Red, White and Blue

Indie punk horror rules in Rotterdam

If the term ’slacker revenge’ seem oxymoronic, tell that to Simon Rumley, director of festival discovery Red White and Blue, a film featuring some nifty genre-shifting and a killer soundtrack, which set the tone for a Rotterdam festival featuring many musical delights.

Set in Austin, Texas, Red White and Blue starts as a character study of the ravenously promiscuous Erica, whose existence consists of picking up random men in bars and trying to hold on to the cleaning job at the guest house where she stays. Despite her frosty attitude, a tentative friendship blossoms with fellow lodger Nate, who, as it’s quickly apparent, is both disapproving and slightly unhinged.

Cut back to punk hipster Franki, an earlier Erica conquest, trying to get his band a European tour, giving his boss grief at his burger-flipping job, and looking after his ailing mother. On her death, Franki and Erica’s paths become entwined again in a twist that would jump out as controversy-baiting, had the preceding scenes not treated the characters in such a non-judgmental way.

From then the film shifts gear, unleashing a vicious streak of inventive violence that will satisfy gore-seekers (death by gaffa tape – the ultimate indie way to go?) but still retain the less squeamish brand of cinephile. ‘I liked the idea of making a horror film that people would enjoy but wasn’t an out-and-out horror film; almost subverting the concept of what is scary and what makes people disturbed,’ Rumley says. ‘With Red, White and Blue, it was about how to make a film with a killer, who’s not a traditional killer in that they don’t go round with a knife. I thought the idea of a person who uses their body as their lethal weapon was an interesting place to start.’

To talk more about the plot would spoil the film’s unfolding, but we can say much of the charm lies in the snappy pacing, a certain austerity of tone and an impeccable sense of place. Authentic feel was an important factor for Brit Rumley: ‘New York, LA and London all have their scenes. They’re different and they’re punk in their own way. There’s an Austin look too. It’s very much earth mother punk – a lot of tattoos, a lot of long hair, a lot of big beards. Marc Senter (who played Franki), is from LA and I don’t think he’d ever been to Austin before. We were discussing how the character and the band in the script are basically punk. I was saying I maybe wanted him blonde, and he was saying, “I see him more as Iggy Pop”, which I disagreed with. So I took him to Emo’s, the club in the opening scene. When I was filming there I saw the New York Dolls, Henry Rollins and Gallows play. It’s a very punky club. We went down the first evening he was in Austin, and he was like, “Oh my God, OK, now I totally understand what you mean”.’

The addition of Franki’s feather earrings, alongside a soundtrack of unknown Austin bands seals the film’s world. ‘While it’s not necessarily the look I would go for, I think a lot of people there look really cool. I was trying to recreate that,’ states Rumley.

Further subversive slackers

This seam of music and a stylised discontented youth was highlighted most obviously in two other films with indie credentials and unlikely genres: Hiroshima (hyper-realist/surrealist slacker) and The Sentimental Engine Slayer (slacker incest fantasy).

In Hiroshima – Pablo Stoll’s Uruguayan paean to the joys of the discman – we follow unemployed Juan as he drifts through a day of encounters with friends, family and a life drawing class. There is very little dialogue, and what there is is delivered through witty use of intertitles, while the film plays with its post-punk audio to cracking effect. It’s a film that’s in no hurry, and occasionally drifts out of interest, yet it packs a surprising amount in. And the opening scene sets a stylish tone that will swell the heart of any music fan with a pair of headphones in their pocket.

The directorial debut of Omar Rodriguez Lopez (of At The Drive-In and Mars Volta fame), The Sentimental Engine Slayer is a psychedelic odyssey with an enviable score and an El Paso setting shot with dizzying urgency by Michael Rizzi. However, the scenario, of which has Barlam (played by Lopez) as an unlikely virgin geek with a crush on his drug-addicted sister, is way too pleased with its characters to fulfill its premise. Thus an exploration of the transgressions of grief and resulting sexual confusion falls lazily into a hateful machismo that regales us with the philosophy that ‘all that matters is pussy’, bolstered by a string of violent transactions with prostitutes, while the plot gets tangled in its own quasi-experimental flourishes.

Let Each One Go Where He May

Cinematic sound delights

Aural pleasures with post-rock flavour were to be found in the bursts of indie distortion from Thai musician The Photo Sticker Machine in Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History. A Tiger award- winner, the film makes a choppy segue from a delicate relationship drama unfolding between an sick young man and his nurse into a full-on existentialist romp complete with journey into the sun and full birthing scene.

Bursts of ska, Spanish ballads and the Country & Western of a prison request radio show set a quirky tone that punctures the often brutal world of Samson & Delilah, an emotional punch in the face of a film about two Aboriginal petrol-sniffin’ misfits trying to get by. While momentarily undermined by the inclusion of a bombastic cover of David Gray’s ‘Nightblindness’, much of the score was composed and played by director Warwick Thornton and his children.

A beautiful moment of non-diegetic sound occurs in Ben Russell’s experimental FIPRESCI winner Let Each One Go Where He May. The film consists of 13 ten-minute takes, as a Steadycam follows brothers Benjen and Monie Pansa going about life in Suriname. Using the language of visual anthropology with a fine art sensibility, it becomes a work about ways of seeing and the viewer’s relationship with the observed. In one shot we are looking back at the crowded rows of passengers on a bus, when a woman takes the seat directly facing the lens. There is a palpable sense of the brothers trying not to smile or acknowledge the camera, and then some music starts (composed by Monie himself), and for a few minutes the bus bounces around in an upbeat rhythm and with a shy joy as Monie puts on his best poker -face and looks out the window; his expression that of a man in a film pretending to be a man who is in a film but doesn’t know it.

While festival scheduling meant that the Where Is Africa? focus at IFFR started as many delegates were heading home, it felt timely that several of the wider festival’s standouts were set on the continent including Claire Denis’s superb White Material and the Tiger award- winning short Atlantiques by Mati Diop (herself the star of Denis’s earlier 35 Shots of Rum).

Live performance and furniture humping

On the live front, the festival offered eclectic pleasures, including Lovid’s mind-warping circuit-bending AV performance Light from the Dark Ages, and the soul-nourishing experience of Luke Fowler’s 16mm accompaniment to Alasdair Roberts’s folk singing. Both occurred in the Break Even Store, a pop-up concept shop selling filmmakers’ books and DVDs and hosting talks and happenings throughout the festival.

Sonic experiments from Mike Cooper fused with Greg Pope’s projections in Cipher Screen, a slow build of dots and scratches: a tasty piece of expanded cinema that, while not ground-breaking, did the trick of talking to the brain with a language that only live projections can achieve. It was a fitting highlight in the closing programme of Kino Climates, a summit of independent cinemas from across Europe (including the UK’s Cube, Star and Shadow, Side and 7Inch Cinema), which discussed the future of alternative exhibition.

Finally there was Cameron Jamie’s short film Massage the History. ‘The single greatest dance film ever made!’ ‘Better than The Red Shoes!’ So proclaimed a hyperventilating Harmony Korine (in town pimping his own Trash Humpers with such oddball gusto that people were walking out during the introduction), taking time out to whip the crowd into a frenzy for Jamie’s premiere.

It’s a mind-boggling piece, based on a group of tattooed young black men in Montgomery, Alabama, that Jamie first encountered online. Bored and surrounded by soft furnishings, they make up little erotic dance routines, occasionally don white gloves, and basically hump the armchairs in a semi-balletic fashion. Jamie’s addition of a Sonic Youth soundtrack elevated the would-be YouTube curio to a warped state of grace.

Kate Taylor

Kanikosen

In her final dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on the Asian films in the programme, including new works by Zhang Yimou and Kôji Wakamatsu.

Kanikōsen
There is traditionally a strong Asian presence in the Forum section, and after last year’s inventive Korean features (including Baek Seung-bin’s debut feature Members of the Funeral) I was hoping for another batch of exciting films this year. Unfortunately, I missed the two Korean films on offer, but the most original of the four Japanese entries in the section was undoubtedly Sabu’s Kanikōsen. A witty, ferociously crafted screen adaptation of Takeji Kobayashi’s 1929 agitprop novel, the film mainly takes place on a battered cannery ship in imperialist Japan. The set is somewhat reminiscent of Metropolis, and the film tells a similar story, focusing on a crew of downtrodden workers who eventually rise up against their tyrannical oppressors. As one would expect from a filmmaker who is known for fast-paced action-comedies and anarchic satire, Kanikōsen is informed by a pitch-black sense of humour that at times turns into slapstick; yet Sabu manages to make the novel’s fundamental and still relevant critique clear by keeping the right balance between theatrical elements, brutality and idiosyncratic ingenuity. Employing an anti-realist approach to the historical context, Kanikōsen is a bizarre and often claustrophobic cinematic experience where Brecht meets Chaplin on the high sea.

Parade
Diving into the abyss of modern Japanese society, Isao Yukisada’s Parade is an often comical but increasingly gloomy urban tale revolving around the phenomenon of people in their mid-20s who refuse to grow up and face life. At first, the narrative is driven merely by dialogue and the infrequent actions taking place in a household of four troubled Tokyo drifters, but it sparks up the moment a homeless teenage hustler suddenly takes over the couch in the living room. The film is roughly divided into four chapters, each focusing on one of the tenants and his or her private obsession, and the dark nature of the story is emphasised by the soundtrack and sublime twists that carefully hint at the film’s surprise ending. Although Parade lacks the drive, visual subtlety and thoughtfulness that made Yukisada’s 2001 teen drama Go such a compelling watch, just following these offbeat, gentle dreamers is a pleasure, and it made this somewhat overwrought film stand out as one of the wittier and more honest works on show in the Panorama section.

Caterpillar
Excoriated as a ‘national disgrace’ in the Japanese press at the time, Kôji Wakamatsu’s Secrets Acts behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto) caused a stir when it premiered at the Berlinale in 1965, which ultimately helped push the pinku eiga pioneer to fame home and abroad. Forty-five years later, Wakamatsu’s eagerly awaited new feature Caterpillar – a loose follow-up to his 2007 monstrous docu-fiction drama United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi) – was screening in competition, but although it confirms Wakamatsu’s credentials as one of Japan’s most fiercely independent directors/producers to date, the style and backdrop of his latest effort are quite different from his earlier work. Set in a rural village during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1940, Caterpillar tells the story of severely disabled war veteran Lieutenant Kyuzo Kurokawa (Shima Ohnishi) who returns home disfigured and dumb, and with no arms and legs, but highly decorated, with three medals paying tribute to his heroic deeds. For his wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima), however, he is less a ‘war god’ than a burden, as rude and demanding with her as he was before he was maimed, and while carrying out her duty as the docile peasant, sacrificing herself by caring for the glorified soldier and taking him out for public display, her meek patience is thinning rapidly and eventually turns into a desire for revenge. Caterpillar uses documentary war footage, radio propaganda and excessive, brutal imagery that hint at the violently, sexually and politically provocative spirit of Wakamatsu’s previous work, but the film is strongest in its meticulous depiction of the strained relationship between Kyozu and Shigeko. Overall, it makes a fitting addition to the 73-year-old director’s remarkable oeuvre, which now stands at 100 films.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (San qiang pai an jing qi)
Undeniably the most colourful entry in this year’s programme was Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop – a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut Blood Simple. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.

Golden Slumber (Goruden Suramba)
With no more major surprises to be expected after a week of enjoying an inspiring, yet patchy festival programme, my last choice turned out to be something of a lucky draw. Golden Slumber is essentially a Japanese indie man-on-the-run conspiracy thriller that follows the conventions of the genre, but the imagery of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s film is all his own. Aoyagi (Masato Sakai), a delivery-truck driver, is meeting up with his old college friend Morita (Hidetaka Yoshioka) when the new prime minister is assassinated in a bomb attack during a procession through the streets of the Japanese city of Sendai, and, through some far-fetched coincidences, Aoyagi becomes the prime suspect. Nakamura deftly hurls his unobtrusive hero from one hair’s breadth escape to another, filling in his background in comic-style fashion, and even though the story feels a bit longwinded in the middle, it lays the groundwork for the triumphant climax. A witty, refreshing genre treat, and arguably one of the most easily enjoyable films at the Berlinale this year.

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall

In a third dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on a new American indie talent and Oskar Roehler’s unsuccessful take on a famous case of Nazi propaganda. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Winter’s Bone
An austere, dark adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s country noir saga about a teenager’s search for her missing father, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a chilling, nightmarish tale of rural struggle for survival complicated by family feuds. When 17-year-old Ree (impressively played by Jennifer Lawrence) learns that her drug-dealing father has disappeared after pawning the family home and jeopardising her sick mother and young sibling’s existence, she decides to find him – dead or alive. Looking for the truth among members of his criminal circle of friends and relatives scattered in the forests of the Ozark Mountains, she is faced with a series of dangerous and violent events, but gradually disentangles the web of lies that surrounds her father’s vanishing. As the mystery is solved, however, the story becomes overly sentimental, which feels at odds with the film’s otherwise intriguing atmosphere of mistrust, threat and everyday misery. But besides this, Winter’s Bone is gripping enough to keep you interested, with Granik showing an eye for detail and a genuine talent for building a creeping sense of obscurity and despair.

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall (Jud Süß – Film Ohne Gewissen)
Boos and incredulous gasps greeted the end of the press screening of Oskar Roehler’s Jew Suss: Rise and Fall, a star-studded and slick but overall disappointingly hollow Nazi drama about one man’s Faustian pact with the Hitler regime. A confused, clunky mix of satire and melodrama, the film tells the story of Austrian actor Ferdinand Marian (Tobias Moretti), who is forced to perform the role of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in Jew Suss, a film based on Goebbels (ridiculously overplayed by a ranting Moritz Bleibtreu) and Veit Harlan’s fraudulent adaptation of a novel by German-Jewish writer Lionel Feuchtwanger. Married to a half-Jewish woman, Marian’s initial attempts to turn down Goebbels’s offer only serve to intensify the excitement of the latter, leaving the actor no choice but to accept and perform the part of the powerful, manipulative Jewish businessman and financial adviser of the Duke of Wurttemberg, who was hanged in Stuttgart in 1738. The main problem with Roehler’s film is that he focuses merely on Marian’s tragedy, ultimately turning the attention away from the history of the notorious film that became one of the Third Reich’s most offensive and commercially successful pieces of propaganda to concentrate on an all too predictable human drama.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection \ Dana Kasdorf \ Around the World from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection \ Suleyman Yilmaz \ No More Overlap from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection \ Sam Moorman Barnett \ Religious Experience from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ART BY CHANCE is opened to movies of all kinds; fiction, animation, documentary and video art with the exception of training and advertising films. Enthusiastic and creative international filmmakers will be preparing 30-second long films on ‘Time’. Participants can also submit online from www.artbychance.org.

Exit through the Shop

In her second dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn tells us about Banksy’s first directorial effort as well as a German crime thriller based on the real-life story of an Austrian robber-cum-marathon runner. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Exit through the Gift Shop
Given all you know, or rather don’t know about Banksy, it comes as quite a surprise that for his first foray into filmmaking the clandestine street artist has made a documentary that to a certain extent features his secretive self. Billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’, Exit through the Gift Shop gives an exclusive insight into the street art scene of recent years as seen through the eyes of an over-excited French second-hand-clothing dealer, Thierry Guetta, who became obsessed with videotaping street artists and graffitists at work in Los Angeles and abroad, and ultimately plunged into the art scene himself. Both Guetta’s life and Banksy’s film take a dramatic turn as the illustrious Frenchman and the street artist become friends. Encouraged by Banksy to mount his own show, Guetta conquers the art world as Mr Brainwash and in return entrusts his enormous tape collection to Banksky who knows how to use the material to good effect. What follows has to be seen to be believed – or not. For entertaining as Exit through the Gift Shop is, it is not quite clear whether what we see is real or just another hoax, or as Bansky himself prudently claims in a video message that precedes the screening: ‘As it turns out, some of the people don’t believe it anyway and they think the film is some kind of spoof. This is ironic because Exit through the Gift Shop is one of the most honest films you’ll ever see.’

The Robber (Der Räuber)
Based on the real-life case of the Austrian serial bank robber who became known as ‘Pump-gun Ronnie’ in the late 80s, Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber was a welcome discovery in a competition section that so far has been rather dreary. The film tells the story of Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), both a successful marathon runner and confirmed criminal, who is driven by a constant, uncontrollable need for speed and adrenalin rushes. Shortly after he is once more released from jail, Rettenberger inevitably falls back into his old habits, raiding and running, and soberly measuring his heart rate after any physical strain. He even breaks records as an athlete at local competitions, but neither the sport nor the unconditional love he receives from his girlfriend Erika (Franziska Weisz) can bring his troubled mind to rest. Following a man permanently on the move, Heisenberg succeeds in capturing the inner turmoil of Rettenberger’s animal-like spirit with the same meticulous precision and steely determination that his character puts into his strict training scheme. And although some might argue that with its bleak, cold visual style and sparse narrative The Robber doesn’t add anything new to the gangster genre, the film is well done and has an unsettling intensity and unfaltering energy from start to finish.

Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival

From 28 January to 12 February 2010, the Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival celebrated the rich and varied cultures of the world’s mightiest mountain range with film, music, art and photography. Eleanor McKeown sums up the aims and achievements of this unique event.

The UK’s first Himalayan Film & Cultural Festival came to an end on Friday, after two weeks of screenings embracing a broad sweep of cinematic culture, from Afghanistan to Szechuan. A mixture of documentary, shorts and fiction film (complemented by musical acts and an art exhibition), the programme allowed audiences to experience many works that would not normally reach London cinemas.

A case in point was the feature film Kagbeni (2007), a Nepali adaptation of WW Jacobs’s 1902 short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. After the screening, I caught up with director Bhusan Dahal for a chat about the Nepali film industry. It was fascinating to talk with Dahal about the novelty of the industry in Nepal. The first Nepali film was made only 50 years ago and production has been inconsistent during the industry’s short history, interrupted by insurgency within the country. With Kagbeni, Dahal hoped to reignite a struggling industry and encourage others within Nepal to start making films again. He and his crew created a buzz around the film by employing unknown actors and using new technology. The film was the first ever Nepali feature to be shot on digital video: ‘We were criticised. A lot of people said digital cinema is not cinema. Film has to be on film. It has to be celluloid.’

This may sound strange to UK filmgoers, but surprises like this was what the Himalayan Film & Cultural Festival was all about. The cinema programming aimed to expose UK audiences to film industries from remote cultures that they might not otherwise engage with. This aim was nicely echoed in a special educational strand, which arranged video exchanges between children from Hackney schools and the Tibetan Children’s Village in the foothills of the Indian Himalaya. With lively and packed-out screenings, live musical performances and a specially-curated art exhibition, it is to be hoped that the festival goes from strength to strength in creating a dialogue between Himalayan cinema and London audiences in the years to come.

Electric Sheep liked Frozen (Shivajee Chandrabhushan)
A graceful, elegant film, both visually and thematically, Frozen is a slow-paced evocation of a rebellious young girl’s life with her father and brother in the remote Himalayan mountains. When one day the Army disrupts the desolate peace of their surroundings and erects a camp opposite their house in order to fight some vague terrorist enemy, it is the first sign that the family will be forced to change their way of life. Elliptical and subtly suggestive, infused with thoughtful spirituality, filled with memorable images, it is a deeply affecting, soulful film. VIRGINIE SELAVY

Metropolis

The 2010 edition of the Berlinale has just started and in her first dispatch from Berlin Pamela Jahn tells us about the highlights of the first few days. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Metropolis
This year’s Berlinale opened on Thursday 11 February, but the real standout event was the gala screening of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Friedrichstadtpalast on Friday 12, with live accompaniment from the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Part of the myth surrounding Fritz Lang’s best known work comes from the fact that the original was cut shortly after the premiere of the film at the Ufa-Palast in Berlin on 10 January 1927. Although the restored version is 30 minutes longer than the print released in 2001, it still doesn’t completely recreate the original version. One sequence of the 16 mm negative of the film that was miraculously found in Buenos Aires in 2008 was simply too damaged and had to be narrated in intertitles. The newly added scenes not only help to better understand the fragmentary plot of Lang’s futuristic epic about the struggle between workers and bosses in a capitalist dystopia, but they also ensure an entirely unique and captivating cinematic experience. In addition to sequences depicting the conflict between industrialist Joh Fredersen and scientist Rotwang, creator of the machine woman, and extended scenes at the end of the film, when Maria is pursued by the masses of uprising workers, stunningly mounted images of Metropolis’s red-light district Yoshiwara and inserted biblical references intensify the fantastical portrait of a time and place that feel both strangely affecting and disturbingly familiar. This reconstructed classic was the perfect – if ‘unofficial’ – opening to the 60th Berlinale.

Howl
Also worthy of note in the first few days of the festival was Howl, one of the American films in competition, which dramatises the landmark 1957 obscenity trial revolving around Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name. Combining animated sequences, dramatic narration and documentary style, the film offers a captivating, yet partly unsatisfying, insight into the creative process and personal struggle that Ginsberg was going through while writing poetry. The dark Kafkaesque animation – which is reminiscent of the visual style of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir – creates a vibrant and fascinating imagery that brilliantly evokes the poem, complementing the dramatic courtroom scenes and fragments of a re-imagined interview with Ginsberg (played by James Franco), given to an unseen interviewer and interspersed with flashbacks from his past. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman aim high both aesthetically and conceptually, but they only really dazzle on the former level. Yet, despite a slightly artificial, long-winded feel, Howl is a vivid, engaging and lovingly made film.

Here’s an exciting new festival: YARN celebrates story and storytelling through film, theatre, music and literature. It runs 20 – 24 Feb 2010 at The Book Club and The Queen of Hoxton in East London.

Our friends of the London Short Film Festival are involved in Bedtime Stories on Sunday 21 February at The Book Club, described as ‘a beautiful programme of short films, each with story at their heart’.

And we particularly like the sound of these events:

Paper Cinema presents The Lost World (Sunday 21st Feb @ The Book Club)
The cereal-box maestros return with another piece of magical ‘live animation’. Using a basic camcorder and a pile of cut-out illustrations they whisk the viewer across the world – in this case to Venezuela – for a retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale of intrepid explorers and blood-thirsty dinosaurs. With Live music by Kieron Maguire.

Four Stories High (Tuesday 23rd Feb @ The Queen of Hoxton)
YARN have taken Homer’s Odyssey and divided it into twelve equal measures, split across the four pillars of modern storytelling – film, theatre, literature and music. Novelists, thespians, auteurs and musicians across the city have been developing their own unique ‘odyssey twelfth’, but what will happen when they try and put it all back together again in story order? Fractional Homers include Harriet Fleuriot, The Android Angel, The Room, Alex Preston and The Strumpettes.

Should be an interesting evening…

Amer

FrightFest returns to the Glasgow Film Festival for 5th year and we like the sound of Belgian giallo homage Amer (Bitter), and to stay with the genre, the re-mastered, uncut version of the classic Lucio Fulci movie, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. Also definitely worth checking out is the new film by Vincenzo Cube Natali, Splice. And if we were in Glasgow we wouldn’t miss the first Icelandic exploitation film, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre…

More info on these films from the press release:

AMER (BITTER) – UK Premiere
Gialli fans will not want to miss co-directors Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s immaculately executed and flawless valentine to the 70s thriller genre popularized by Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Recreating the motifs, clichés and visual codes from the vintage Italian back catalogue (including A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Suspiria and Deep Red), the Belgian duo unfold a virtually dialogue free tale of frightening obsession, sexual sensation and stunning black-gloved murder. Scored to recycled Italian soundtrack selections in the Tarantino tradition, the hypnotic and ethereal allure of the classic gialli lives again in this boldly imaginative cult phenomenon.

A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN – World Premiere
Enjoy this re-mastered, restored and never-before-seen fully uncut version of Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci’s hippy, trippy 1971 giallo classic. Did rich socialite Carol Hammond (gialli goddess Florinda Bolkan) kill her nymphomaniac neighbour during a depraved orgy of LSD-induced sadistic sex? Or is she just being framed by her philandering husband? Swinging London decadence, scandalous blackmail, neurotic visions and gory throat slashing all wrapped up in one of Ennio Morricone’s finest scores. Quirky touches of Fulci fantasy horror make this stylish psycho thriller a quintessential masterpiece of the giallo genre.

SPLICE – UK Premiere
From Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube and Cypher, and visionary producer Guillermo del Toro, comes a new kind of monster movie. Rebellious scientists Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley defy legal and ethical boundaries and forge ahead with a dangerous experiment: splicing together human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Named ‘Dren’ the creature rapidly develops from a deformed female infant into a beautiful chimera, who forges a bond with both of her creators. But then that bond turns deadly in a Frankenstein fable for the modern era…

REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE – World Premiere
A group of tourists embark on a sightseeing trip aboard a whaling vessel with none other than Captain Gunnar (Leatherface) Hansen himself. It’s when the ship breaks down the terror starts because the day-trippers come under attack from a crew of deranged Fishbillies hellbent on mayhem and slaughter. Let the bloody sea battle begin in director Julius Kemp’s horror comedy hybrid with a strong surreal flavour, the first exploitation film ever made by the Icelandic Film Industry.

Full programme at www.frightfest.co.uk.

HITS:

MISTER LONELY (Harmony Korine)

A pure pleasure: joyous, kaleidoscopic, fragmentary and incredibly silly, Harmony Korine’s return feels almost like the work of a different filmmaker, a man baptised by fire and chronic depression, now returned with a new fervour and passion for film and life itself. That is, until you get to the part with Werner Herzog as a flying priest. Tom Huddleston

FAR NORTH (Asif Kapadia)

With Michelle Yeoh magnificent in the central role, Asif Kapadia’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut feature The Warrior is another stunning epic fairy tale set amid breathtaking landscapes. Against the savage beauty of the Arctic Circle, in an environment where life is a constant, violent fight for survival, an increasingly tense triangle develops between two women and the escaped soldier they have rescued. At a time when there is so much angsty questioning about the state of British filmmaking, it is baffling that such a beautifully accomplished film should still be awaiting distribution. Virginie Sélavy

I’M NOT THERE (Todd Haynes)

Not for everyone, but a pure joy for Dylan fans, this is a bit of a nerds’ compendium, overflowing with in-jokes and witty asides, and some of the greatest music ever recorded (and, in some cases, re-recorded, for the most part very tastefully). Not all of it works, by any means, but what does is so dreamlike and involving, so vivid and original, it’d be a hard heart who didn’t come away feeling something. And Cate Blanchett’s performance is quite simply uncanny. TH

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett)

Newly restored by the BFI, Charles Burnett’s 1977 neo-realist look at life in the ghetto is a beautiful, heart-rending film. Weighed down by his dehumanising job at the slaughterhouse, Stan sleepwalks through his life, unable to respond to his wife’s loving gestures. Stan and his friends’ efforts to improve their lives seem vain, and even though there are some very warm, humorous moments – in particular the scenes of kids playing in the wasteland – all that remains at the end is sheer hopelessness: the film closes with images of Stan working at the slaughterhouse as Dinah Washington’s sorrowful ‘Bitter Life’ is heard on the soundtrack. VS

TALK TO ME (Kasi Lemmons)

Something of a no-brainer, this tells the story of loudmouth ex-con and DJ Ralph Waldo ‘Petey’ Greene, a no-holds-barred man of the people and civil rights agitator who ruled the Washington airwaves in the late 60s and early 70s. Recycling every cliché in the DJ-biopic rulebook, this manages to be totally familiar and consistently surprising, thanks in large part to the passion and drive of director Kasi Lemmons, a terrific period soundtrack, and an extraordinary central performance from the wonderful Don Cheadle. TH

FROZEN (Shivajee Chandrabhushan)

A graceful, elegant film, both visually and thematically, Frozen is a slow-paced evocation of a rebellious young girl’s life with her father and brother in the remote Himalayan mountains. When one day the Army disrupts the desolate peace of their surroundings and erects a camp opposite their house in order to fight some vague terrorist enemy, it is the first sign that the family will be forced to change their way of life. Elliptical and subtly suggestive, infused with thoughtful spirituality, filled with memorable images, it is a deeply affecting, soulful film. VS

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (De Fortabte Sjaeles) (Nikolaj Arcel)

Or, Harry Potter, Danish style. This is a rollicking kids’ fantasy, drawing on diverse sources (Scandinavian folklore, Buffy The Vampire Slayer) to create a dynamic, exciting and enjoyably daft mythos of its own. The special effects are cheap and cheerful and the action sequences may lack pace, but the script is witty and self-aware, the young actors striking and watchable, and the plot moves at a lick. Roll on the American remake. TH

PERSEPOLIS (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud)

Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her own graphic novels deservedly won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes festival. Although the film is a necessarily stripped-down version of the two volumes, which respectively describe her childhood in Teheran and her exile as a teenager in Austria, the film version retains all the elements that made them so successful: the mix of Satrapi’s personal story with her country’s history, the wryly humorous look at the absurdity of political power games, the penetrating observation of both Iranian and European societies and the powerful contrast between cute, simple animation and the complex, tragic events it depicts. Full of life and irreverent spirit, this is a film that is simply impossible to dislike. VS

MISSES:

EXODUS (Penny Woolcock)

Like a bad school play with far too much cash behind it, Penny Woolcock’s latest is a desperately worthy, hopelessly amateurish plea for understanding. The idea is fine – a retelling of the Moses story in a modern context – but the execution is woeful, wildly unsubtle, battering us over the head with its sociological and political parallels, insulting the audience’s intelligence at every turn. The cast are awful, the script weak and the narrative laughable – overall, this is a misjudgement of epic proportions. TH

THE LAST MISTRESS (Catherine Breillat)

I really wanted to like Catherine Breillat’s latest. A confrontational filmmaker who has been unfairly and violently reviled simply for taking a brutally honest look at sexuality, Breillat has always had all my sympathy. A ma soeur was a stunning film; Anatomie de l’enfer was flawed but had the merit to radically question traditional male views of women’s sexuality; even when not entirely successful, her films are usually fiercely intelligent and thought-provoking. Sadly, this is not so in her latest work and The Last Mistress, centring on the character of a nineteenth-century femme fatale, has none of the punchy questioning spirit that made her earlier films so exciting. VS

LIONS FOR LAMBS (Robert Redford)

Interminable at 90 minutes, Robert Redford’s well intentioned but hopelessly toothless take on the war on terror has attracted publicity for its cast and its subject matter, not for the film itself. This is essentially three tedious conversations about the state of America, between Tom Cruise’s slimy senator and Meryl Streep’s disillusioned journo, between professor Redford and his apathetic student, and between two heroic American soldiers stranded on an Afghan hillside surrounded by jibber-jabbering Jihadi insurgents. Boring, worthy, pointless. TH
HIT OR MISS?

FUNNY GAMES US (Michael Haneke)

Michael Haneke has done a Gus Van Sant and remade his own controversial 1997 film almost frame for frame, only in a US setting and with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the hapless couple tortured by two freakily polite young men. Funny Games US offers the same unsettling and provocative dissection of our voyeuristic consumption of violence but adds nothing new to the original. VS