SXSW 2010 Film Review: The Red Chapel

Documentary comedy The Red Chapel contains some of the bravest comedy I have ever seen. Forget Sacha Baron Cohen, he only tackled prejudice, whereas The Red Chapel infiltrates North Korea, one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the world, and mocks its pretensions in the faces of the secret police. No wonder it won “Best Foreign Documentary” at Sundance.

The group gets into North Korea on the pretext of being a socialist comedy troupe called The Red Chapel, who have come to the country as part of a Dutch cultural exchange program. The group is eclectic to say the least. The brainchild and narrator of the experiment is an unscrupulous journalist, willing to utter any lie and parrot North Korean propaganda to get the shots he wants. The comedy duo following him consists of two Danish-Koreans, one a tattooed but sweet man, the other a self-described “spastic,” who has a developmental disability and a terrible speech impediment. One wonders how these artists agreed to this mission.

Freshly landed in Korea, the Danish troop is introduced to their communist minder, Ms. Pak, who proves to be the most interesting character in the film. Though she seems motherly and polite, Ms. Pak is a highly trained communist official, possibly a member of the secret police, and is utterly convinced of Korean superiority. Within minutes of deplaning, she scolds the comedians for not knowing the Korean language, and insists on teaching them to count from one to ten. They find this amusing, and repeat after her. Each time they finish, she smiles and says, “Again.” On the sixth repetition, they give up, realizing that they are being drilled instead of taught. The next morning, she takes them to get tailored North Korean military uniforms, exactly the type worn by the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-ill. The culture wars continue to the performance itself, when the Koreans revitalize the (admittedly, terrible) Danish comedy show, replacing all Danish elements with ones that will be “better” and more geared toward North Korean tastes. The most grotesque change involves confining the disabled performer to a wheelchair which he is in no need of, and telling him that he must pretend that he is an able-bodied actor playing a disabled person. This is particularly revolting when one realizes that North Korea has been accused of killing disabled children at birth, and sending persons who develop physical handicaps to work camps.

One wonders while watching if the changes are meant to make the show more accessible to Korean audiences, killing any thought of cultural exchange, or make performance terrible, reinforcing the superiority and professionalism of the North Korean girls’ choir serving as backup singers.

The Red Chapel makes little pretence of being a fair documentary, and frequently shades into propaganda itself. The director/narrator defends these tactics as pitting one piece of propaganda against another, and as a viewer I find myself agreeing with that statement more often than not. To be fair, the film doesn’t show anything that the North Korean propaganda machine doesn’t want an audience to see (the secret police watched the tapes daily) and the fact that the socialist perversity staged for the camera is the best face North Korea can show proves the film’s thesis that North Korea is a dictator’s puppet show. For all the cheap shots pulled, the film doesn’t hit below the belt—it never tells us that the founder of the country, Kim Ill-sung, is kept in a glass casket like Snow White, labeled with a sign reading “Our Leader For Eternity.” Nor does it mention that state propaganda occasionally suggests that Kim Jong-ill controls the weather. Instead, the director lets the country speak for itself: the near-empty streets of Pyongyang, the aggressive military parades, the deliberate misinterpretation of history, and the creepy groupthink mentality of the schoolchildren.

This all makes The Red Chapel sound like a bleak film, and it is, but that didn’t stop me from laughing throughout the entire running time. Everyone in this film is funny, the devious director, the over-earnest Ms. Pak, and the “spastic” Jacob, whose speech impediment is so thick that he’s the only one who can speak his mind without fear of blowing their cover.

The only downside to the project is the camera work, which is frequently shaky and sometimes pans fast enough to make the audience motion sick. Likewise, the subtitles are sub-par for a movie this good, blocky and far too high up on the screen. Still, these are small issues that didn’t detract much from my overall enjoyment of the film.

I dare not reveal how far their charade goes, and where it leads them, but it is fair to say that if I were a member of The Red Chapel theater troupe, I’d have kissed the ground after landing back in the Netherlands.

Film Review Flashback to SXSW 2009: BLACK

This review was originally posted following SXSW 2009. Since the film has now been released for pre-order to the U.S. market, I decided to re-post the review in order to drum up interest and prime the pump for the SXSW 2010 reviews I will post later this week.



Black is a French nouveau Blaxploitation heist film, in which a group of Parisian North Africans pull a bank heist in Dakar and end up embroiled in a gang war that involves con men, a Russian Spetsnaz Colonel, a shaman, American military contractors, giant machete-wielding wrestlers, a femme fatale from Interpol, a witch, and an arms dealer who's mutating into a snake. If that list didn’t excite you, this isn’t your movie.

The current racial tension in France is roughly analogous to that of 1970s America, so it makes sense that French directors are becoming attracted to the strong, virile, anti-establishment heroes of the American Blaxploitation era (think Shaft or ) as both artistically interesting and commercially bankable. To his credit, director Pierre Laffargue has no qualms about hijacking the genre and running with it as far as it can go, including bloody bank heists, sexy cast members, kung fu, big guns, nasty white villains, and a soundtrack that’s unapologetically funky. The end result is dizzying, violent and leaves the viewer with a lunatic grin.

The best thing about Black is MC Jean Gab’1 (District B-13, District 13: Ultimatum), the French rapper who portrays the titular character. MC Jean keeps the film grounded with his wicked smile, tough-but-handsome face and precisely delivered one-liners. (The best of which has him pulling grenades from a glove compartment and growling, “If they want Beirut, I’ll give them Beirut!”) The man’s got talent, which only shines all the more in a film where every actor consciously and consistently goes over the top. The manic Russian Colonel is especially fun to watch. In this era of “realistic” depictions of Batman and James Bond, it’s nice to see a villain that jumps out of hiding with a grin on his face and shouts, “Ah ha!” The Interpol agent played by Carole Karemera is the closest thing to subtlety in the movie, which isn't saying much, but she plays her part competently... or maybe Ms. Karemera is just really beautiful—it’s hard to tell when she’s speaking in such dreamy French. The action scenes aren’t anything we’ve never seen before, but they’re shot with an urgency and personality that makes them breathless. The soundtrack, as noted, is delicious ‘70s retro, beginning with a funk remix of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The only fly in the ointment is a subplot where the leads begin to, literally, morph into animals. If you feel uncomfortable seeing urbane, modern characters with African ancestry transformed into jungle beasts via tribal magic, rest assured that you’re not the only one. At least that's what the nervous laughter in the theater told me. The French have a different standard of what’s racially appropriate than the United States, where this wouldn't fly. It doesn’t spoil the film, but for a few crucial minutes, this guilty pleasure offers up more guilt than pleasure.

Black was by far the most bizarre film experience I had at SXSW this year, which is really saying something, since I also saw a short film about a cupcake sailing to an island of vegetables. Black is easily worth a rent, if only for its sheer madcap zaniness.

There Is No Fumble: The Wachowski Brothers Come to the NFL

EDIT: There was a really good article on CNN today, suggesting that instant replay has ruined both sports and life. Frankly, I think he stretches the point too far, but it's a good piece.

Wow, how 'bout them Saints, huh? So what is there to talk about other than a heartening upset and a second-half comeback for a city that's overdue for something to celebrate? No, the NFL announcer meatheads will cover all that- you know the ones, the guys that yell at each other over the action, like a bunch of arguing patients in a head trauma ward.

How about the cameras?

Yeah, that'll work.

Saints 2-Point Conversion- Neo from New Orleans?

Watch the video above, and watch it very carefully. It was exactly at this moment, when we watched Lance Moore float down to the turf, stretching the football toward his ankles for a 2-point conversion, that I realized Hollywood filmmaking techniques had changed the face of sports as we know it.

There's a reason this shot, and most NFL slow motion shots like it, make you think of The Matrix. Essentially, it's the same filmmaking technique that the Wachowskis used to freeze Carrie-Ann Moss in a crane stance and unnaturally resuscitate Keanu Reeves' career. To put it very, very simply, the cameras shoot an incredibly impressive number of frames per second as the camera zooms around the subject, taking it in from all angles, then splices the frames together digitally. This technique is why the NFL cameras seem to always be at just the right angle to see whether the ball crossed the goal line. It's known as EyeVision, and is responsible for every digitized first down line and field readjustment during instant replay.

To prove that the similarities in these systems are no accident, see article below, in which the makers of EyeVision are clear about their inspiration:

NFL Cribs Notes from The Wachowski Brothers

Ok, so maybe my revelation is nearly a decade late. EyeVision is nothing new for the NFL. It premiered in January 2001 during Super Bowl XXXV- a more innocent time when the Backstreet Boys sang the national anthem, General Schwazkopf made an appearance for the 10th anniversary of Desert Storm, and we all thought the joint halftime show between Aerosmith and 'N Sync would certainly be the largest national disaster befalling us that year. When it premiered, most people thought of EyeVision as a gimmick-little more than instant replay on psychedelics, that is, until it helped uphold a fourth quarter touchdown by Jamal Lewis. Today, it's a fairly standard weapon in the Ref's arsenal of play reviews. If you watch the NFL, you see it every so often. It's become part of the gradual digitization of the football field.

Even so, I find it fascinating that Hollywood technology is being used for practical applications. (There would be those that would suggest that referee play-review is not a "practical application," but screw them, we know better.) Really the only difference between EyeVision and the Matrix rigs is the network of cables and zip lines that let them circuit the players, rather than swooping around on a 360 degree dolly. What we're really talking about here is special-effects magic affecting the real world, where it sometimes, as we saw today, decides the outcome of games. This is amazing stuff, since most special effects tech is wholly useless outside a film set.

How much Hollywood SFX will become part of pro games world will no doubt be subject to the traditionalism of individual sports. American Football has always led the pack in introducing innovations- college football harnessed the power of instant replay in 1963, whereas Major League Baseball didn't introduce it until 2008, and waited to actually use the thing until 2009. The NBA didn't catch on until the 2002-2003 season, and the NHL likewise waited years. In all of these cases, and international sports such as rugby, instant replays are rare occurrences only used to confirm goals or fouls, in fact FIFA is so old-school it doesn't allow IRs at all. Out of all sports, only American football could be said to have developed an instant replay aesthetic, where it has become as much a symbol of the sport as the ball, the uprights, and the helmets.

While this is no doubt because the stop-and-go nature of American Football allows audiences to watch slow motion replays between plays, it does make me wonder what other cutting-edge SFX and cinematography tricks football might co-opt in the future.

I'm crossing my fingers for a Na'vi Football League.

My Top 10 Films of 2009

This list is tentative because I haven’t nearly finished seeing everything I wanted to see, or felt obligated to see, in 2009. For example, I have little doubt that if I had managed to see either The Cove or A Serious Man they would probably have bumped Up In The Air off the list. Likewise, I haven’t included anything I saw at Fantastic Fest (though I have included two in the honorable mentions section).

I’ll try and be brief here:

1. The Hurt Locker
Possibly the best war drama of the decade, The Hurt Locker follows an elite Explosive Ordinance Disposal team as they try to survive the last 38 days of their rotation in Baghdad. A taut action/suspense thriller, The Hurt Locker is one of the most realistic depictions of modern warfare ever filmed. Written by an embedded journalist and based on factual events, the film is brutal in its authenticity. Every inch of the costume fatigues are stiff with sweat and flies crawl over the eyelids of the actors. The gunfights and bomb defusal scenes are harrowing rather than exciting. Director Kathryn Bigelow (of Point Break fame, and James Cameron's ex) manages to create a film where imminent death seems to lurk in every blind corner and empty window.

Jeremy Renner’s tour-de-force performance as the intense and reckless Sergeant James carries the picture and deserves an Oscar nod. Chalk this up as the best film I saw in 2009, without any question, and one of the most suspenseful movies I've ever seen. It just won the Producer’s Guild of America Award for Best Picture, so consider it a dark horse for Best Picture at the Oscars. (Can you imagine the drama of James Cameron and his ex vying for Best Picture? It's a reason to watch the telecast in itself.) See it, see it, see it. Seriously, go now, it’s out on DVD, you can finish reading this post when you get back.

2. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Every five minutes of Werner Herzog’s dreamlike crime drama serves up another steaming mug of “Holy Crap I Can’t Believe I’m Seeing This.” Lieutenant Terrance McDonagh (Nicholas Cage) is the worst kind of bad cop—a drug addict, a thief, a compulsive gambler, a rapist—a demon prince in the hell that is post-Katrina New Orleans. Tasked with solving a multiple homicide, McDonagh tries to close one last case, even as he senses that this is his last circle around the drain before he finally succumbs to madness. Cage goes back to his indie roots with this film, playing the character so over-the-top that his crimes alternate between funny and horrifying. The levels of insanity here are tremendously deep, eventually he begins hallucinating iguanas crawling across crime scenes. See it if you have the stomach.

3. Watchmen
Though it only broke even at the box office, Zack Snyder’s art house superhero film was two and a half hours of cinematic dynamism. Though possibly too dense for the uninitiated, Snyder captured the same cosmological depth as the graphic novel, creating a world that seems more real than most of the places we visit at the movie theater. Best of all, Snyder chose not to talk down to the audience, sacrificing wider accessibility in return for a more active viewing style where audience members had to put together the pieces for themselves. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen, and nothing we’ll ever see again. (PS: The Director’s Cut made notable improvements to the film.)

4. In The Loop
Developed from the British TV series The Thick of It, In The Loop sets itself up to be the Doctor Strangelove of the 2000s (or Naughts, or Aughts, or Naughty Aughts, or however, you want to style them) and it’s a testament to the film’s success that I’m actually considering whether that might be the case. Shot like a documentary, the film follows British Minister for International Development Simon Foster, who is swept up on the Washington warpath after departing from the party line in an interview, and stating that a proposed war in the Middle East is “unforseeable.” Bounced as a political pawn between Republicans, Democrats, irate constituents and his own country’s civil service employees, the hapless Foster sinks in way, way over his head in a town that manipulates everyone and forgives no one. Peter Capaldi gives the standout performance as Malcom Tucker, the Prime Minister’s Scottish “enforcer” who weaves chains of obscenities so intricate they’d make R. Lee Ermey’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman blush. Don’t miss this one.

5. District 9
Thank you Neill Blomkamp, thank you for delivering an original, high-concept science fiction film that uses its fantastic setting to deal with real-world issues. This movie made me connect with the plight of South Africa under apartheid more than Invictus, which is no mean feat, since Invictus was a hell of a movie too. That’s what good sci-fi does though, it sneaks past your guard and sucker punches you. It approaches problems from a different angle and allows you to look on the world with fresh eyes. Added to that, we finally got to see some genuine Starship Troopers-style power armor! Dear Lord, I’ve been waiting ten years to see someone do that. Kudos, Neill Blomkamp, your giant robot suit beats James Cameron’s hands-down.

6. Inglourious Basterds
There’s been so much written about Inglourious Basterds that it’s hard to think of something original to say, though I find it telling that Tarantino’s madcap, highly inaccurate World War II epic is actually better than most period-accurate films about the War. As is standard for QT’s movies, Basterds isn’t really about the War itself, it’s about World War II films, and the culture that’s grown up around them.

While European films look on the War with a sense of melancholy, weaving narratives of desperate hardships and tragedies, American films often depict the war as a grand adventure, with tough American soldiers swooping in like comic book heroes to save Europe from Hitler’s tyranny. The real brilliance of Inglourious Basterds is that it fuses those two traditions, placing the gung-ho Aldo the Apache and his squad of larger-than-life commandos amongst characters from a holocaust drama. In doing so, he says a lot more about the War, and its cultural legacy, than most historical movies dream to.

7. Moon
Before Moon, I thought hard science fiction was a thing of the past. Well it’s back, and in a big way. The plot contains so many great surprises that I’ll restrain myself from explaining it other than this: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the lone crewman of an automatic mineral mining station on the lunar surface, harvesting Helium-3 to solve the Earth’s chronic energy crisis. Nearing the end of his three-year tour with only video communications from his wife and the station’s AI system GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) to keep him company, Sam begins bug out to see and hear things that aren’t there. Or are they?

Moon is a movie full of ideas with the feel of old hard sci-fi dramas like 2001 and Solaris. It even bogarts their look, using models instead of CGI for the lunar station and its moon rovers. The models actually make the lunar surface seem much more realistic, they’re not overly detailed, and by God, they have weight, unlike CGI objects, that always seem to defy gravity. I can’t tell you why Rockwell is such a joy in this, but believe me, he is. Can someone give this man an award please?

8. UP
Another movie that needs little introduction, UP is a delightful return to the pulp boy’s adventure stories I sucked down as a kid. Airships, lost ecosystems on sky-high plateaus, talking dogs, and giant silly birds—if that was the only thing this film had going for it, it would still be the best kid’s movie of 2009.

However, it also contains the most touching four-minute romance story I’ve ever seen. If you’re not borderline bawling by the end of the Elle and Carl montage, you need to take a Voight-Kampff test because you're surely a replicant. Disney Magic might make princesses into frogs and show us incredible musical numbers, but leave it to Pixar to create something so poignant from an everyday story. Who else would front end a children’s movie with something so meaningful? Who else could make us care about characters so intensely in under ten minutes that we're reduced to tears?

9. Avatar
Screw the haters, this is an incredible movie. Not the greatest script in the universe, but it gets the job done and is surprisingly adept at juggling the large cast of characters so that everyone has a purpose and clear character objectives. Is it a leap forward in filmmaking? Yes, very much so in a technical sense. As much as the average moviegoer likes to think anything is now possible with special effects, there are several things that are still elusive for CGI artists. James Cameron has now cleared one of the last and largest hurdles in special effects—the creation of animated characters that look convincingly real.

The problem is that our brains are so well-trained at recognizing what real beings of flesh and blood look like, it’s nearly impossible to fool us with any sort of artificial life, but Cameron at least makes us suspend that disbelief for awhile. The Na’vi have shifting irises, they have chests that move with breath, and they have muscles that bunch and slide underneath their skins. As an audience, we can tell them apart by facial features, an amazing feat, yet we’re so desensitized to cinema magic that the average moviegoer dismisses the amount of artistry that it took to create these wonderful creatures.

The environments too are a triumph of artistic concept, mixing the bioluminescence of the deep sea with the topography of a triple-canopy rainforest. If you saw Avatar and doubt that it was a leap forward, I want you to think about the last time you felt pity, or joy or any strong emotion at all for a photo-realistic digital creation. There’s a reason Lucas confined Jar-Jar to pratfalls.

10. Up In The Air
Make no mistake: this is a corporate horror film. Timely and diabolical, Up In The Air is a bleak, bitterly funny drama about how our personal relationships are increasingly defined by technology. The main action of the story, for example, centers around a man whose job makes him travel around the country to lay off unneeded workers. He’s good at his job, and often is able to let his subjects down easy, taking some of the stress out of the experience. He’s developed a system that works, until a newly-minted graduate comes along and convinces his boss that they could cut costs by firing workers remotely by webcam.

Many of the conversations during this film, especially the key emotional scenes, take place over cell phones, text messaging, or webcam. It’s a sort of eternal proxy battle between the three principal characters—in some scenes we almost feel as if they’re keeping their emotions locked down in person so that they can later spill them over the phone or by email. What hope is there for our society, now that we seem to be losing the ability to speak face-to-face? Are there things that social media was just not meant to do? Up In The Air has no answers to these questions, and maybe, as it suggests, there really are no answers. This is a hard movie to like. For all the admiration I had for it, I wouldn’t name it as one of my favorite movies of the year, but the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about it means it belongs on this list.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Fantastic Mr. Fox; Invictus, Mandrill (see review below), A Town Called Panic, Coraline, Private Eye (see review below).

The Hardboiled World of Detective Pulp Cover Art

A few weeks ago I found myself at a book shop in the Tenderloin, sifting through stacks of old pulp magazines. I was scouring the shelves for a vintage copy of Weird Tales, preferably with an HP Lovecraft story, and having no luck whatsoever. Spotting a set of archival drawers, I decided to delve into them, and was soon up to my elbows in paper dust from copies of Doc Savage and old Conan comics. When I pulled out the sixth drawer and waved away the cloud of dust particles, I saw them-- a stock of vintage Detective magazines.

I love old detective pulps. Yes, the stories in them are mostly awful if you're not reading Chandler or the like, and the bad quality of the paper means it's almost impossible to keep them in good condition as a collectable (the name "pulps" actually came from the rough, wood-pulp paper they were printed on) but detective pulps have one thing about them that's always incredible: the cover art.

See, back in the days when pulp fiction magazines were big, there were literally a dozen of them lined up on the newsstand. The authors themselves weren't usually enough of a draw to make a young boy or a bored industrial worker pick one mag over another, so the publishers wisely made it their focus to have the most wicked-cool cover art on the rack. The preferred themes for these covers were murder, pin-up girls, and a surprising twist in the same picture, a combination that proved endlessly fruitful in the artist's imaginations- it eventually reached a point when authors were asked to depict the covers, rather than the other way around. As the art developed, film noir made its mark on the covers, bringing its palette of shadows and blood to the print medium to create increasingly sensational images.

Eventually, as publishers tried to one-up each other with salacious and action-packed covers, the art became so over-the-top that it shaded into self-parody. For example, one mens magazine in the early 60's depicted Fidel Castro holding a bikini-clad girl at knifepoint while a musclebound CIA agent rushed to her rescue. As you'll see, there's some serious "found comedy" waiting on the covers of the pulps below.

Overcooked or not, pulp art is fantastic at visual storytelling. Each pulp cover is itself a self-contained story, a little violent tableaux that whets the appetite and hooks the viewer with unanswered questions. Silly as they are, it's almost impossible to look at one and not have a narrative leap to mind.

These three I bought were my favorites, think of them as spark plugs for the imagination:



Famous Detective Stories, February 1951, Featuring: Trigger-Happy Honey, and The Chortling Corpse

Believe it or not, scenes like the above that show the hero "ambushing" a goon sneaking up on him or her are common in pulp detective magazines. Of course, the hero's ambush plans are often so overly-elaborate that they're just as absurd as they are exciting.

Let's consider this: obviously our hero is a hard-boiled detective of some sort. Obviously he's been roughed up by a street hood or a gangster to make him drop a case- he managed to survive, but now he's in a wheelchair, broken arm in a sling, getting 24-hour bedside care from a nurse that looks suspiciously like Marilyn Monroe. He knew that the bastards were coming to finish the job, and somehow he managed to convince Nurse Monroe to wrap his broken right arm in plaster while still gripping his forty-five.

Then he waited.

I love everything about this cover. The horror on the nurse's face, the firing detective who looks like he's cursing the goon as he kills him, and especially the enormous muzzle flash coming out of the cast. Hell, with the size of that cast, he could have anything under there- a shotgun, a Tommy gun, even a Mega Man cannon. The fact that the hardcase detective has a blanket over his knees like a Southern granny is just icing on the cake.

Man I hope this scene is in the actual story.

Oh, and how about The Chortling Corpse as a title, huh?




G-Men Detective, September 1947, Featuring: The Kidnap Kills

The cover above is from one of a series of "G-Men" pulps that were popular during the 40's and 50's, which centered around FBI agents being good, flag-waving, upright Americans while outwitting bank robbers, smugglers, and people who believed that workers should control their own means of production.

This is a pretty standard pulp cover, if a highly intriguing one. Note how it establishes a story hook right off the bat: a man has been shot, and a woman was seen taking a packet of documents off his body, but she can't be identified. Who is this mysterious woman with excellent taste in shoes? What are these missing documents, and what makes them worth killing for? Who is this man? Is he an FBI agent? A consular officer? My God, if he's a consular officer, could those be diplomatic dispatches?! Secret codes?! Could this be the Russkie's first move?! Has the balloon finally gone up, leaving Berlin on the very brink of being ravaged by the Soviet horde?! Can Hoover's intrepid band of agents thwart the Red Menace in time?! Oh dear God I have to read this story!

This is a classic example of visual storytelling. Admit it: you want to read what's behind this cover. This single illustration suggests murder, intrigue, mystery, and a femme fatale, and all in the space of a single sheet of office paper.




Smashing Detective Stories, March 1951, Featuring: Smell Money, Smell Murder and Blonde and Bad

This is hands down my favorite of the bunch for its sheer ridiculousness. Here we see another "ambush" picture, but this time the hero isn't pretending to be hurt, she's pretending to be dead. That's some dedication, right there. What's even more intriguing about this picture is the fact that the victim doesn't seem to be carrying a gun at all- so what exactly is happening here? Did he try and kill her, and she's taking revenge on her would-be murderer?

Here's my stab at it: she was a too-trusting dame with a good heart and a bad taste in fellas. Against her better judgement, she took out a massive loan from the local loan shark to finance a business deal for her no-good boyfriend, who to no one's surprise, split for Atlantic City with a cocktail waitress and the suitcase full of cash. Suddenly she's being chased by a mob shylock with a monographed pair of brass knucks and an unforgiving demeanor. At the end of her rope, she gets an idea: she fakes her death and arranges an open-casket funeral, then waits for her weepy, regretful, no-good dirtbag ex-squeeze to come by and pay his final respects, then... Surprise, Darling!

But that still doesn't explain why she chose to be eulogized while wearing the sluttiest cocktail dress known to science. Honestly, the thing I love most about this cover is how ham-handedly it smashes together the themes of sex and death. Consider it: not only is a scantily-dressed fantasy pinup killing a man, she's doing so from inside a casket. Even before you factor in the irony that the pair have switched places-- the "dead" woman coming to life and the living mourner being killed--the picture already has a lot of accidental subtext to process. The warm and inviting look of the stained glass windows in the background make the whole thing even more surreal, like Easter Sunday in the Village of the Damned. Also notice the lady in the background sniffing into her handkerchief... I mean most funerals are awkward, but really.

A creative writing professor once told me that every great novel could be boiled down to sex and death. Based on this evidence, I postulate that Smell Money, Smell Murder, sold eighty-six trillion copies and won every Pulitzer for literature between 1951 and 1964.

What do you guys think? Do any of the covers above suggest an alternate narrative to you? Tell me in the comments!

WHAT I SAW AT FANTASTIC FEST PART 4: THE WILD AND THE WARPED

As promised, here is the last of my spiel on Fantastic Fest. I already have my ticket for next year, and I hope that then it doesn't take me three months! Happy New Year everyone.

METROPIA (Sweden, shot in English, )
Strongly Recommended



Metropia should be seen by anyone who’s a fan of dystopian weirdness. The filmmakers have managed to create a unique and fascinating world of mad corporate conspiracies and human eccentricity. It’s a cerebral world, and it’s no accident that all the characters are animated with thin, doll-like bodies and giant heads.

Roger is a banal man living a banal existence, inhabiting a Kafkaesque near-future world where all the cities of Europe are connected by super-fast metro trains. You can get from Copenhagen to Rome in twenty minutes, which sounds great to international travelers like myself, but in this world you’d probably step out of the station to find that the Trevi Fountain has been paved over to make room for a shampoo plant. Roger marches through this world in a sort of well-mannered depression, with his only endearing quarks being that he has a crush on a shampoo model and harbors a general paranoia about sinister things going on in the metro. Because of his refusal to use the tube, he rides his bike to his unfulfilling job at a call center, passing shuttered shops that no one has visited since the metro began speeding under them. At first, Roger’s odd conspiracy theories seem only a shade or two from normal—then he starts to hear voices. They tell him his wife might be cheating, they tell him to buy things, they tell him to keep the cogs of capitalism going.

Then he sees her: Nina, the woman from the shampoo bottle. He knows her well, because he stares at every morning as the water rushes down over him and he rubs shampoo onto his head. We suspect that sometimes he does more than look. Roger is bald and doesn’t need shampoo, but he compulsively buys it anyway, maybe out of his infatuation, or perhaps because of something more sinister. In a moment of uncharacteristic passion he follows his blonde dream girl, meets her, and gets drawn into a conspiracy so bizarre you wouldn’t even believe me if I described it.

While the bleak paleness of the palette doesn’t work in Van Dieman’s Land (see below) here it reinforces the odd, half-lit quality of the underground world. If, like me, you have always had a certain horror of subways, this shadowy wan light will evoke the same feelings of paranoia and suspicion that Roger feels. The oppressive atmosphere and black humor are the best parts of the production, and make up for a plot that plods rather than races to its conclusion, and never totally gels. I didn’t feel the length personally, since I was drawn in by the oddity of the world, but some may become disinterested in its quiet humor.

What makes the film so interesting are its visuals and its ideas, which manage to pull the viewer along through a plot that is not particularly intriguing. I’d recommend it strongly, but know that you’re watching it for the ideas and surprising conspiracies, rather than an involving story.



VAN DIEMEN’S LAND (Australia, No US Release Date)
Strongly Recommended (Warning: Extremely Intense)



In 1822, Irishman Alexander Pearce and seven other convicts escaped the prison colony of Macquarie Harbour and made their way into the wilds of Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tazmania. They escaped what was arguably the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire—a place where convicts slept in mud-filled lean-tos, and every morning were marched shoeless up a mountain under armed guard to cut Huron Pine trees for the British shipbuilding industries. Afterward, they would either have to drag the large trunks down the mountain or tie them together and ride them down the rivers as rafts. Often, convicts did all this in chains.

Unbeknownst to the escapees, they are headed for a fate far worse. Driven into the interior of the island by soldiers, they must contend with mountain ranges, icy rivers, snowstorms, and worst of all, the gnawing silence of hunger. After a few days without food, it’s clear what they have to do.

Most films about cannibalism dwell on the lurid aspects of the practice, but thankfully, Van Dieman’s Land takes a more cerebral approach. This isn’t a movie about murder, it’s a movie about food. It’s clear that Director Jonathan Auf Der Heide understands this from one of the first shots of the movie: a pair of hands pulling at a grisly piece of meat. We hear the crackle of the fat, the smack of chewing lips, see a pair of filthy fingers sopping up the grease with a piece of bread. The close, almost over-personal shot is unappetizing. Even when the camera pulls out to reveal that we are watching a British soldier eating a piece of beef, the message is clear: in this place, eating is not for pleasure, it’s for survival.

In the end, this sense of cannibalism actually makes the film more, rather than less terrifying. This film doesn’t really match the criteria above—it’s neither wild nor wonderful, unless you count the wildness of nature of display—it’s a horror flick through-and-through, one starring human monsters.

The crew mad accuracy a goal of this project, from the costuming and dialogue to the use of Gaelic for the Irish characters. Most of that is spot-on, but what functions so well about this film is its visceral authenticity, the way can feel the bite when the convicts cross freezing rivers or smell the foulness of their greasy bodies. This realism stems from Auf Der Heide’s apparent philosophy that his actors should suffer as much as the original convicts did. He shot the movie in the Tasmanian wilderness, convincing the actors to forge rivers and walk through the snow while dressed in rags. All that abuse carries over to the screen, where every shiver and moan looks genuine.

That same eye for human misery makes the killings shockingly effective. Fantastic Fest audiences are infamous for cheering after a particularly violent death scene, especially in horror movies. Laughter and applause are not uncommon. By contrast, every murder in Van Dieman’s Land was greeted with silence. These murder scenes are horrifying in their realism, in their cruelty, in their sheer biological accuracy. In one particularly disturbing scene, a man who has had his skull split with an ax convulses, screaming, for nearly ninety seconds while the killers stand around him, unsure of what to do next. The product of their own violence frightens them into inaction.

The film’s color palette is less effective. Auf Der Heide uses a filter for most of the shots that drains much of the rich color from the lush Tasmanian forest, which makes the scenes seem more bleak, but one wonders, given the material, if he really needed any help in that regard. Washing out some of the color has become a well-used technique in historical film, made famous by Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, which seemed to say: see, this is authentic because it looks like old film. This (overused) technique looks alright in World War II movies, since we’re used to accessing the period through faded film prints and photos, but it makes little or no sense in the context of the 19th Century, where film had not yet been invented. It is possible that the color muting—which becomes more prominent throughout the film—serves as an indication that the men are coming closer and closer to starvation, but I’m not sure. Keeping track of how deadened the color palette gets can be a tricky thing, since once the audience has to mentally track the degree to which the color has washed out. It doesn’t help that the movie is a bit on the long side and drags in places, especially since it’s entirely made up of footage of men walking. If the Frodo sections of LotR pissed you off, you might want to skip this one.

I could keep writing about this movie for hours, talking about how the sound of musket shots were masterfully recreated, how the men carry their very British Politics of Empire with them into the wilderness, the prejudice against the Irish members of the group (the majority English always seem to vote to eat the Irishmen first), and the extremely tense final twenty minutes, but I’ll leave you to discover those things yourself.


STINGRAY SAM (US, Online Distribution at www.stringraysam.com ; showing at Alamo Drafthouse)
Recommended



If you’re a fan of social commentary, westerns, musical comedy, and Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide, I would strongly suggest you check out Stingray Sam.

Series creator/star Cory McAbee specifically designed Stingray Sam to work on all screen sizes, from iPod to a full theater, and has succeeded to a great degree. Each ten-minute episode has roughly the same elements, and features a comedy sketch, some animation, and a song and dance number. It’s a good format, though without doubt the most successful portions are the animation sequences, which evoke Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python days crossed with a Douglas Adams-style narration performed by David Hyde Pierce.

In brief, the plot follows galactic ne’er-do-wells Stingray Sam and the Quasar Kid, former inhabitants of a prison planet, as they pay their debt to society by rescuing a little girl from galactic despot Fredward. (Who was created in a scientific experiment combining he genes of two male scientists named Frederick and Edward.) To say more than that would spoil things, especially when you can see the first two episodes free at www.stingraysam.com

Follow that link and check it out (both episodes, since it really finds its stride in the second one), I almost guarantee you’ll like it. If you decide to Mount up with Sam and Quasar for the long haul, you’ll meet bored dancing girls, sadistic bureaucrats, genetic oddities, incredulous scientists, convicts in mascot costumes, badly-designed robot suits, and eventually meet and fall in love with the smooth and mellow flavor of Liberty Chew Chewing Tobacco.

Just see if you don’t.


KENNY BEGINS (Sweden, No US Release Date)
Recommended



Fans of stupidity humor: I have met your new God. Easily my favorite of the “weird cinema” movies I saw, Kenny Begins is the Godfather of idiotic-but-lovable-leading-male movies. Kenny Starfighter has been a Galaxy Hero in Training for years, the sci-fi equivalent of that cousin you have who’s been in college for seven years. If he fails one more semester he’ll suffer a fate worse than death—being forced to work in his family’s hair salon (and when you see the flowing blonde mullets they have, you know what a terrible fate that is). Hoping to pull his grades up by making a clean arrest, Kenny follows über-villain Rutger Oversmart through a black hole and crash-lands on Earth. Teaming up with a couple of high school kids (a geek who can barely believe his luck at developing superpowers from an ancient artifact and the girl he secretly pines for) Kenny races the clock to outsmart Oversmart, and finally graduate the academy! He’ll probably find some time to eat ice lollies too.

Kenny Begins is the prequel to Swedish mini-series Kenny Starfighter which must have been outrageously funny if it was only half as hilarious as this. The heart of the comedy comes from Kenny’s vulnerability; he knows he’s a washout and a failure, but the kids don’t, and he tries to carry off his bumbling heroics with enough aplomb to keep his young companions in awe. Of course, these kids are in high school and know all about faking confidence, so they see right through him.

Hey Adult Swim generation? You’ve gotta see this movie. This is totally in your arena and will get you spouting Kenny’s nonsensical catch phrases (Ischlo Pischlo! Woolie Boolie!) for years to come.

ISCHLO PISCHLO!


UNDER THE MOUNTAIN (New Zealand, No US Release Date)
Recommended for Parents with Tweens



I always find it difficult to get into a movie like Under the Mountain. I sort of skipped the whole “teen horror” phase, and went directly from kids horror to Michael Crichton and Preston/Child. Let me tell ya: after you’ve seen velociraptors eat Henry Wu’s intestines while he’s still alive, Goosebumps just doesn’t do it for you anymore.

Even so, the movie is pretty likable. Two fraternal twins with parental problems (dead mother, grieving father) spend a summer at their cousin’s house while their dad cools off. Meanwhile, they get mixed up with some creepy neighbors in the house across the lake, who are shape-shifting aliens trying to raise the old ones from the depths of Auckland’s extinct volcanoes. If the twins want to stop them, they’ll have to pair with Sam Neill, the last of a race of galactic lawgivers who want the creepy Wilberforce family contained or eliminated. Saving the world takes a lot of sneaking around creepy houses, diving down gooey alien tunnels, and, in the movie’s best sequence, a short glimpse of the delightfully Lovecraftian horrors that stir in the bottom of the volcanic chambers. A lot of the fun comes from Neill chewing the scenery, spitting it out and chewing it again. It’s clear he had a blast on set.

It’s a damn fine movie for an early teen horror/thriller, and if you’ve got kids about this age, or even nephews and nieces, it’s a hell of a lot better than taking them to Disney’s latest failure to capture family-friendly action on film. It’s not a classic like Goonies or as frightening as the introduction to The Witches, but you could do a lot worse at the multiplex.


BURATINO, SON OF PINNOCHIO
See It If You’re Interested, But You’ll Never Get the Chance (Estonia/Russia, No Distribution Except Festival Circuit)



Apparently the Russian company that funded Buratino, Son of Pinnochio is never going to let it get released. My sympathies are with the director, Rasmus Marivoo. If you’re out there Mr. Marivoo, I just wanted to tell you that I really liked your movie. It was entertaining and made me laugh, and the songs stuck with me, particularly the villain, Karabas Barabas’s song and dance number.

For the curious: Buratino, Sun of Pinnochio is an Estonian rock opera about a young man who was born after his mother wished for a child. Little did she know that child would come about from a sentient splinter that flies up her skirts like Tinkerbell and knocks her up. Five minutes later, the doctors deliver a wooden child from her swollen belly, and (after his bark falls off) he looks pretty normal. At least, as normal as you can look in a world where Clockwork Orange-style youth gangs roam the streets in gas masks and spiked jackets. As a teenager, Buratano and his band/youth gang sally out from Badville on lowride bikes to hold up the residents of Goodville, including town honcho Karabas Barabas, who wants to catch the wooden boy for sinister experiments. The plot thickens, as plots are wont to do, when Buratino falls hard for Barabas’s cute blue-haired daughter.

Marivoo carries all this off with a great deal of fun, especially for something he struggled to put together on a small budget and under pressure from Russian backers. This world runs on Looney Tunes physics, with people looking long distances by shaping their hands like binoculars or brushing themselves off after an explosion hurls them hundreds of yards. Yes, it contains villains, and nasty police, and poverty, but all of these things are silly to the point of non-threatening. For example, though the police frequently shoot at poor Buratino, they do so with what can be only described as Zap Guns.

Rasmus Marivoo, your film may not get distribution, but I will always talk about “this insane Estonian rock opera” I saw once. I think you’re a great filmmaker, and I hope you have better luck next time.

What I Saw At Fantastic Fest Part 3: Rip-Snorting Action Edition!

I'm determined to get the Fantastic Fest posts done by the end of the year... so keep on the lookout for the conclusion in the next week. Now, feast your eyes on the cornucopia of throat kicks and head shots below:

MANDRILL (Chile, No US Release Date)
GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW



I’ve always believed that an action film makes its bones in the first five minutes, and Mandrill proves it’s serious right off the bat with a series of shakedowns ripped from the opening of Diamonds Are Forever. If that sounds like a criticism, it’s not, since this is a homage that improves upon the original. See, Mandrill is a spoof, well, at least kind of... you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a comedy throughout the first scene, until ninety seconds later when Marko Zaror leaps into the air, flips like a gymnast and kicks a pistol out of a henchman’s hand.

Without any wires. That’s right, Zaror does this crap for real.

Mandrill was my favorite film at this year’s festival. I was enthusiastic about many of the movies I caught, but it was only Mandrill that made me run out and rent the director’s earlier films. Chilean director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza and action star Marko “The Latin Dragon” Zaror are a hell of a find, and I also would encourage you to see their earlier films, Kiltro and Mirageman.

Mandrill is a hitman who takes the toughest targets in South America, but we get the impression that his real job is just being cool. He drives hot cars while listening to funky music in his cassette player, he propositions beautiful women with alarming directness, and he gambles at swanky casinos. Mandrill is a man of few words, which is a welcome change in a decade that’s been overshadowed by Tarantino’s garrulous mobsters and their copycats. If our hero opens his mouth, it’s either to take a contract, interrogate a lead or seduce a woman. Often, he gets by on sheer presence alone—at one point a bellhop tells him he’ll need a tuxedo to play at a high-stakes table. He tips the kid a hundred and pulls off the hop’s clip-on bow tie. Problem solved.

The plot is fairly simple: Mandrill takes a contract to assassinate a man with the classic mafia sobriquet “The Cyclops,” a one-eyed kingpin that our hero suspects of killing his parents. Unfortunately for Mandrill, it’s a well-known fact that all kingpins have beautiful and enchanting daughters. Though most women in Mandrill’s life are disposable (sometimes literally, you’ll see what I mean) he’s so driven to possess this beautiful young lady that he does the unthinkable—interacts with her on a human level. As his hyper- suave persona begins to fracture and we see the elements of his past that shaped him (which are thankfully hilarious rather than psychoanalytical) Mandrill must keep his cool while engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with The Cyclops, his daughter, and more henchmen than you can shake a magnum at.

The movie wouldn’t work if it weren’t for two things—Zaror’s excellent comic timing and his incredible physicality. Action/Comedies usually fail because comedians make poor action stars and vice versa. Had Espinoza and Zaror (they shot the film mostly without a script, so I credit them both along with the entire cast and crew) tried to get the audience to take Mandrill seriously it would have been a dud. The plot is just too silly, the concept of the “cool agent” far too played out. Likewise, if he’d skimped on the action, the movie wouldn’t be anything but mildly funny. Instead, they managed to shoot the gap and produce a powerhouse of a movie that’s lighthearted in its violent mayhem, yet still satisfies our need for flying bullets and roundhouse kicks.

Seriously guys, I want Mandrill on a shirt. Marko Zaror has become my new favorite action hero, and he deserves all the accolades that’ll come his way in the next few years.


DISTRICT 13: ULTIMATUM (France, No US Release Date)
Strongly Recommended



District 13: Ultimatum is stylish, fun, and trés français. Like Mandrill, the District 13 series is one of the international holdouts of old-school action films, the kind where stars do their own stunts as the director gives the studio insurance agents the finger. “Damn the skyrocketing premiums,” they say. “We’ve got a movie to shoot.”

Like the original, District B-13, Ultimatum takes place in a near-future Paris where the government has decided to deal with the city’s endemic crime by walling up the slums. , because it gives parkour expert and freedom fighter Leto (David Belle) and his odd-couple ally, undercover policeman and martial arts master Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) free license to stick it to the man by running up walls and kneeing dudes in the face. The plot is pretty much a retread from the first one with some Bush-era War on Terror references, but does that really matter? This film has everything that was good about the original—the amazing free-running, the action, and the predictable but enjoyable twists—plus a bigger budget that really cranks up the spectacle. In one particularly explosive scene, the heroes rampage through the third floor of an office building in a sedan, plowing down walls, doors, and a half-dozen unfortunate henchmen.

While the first movie mostly showcased Belle’s extraordinary parkour skills, the sequel focuses on Raffaelli’s cabinet of roundhouse kicks, short punches, and Judo throws. But his fighting skills aren’t what makes him fun to watch, Raffaelli’s real talent lies in the bizarre comedic turns that this franchise requires of him when Damien dons his signature disguises.

Unfortunately, as good as this sequel is it doesn’t quite capture the breathless, dynamic, race-the-clock energy of the original’s third act. The villains here are also quite bland, replacing flamboyant drug lords with staid, starch-collar bureaucrats.

I never saw many French action films until this year, but all I know is that the more of them I see, the more I love French action movies. They’re generally smaller and tighter than the American shoot-em-ups, and have the guts to go down roads that US studios would consider too risky. There’s one particular sequence in this movie that no square-jawed American star would risk his reputation with, fearing immortality on YouTube. Raffaelli carries it off with aplomb.



THE REVENANT (US, On the Festival Circuit, Look for it on DVD)
Recommended (Strongly Recommended for Zombie/Vampire Fans)



I can only think of two things worse than your best friend dying in Iraq—either dying in Iraq yourself, or having your best friend knock on your door after he’s been killed in Iraq. In this movie, friends Bart and Joey have do deal with both of these scenarios, Bart the former, Joey the latter. Not only do the pair have to deal with the repercussions to their own friendship arising from Bart’s ghoulish resurrection, and the impact on Bart’s poor girlfriend, they need to figure out how to acquire enough blood to keep him from rotting. Unfortunately for these Google-trained Gen-Yers, there isn’t any Wikipedia entry on how to do that.

Stephanie Meyer, take note--this is what guys would do if they were turned into the immortal undead. And by that I mean: heisting blood banks, stockpiling weaponry, and roaming around LA like the Boondock Saints, gunning down every criminal they come across and drinking their blood.

This isn’t an action/comedy/bromance though—it has blood and bite, and is far less about friends in a weird situation and more about the common male experience of blundering through life directionless, figuring out the rules through trial and error. It’s an American Shaun of the Dead with a lot more blood and a bit of mean streak. After all, in this film it’s the heroes that have become monsters.

The third act is perhaps too dark for its own good, but also contains a few moments of pure brilliance. It’s then that things get completely out of hand and the ramifications of Bart’s condition reach beyond his limited social circle. That kind of widescreen view of the world is what sets The Revenant apart from lesser entertainments.

Ultimately The Revenant succeeds because of its inventiveness and it’s logical progression. Characters often find creative solutions to problems (including the most innovative use of a vibrator in the history of cinema) but those solutions always make sense. Likewise, the plot twists stretch the bounds of imagination without rupturing the suspension of disbelief. It’s one of the few vampire/zombie films I’ve ever seen that’s merge horror, comedy and geopolitics while still making a movie that’s fun to watch.

If you’ve got the stomach for the blood and the cynicism for the humor, this one’s a sure bet. It’s sure to be a cult classic in zombie/vampire circles.


FIREBALL (Thailand, No US Release Date)
See It If You’re Interested



There is a part of me that wants to like Fireball oh-so-badly. It’s the same part of me that loves wounded animals and ugly children.

Fireball is a throwback to the rash of “combat sports” movies that appeared in the 1970s after the advent of Rollerball, with the shtick this time being an underground league of full-contact, Muy Thai Basketball.

You can pretty much imagine the plot from there. Hero gets out of prison, finds his brother in a coma, turns out little bro was playing combat basketball to make ends meet for the family, guy who KOed him is a big asshole on the other team, hero swears revenge, etc. Other than some minor character development that goes into each team member (mostly so we feel bad when they’re killed) that’s basically it, but it’s enough for a film like this. After all, the movie is almost entirely cast with stuntmen, so we’re not going to see a lot of acting chops on display.

The problem is we don’t see a lot of martial arts on display either. Fireball is shot with so many shaky, close-up quick-cuts ala Jason Bourne that I could hardly tell who was elbow-dropping who. Even worse, since the teams don’t wear anything resembling uniforms, it’s almost impossible to see who’s winning. My efforts to follow the ball from hand to hand put me in mind of a Hogwarts Seeker trying to catch the Golden Snitch. It’s the opposite of Mandrill and District 13, wherein athleticism is always highlighted by flattering cinematography. Here we have guys doing incredible stunts, but we never have more than a half-second to appreciate them.

Listen up directors: Stop using shaky cam and rapid close-up cuts for action scenes. I don’t want to feel like I’m in a fight scene. I came here to watch the movie, not participate.

Which isn’t to say it’s totally terrible. By all means, there’s some coolness here. One match where the audience throws lead pipes to their favorite team is particularly memorable, but overall, I’d rather just watch Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior again.

Now that’s good Muy Thai.


THE LEGEND IS ALIVE (Vietnam, No US Release Date)
See It If You’re Interested



The Legend Is Alive, a film about a mentally handicapped martial arts expert, has me split. On the one hand, it’s one of the only martial arts films I’ve ever seen that touched me on an emotional level, but on the other hand, the fact that I actually felt for the hero undercut my enjoyment of the film’s action scenes.

Confused? Check this out:

The film follows Lee (Dustin Nguyen), a boy who grows up in postwar Vietnam, where a dose of Agent Orange has kept him from progressing mentally past the age of ten. Kicked out of school for failing to progress, his mother takes him home to the martial arts school that she runs and formally educates him in the fine art of being able to kill with his bare hands. See trouble brewing?

Sadly, mothers don’t last forever, and when Lee’s poor devoted mom dies, he decides that he’s going to take her ashes to America so that she can be with the father he never knew. Due to his mental limitations, he doesn’t realize that this will take a lot more than boarding the village bus—which makes a great deal of sense, from his point of view. If you’ve never left a small town, or even a martial arts compound, what exactly is your concept of “far away?” Two towns over? Twenty-five miles? Lee’s grief is all the more tragic because, unlike him, the audience knows he’s embarking an odyssey of Homeric proportions.

On the bus ride to the city, he meets a young girl who is young and charming, but might as well have “stupid victim” tattooed on her forehead. She’s sixteen, in love with a man she met on the internet and has run away from home to meet and marry her sweetheart. This story confuses Lee something fierce, since he’s never seen a computer, and probably doesn’t have the capacity to understand online interaction, but when he sees his new friend grabbed by her new “boyfriend”—a sleazeball sex trafficker—he understands what needs to be done.

Kick tons of gangster ass.

And kick ass he does. The martial arts scenes aren’t flashy, but man are they brutal. We’re not just talking hands and feet here, but 2x4s, bottles, panes of glass, knives and more thrown elbows than a Manhattan subway platform at rush hour. I’ve never seen Dustin Nguyen before, but the man is obviously a master at what he does, and knows multiple forms of martial arts. What’s most amazing though, is how he manages to carry off explosive fight scenes without breaking character. No matter what he’s doing, from getting hit with a bottle to kneeing gangsters in the face, we still believe that he’s mentally challenged.

The only problem with this movie is that it’s playing both sides against the middle. Every drama scene is heartfelt and well carried, but they tend to move slowly, and the audience often becomes restless waiting for the action. On the flip side, we care so much about Lee that when it’s time for him to put the beatdown on goons, we’re too worried about him getting killed to really enjoy ourselves. The central paradox is this: Nguyen’s talent for holding character often makes the fight scenes disturbing to watch. Oh sure, Lee’s still the good guy, but watching his screams of childlike rage, I couldn’t help but think, Jesus, does he realize he’s killing people? It’s even worse when the situation is reversed, and gangsters are slashing him with knives or beating him with chains and bottles—the confused, hurt expression on Lee’s face robs the fight scene of entertainment. Halfway through I realized that was the point. It’s an anti-action film, and brilliantly decries the glorified violence of the film industry, but a lot of audience members who went in to see a martial arts movie came out disappointed.

The Legend Is Alive is a very, very excellent movie, no doubt about it. It swept the Golden Kite awards, Vietnam’s version of the Oscars, and deserved every award it got. If you decide to see it, just keep in mind that it’s a drama, not a martial arts movie.

RAMPAGE (United States, No US Release Date—Let’s hope it stays that way)
Avoid This Movie Like you Would a Leper with TB



No, that's not the real trailer. This movie pissed me off so much I don't want the real trailer on my blog. Screw Uwe Boll and Screw this movie.

Until Rampage, I had not seen a single film at Fantastic Fest that I disliked. When I got to the front of the line that morning and found out that the only tickets left in the midday time slot were for a Uwe “I’m the modern Ed Wood” Boll film, I took them happily. First of all, it was either see Rampage or drive home and walk the dog. Second, I had never actually seen a Boll film all the way through and was more than a little curious if they were really that bad. Third, I have to admit I wanted to see at least something I could hate on, since hating on bad movies makes me feel articulate and sophisticated. After all, I could never be the bully at the playground, why not do so at the theater? Besides, I heard that the Q&A with Boll at the first show was hysterical.

I should have walked the dog instead. Uwe Boll may have been murdering world cinema for years, but like all serial killers eventually do, he’s escalating.

If you don’t want to hear spoilers, stop reading right now. Rampage is about an unlikable, selfish, ambitionless, college-age wastrel who decks himself out in Kevlar and goes on a shooting spree through his Washington town. He kills soccer moms at the beauty salon, he kills a barista who didn’t make his coffee with extra foam, he shoots a fast food employee who spilled a drink on him and “didn’t seem sorry enough.” From Boll’s record of directing fanciful but supremely stupid films that include heavy doses of satire, you’d think this would be some kind of satire on video game culture or violence in media. It isn’t. It’s just 90 minutes of filthy, mean-spirited, irredeemable hatefulness.

Which is almost sad, because certain scenes are actually not bad. There’s a fascinating section where the shooter walks unnoticed into a bingo hall full of senior citizens mesmerized by their cards and counters. He harms not a hair on them, presumably because he believes them to be bereft of life already. Likewise, early scenes of the shooter and his best friend debating over a fried chicken meal are at least mildly interesting in a sort of philosobabble sense, but the stench of Tyler Durden lies heavy on them, as if Boll has failed to realize that Fight Club wasn’t that profound in the first place. What is so tragic about this whole situation is that while Boll’s skill may have improved, his vision is so artistically wrongheaded that the theme completely destroys itself, when in the end, it turns out its 45 minute scene of civilian-murdering audience torture was only done to cover up a bank robbery. Seriously. After all that crappy debating about consumerism and hints about the stresses of American life making young people lose it, it turns into a heist flick. The guy just wants to steal a bunch of money, kill his best friend, and pin the rampage on him after making it look like a suicide.

And he gets away with it. No punishment at all. In fact, the kid isn’t even sorry, or in any way marked by what he’s just done. I can’t help but think Dylan Kliebold and Eric Harris would have loved this movie. What’s even worse about this is that the ridiculous philosophizing at the beginning condones mass murder because “most people don’t contribute anything to society.” This presupposes that raising children and having jobs and doing all the responsible things these dickhead unemployed pseudo-intellectual brats don’t do isn’t enough of a “contribution.”

You know who doesn’t contribute anything to society? Uwe Boll.

Enjoy this video of Festival Founder Tim League and Uwe Boll in the boxing ring at The Fantastic Debates. Keep swinging Tim, keep swinging.