No, really. I haven’t died. I’ve just been, er, distracted. But this can’t pass without notice… It simply cannot!
Here is the trailer for Shut Up And Play The Hits… the movie of 2012 for me.
Its world premiere is at Sundance, later this month, when there are 5 screenings scheduled. Agh, how I wish I could be at one of ‘em!
As is often the case, it’s not whatcha know as much as it’s whoya know… and, in this case, it means I was invited, again, to participate in The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell‘s annual pre-TIFF feature called Chasing The Buzz, wherein li’l film-loving bloggers like me get to throw our 2¢ into the pot along with the pocket change from professional film columnists and reviewers, critics and professors, festival programmers and assorted muckety-mucks (Hello, Piers). What’s in the pot, you ask? Well, Pete wants us to explain–in a single sentence (although a garrulous few get away with more)–which three films we are most excited about seeing at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Jeff Nichols wrote and directed one of my happiest discoveries of the past year, Shotgun Stories (2007), which also features the star of Take Shelter, the estimable Michael Shannon. (Okay, full disclosure: I have an extreme case of the h-h-hots for Mr. Shannon. Fair ’nuff? In fact, Shotgun Stories may have been the Shannon performance that hooked me. You might know him best as Agent Van Alden Awesome in HBO‘s “Boardwalk Empire”.) It is a quiet but devastating little film about a feuding family that I highly recommend–the writing and performances are beautiful.
It is on the basis of Shotgun Stories that I am keen to see Take Shelter. Again written by Nichols, it is the story of Curtis–a young husband and father and a crew chief for a mining company in the American Midwest–who may or may not be taking a frightening trip around the proverbial bend. I expect it will be up to the viewer to decide which is the case… as Curtis struggles to understand the same thing onscreen. Read more
The Toronto After Dark Film Festival has announced its first 8 titles for this year (Oct. 17-24).
Two jumped out at me immediately: Red, a story about revenge starring the always wonderful Brian Cox…
and Let The Right One In, a Swedish vampire film based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist…
If you are a Facebook member, you can see all 8 hi-res trailers here. Otherwise, g’wan over to the TAD site to watch ‘em.
I attended last year and I gotta say I hadda blast. I was really impressed with this upstart fest: it was well organized, the programming was international in scope, it included short programmes as well as features, it cut a pretty wide swath of genres (horror, SF, documentary, animation, cult, musical, and unpredictable combinations thereof), and it attracted thousands of patrons who weren’t averse to a little grue. Or a lotta grue, for that matter. 
Plus, it dovetailed with the annual Toronto Zombie Walk! Beat that, TIFF!
→ originally published 2008-08-27
Y’know, I felt expectedly sad but still in control throughout Grant Gee’s documentary about Joy Division—long one of my favourite bands—before finally breaking down and sobbing over a visual pun at the end of it all. Gee had overlaid footage of a New Order performance of “Shadowplay” and footage of a Joy Division performance of same (one shadowing the other, you see) and, my God, what a terrible feeling of loss came over me.
Ian Curtis was gone before I’d ever even heard the band. I was introduced to the music of Joy Division by my friend Peter (who had eclectic tastes and who introduced me to a lot of interesting music) when I was in third-year university. At that time, the band’s dark and brooding post-punk music resonated with me and it has remained very important, very personal to me even though I’ve gone through a lot of changes since then. The intriguing thing about their music is that it just doesn’t sound dated. It doesn’t sound out of place today—nor has it ever, throughout all the years since it was laid into wax. They were way ahead of their time back then and, despite their minimal output, are generally considered a hugely influencial band.
I first heard of Gee’s documentary in the run-up to TIFF07, where it got its world premiere. This film, along with the North American premiere of a dramatized version of the story (Anton Corbijn’s Control) meant that Joy Division was certainly well represented at the film fest. Unfortunately, neither film screened during the few days I attended and—naturally—neither film ever showed up onscreen in the city where I live, so their release this summer on DVD was much anticipated. Read more
Heh-heh-heh, this abridged version of the script by Rod Hilton is way better than the one they used!
→ originally published 2008-06-19
‘I have a bad feeling about this…’
- Indiana Jones, quoting Han Solo, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Damn, I knew it was a mistake to let hope and a few (over-?) generous reviewers overwhelm my longstanding belief that another Indiana Jones film would be a fiasco… As I start to write this, I just got back from seeing the latenight screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Incredibly Long and Charmless Movie Titles, and I’d rate it somewhere between the hokey-jokey Last Crusade and the screamy-corny Temple of Doom. And closer to the latter than the former. None of ‘em even comes close to the pure cinematic joy of Raiders, of course.
But at least I didn’t hafta pay to see it.
The film bolts out of the gate and maintains the frenetic pace of a gallop to the end. It needs to stop and take a breath. It needs to pause and take a look around and think for a minute. Instead, it’s just one furious action set piece after another. But for all that, there are no thrills. I wasn’t moved to the edge of my seat even once. I never felt any sense of danger for the characters onscreen, even when they went plunging over three (count ‘em: 3) enormous waterfalls. (Overfuckingkill. That’s the film in a nutshell.) Read more
I see Rotten Tomatoes has compiled a 95% positive rating so far for Iron Man. And that percentage is slightly higher than the percentage of the movie than I saw tonight at the preview. Apparently, there was about 20 minutes left in the film when there was a reel switch and–whoosh!–everything onscreen was now dizzingly 1. backwards, and 2. upside-down. Remember the dancing Man From Another Place in Twin Peaks? Yeah, it sounded kinda like that. Except without the dancing.
Y’know, in the olden days, I’d've flipped out over that. I woulda stormed the projection booth, cussing and flailing, spittle flying. (I know, I know what you’re thinking: “Carla? Swearing? Nawww!” But it’s true! Believe. It. Or. Not.) It seems I have mellowed.
Up ’til that point, though, I can tell you that this is probably the best comic book adaptation I’ve seen onscreen. (And this coming from a diehard Hellboy fan. Sorry, GDT.) It’s an absolute blast–it’s got all the action you’d expect in a film of this genre, plus more wit than you’d expect, and a first-rate performance in the lead. Ah loves me some Robert Downey Jr, and his built-in bad-boy rep serves him well as Tony Stark–whose life-long self-absorption gets turned on its head (kinda like the final reel of this screening!). It’s still there, mind you–and this is good because I prefer my heros flawed–but leading him in a different direction after a rather major epiphany.
Downey’s razor-sharp delivery is perfect for Stark. His darkness is perfect. His intelligence and quick wit are perfect. And how he learned to perform his lines backwards and upside down is some kinda miracle. Genius! (Plus, umm, this might sound a little drooly girly but, oh my, those muscular shoulders and arms look mighty fiiiiiiine in those muscle shirts!)
(Incidentally, we were each given two free admissions to try to make up for the badly fracked screening, and one of mine will be used to see this again. All the way to the end right-side up next time. I hope. By then, of course, you will have seen it y’self, so I don’t need to tell you about it. And if you haven’t seen it by then, yeesh, crawl out from underneath that rock.)
→ originally published 2008-05-01
Could you love a robot? Should you love a robot? Or, rather, a geminoid, as its creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, calls it. That’s one of the questions posed in Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love.
Ishiguro built his geminoid in his own image. Make of that what you will.
In fact, he coined the word “geminoid” from the Latin geminus, meaning “twin” or “double” and oid, which indicates “similarity”. And the damned thing does really look like him. If he were a robot, that is.
Apparently, he got the idea for this because he is so busy. He can’t be in two places at once, after all. So he built this copy of himself–sculpted from casts of his body–so that it could, say, sit in a meeting at the office while he was working elsewhere, and it would stand in for him as he spoke through it and manipulated it via remote control. ‘If I could have one at the university, and one at ATR, I would just do all my work from a hot-springs resort.’ Well, okay… it makes sense when he puts it that way. But he also wonders if people could come to have feelings for these things. Read more
Starting with Sundance, back in ’06, I have made a habit of trying to sit on the aisle, in a row near the back of the theatre, whenever I go to film festivals. Sometimes you need to get out quickly to get to another screening and other times you discover that you’ve chosen unwisely and just wanna slink out without causing other audience members to be taken out of the film by your rustling and excuse-mes as you squeeze past them out the row.
Well, wouldn’t you just know it, but the only time I ended up having to sit down at the front of the theatre at this year’s Hot Docs was for the one film I absolutely hated and wanted to get the hell outta before it was finished. There was nothing I could do but just gut it out.
The write-up on this thing described it as being about Carlos Castaneda‘s five “wives”, who mysteriously disappeared right after his death—never to be seen again. Sounds like it might be interesting, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when the director introduced her film by saying that she doesn’t normally make her films for an audience—she makes them for herself—and then added, ‘I hope that if you don’t find what you are looking for in this film, you find something else’, well… As it turns out, I didn’t find what I was looking for and all I found in its absence was frustration and boredom.
Minou Norouzi’s Anatomy of Failure reminds me of something that was made by a self-absorbed teenager who doesn’t know 1. how to construct a story, 3. how to capture something interesting within the frame, 3. how to draw a comprehensible story from the people she sets before her lens, or 4. how to focus her fucking camera!
I sat and seethed through this self-indulgent thing. What on earth the programmers saw in this, I dunno. I saw some blurry navel-gazing shit on a beach and then a bunch of interviews with flaky nouveau-hippies.
At least the opening film was interesting. It was called The Apology Line and was a rather poetic little film about an anonymous phone line in Britain that you call when you need to apologize for something and you don’t feel you can make your apology to the person who deserves it. Some of the apologies are funny while others are wrenching. Directed by James Lees, it won the Best Short Documentary award at the festival.
Minou, the number is 0800 970 93 94.
→ originally published 2008-04-26
