The strong sense of community is immediately evident at L’Etrange Festival, the Parisian celebration of outlandish new films and obscure rarities from the past, now in its 16th edition, but without an ounce of cliquishness. While the same faces were spotted eagerly returning to get their fill of strange gems, there was also enough diversity in the audience to demonstrate the breadth of the programme, which attracted art-house audiences as much as fans of alternative, genre and exploitation cinema.

This year’s event was graced by the presence of two legendary guests, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who curated a selection of films, and Tobe Hooper, who came to introduce a brief retrospective of his work, including a screening of his restored 1969 debut Eggshells, rarely seen until now. Both Jodorowsky and Hooper were engaging speakers, and it was fascinating to hear Hooper discuss the making of Eggshells, explaining how The Night of the Living Dead played a major role in leading him away from experimental cinema and into the more lucrative horror genre that he mined with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The programmers are passionate fans of alternative cinema themselves, and the joy of the festival is to know that any screening randomly chosen will lead to the discovery of something interesting or challenging in one way or another. Below, Nicolas Guichard and Virginie Sélavy report on some of the more noteworthy films in this year’s programme.

No Mercy (Yongseoneun Eupda, 2010)

Alejandro Jodorowsky was given carte blanche to put together a programme of films, among which was South Korean revenge tale No Mercy, by director Kim Hyeong-jun. In good form as always, Jodorowsky was warmly welcomed by the Etrange Festival crowd. Introducing No Mercy, he talked about his passion for Asian cinema, explaining that he hates recognising actors and that he finds it easier to get into the stories of Asian films because he doesn’t know the cast. He told the audience that he buys piles of unknown films from his local Chinese corner shop, and acquired No Mercy in this way. Thinking at first that it was a classic crime thriller, he was surprised when the film’s tone changed and turned into a ferocious revenge tale, one that he says impressed him as more extreme than Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy.

While this is debatable, No Mercy certainly offers an interesting take on the revenge story. It starts with famous forensic pathologist Kang Min-ho being called to the scene of a gruesome murder, a woman cut into pieces. The culprit is soon found, a crippled fanatical eco-activist, but it turns out that he kidnapped Kang’s daughter before his arrest to force Kang to help him; the first murder was in fact a set-up to involve Kang because of something in their shared past.

Here, vengeance is about narrative, about the institution or reinstitution of the law. The avenger, being disabled, is not a protagonist, an actor, but is a creator of narrative. As in Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, the law is inscribed in the physical body itself. The puzzle of the bodies in the film offers a variation on the system of cruelty; the pathologist’s job is to guarantee the correct reading of the signs of law-breaking. But a past mistake prevents him from correctly interpreting what should be obvious: the avenger is not a transgressor, but a rigorous applier of the talion who seeks to punish the story’s real transgressor. Like in a tragedy, not Greek but Elizabethan, the transgressor is the author of his own misfortune.

While the structure of the film offers a fascinating passive variation on the theme of vengeance, the direction is not entirely successful: the realistic style is more banal than in Bong Joon-ho’s landmark Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder and the film does not achieve the fantastical power of Oldboy. The dénouement weakens the theme, as is generally the case in the genre: vengeance relies on a fantasy of power, which necessarily has something surreal, floating, indefinite about it…

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of Virginia (2010)

Appalachian mountain dancer and all-round hell-raiser Jesco White has already been the subject of a feature film by Dominic Murphy, the excellent White Lightnin’ (2009), and of a 1991 documentary by Julian Nitzberg, Dancing Outlaw. Here, Nitzberg returns to Boone County to paint a fascinating portrait of the whole White family, exploring the family tree, down from Jesco’s father D. Ray White, a legendary mountain dancer and rugged miner, and his wife, an extraordinarily strong woman who raised over 20 children (not all hers!), in spite of the dire poverty of their circumstances. Next on the tree come hard-living, pill-popping Jesco and his siblings, their dazed, violent, drug-addicted offspring and their own children.

Nitzberg’s film is never condescending or exploitative and it certainly doesn’t glamorise the Whites. As stories of glue-sniffing, dope-smoking, hardships, misery, fights, shoot-outs, murders, prison, two-timing and violent husbands are told, it’s almost like we’re in an old country song – unsurprisingly, the Whites have been the subject of several ballads, one penned by Hank Williams III, which he is seen singing in the film while Jesco White dances along. The Whites are like the last representatives of a lost culture in a modern world that finds them unmanageable and only tolerates them as characters in a folk tale. It recalls the moment when Nashville country tried to get rid of the last old-school country singers in the early 70s, when Waylon Jennings invented Outlaw Country in reaction against this sanitisation.

It is a fascinating and poignant film because it documents the tail end of a long-gone era that gave birth to country music, but has now degenerated into a world of desperados addicted to prescription drugs, no longer connected to their culture. While the older generations (down to Jesco and his siblings) have a strong sense of where they come from (as when Jesco’s older sister Mamie sings ‘I’m a miner’s daughter’), and entirely understand and take on their outlaw position in relation to mainstream society, the younger Whites seem lost, disconnected from D. Ray White’s harsh spirit and values, devoid of their parents and grand-parents’ ability to make the system work for them, and unable to control their lives, finding themselves in prison or institutionalised. One of the county’s officials describes the Whites as completely free, and in one way, this is very true. No law seems to apply to them, and there aren’t many people capable of living as much in the moment and according to their immediate impulse, without a thought for consequences, as they do. In that sense, they are truly rock’n’roll. But Jesco also says that he feels like he’s already dead, and you cannot help but feel that it is also a sense of profound despair that frees them from caring about what happens.

Rubber (2010)

Quentin ‘Mr Oizo’ Dupieux’s gamble of making a serial-killer thriller with a tyre in the role of the psychopath had us salivating in anticipation. It started well, opening with a US cop in the desert warning spectators armed with binoculars that sometimes there is ‘no reason’ for what happens in films. Their entertainment programme starts when a tyre thrown away in the desert comes back to life and starts exterminating the animals in its path, blowing them up with the sheer force of its evil vibrations. So far so good, but all the deaths follow exactly the same pattern, so that it soon becomes very repetitive. Surely, inventive cruelty is one of the basic rules of horror… The tension and terror we were hoping for failed to materialise, and it wasn’t imaginatively surreal enough to hold our attention.

Mr No Legs (1979)

When a film is described as ‘so bad it’s good’, you can usually safely assume that it is just plain bad and is best avoided. But in the case of this 1979 wheelchair exploitation shocker, this overused phrase of post-Tarantino times provides a perfect and truthful description. Directed by Rico Browning, the creature from The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequels Revenge of the Creature and The Creature Walks among Us, Mr No Legs is so woefully inept that it is phenomenally entertaining. The standard cop story is prodigiously enlivened by the title character of Lou/Mr No Legs, the vicious wheelchair-bound henchman of a drug lord played by real-life amputee Ted Vollrath with tremendous gusto – in fact, the film’s biggest fault is that it doesn’t give him more screen time. The culmination of the film’s bad taste, oddness and outrageousness comes in the swimming pool scene, where Mr No Legs dispatches a number of able-bodied assailants in a jaw-dropping display of legless Kung Fu, complete with jumps, back flips, killer screams and secret weapons. The final car chase is splendidly preposterous, the stunts hilariously amateurish, and it has to be a contender for the title of longest and slowest car chase ever committed to celluloid. Although the comedic value of the film (enhanced by the French dubbing in the version we saw) is clearly unintentional, it is laugh-out loud funny. There is genius in this level of ineptitude.

L’inconnu de Shandigor (1967)

Directed by Jean-Louis Roy in 1967, this Swiss film is part of the golden age of late 60s European science fiction, a dystopian, speculative fiction describing a parallel rather than futuristic world. A mad scientist (played by Daniel Emilfork, who would play another mad scientist nearly three decades later in Jeunet and Caro’s The City of Lost Children) has invented a secret anti-nuclear weapon, the Annulator, and several groups of spies from various countries want to get their hands on it.

Situated between Alphaville and Who Are You, Polly Magoo? L’inconnu de Shandigor is a pop film, boasting a great credit sequence consisting of black and white serigraphy, as well as a superb use of architecture and locations. It stars Serge Gainsbourg as a dandy-ish spy, who plays the organ in black gloves at the funeral of another spy, interpreting ‘Bye Bye Mr Spy’, a song he wrote especially for the film. Like Polly Magoo, it has all the pop accessories, but devoid of the existential depths of Alphaville, it is more on the cartoonish side of sci-fi, and it never really takes off or coheres into a substantial narrative.

Fade to Black (1980)

Vernon Zimmerman’s 1980 Fade to Black could be described as post-modern horror: the protagonist, Eric, can only act in reference to his extensive knowledge of film. A loner whose only passion is cinema, he has a neurotic relationship with his mother that imitates Hitchcock’s Psycho. Mounting frustration and unhappiness lead him to seek revenge against those who have humiliated him, and for each murder he transforms himself into one of his favourite characters (including James Cagney in White Heat, another psychopath with a mother complex).

Fade to Black marks the appearance of the nerd in cinema (here, in an early instance of the revenge of the nerd sub-genre). Eric is like a failed Tarantino who never got his break. And what the film demonstrates is that if the nerd succeeds in expressing his frustration (or if he succeeds in becoming a ‘creator’), he is doomed to repetition.

The Housemaid (Hanyo, 2010)

A re-interpretation of the 1960s South Korean film of the same title, Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid ominously starts with an anonymous suicide, only obliquely related to the story, announcing impending tragedy. From this shocking opening set on bustling, crowded city streets, the film moves to the rarefied surroundings of a rich family’s house. The luxurious, but cold, marble floors, the dark corridors and the blue-green glass lampshades, remindful of Dario Argento and Italian giallos, create a sinister, claustrophobic atmosphere around naïve new young maid Euny, hired to look after little girl Nami because her mother is pregnant with twins. The innocently sensual Euny is soon seduced by the husband, a haughty, cruel, rich heir, and their illicit affair leads the family to intimidate and brutalise Euny, with terrible consequences.

As a melodrama about the exploitation of the lower classes, the film is quite heavy-handed and the wealthy family is too simplistically depicted, their cruelty not sophisticated enough to be truly interesting, while the misery piled upon Euny feels relentless. However, this is redeemed by the superb use of décors and lighting, the sense of atmosphere, the palpable sensuality of the affair, and the stunningly extravagant, over-the-top dénouement. Interestingly, the film follows a similarly unusual structure as Bedevilled, another slow-burn Korean film (also showing at L’Etrange Festival) about the exploitation of a lower-class woman, which culminates in an extremely violent, blood-splattered finale that strongly contrasts with the rest of the film.

La vie à l’envers ((1963)

This was the last film we saw at this year’s festival, and what a terrific end to the event it was. This Alain Jessua film from 1963 was a total discovery for us, and has led us to seek out his other films – expect to read more on the writer/director in Electric Sheep soon! Adapted from Jessua’s own novel, La vie à l’envers (Life Upside Down) centres on Jacques, played by the fantastically long and angular Charles Denner, who gradually disengages himself from all the situations and conventions imposed by society – work, marriage, etc. The detached, ironic, sharp observational tone makes the film a total joy, each of Jacques’s frighteningly lucid comments a devastating and effortless blow to social hypocrisy and conformism. The film has been misleadingly described as anti-consumerist and a rejection of modern society, but it goes far beyond that: it is an existential meditation on withdrawal from life itself, modern or otherwise, and from all human interaction. Shot in minimalist, elegant black and white, the film offers one of the best and subtlest incarnations of the Duchampian bachelor machine in cinema. The end is beautifully ambiguous, and we are left to decide if Denner is mad or whether he has managed to trick society into giving him what he wanted – total solitude and isolation.

Nicolas Guichard and Virginie Sélavy

More London Film Festival reviews from Mark Stafford and Pamela Jahn.

The Taqwacores

A bracing stroll through an emergent American Muslim punk sub-culture, The Taqwacores follows newcomer and straight A student Yusef as he moves into a shared house in Buffalo, New York, to get his head thoroughly rattled by its inhabitants. There’s a dope smoker, a feminist riot grrl, a flamboyant gay dude, various drinkers and promiscuous party people, all of whom claim to be devout in their own way. Thus we have skateboard sequences jostling with moments of unconventional worship (‘You gotta come to Friday prayers!’ ‘Totally, I’m there!’). We have a call to prayer played on an electric guitar and we have bands called Osama’s Tunnel Diggers and The Guantanamo Bay Packers. Tensions build within the house as the contradictory belief systems clash, and it all comes to a head at an ill-starred all-star punk blow-out.

The film The Taqwacores brings most readily to mind was Penelope Spheeris’s cult gem Suburbia, which detailed the LA squatter punk scene of the early 80s. Like Suburbia, it’s a bit gauche and earnest and embarrassing in places, with lots of on-the-nose dialogue as the ‘cores thrash out their conflicting ideologies. Like in Suburbia, the story has a tragic arc we can sense in the offing, and we have to endure a central character who’s mainly there to ask dumb questions and get opinions thrust at him. Unlike Suburbia though, The Taqwacores has pretty good performances, especially Noureen DeWulf as Rabeya, who manages to convey a forceful personality through a customised full burqa, and Dominic Rains as the mohawked poster boy Jehangir (‘I’m too wrapped up in my mismatching of disenfranchised subcultures!’). It has energy and humour and a nice bleached out look. And it throws a startling image or off-the-wall piece of dialogue at you every few minutes of its lean 83-minute running time.

Apparently the Taqwacore scene didn’t exist until Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel, on which the film is based, inspired a number of bands to spring into being. If so, more power to their various elbows, at least if they’re anything like the mess portrayed here, a welcome vision of Islam as something not set in stone by humourless pricks, but something fluid and playful. Mark Stafford

Amigo

Another rock solid effort from writer/director John Sayles, Amigo is set during the US invasion of the Philippines in 1900, where a garrison of troops is stationed in a small farming village, surrounded by guerrilla fighters. Sayles, of course, has time for everybody – the Yanquis, villagers, guerrillas, and Chinese coolies all get their sides of the story shown – but he especially has time for Rafael, the poor bastard stuck in the middle: as head man of the village, brother to the local insurrectionary leader, and now servant of the Yanqui occupiers he is, as he rightly surmises, ‘fucked from both ends’. There are clear allusions to the current US Middle Eastern misadventures, of course, including a spot of low-tech waterboarding, and the film as a whole is a demonstration of why invading a country and then expecting to win hearts and minds is doomed. The film’s true ire is reserved for the military high ups (here personified in Chris Cooper’s Col. Hardacre) and the church, in -‘s devious and self-serving friar. It’s an entertaining, old-school, well-constructed piece of liberal drama. But as often happens with Sayles’s films, the visual aspects feel a little bit meat and potatoes, and a little more cinematic exuberance wouldn’t go amiss. Mark Stafford

Kaboom

Finally arriving on the big screen in the UK after it was withdrawn from this year’s FrightFest by the filmmaker and its producers, Kaboom is not as stunning and exceptional as you might expect from the American enfant terrible Gregg Araki, especially as a follow-up to his wonderful Mysterious Skin. A campus B-movie sci-fi comedy romp totally out of this world, the film spins an insane narrative of teen sex of all kinds, drugs, dreams, cuckoo conspiracies and animal mask-wearing cultists. At the centre of this maelstrom is handsome but shy college student Smith, who secretly lusts for his chav surfer roommate Thor, but prefers hanging out 24/7 with his sarcastic lesbian best friend Stella. It’s a candy-coloured, bizarre, chaotic, silly joyride that wins you over instantly once you abandon yourself to its wackiness. A mature continuation of Araki’s confrontational earlier work in terms of directorial style, it is suffused with the same dazzling blend of antic spirit, questionable taste and truly anarchic fervour. Twin Peaks and Donny Darko might obviously have been influences for Araki here, but Kaboom is way too soft and outright ridiculous to ever draw you in in the same way. Nevertheless, it’s sexy to look at and a fun piece of cinema for short-term pleasure. Pamela Jahn

Tabloid

The question of how the hell Errol Morris alights upon his subjects seems less of a mystery in this case, as Joyce McKinney has a habit of thrusting herself into the public eye, though she would deny this was ever her intention. In 1977, she was behind the ‘manacled Mormon’ case that obsessed the British tabloids, and more recently she bubbled up clutching a litter of cloned puppies, in another media sensation. Morris’s entertaining documentary has Joyce, her collaborators and a brace of journalists all telling their parts in a jaw-droppingly screwy tale of bondage, kidnapping and high religious weirdness – it’s a cavalcade of WTF!? moments. Tabloid touches on themes of truth and madness and media complicity, but it’s pretty bubbly stuff, and the style used here is bouncier than in, say, The Fog of War: John Kusiak’s music is suited to a caper comedy, and there are little bits of animation amid the usually artfully picked illustrative clips. But Joyce is a fascinating, mercurial subject, a hyper-intelligent stalker, an ‘aw shucks’ down home gal, a bondage queen and master of disguise. Her relationship with any objective reality is clearly pretty strained, and working out how much of this tall tale you’re prepared to believe is a large part of the fun. Mark Stafford

Meek’s Cutoff

Decidedly non-yeeha Western tale from Kelly Reichardt, the director of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. We’re in Oregon in 1845, following a tiny wagon train as shaggy guide Stephen Meek leads it astray while attempting to cross the Cascade Mountains. Bruce Greenwood is Meek, and indie stalwarts Shirley Henderson, Paul Dano, Will Patton and Michelle Williams are among the increasingly paranoid and disgruntled travellers, as water runs low and notional Indians lurk in the shadows. It feels absolutely authentic: Reichart does an impressive job of creating the sounds, sights and textures of life on the trail, the feeling of isolation and peril, and slowly builds real and involving characters out of the figures in this vast landscape. But I’m not sure she guides us to a satisfactory destination. Mark Stafford

The Arbor

An extraordinary film, The Arbor is an exploration of the short life of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar and her three children, in which extensive interviews with all concerned have been given to actors to lip-synch direct to camera in various settings. These are intercut with a staging of one of her plays in the middle of the Buttershaw estate where it was set, and occasionally spliced with some of Dunbar’s rare appearances on TV. The result is mesmerising and artful where the bare facts of the lives detailed would have just been unbearably bleak served up straight, especially the life of Dunbar’s daughter Lorraine, a slow motion car crash of child abuse, domestic violence, drug addiction, prostitution, and worse. The lip-synched, cleverly staged sequences give all this squalor and neglect a dreamy, not-quite-right intensity as various parties tell their side of the tale, and we skip around in time and space, from memory to theatre to street and back.

It’s an odd technique, curiously distancing and involving at the same time, and seems to have been inspired by the ‘verbatim play’ An Estate Affair, which the Royal Court staged following up Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too, (which was filmed by Alan Clarke). Curiously, Dunbar’s The Arbor, her most extensively represented work, doesn’t come across very well, almost seeming like a parody of gritty northern drama. But the film overall is an original audio-visual one-off, a highly choreographed waltz through memory and truth and time. Mark Stafford

Carancho

Arguably one of the strongest films in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year, Carancho is the latest work of Argentine filmmaker Pablo Trapero, whose Lion’s Den impressed us last year as a brutal and morally ambiguous portrayal of a young mother’s life in prison. Carancho is an equally well-crafted, tough-as-nails thriller built around the world of ambulance chasers, corrupt hospitals and unscrupulous lawyers who make their money out of late-night traffic accidents and other calamities. Echoing the style and moral decay of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood film noir, it feels at times like Trapero is a little too caught up in his own ambitions to push social realism on screen beyond its usual thematic and emotional boundaries, and to get the right balance in the web of corruption, murder and love that connects Sosa (Ricardo Darín), a legal vulture who is tired of his job, to young ER doctor Luján (Martina Gusman). But as predictable as the narrative is, the procedural set-pieces in which the culmination of car crashes and the couple’s dangerous liaison play out are shot in a handheld style with great old-school skill and energy, and the intense performances by the two leads make for a gripping film that aptly rings alarm bells for the state of the nation. Pamela Jahn

It’s kind of a Funny Story

A teen movie about Depression Lite, call it Absence of Glee. Craig (Keir Gilchrist), a would-be suicide, checks into a mental health ward instead of chucking himself off Brooklyn Bridge, and over the next five days, surrounded by various shut-ins, schizophrenics and self-harmers, learns to gain a sense of perspective on his life and problems. The previous two films by writing/directing team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson and Sugar, were both low-key observational indie art-house affairs, but their third film seems to have unleashed a whole world of wacky that they had previously kept hidden. Thus we have freeze frame flashbacks, fantasy sequences, cut-away gags, animation and all manner of quirky bits of business thrown into the mix. It’s warm-hearted and funny if you’re in the mood for that sort of caper. But I found the cutesifying of mental illness a little hard to take. Craig’s problems are reduced to John Hughes movie dilemmas, where his suicidal urges can be shelved if he just picks the right girl, says no to his dad’s career pressure and develops that recently discovered lucky artistic streak. Only Zach Galifianakis’s striking and believable turn as Bobby seems to come from a world where depression is an intractable problem with no easy answers, and he remains gratifyingly awkward throughout. Nice soundtrack by Broken Social Scene though. Mark Stafford

Everything Must Go

Fair tilt at Raymond Carver’s short story ‘Why don’t you dance?’ in which alcoholic Will Ferrel loses his job and arrives home to find his wife gone, the locks changed, and all his possessions out on the front lawn. Already half-blitzed on Pabst Blue Ribbon, he elects to stay out there, surrounded by the remains of his world, until life, the law and his neighbours intervene. I suspect Carver fans will be unhappy that one of his best oblique little vignettes has been fitted with character arcs and social conscience and structure and all that Hollywood stuff, and Will Ferrel fans will just be wondering where the hell the funny got to. Everything Must Go is alright, as it happens. And it’s nice to see Ferrel playing someone difficult, and occasionally unpleasant. Mark Stafford

Archipelago

It’s remarkable that in only two films Joanna Hogg should already have developed such a distinct style and world that I suspect most critics would recognise a piece of her work in 30 seconds or less. I wish it was a style and a world I was more enthusiastic about watching, but there you go. After her debut Unrelated, here we are again with a frosty rich family in a remote location discovering untapped oceans of anger and social tension as a mother, her son (Tom Hiddleston) and daughter ( Kate Fahy) go to Tresco in the Scilly Isles for a family holiday. To await the arrival of the patriarch, who remains stubbornly absent, they picnic, and stroll, and paint, and eat, and fall apart over tiny social fault lines. Hogg’s style, with its off-kilter framing, where her actors are dwarfed by architecture and landscape, and a habit of entering scenes before and after they have started, creates a weird, tense form of naturalism, like a nature documentary observing strange creatures in one of their natural habitats. It’s smart and well crafted and Hogg’s clearly got something. But I hate these people. Mark Stafford

Waste Land

Lucy Walker’s documentary follows artist Vik Muniz back to his homeland of Brazil, where he hopes to spend a couple of years producing pieces about Rio’s Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest rubbish dump. He settles on producing a series of huge portraits of some of the ‘pickers’ who scour the trash for resellable recyclables. The portraits are to be constructed from Jardim junk, and sold to raise money the pickers desperately need to improve their lot. What could have been a simplistic doc about the transformative power of ART, is made more complicated, and touching, by the lives of the pickers themselves, who take centre stage for much of the film. The last 20 minutes or so had me crying like Niagara goddamn Falls, which I guess is a recommendation. Moby does the soundtrack, if that does anything for you. Mark Stafford

Blue Valentine

American Indie dream couple Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a couple, married with a cute child, and heading for the rocks. Over a few days we see them bicker, fail to communicate, pick fights out of thin air, and make a disastrous visit to a love hotel in an attempt to fix the problem, unable to alter the character traits that are driving them apart. And this, heartbreakingly, is intercut with scenes of their initial meetings, when they were funny and fumbling, the story of their road to marriage. Romantic expectation is weighed against harsh reality, and we detect the DNA of their split within their budding relationship. Gosling and Williams are extraordinarily convincing as the cute couple going to hell, and the whole thing is almost too painful and intimate to bear. It’s picked up an NC-17 rating in the states, and doesn’t stint on the tougher details of life and love. Upsetting, recommended, fine Grizzly Bear soundtrack too. Mark Stafford

The Tillman Story

Pat Tillman seemed almost tailor-made for pro-war propaganda when he joined the fight in Afghanistan, a hunky football star and all-American boy, married to his high school sweetheart, who’d set aside a lucrative NFL career to join the frontline. You can see what the Bush administration was doing when they used the example of his heroic 2004 death in speeches and press releases. The only problem was that the story the military first put out was bullshit. Pat hadn’t been battling terrorists to save the lives of his brothers in arms, Pat had been killed by his fellow troops in a ‘friendly fire’ incident. This documentary follows the story of his family’s battle to get to the truth through a fog of military and political manoeuvring. It’s overlong and nothing new, technically, but the story’s worth hearing. Mark Stafford

Upside Down: The Creation Records Story

Competent and entertaining documentary detailing the rise and fall of Alan McGee’s label, home to Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and others, from indie roots signing The Loft in the mid-80s to their collapse after the cocaine blizzard/Sony buyout/Oasis at Knebworth years of the late 90s. Full of great stories, but could have done with a bit of context to explain why this music meant so much at the time, and the later years have been pretty well covered elsewhere. Mark Stafford

Mark Stafford and Pamela Jahn

Greg Klymkiw tells us about some of the highlights of the Toronto Film Festival.

Black Swan

I love this movie to death! To pinch myself to see if I was dreaming, I attended a second showing during the 2010 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival with my wife and 9-year-old-daughter in tow. Bearing a passing resemblance to The Addams Family we settled in for an evening of prime family entertainment. I wasn’t dreaming. Black Swan is exactly the sort of film we’ll all look upon as a milestone in cinema history. It’s Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes meets Mankiewicz’s All about Eve meets Verhoeven’s Showgirls with heavy doses of Polanski’s Repulsion – and then some!

Director Darren Aronofsky etches the tale of Nina (Natalie Portman), a ballerina driven to achieving the highest level of artistry, brutally encouraged by crazed impresario Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), thwarted by her possessive, narcissistic mother (Barbara Hershey), terrified at the prospect of failure exemplified by an ageing prima ballerina (Winona Ryder) and most of all, facing the threat of extinction by Lilly (Mila Kunis), an earthy rival with less technique, but greater raw passion – something Nina desperately needs to wrench from the depths of her soul to move beyond mere technical virtuosity. O, glorious melodrama! Replete with catty invective hurled with meat-cleaver sharpness, corporeal cat fights, blistering mother-daughter snipe-fests, swelteringly moist masturbation, scorching lesbo action, furious anonymous sex in nightclub washrooms and delectable over-the-top blood-letting, Black Swan is one motherfucker of an ice cream sundae with not one, not two, not three, but a jar-full of maraschino cherries in a pool of glistening globs of red syrup on top.

The performances are expertly pitched to melodrama. Miss Portman commands with such bravado that it will be the performance to beat in the coming awards season. Mila Kunis is raw, gorgeous and sexy as all get out. Winona Ryder proves to be a worthy successor to the suffering bitch goddess Susan Hayward. Barbara Hershey drags us into the demonic bilge barrel of great movie harridans. While last, but certainly not least, Vincent Cassel is a perfect impresario: part genius, cocksman and Mephistopheles.

Some have already referred to Black Swan as ‘The Red Shoes on acid’. They couldn’t be more wrong. Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes is already on acid. From my vantage point, Aronofsky’s Black Swan is pure crack cocaine – a free-base dose to rival that which lit Richard Pryor up like a flaming Weihnachtsbaum.

This is a rewrite of a review that first appeared during the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival at Daily Film Dose.

***

Modra

Consider this review a love letter to a true artist, an artist who has created a film so delicate, inspiring, moving and heartbreaking that it connects with all who see it on a very personal level.

So.

To now begin.

You!

You were born in the former Czechoslovakia – Bratislava, to be precise – but you are too young to have experienced the phenomenal rise to power of Alexander Dubcek and his extraordinary Prague Spring – the grand cultural explosion that infused a national pride that threatened to topple Russian domination. As a young adult, you knew the Prague Spring was cool – not only was there Milan Kundera’s great book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but there also existed Philip Kaufmann’s sumptuously romantic and sex-drenched film rendering of it. And as Kaufmann brought the Russian invasion so sadly to life on film, you can’t – try as you might – remember being clutched in your mother’s arms as your family flees the Russian tanks rolling in during that horrendous year of 1968 when the Spring turned to a communist-ruled Winter once more.

Or perhaps you remember all too well. The brain is a powerful machine, as is the soul. Your parents’ reminiscences of that time, your experience of being the child of immigrants who were forced to leave everything they loved behind to give you the life you never would have had under communism, your sense of childlike wonder that grew within you and stayed in your heart long beyond childhood – all this and more still might have managed to retrieve these memories and allow you to blossom into the artist you are – to blossom within your soul, the soul of a Slovak!

You grew up in Canada – as Canadian as maple syrup (but with more than a few dashes of Neil Young) – and yet something nagged at you about your beginnings, your parents’ struggles, the painful inability to connect with family left behind (for fear of communist reprisals against them) and always wanting to discover your roots. At the age of 17, you visited the ‘old country’ and reconnected with your family and ethnicity. Returning to Canada, you worked as an actor, a producer and eventually a director.

You are Ingrid Veninger – an auteur of the highest order: the real thing and then some.

Frankly, there’s a film in the above, but as an artist you have taken it so much further in your extraordinary solo directorial feature debut Modra. After producing such ground-breaking Canadian feature films as Gambling, Gods and LSD and Nurse Fighter Boy, co-directing the fabulous experimental short URDA/Bone that premiered at the New York Film Festival and the exquisite feature film Only that was feted with a screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and festivals all over the world, you took the next logical step and solo-directed Modra.

Like your co-directorial effort Only, you continued to craft a film comprised of tiny, tender moments and infused with the warmth and love of family. Only starred your son Jacob Switzer as a young boy living in a small Northern Canadian town who, along with a young girl the same age, discovers the simple pleasures of life, the glory of nature and most importantly, love.

Modra stars your 17-year-old daughter Hallie Switzer as Lina, a young lady who, like yourself, takes a trip to the ‘old country’ to connect with her roots. Having just broken up with her boyfriend, she drags along a platonic pal Leco (Alexander Gammal) who has a bit more on his mind than friendship. During the weeklong trip, both kids discover that they have little in common and romance is not going to be part of the equation. However, all of Lina’s old world relatives think they’re a couple. As Lina finds her roots, she finds herself and so does Leco. Most importantly, they discover the value of connecting as human beings and the true power of friendship and shared experience.

To say this movie had me squirting tears would be an understatement. I chocked up emotionally at several points, but also wept tears of appreciation for the movie’s consummate artistry. While Modra, much like Only, feels unscripted, it IS, in fact, beautifully scripted, and the natural performances of the kids, the real friends and relatives in Bratislava and your magnificent probing directorial eye, add up to a film where art meets life, and in so doing, creates a lovely collection of those precious cinematic pieces of time that make us realise again how precious life is, and at the same time, what a glorious, wonderful gift the art of movies is.

My love letter draws to a close. It’s nice to review a movie this way – especially when it’s a movie so infused with love.

***

Stake Land

Imagine Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ejaculating the seed of post-apocalyptic despair into the foul egg of vampirism that is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend until a putrid vaginal maw barfs out a cinematic love child in the form of Stake Land.

This intelligent, super-cool, super-scary and super-knock-you-on-your-ass dystopian sci-fi horror picture is set in the heartland of America where ignorant Bible Belt Christians bearing arms, hole up in fortress (gated) communities, killing non-believing heathen rather than vampires. Due to a mysterious virus, the bloodsuckers have taken over much of the world and the Jesus-nuts believe this pestilence was wrought by God to rid the world of sinners. Martin (Connor Paulo), a young boy whose parents have been torn to shreds by the creatures, is rescued by the legendary Mister (Nick Damici), a no-nonsense vampire hunter who, like the character of Neville in Matheson’s great novel I Am Legend, is known to the Bible-thumping survivalists as the meanest, nastiest vampire killer of them all. Not unlike The Road, man and boy journey across America in search of a ‘New Eden’ (Canada, no less). The antagonist, a skin-headed, bible-spouting madman is always on the prowl for women – fer rapin’ anna breedin’, uh course. Even the vampires seem benign compared to this whack-job.

In addition to Jim Mickle’s tremendously directed suspense and action scenes, the writing is first-rate. While I might have preferred a bit more humour, I’m thankful it didn’t descend to the annoyingly silly tongue-in-cheek laugh-fest-grabbing level of Zombie Land. The screenplay delivers a nasty, solid, straight-up 70s-style dystopian social commentary that never feels sledgehammer-like. Written by star Damici and director Mickle, it’s especially gratifying that the script distinguishes between fundamentalism and genuine faith – avoiding the kind of knee-jerk pot shots usually levelled against Christianity.

Into the mix, they’ve written a terrific role for Kelly McGillis (Top Gun, Witness) as a middle-aged nun who is saved by Mister from a gang rape. The nun uses her faith to impart the kind of wisdom missing on both sides of the fence and the writers draw the character so that she’s a genuine human being faced with a crisis of faith.

Intelligence and artistry aside, though, this movie delivers what all true genre fans would want. The carnage is superb, the make-up effects on the vampires is first-rate (l love how they look like zombies/demons) and we also get two MAJOR babes all genre films must have in the form of the delectable Danielle Harris (the token female eye-candy) and McGillis – long-in-tooth (as it were) in all the right ways.

Most importantly, and especially given the title, I for one, was utterly delighted that Stake Land features several magnificent sequences involving the driving of wooden stakes into the hearts, throats and bellies of the vampires.

These days, a good stake is rare indeed.

This is a rewrite of a review that first appeared during the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival at Daily Film Dose.

***

The Ward

A cinematic math equation to demonstrate genre success:

Veteran genre-meister John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween) directs a horror film set in the 1960s where none of the babes have hairstyles remotely resembling 60s dos. + One mouth-wateringly hot Amber Heard (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane), incarcerated in a creepy old asylum after committing arson in her sexy under garments. + As luck would have it, the ward Amber gets thrown into is replete with babes. + One by one, the babes are butchered. + Amber keeps seeing a weird chick wandering the halls, but is told it’s just her imagination and when she insists and persists, Amber gets manhandled by burly male nurses who zap her with electro-shock therapy and truss her lithe body into a straightjacket. + In one of the more disgusting moments in horror movie history, one of the babes in the ward is electro-shocked until… well, I won’t ruin it for you, but trust me – it’s pretty fucking gross! + The ghost is one super-gnarly monster: mucho-drippings of the viscous kind. + A creepy psychiatrist appears to be engaging in (what else?) unorthodox experiments upon the babes in the ward. + An ultra-butch ward nurse manages to give Louise Fletcher a run for her money in the Nurse Ratched Mental Health Caregiver Sweepstakes. + Tons of cheap scares that make you jump out of your seat and, if you have difficulties with incontinence, you are advised to bring along an extra pair of Depends. + A thoroughly kick-ass climax leads up to the delivery of a Carrie-like shocker ending = One free blowjob for the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes for selecting the film and especially for getting me into the sold-out midnight screening after I fucked up getting my ticket from the right place at the right time. Said blowjob shall occur once someone carves glory holes into the public washroom stalls of the new Bell Lightbox complex where the festival and its year-round Cinematheque are now housed. One free blowjob and rim job shall be bestowed upon John Carpenter for making this film. Said delights for Mr Carpenter shall occur once he finishes (I kid you not!) jury duty in El Lay, which, alas, kept him from appearing in Toronto to do a Q&A session.

And that, genre freaks, is your Mathematical equation for the day. It all adds up. Real good.

This is a rewrite of a review that first appeared during the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival at Daily Film Dose.

Greg Klymkiw