trailer tuesday

the countdown is almost over. fantastic fest starts in less than forty-eight hours. this week's entry is for one of a number of films i hope to see this week, peter strickland's berberian sound studio (2012).

for the full schedule, click here. hope to see you there.

on my fest behavior

one of my favorite weeks of the year, fantastic fest, will be upon us in just a few more days, so i thought i would give you guys a rundown of some of the things i am looking forward to most. my schedule is limited, so i am going to stick mainly with discussing things that i am potentially going to get to see.

saturday, 9.24.11, is going to be the first day that i get to really attend the festival in earnest and that morning is kicking off with a kids club screening of byron haskins' war of the worlds (1953). very excited about this one. never seen it on the big screen and this science fiction classic will be a nice way to ease into things before the full-tilt madness begins.

we will be going from the end of one world to the end of another with lars von trier's melancholia (2011). i approach this one with some trepidation, but after the unforgettable experience that antichrist (2009) was a couple of fantastic fests ago, i figure it's worth a shot. if nothing else, it appears to be beautifully photographed.

the rest of the evening is most likely going to be dictated by the size of the crowd. being badgeless, i anticipate difficulty getting into the screening of an american werewolf in london (1981), as revolutionary makeup artist rick baker will be in attendance. ditto for the more high-profile fest entry you're next (2011) with director adam wingard doing q & a afterward. fortunately for me, laurent achard's last screening (2011) looks to be flying under the radar with its intriguing mixture of french arthouse sensibilities and italian giallo tendencies, all while ruminating on the role of cinema in our lives, something i like to do a fair bit.

sunday, 9.25.11, starts with tomasz thomson's blackly comic snowman's land (2011).

following that, we have the return of a film that hasn't lost a single high-octane step in the decade or so since its original release, ryuhei kitamura's versus (2000). lead performer tak sagaguchi and writer yudai yamaguchi wii be in attendance for this one.

which brings us to my first absolute must-see on the schedule, jeff nichols' haunting take shelter (2011). michael shannon is the best actor working today that almost everyone is unfamiliar with and i have high hopes for this one. if there is one film during the week that i wish i could convince everyone to see, this is it.

hoping to close things down sunday night with hong kong action. throughout the week, they are screening a surprise roster of hong kong exploitation classics from the early eighties/late nineties and i am crossing my fingers that they won't be filled to capacity.

monday evening kicks off early with a screening of jiang wen's let the bullets fly (2010) which i recently featured in this installment of trailer tuesday. after a brief dinner break, i am shooting for a second round of the hong kong mystery movies. closing out the monday festivities will be the midnight madness of lucio fulci's house by the cemetery (1981)

tuesday evening begins with the second effort from nacho vigalondo, extraterrestrial (2011). i thoroughly enjoyed his debut feature, timecrimes (2007) and look forward to seeing what he does next. he will be in attendance along with producer nahikari ipiña for q & a after the film. following that, i will probably forego a third round of hong kong in favor of justin kurzel's snowtown (2011), which appears to be just the latest in a growing line of staggeringly powerful australian crime films. no one is doing it better than them right now.

i know it's a longshot, but i am going to try to get in to the 100 best kills event to close out tuesday evening.

barring any unforeseen openings in my work/band schedule, that looks like the extent of what i will be able to catch. of course, as with most festivals, plans B and C will probably come into play, but if you're interested in seeing any of these with me, just let me know. i guarantee a good time. fantastic fest never disappoints.

trailer tuesday

this week's entry is for hideo gosha's three outlaw samurai (1964).

as part of the preliminary to fantastic fest, the alamo drafthouse is showing a pair of gosha's beautifully dark samurai films. alas, three outlaw samurai was last night, but you still have the opportunity to see bandits vs. samurai squadron (1978) next monday, 9.19.11, at 7 p.m. i heartily recommend it. it's free if you have any type of fantastic fest badge. if you're not a badgeholder you can purchase tickets here.

fantastic-er

i just got home from the second of the two days i was able to attend fantastic fest this year. they advertise it as the "festival with the boring parts cut out" and that pretty much sums up my experience.

my friend chelsea and i camped out at the alamo drafthouse on south lamar all day and hit the freaking jackpot. we got in to everything we wanted to see, twice getting free tickets out of the clear blue sky from generous folks. our program was even more varied and interesting today than the lineup i was able to see saturday. it couldn't have worked out better.

we started the day off with a bang with legend of the fist: the return of chen zhen (2010). this theatrical continuation of the popular chinese television series features donnie yen as both star and action choreographer and he knocks it out of the park on both counts.

an outrageous opening set piece sets the tone for some daring and imaginative action sequences throughout. it generated a round of spontaneous applause from a festival audience that has just about seen it all this week, not an easy feat. these stories are often just a flimsy peg to hang a series of ever-escalating acrobatics on, but this one is bit unique, at least for western viewers. it is set during/just after world war one, a time frame most history students are familiar with, but is filtered almost exclusively through the prism of china versus japan and what the aftermath of the great war means to the dominant powers in asia. anglo interests are minimal, if not non-existent. it is refreshing that an action film can also serve as a stirring reminder that we are not alone in this world, that the globe goes right on turning and sometimes we have absolutely nothing to do with it. the title character, chen zhen, is something of a folk hero by this point and has also been played by bruce lee and jet li in the past. the politics on display are, of course, greatly simplified in these film versions and your notion of hero and villain could vary a bit depending on how you feel about the early chinese republican era and the rise of the japanese empire. what you cannot dispute is how much ass donnie yen kicks, about one hundred of them in one scene alone. very entertaining and, in spite of its twenty-first century kicks, a little bit of a throwback. the nods to rick's place in casablanca (1942) are no accident. it was a great, and very energetic, way to start the day.

then it got dark. next up was jang cheol-so's bedevilled (2010). this festival entry from korea won this year's audience award and it was nice to see it go to something so challenging rather than more high profile, easily digestible films.

there is nothing that feels good about this film. it forgoes the quick setup that would have turned this into cheap exploitation fare and we spend the bulk of the film becoming intimate with the pain of bok-nam, the island girl who longs for a way out of her miserable existence. we see in excruciating detail the indignities and abuse she suffers daily at the hands of her husband, his brother and the elder women of the island, population nine or so - seven unfeeling monsters and one perpetual rape victim/punching bag/pack mule and her young daughter. the hint of her child possibly being molested is the last straw. she makes arrangements to make a run for the mainland but, as with everything else that happens in the first three quarters of the film, that comes to a futile and infuriating conclusion. finally, after the death of her daughter, she cracks. she stares into the sun and it tells her what she must do. it's a testament to just how horrible her "family" is that when she sinks a sickle into the throat of her first victim, a seventy year old woman, cheers erupted throughout the theater. it's an incredibly cathartic moment. thus begins a final cycle of violence that vaults this into the pantheon of the greatest revenge films ever made. you can only push a girl so far. and you will never think of bean paste the same way again.

it's not for everyone, but if you have a sturdy constitution i highly recommend it. it is full of brilliantly painful performances and lush korean location photography that highlights both the physical beauty of the landscape and how ironically fouled it is with all this degradation.

as evening fell, we left the pacific rim for ol' virginny. this turned out to be my favorite thing i saw this week, i think. in a stroke of programming genius, the festival organizers brought in the stage production nevermore - an evening with edgar allan poe. stuart gordon and jeffrey combs, who most folks know from their work together on re-animator (1985), have re-teamed as director and performer for this one-man show that lets us travel back in time to watch richmond's not-so-favorite son read, recite and unravel before our very eyes.

this was a gamble on the organizers' part, i thought. genre film fans, as a lot, can occasionally come up short in the attention span department. with so much overstimulation going on in every theater how would a one-man play based on literature a century and a half old, filled with florid and increasingly archaic language go over? in this case, like gangbusters. it was a great performance filled with tender humor, pathos and drunken trash-talking of henry wadsworth longfellow. combs was uncanny in resemblance and effective in manner. "the tell-tale heart" and "the raven" were among the signature pieces he performed but the heart of the play was in the asides and reveries. the women in poe's life turned out to be the most significant characters in the play without ever setting foot onstage - his sainted mother, his tubercular cousin/wife, recently deceased and his intended - they all were ghosts that haunted him that he exorcised with demon rum. or rye, in this case. combs' performance received a well-deserved standing ovation. i hope they do more of this type of alternative programming in the future. bring in grand guignol theater next year!

after that it was back in line for the fourth and final secret screening of the week. it turns out, we were in a select group of eleven non-badgeholders that got in to this particular event. our reward? troll hunter (2010).

this particular bit of norwegian wackiness resides at the intersection of the blair witch project (1999) and grimm's fairy tales. using the same "recovered footage" conceit as blair witch, this tells the story of a group of student documentarians who went missing after they stumbled upon a man who hunts trolls for the norwegian government. now, norwegian trolls are nothing like gnomes or other, more friendly, "mythical" creatures. these trolls bash. they bludgeon. they bite heads off. they are gigantic brutes, as dumb as the rocks they routinely dine on. this is played (mostly) for laughs and is fairly well done. it's not winning any oscars anytime soon, but as tonight's dessert, it was just right. one of the big lures of the secret screenings is the air of exclusivity that surrounds each one and this one was about as exclusive as it gets. aside from the five people - director, two producers, sound mixer and dolby lab guy - who assembled this cut of the film a scant twelve hours before, no one had ever seen the finished product before we got to. they haven't even shown it to their distributor yet. so, that's kind of fun. i got to be the first kid on my block to see it and thereby completely round out my fantastic fest experience. not bad.

looking forward to next year already. hope to see some of you there.

closing in on the gods

fantastic fest, the world's best genre film festival, is well underway and i finally had a day off to take in as much of it as i could. once again, it exceeded expectations.

i started the day at the alamo drafthouse and first on the agenda was an afternoon screening of roger corman's x: the man with the x-ray eyes (1963). this is one of my favorite mad scientist movies and, as corman goes, ranks just behind the poe adaptations he made with vincent price. actually, it's a bit unfair to refer to ray milland's character as mad. he is a visionary (zing!). dr. james xavier develops eyedrops which make your vision so acute that you can actually see through things. his noble aim is to use it to help mankind, beginning in the hospital where he works. as a diagnostic tool, it will make x-rays primitive, suitable for "witch doctors". as is often the case with those ahead of their time, his work is met with a mixture of misunderstanding and fear. he begins to experiment on himself with increasing frequency and a series of desperate acts/accidents forces him into hiding. he has become both mad scientist and his own misunderstood creation, simultaneously. it's as entertaining and thought-provoking a piece as corman ever came up with. ray milland, a heavyweight in decline, brings a certain gravitas to the picture that karloff or price, as much as i love them, couldn't have. don rickles shows up and turns in a rare and effective dramatic performance. the "spectarama" effects, which show you the point of view of our afflicted doctor, are a riot of color and light and the costly nature of vision weighs heavily on all concerned. just exactly how much is too much to see? it begins playfully enough, with a nice touch of exploitation humor that uncovers all the kids and colleagues at a party but by the end, when no amount of darkness is enough, there is nothing left for the man to do but pluck out the eye that offends him.

more than once, milland covers his stricken eyes in a telling pose that looks like nothing as much as grief. closing his eyes does no good. he finally suffers the worst fate that can befall a man of science, a desire to see no more. it is only then that he has truly gone mad. he has begun to see things we cannot comprehend. he is, as he said, "closing in on the gods".

then the man himself dropped by and entertained everyone with anecdotes and fielded questions from the audience. he talked about everything from the conundrum of having a hit versus having critical acclaim (and having both) to working with vincent price and ray milland to his festival experience so far. he was quite an engaging guy and after all this time he is still trying to make sure his audiences get their money's worth. mission accomplished today, roger.

next up was jorge michel grau's we are what we are (2010). this is a grim family drama from mexico which begins with the unexpected death of the patriarch, leaving three siblings and a mother who may be a bit unstable to fend for themselves. and did i mention they were cannibals?

the film follows this somewhat hapless bunch, adrift without their father/husband, as they attempt to round up food/a subject for the ritual they believe perpetuates them. the genre elements are downplayed in this, for the most part, and that works in the film's favor. i still didn't think, though, that it realized its full potential. it was good, not great. it was most effective when it started to edge into other taboo areas aside from the cannibalism. issues and intimations of sexuality, both within and without the home, provided the most interesting scenes for viewers to sink their teeth into but they weren't developed in a fashion that sustained any momentum. it is somewhat strange to say it, but i wish even more time had been spent on these thornier questions, possibly at the expense of the horror elements altogether. it could have been a much better horror film if the horror was left out.

the last film of my evening was a screening of snake in the eagle's shadow (1978) that was taking place at the paramount theater. this was part of of an evening of programming devoted to yuen woo-ping that also included a showing of true legend (2010) and a lifetime achievement award presented by none other than the RZA himself. i missed the first half of all that but got there in time for master yuen's q and a and the second feature. for those of you unfamiliar with yuen woo-ping, he has been one of the most revolutionary figures in hong kong action cinema for the last thirty years. his fight choreography is always dazzling and innovative. he is the bridge from the shaw brothers kung fu theater of the sixties and seventies to the visually arresting wire work extravaganzas that are prevalent now. snake in the eagle's shadow was his directorial debut and is every bit as fun today as it was in 1978. it doesn't stray far from the rival schools/betrayal mold of kung fu films, but it doesn't have to. it is personality plus. this is the film that took a young jackie chan (then billed as jacky) and set him on the path that would make him a household name. it jettisoned the "new bruce lee" thing he had been saddled with in favor a funnier, more acrobatic approach that has been his hallmark ever since and it changed the hong kong film industry in the process. master yuen's father, yuen siu tien, is perfectly cast as the master of the snake fist style who takes chan under his wing as they head toward a final showdown with the evil practitioners of the eagle claw style. their chemistry makes for a winning combination and it's a testament to their rapport that the most memorable piece of choreography in the entire film isn't a fight scene but, rather, their spirited game of keepaway with a rice bowl. description/photos won't do any of this justice. you have to see it in motion.

if you like martial arts films at all, i highly recommend you check out master yuen's body of work and this film is a fine, and fun, place to start.

all in all, a pretty great day. well done, fantastic fest. i think i'll get at least one more full day in on wednesday. talk to you then, if not sooner.

trailer tuesday

in anticipation of the upcoming fantastic fest, this week's entry is for what i consider one of the real coups of the programming team this year, kim ki-young's the housemaid (1960).

you don't have to understand korean to get chills from that bit with the water glass. i cannot wait to see this tense and unpredictable little gem. fantastic fest runs at the alamo drafthouse on south lamar from 9.23.10 through 9.30.10. ifc is running a contest where you can enter to win two all-access passes to the festival and you can register for those here. i'll see you there.