target audience for My Dog Tulip's brand of saccharine whimsy. Except I hated it. I hated the animation style, I hated the cloying score, and I especially loathed the fact that the film presented the antics of a rude, dull old man and his stupid dog as if they were inherently delightful.
But, like I said, I walked out, so I'm not qualified to write a real review of My Dog Tulip. Maybe something really awesome happened in the last twenty minutes. Like, maybe the old man fell down in the shower and broke his neck and had to lie awake as Tulip, driven mad with hunger after several days, turned feral and ate him. That would have been an interesting twist. Maybe it happened. I wouldn't know, because I didn't see it.
I had a little time before the Midnight Madness premiere of [Rec]2, so I crashed another industry party. However, after my sixth or so free drink, I started to let my nasal accent slip. A group of industry professionals seated at the bar immediately reacted with suspicion, gathering around me so that I could not escape...
On my list of films I'd hoped to see at TIFF, [Rec]2 was at the absolute top. I found Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's original [Rec] to be perfect horror entertainment and regretted not having had the chance, as a resident of the U.S., to see the film in a movie theater. Furthermore, I consider the rote remake Quarantine to be a curious example of how a remake can precisely imitate its source material without managing to capture anything that was good about it. Anyone who has only seen Quarantine and not [Rec] has done themselves a disservice. So I was glad that Balagueró and Plaza had returned to continue the story of their original film, one of the few recent horror films that invited a sequel.
[Rec]2 did not disappoint. I'd say the film overall isn't as good as [Rec], if only because it no longer has the element of surprise on its side and has to do some expository heavy lifting in its first reel to justify its existence. From that point on, though, the film doesn't stop for breath. By far the most entertaining film I saw at TIFF, [Rec]2 had the jaded horror fans I was seated with screaming, jumping out of their seats and covering their eyes. Not me, of course. But I still enjoyed it.
Much will probably be made of the filmmaker's decision to convert the more scientific, disease-based horror premise of [Rec] to a potentially silly supernatural element in [Rec]2. To me, it seems like the only way they could really up the ante on the original and do something cool and new. And make no mistake, the focus in [Rec]2 is on doing cool shit rather than making any sort of sense. But that's not the point. The point is, the [Rec] movies are scary fun, and at this, [Rec]2 is wildly successful. Seeing it at the giant, beautiful Ryerson theater is probably among the best moviegoing experiences of my life.
Afterward, Balagueró and Plaza were present for an affable Q&A with Colin, during which the possibility of [Rec]3 was discussed. Usually, I wish horror filmmakers would quit while they're ahead, as few horror franchises are known for their continued quality. Coming out of the theater, however, I realized that I hope they do make a [Rec]3, and a [Rec]4 and [Rec]5. I hope [Rec] becomes the next endless sequel franchise. With [Rec]2, Balagueró and Plaza have shown themselves to be committed to delivering inventive entertainment over all other considerations, and as a fan, I just hope they continue to work in the same spirit.
Ratings:
Life During Wartime - 6/10
The Disappearance of Alice Creed - 7/10
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done - 5/10
My Dog Tulip - W/O
[Rec]2 - 9/10
Film Festival Follies: Toronto International Film Festival - Day 6Micmacs à Tire-Larigot, Soul Kitchen, and Valhalla Rising
Well, it was bound to happen. After five days in a row of watching Midnight Madness movies and then waking up in time for 9 a.m. industry screenings of high profile films, I finally overslept and missed the first few minutes of one. Fortunately, it was Micmacs à Tire-Larigot, another vastly disappointing "comeback" film from a once-beloved director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, that I frankly wish I'd missed all of.
Jeunet, of course, is the maker, with Marc Caro, of the brilliant and innovative Delicatessen, as well as the writer and director of what might be the greatest romantic comedy ever made, Amélie. Since then, however, he's only made one other film, the uninspired 2004 war romance A Very Long Engagement. Micmacs à Tire-Larigot was hyped as a return to his earlier, more overtly comedic work. And it is indeed overtly comedic. Unfortunately, I didn't laugh once. I don't think I even smiled.
Micmacs tells the story of Bazil (French comedian Dany Boon), a man whose father was killed by a land mine. Later, while fiddling with a gun, Bazil accidentally shoots himself in the head, causing him to act like an idiot. Or maybe those two things are unrelated; I don't know. At any rate, Bazil is taken in by a fanciful group of street performers. When he discovers that the manufacturer of the land mine that killed his father and the manufacturer of the bullet that wounded him are rival companies located across the street from each other, Bazil develops a plan with his new friends to utilize the companies' rivalry to destroy them both.
Mainly I disliked Micmacs because it's annoying, stupid and not funny, but there was also something that I found deeply souring in its uneasy fusion of consequence-free slapstick and real world political commentary. The very premise of the film puts forward the notion that weapons manufacturers are implicitly responsible for the violent acts perpetrated by their products; hence, the companies are accountable for the death of Bazil's father and Bazil's wounding himself. Okay. I can accept that, even if incompetence was surely a factor in the latter instance. But in their plot against these weapons manufacturers, our heroes engage in all sorts of violent tomfoolery, such as launching a jar of bees at dockworkers in order to steal a missile. We even see that their actions lead to a building being destroyed with people inside of it; through a wacky contrivance, the people are unharmed, but still. And I guess we're supposed to just laugh at those scenes, but when the movie provides us with information regarding the actual use of land mines in Afghanistan, we're supposed to shake our fists at the evil weapons companies that profit off of death and destruction.
I'm all for turning off my brain and enjoying a silly comedy, but Micmacs wouldn't let me. When, at the end of the film, the owners of the weapons companies are presented with photos of limbless North African children wounded by their products, I finally had to wonder, who the fuck is this movie for? It's not funny. It's not serious. It's simultaneously preachy and daftly naive.
All the more frustratingly, I essentially share Micmacs's ideological viewpoint that defense manufacturers are, you know, not good. I was ready to agree with what the movie had to say and enjoy it. It's a testament to how bad Micmacs is that it made me actually root for the weapons manufacturers; in a theater full of snickering liberals, I felt like a Republican for the first time in my life. Micmacs isn't a total waste; it is a Jeunet film, so there's a couple of neat visuals and a nice look to the film. But I can't imagine it will find an audience in North America, where its fusion of mindless humor and political proselytizing will likely fail to amuse many viewers.
I had some time after Micmacs, so I grabbed a rare full meal, then headed to see Soul Kitchen, the new comedy from Turkish-German director Faith Akin, which I had heard a festival volunteer label the best movie at TIFF. I greatly enjoyed Akin's last film, the international drama The Edge of Heaven, so I was up for Soul Kitchen, although I knew little about it. But once again, I found myself thoroughly unamused by a comedy.
Soul Kitchen is exactly the type of breezy, crowd-pleasing foreign film that tends to be a hit in America. I strongly anticipate that, when this movie opens here, it's going to be a film that elderly people see and recommend to their friends. If I could buy stock in its U.S. release, I would. But I did not personally enjoy it.
Part of the reason I disliked Soul Kitchen is that I vaguely resent movies where I am called upon to be emotionally invested in characters who repeatedly do stupid things for the sole purpose of creating narrative conflict. This is an easy thing to do as a screenwriter, and it's both condescending and manipulative. The protagonist of Soul Kitchen, Zinos, runs a barely successful restaurant based around soul food. Then a bunch of silly, completely unnecessary stuff happens, mostly because he makes some obviously poor decisions, and his restaurant begins to fail, and then he has to fight to turn it around. I didn't like Zinos, a passive protagonist if there ever was one, and I didn't like his stupid brother, and I didn't like his wacky restaurant staff. I wanted them to all go away.
Overall, Soul Kitchen is not a bad film; it's not as ambitious as Micmacs, for example, so it doesn't fail as badly. It's just a mediocre, forgettable comedy that didn't make me laugh. I'm frankly a little confused as to why Faith Akin would follow up an ambitious project like The Edge of Heaven with an innocuous bit of fluff like Soul Kitchen, but heck, maybe the guy just needed a break. Okay, dude, break's over. Can you make a good movie again now, please?
It was with a lump in my throat that I approached my next screening, as I realized it would be my last film of TIFF. I had to catch a train out of town early the next morning, and there were no other films before then that I wanted to see. However, I was also sort of glad, as I was exhausted, malnourished, and had developed the unfortunate habit of scratching at my face like a meth addict sometime during the past week. I was also glad that I'd saved for last a film that I truly wanted to see, Nicolas Winding Refn's Viking saga Valhalla Rising. Refn, the Danish director of the excellent Pusher trilogy and the underrated, unfortunately titled English language thriller Fear X, is a filmmaker whose work consistently interests me, and the news that his latest film was a movie set in the year 1000 AD and starring Pusher's Mads Mikkelsen as a mute, one-eyed Viking named One Eye sounded to me like it could be the best movie ever made by anyone, ever.
And for the first 30 minutes of Valhalla Rising, I really thought I might be watching the best movie ever. I hadn't been able to get anyone to join me for the screening, and as I watched Mads Mikkelsen, playing the warrior slave of a Norse chieftain, crush skulls and eviscerate his opponents in gory detail, I thought of how Mr. Disgusting would kick himself when I told him that he'd missed the goriest film of the fest.
Then nothing at all happened for the next 60 minutes. And then the movie ended.
After about minute 35 of Valhalla Rising, a steady stream of walk-outs began that continued, unabated, until the theater, once packed, was nearly empty. Even Enter the Void and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done hadn't prompted such an exodus. I could kind of understand it, although I thought it was basically a good film. The first 30 minutes of Valhalla Rising are nonstop violent action, and then the following hour, in which One Eye and his boy companion join a group of Vikings intent upon bringing Christianity to North America, plays like a slow, experimental feature. More than anything else, Valhalla Rising reminded me of early Herzog films such as Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo in its portrayal of delusional travelers growing increasingly deranged in an unfamiliar land.
Seriously weird and often dull, Valhalla Rising definitely isn't for everyone. But even if you can't get into its more aimless second half, in which a group of hungry Vikings get strange with each other, it's worth seeing for the first half, in which Mads Mikkelsen angrily smashes a bunch of people's heads. And for fans of Viking cinema, I'll personally take Valhalla Rising over the other 2009 experimental Viking feature, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, any day. Although admittedly, it is kind of annoying that the characters in Valhalla Rising speak English. Severed Ways at least got that right.
Ratings:
Micmacs à Tire-Larigot - 2/10
Soul Kitchen - 4/10
Valhalla Rising - 7/10
Final thoughts:
I have never been to Cannes or Sitges, but I find it difficult to believe that there is a better festival than TIFF anywhere in the world. Impeccably organized and staffed by well-informed, polite volunteers, TIFF is a sheer pleasure for movie fans, especially when compared to all other festivals I've been to (ahem, Sundance) in which just finding the right line to wait in to see a movie can be a baffling ordeal. At TIFF, the focus is on the films rather than industry machinations. Furthermore, TIFF always has a better selection than any of the major fests. Fans of weird cinema worldwide should look to Colin Geddes' Midnight Madness series each year just to see what his picks are; the dude really does see it all, and basing my festival experience around his series was the best choice I could have made.
Beyond that, Toronto is a great, clean, friendly city filled with huge, beautiful movie theaters. This year, the festival gave a free transit pass to badge holders, and I made good use of it, taking the subway, buses or trolleys everywhere I wanted to go. I never once had to wait longer than three minutes for a train, and even the buses and trolleys were pretty awesome. Even Toronto's crazy homeless people are cheerful and polite. At one point, as I was drunkenly leaving a bar before the screening of The Loved Ones, I got really good directions to the Ryerson from a passing transsexual prostitute.
In short: Toronto women, I will totally marry you just to move to your city. I don't even care about the universal health care thing, that's secondary. Your city is awesome. Let me know.
During my time at TIFF, I saw 26 movies in six days. That might not seem like such a huge amount, but you try it. My back is still kind of screwed up from slouching in theater seats for over ten hours a day. I blame Solomon Kane for starting that habit. Also, Mr. Disgusting might be a great guy, but he's not the world's best Posture Pal.
The best: Symbol, Mother, [Rec]2, Harry Brown
The worst: Solomon Kane, Vengeance, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Horde
Surprisingly, my favorite film to play at TIFF was a film I saw before the festival began, Werner Herzog's delightful The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans. But even the bad and mediocre films I saw were awesome in their own way, and I loved seeing them. The great thing about a festival like TIFF is that every film there has something distinctive about it to even be selected. With, of course, the exception of Solomon Kane. Screw you, Solomon Kane.
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