Zidane on Blu-ray

Thanks to the unerring eye of our FBE crew chief Coleslaw, an all-regions Blu-ray copy of the 2006 film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait arrived in the KRK box last week. I hadn't noticed it was available and as a result, stole it instantly. For whatever reason this French-Icelandic feature-documentary has never received a DVD release in North America... even though it would seem a good fit for the growing legions of football fans on this side of the Atlantic.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait has been hailed as “a vital portrait of a modern athlete”, “a celebration of the body in motion” and “skillfully realized” by a number of critics. Shot during the April 23, 2005 match between his Real Madrid team and Villarreal, the film makers utilized 17 cameras trained exclusively on the soccer legend for 92 minutes, roughly the length of the match itself. The audience is witness to Zidane's singular actions throughout rather than the match itself, which makes for an unusual mix of sports movie and art film. Instead of telling a story with an arc of triumph or loss, the film makers seem more intent on capturing the ambience of the experience. The roar of the crowd accompanies the varied high-def visuals, underscored by a minimalist musical soundtrack by the composer Mogwai (?) and a few subtitled quotes from Zidane himself.

Based on what I'd read about this film over the years, I'll admit to having some pretty high expectations of it, but I still wasn't fully prepared for the profound effect Zidane would have on me. It was, without a doubt, the most mind-numbingly dull, consistently annoying and unsatisfying wastes of time I've ever sat through. Watching a single athlete for the duration of a game might have been an interesting concept in theory but in execution, it's fucking excruciating. The opening 5 minutes is a nauseating pixelated visual nightmare that simply won't end. It just wouldn't end.... The music by Mogwai is a new-age aural assault that would likely give Bill Frissell an aneurism. Quite frankly, I'd rather listen to 10 hours of whale-song than hear another Mogwai composition. Zidane himself is nearly expressionless throughout, making the whole concept a giant waste of time. Surely to God somebody noticed this during the year-long editing process. Anyone? No? Is it just me, or is this monumentally  boring? That had to have come up.

I should acknowledge here that most art-installation video work (which is probably a better description for Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait than the term “film”is) will find its champions and detractors lining up in opposing camps. With enough weed, I'm sure you could get into the rhythm of the piece, although in hindsight, I'm thinking two to three hits of acid might be a better choice. That said, I could also get into an episode of So You Think You Can Dance provided I was stoned out of my magic gourd, so that's hardly an answer. Zidane was just too pretentious an undertaking for my craw to absorb. I nearly leaped out of my chair the few times that Zidane's face cracked and spent the rest of the time grasping for anything that would quell the never-ending, repetitive tedium of 92 minutes spent staring at another human whose face has the emotional range of an Easter Island statue.

Thanks to Zidane, I have a splitting headache, despise the French, and hate soccer again. It's a stupid sport where fuck-all happens. As you can see, the Blu-ray has “The Greatest Film About Football Ever Made” festooned all over the front cover, which reminded me of a Coleslaw comment about another film from about a year ago.

I'll trade you back for the Graphic Sexual Horror DVD and throw in the Elvis boxset I took in August Joe. Please?

Sporgey.

Midnight Madness 2010 day 10: Fire of Conscience (2010)

There's really not much to say about Dante Lam's Fire of Conscience, the closing film of Midnight Madness 2010. Which is too bad, It's always better to go out on a bang rather than a whimper.

The film is a Hong-Kong cop drama/thriller that follows a detective who has taken a vigilante-esque stance on crime after his pregnant wife was killed by a purse snatcher. He collaborates with a higher ranking officer on a case to catch a cop killer.
While the first half hour held great promise the plot becomes murkier and murkier as twists come at you in rapid fire. Following the complicated plot wouldn't be such a hassle if you genuinely cared for the characters.
This lack of care results in an anticipation of action sequences to help keep you going, sadly, the ones on display are loud and realistic but are much too short.
The film fails as an action and as a drama. When our hero is delivering a baby in a burning garage by the third act you are laughing at the mundaneness of the whole ordeal and hoping for a quick cut to the end credits.
While there is much promise here coming from director Dante Lam, it's the script that lacks emotionality and cohesiveness. Turning what should be hard hitting into straight to dvd fodder.

Why this was a Midnight Madness pick is beyond me, a film already distributed in North America getting a slot at a world reknown film festival? Was it to help the director get a festival selection credit under his belt?  Or maybe it was because the film really did fit with the theme of the festival and was great.... yeah.

If TIFF screens films we already have available for rent, then why not get a print of something real classic? A real crowd pleaser to go out on. That would have been better than this mediocrity.

And with that the festival ends on a low note, but it isn't all bad news. Joe and I caught some really excellent stuff over the past 10 days and now we can finally get some sleep.

-dropkick
-------------------------------------------------------------

It's a shame that after nine days of some wonderful cinematic delights (and a couple troubled productions), Midnight Madness 2010 had to end on a low note, but that's exactly what happened with last night's screening of Dante Lam's Fire of Conscience.  Lam, hailed as the successor to the Jon Woo/Johnnie To throne, has over a dozen films under his belt, and I've not seen any of them save for last night's effort.  And if Fire of Conscience is any indication, Lam has a long way to go before he fills his mentors' shoes.

Fire of Conscience has a few different concurrent storylines, but the way they are tied together is too convoluted, and the pacing of the film, while quick, is uneven.  There are a couple of decent action setpieces, but they are too few and far between.  I don't know if, after nine consecutive nights of staying up until 3:30 AM, my body was finally failing me, or if the film was really that boring, but about 20 minutes in, my eyelids started to droop, snapping open only two or three times in the remainder of the film.  If there's one thing a Midnight Madness film should NOT do, it's put you to sleep.  I really don't understand why this film was included in the program, as it doesn't benefit from being seen with a crowd, and certainly didn't (for me, at least) fit the description of a "midnight movie".

Not to mention that, with a modicum of effort, you can track this down on DVD in Chinatown (legit, not bootleg, as in, it's already been released), or, even easier, at The Film Buff West on Blu-Ray.  Being available in a format other than 35 mm should not necessarily preclude a film from being shown at MM, but if the film is to be shown, it must be a film that is tremendously enhanced by viewing with a rowdy crowd, which Fire of Conscience certainly was not.

Lam certainly has chops, but he needs to tighten everything up and lose a lot of unnecessary dialogue.  The best part of the film were the opening 5 minutes, shot in frozen black-and-white, that show us a tableau of a crime in progress, which then bleeds into colour as the action comes alive.  Thrilling, impressive stuff.  The characters may have been written strongly, but it seemed like the actors who played them didn't really buy it, and thus, we as viewers don't either.  The characters' motivations seemed weak.  Not a complete dud, but because of its inability to engage, and it's meandering script, Fire of Conscience will likely land near, if not at, the bottom of my list.

-the coelacanth

----------------------------------------------------------

AND.....for those of you who've stuck around, you get a SUPER-BONUS, UBER-INCISIVE, APRES-CREDITS third review, courtesy of our very own La Sporgenza, who wasn't in attendance at MM, but checked out Fire of Conscience a month ago on the aforementioned DVD.  Without further ado, Sporgey:

A trip to Chinatown's only legit DVD shop about a month ago netted a Blu-ray copy of Dante Lam's latest Hong Kong actioner Fire of Conscience (2010), which coincidentally closed the Midnight Madness series Coleslaw and Dropkick have been so faithfully chronicling in recent posts. For perhaps the first time, I've actually seen one of the titles in the MM series before the lads and wondered if the environment the film was seen in might  have generated a different response to it.

As a long-time fan of the Hong Kong policier, I think it's probably worthwhile to put Dante Lam's Fire of Conscience in some sort of historical context. The Asian crime genre is about as clear-cut a film category as exists, coming into existence in the mid-'80s and continuing with films like Fire of Conscience today. The cycle was strongest in the earlier days with directors like John Woo, Tsui Hark, Johhny To and others regularly delivering poetically-tinged, action-melodramas that quickly found an international audience. After the Asian financial crisis, which dried up traditional sources of film finance as well as the local audiences' disposable income, the genre fell into period of extended decline. Exceptions existed to be sure, but a combination of factors weighed heavily on the Hong Kong film market throughout most of the 1990's. Overproduction, the exhaustion of overused formulas, and most importantly, the problem of rampant video piracy throughout East Asia, drained the industry of money and talent. From 2000 onwards the HK crime drama might have vanished entirely were it not for the efforts of a trio of directors; Wai-keung Lau, Alan Mak and Johnny To. The Infernal Affairs trilogy from Lau and Mak and To's Election, Election 2, Exiled, Mad Detective and others heralded a return to form for Hong Kong cinema.

Dante Lam is a product of this post-2000 resurgence in the Hong Kong film industry. His breakout film, The Beast Stalker (2008) was a well-received, but tawdry kidnapping/action film currently unreleased to DVD in North America. I've got a Chinatown burn if anyone wants to see it. Fire of Conscience, beyond extending Lam's proclivity for terribly-titled movies, isn't really much of an advancement over his earlier works. While it sports loads of action, some grimly graphic violence and clips along at a furious pace, I found it noisy and unfocused, lacking the gravitas an actor like Simon Yam or Andy Lau might have brought to the picture. The two leads played by Ritchie Ren and Leon Lai just didn't come off as believable. I couldn't tear my eyes off Lai's wispy Inspector-Clouseau beard. It just looked ridiculous. The sole exception to the uninspired acting was Michelle Ye as the female detective, May. Her character in Fire of Conscience is a rarity in HK crime films, a bona fide female character who isn't just window dressing. I'm almost certain that most North Americans will find the goofy baby-delivery in the flame-engulfed garage near the end a tad over-the-top, even though it kind of suits the movie. I've yet to see a film from Hong Kong where something along those lines doesn't happen. It's a staple of the genre that Woo started with all his stupid doves flying around. Birth-Death-Rebirth motifs have always dominated the genre.

Fire of Conscience seems to me a strange pick for the Midnight Madness series, particularly as the program's closing-night flick. It's just too pedestrian compared to the films that preceded it. A much better choice might have been Pou-Soi Cheang's Accident from 2009, a flawed, but very inventive film (and one that, to my knowledge, hasn't received any notices outside Asia). Cheang represents a slightly different kind of upcoming HK filmmaker, one who seems less intent on simply out-To'ing and up-Woo'ing his predecessors and is instead seeking ways to expand the genre. If the Midnight Madness series is intended to be a showcase for films that cut against the grain, Fire of Conscience, like it's silly Babelfish title implies, seems hardly worthy of inclusion.

With apologies for budding into the terrific series of posts you guys have pulled together over the course of the program... I'm kinda glad to be a part of it, if only vicariously.

Sporgey.

Cave of forgotten dreams @ TIFF '10

I've had really high hopes for 3D since Avatar impressed me last year but have only ever been disappointed since. All this retro fitting, remakes and flickering action sequences has really started to bug me. So, when a few months back I heard Herzog was working on a 3D documentary film, I couldn't help but grin. Finally, I thought, a 3D film that isn't going to be a bloated blockbuster.
This films subject The Chauvet Cave in southern France was only discovered in 1994. It contains the most extraordinary array of cave paintings dated from between 23,000 to 30,000 years ago as well as fantastic calcite formations, stalagmites/stalactites and ancient bones of creatures long migrated from the continent. The cave was apparently sealed by a landslide many millennia ago which has preserved everything perfectly. It's really something special to see and the sense of great privilege is conveyed by Werner early on in his very proud introduction. He is the only filmmaker to ever have been allowed access to the cave and throughout I couldn't help picturing everyone at the BBC and Discovery Channel shrugging jealously.
The picture starts with some really beautiful shots of the French vinyards and mountains near the cave. It's presentation is what we've come to expect and it's instantly engaging. Long roving shots from a remote flying camera, hand-held POV's up mountain paths. The problems only start when we get inside the cave. Werner explains that the equipment that they could take in has to be very limited and they use non-professional camera gear. This isn't necessarily the problem though, we can take it with a pinch of salt. The real problem is in the 3D.
First of all there is little light in the cave and so the gain is pushed into the camera signal and there's a lot of digital noise, especially in the dark areas, of which there are a lot. Now, noise/grain is always forgivable, until it starts dancing around in 3D, then it gives you a terrible headache. A lot of the shots are lit solely by a moving torch light and the constant re-focussing of your eyes only strains them further. However. the cave is quite amazing and we get to see it in detail. Later in the film some much better lit 3d shots are shown that really should have been used throughout. Footage of the cave is interspersed with interviews with various characters. The decision to use a rather generic voice over in place of subtitles for these interviews was certainly a small misstep and dries it up a touch, but the film is not without it's moments. There are a couple of hilarious exchanges where Werner has typically cut someone off too early or left them hanging when they have finished. I do get the sense that he has become self aware and when chuckles are raised as Werner describes a cave painting as “Proto-cinema” I detected at least a hint of self parody, which I don't mind at all.
The film winds up with the most spectacularly detailed shots of all, they do linger on a bit too long and I think the back half of the film would benefit from a cut of about 10 minutes. Having said all this, despite the technical distractions, the film is a semi-triumph in the way Encounters at the end of the world was. Some really great personal touches and a fascinating subject, but for god's sake see it in glorious 2D.

The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)

Argentine director Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes was a bit of a surprise victory at this year's Oscars, bagging Best Foreign Film and beating out co-favourites The White Ribbon and A Prophet. I've yet to get around to watching Hanake's White Ribbon, but found Jacques Audiard's A Prophet riveting. I’m not fully convinced Campanella's victory was justified, but The Secret in Their Eyes is a structurally solid, splendidly acted romantic thriller that achieves what it sets out to.

The story is set in 1999 and opens with a recently-retired District Attorney named Benjamin (Ricardo Darin), trying to write a novel about an unsolved murder case he was involved with 25 years earlier. After struggling to commit his memories to paper, Benjamin visits a former colleague (and past object of desire), played by the stunning Soledad Villamil, to share his frustrations about the writing project. In flashback, we are transported back 25 years, where we see the original crime scene and are introduced to a variety of characters including the victim's grieving husband, Benjamin's alcoholic partner Pablo, and the newly-arrived female D.A. Irene (Villamil), who is his immediate superior. As his head swims with theories and uncertainties, Benjamin opts to pursue the case once again, hoping to find the truth after a quarter-century of nagging doubt.

Well-composed and smoothly paced, The Secret in Their Eyes is a true director's film. Campanella displays auteur-like confidence deploying his characters with great precision on a cinematic chessboard. The story unfolds without the typical histrionics Hollywood would likely have shoveled onto a similar script and as a result, some might find the proceedings a little dry at times. Despite the title, there aren't really any lightning bolts flying around here. For the most part, the film's emotional content is underplayed, sometimes a little frustratingly so, but it remains engaging throughout. This is a reserved mystery with several plausible suspects that focuses more on characterization than the seedier aspects at the heart of the story.

There are some moments of film-geek bravado however, chiefly an unbroken six-minute-long chase sequence where Benjamin and Pablo first encounter and arrest the primary suspect during a boisterous soccer match. It’s a neat puzzler of editorial trickery and CGI that also serves to lift the midsection of the film and give it a little pizzazz. Before I get into spoiler territory here, I should stop. Rest assured that the resolution of the story is completely satisfying, advancing the idea that justice need not be a act of simple vengeance, but can be something entirely more personal. The film closes on a nearly pitch-perfect note of salvation, blended beautifully with a faint shot of hope, an emotion long just-out-of-reach for these characters.

Winner.

Sporgey

Fessenden Q&A

Coleslaw deity Larry Fessenden on whether Wendigo is a proper horror film or just an art-trash experiment in visual trickery using a bad elk suit.

Midnight Madness 2010 day 9: Stake Land (2010)

Kris doesn't have access to a computer today, so his review will be delayed a bit, and I will add it here when it comes through.  For the time being, here's my take on Jim Mickle's Stake Land.
---------------------------------------------------------------
So, this year's version of Midnight Madness is winding down, but one of the films that I'd been most looking forward to was screened last night, and lo and behold, did it ever deliver.  Jim Mickle's Stake Land shows us an America perhaps in the not-too-distant future wherein vampires have begun to dominate, and society has essentially been splintered into small bands of survivors, with two clear cut camps: religious fundamentalists and the sane.  In these days of Tea Party hysteria, this is all too uncomfortably familiar.  More a road movie than a vamp flick, Stake Land reveals that, in an age of fanaticism and intolerance, vampires are the least of our worries.

The story has a man ("Mister") and a boy ("Martin")joining forces in order to get to a safe haven in the north known as New Eden.  However, it is unclear if this refuge will even provide solace, as the boy is warned by a store clerk that they'll need to watch out for the cannibals one they arrive there.  Along the way, Mister and Martin pick up a ragtag band of survivors, whose only link is that they share a respect for human life regardless of race or creed.

All of the actors, to a person, do a fantastic job of creating realistic characterizations out of what could very easily have been caricatures.  Kelly McGillis' nun, "Sister", is particularly affecting, for even though she wears the cloth, she is not so lost in fundamentalist beliefs or irrationality to realize survival trumps all when belief and urgent pragmatism clash.  Nick Damici, who wrote the script for Stake Land (as well as Mickle's previous film, the wonderfully grimy and similarly humane Mulberry Street), plays Mister, a brooding antihero who softens over the course of the film, and becomes more and more compassionate, learning that looking out for number one may keep you alive, but it will ultimately have the more damaging effect of total alienation.  Martin doesn't have much to say, but provides the voice-over narration that nudges the story along at an easy pace.  Sean Nelson, Bonnie Dennison, Danielle Harris, and especially Michael Cerveris as Jebedia Loven, the personification of the idea of Christian Fundamentalism taken to a terrifying extreme, all contribute solid work in slightly smaller roles.

The pacing of the film needs mention, as it is neither fast nor slow, but sort of flows like a languid river, free and easy, never slowing or hastening, and always staying the course.  The whole thing felt very natural, very real, and even tangents in the plot acted more like swirling eddies rather than highway off-ramps, deviating for a brief moment of pause before once more giving in to the pull of the water.  In fact the whole film has a very naturalistic feel.  Kris mentioned before the film that he had been speaking with one of the MM programmers and was told that Stake Land was like if Terrence Malick had shot a vampire film.  That idea stuck in my mind as I watched the film, and it is not a poor description at all.  Shades of Malick, David Gordon Green's earlier work, Lance Hammer's Ballast, and, to come full-circle, fellow Glass Eye Pix alum Kelly Reichardt's disarmingly real films.  In particular, I saw similarities between Stake Land's characters and the small, touching and very human interactions in Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy.  Pretty deep stuff for just another "vampire" movie.

But that's just the thing - much like Glass Eye Pix founder, Stake Land producer, and renaissance man extraordinaire Larry Fessenden's own Habit, Stake Land is really a vampire film in name only, using the vampires as a vehicle to deliver a more important message, a message that perhaps would be criticized as being ham-fisted if it had been wedged into a traditional drama.  However, that is an area where horror excels - because of the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoying the films, an urgent message can be the driving force of a film and not come across forced.

The camera work is stunning in Stake Land, and for every gory money shot, Ryan Samul's camera lingers over wintry landscapes, reeds, rushes, trees, streams.  There is a very familiar sense to these landscapes, the purple and blue hills of the Catskills and beyond, not only because I've traveled through them, but because the frosty woods and icy brooks mirror our very own landscape.  This familiarization of the setting helps to drive the message home, but I don't think it would isolate viewers from a different geographical region, though it might make the film a slightly less personal experience. 

Jeff Grace contributes a compelling score that draws as much from symphonic work as it does from early Americana and Smithsonian Folkways recordings.  Mickle spoke of how the score moved backward in time, almost as if the characters were heading back into pioneer days, evoking old ghosts and decaying dreams.  In fact, the film felt very much like we were witnessing a societal de-evolution, a return to primal needs and fears, where survival is not a right, but a privilege, and the score at times reinforces this idea, and at times juxtaposes it, all to great effect.    The score acts almost like another narrative device, in the same way that the camera, the narration, and the plot all have us floating down the river at the same pace.  The way that all these elements seamlessly mesh and play off each other is nothing short of cinematic excellence, and really showcases the power and importance of the "director".

Back to Malick - Mickle mentioned in the Q&A that he was heavily influenced by Days of Heaven while shooting Stake Land, and it shows.  From the child-like voice-over narration, the score and the naturalistic cinematography - even the small group on the run - Days of Heaven is prevalent here.  Which, I suppose, is why Stake Land comes off less like its similarly themed but completely different feeling contemporaneous celluloid peers Zombieland and The Road, and more like, well, a good film, a piece of cinema rather than just a movie.  Stake Land, while having the potential to be overly sensationalistic, is expertly helmed by Mickle and the fine production touches by the Glass Eye Pix crew bring it all home.

So I must say bravo, to all involved, and to Colin Geddes for getting this film for the Midnight Madness faithful.  Stake Land is certainly an 11th hour contender for my MM top spot.  Stake Land is one more addition to the super solid Glass Eye Pix/Scareflix stable, and everyone involved has every right to be very, very proud of what we saw last night.

Also, I want to give a big thanks to Larry, ever the gentleman and awesome guy, for posing for a photo with a huge fan.  Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know my respect and admiration for the man, and I'm still a bit star-struck for having been in the presence of one of my cinematic heroes and long-time champion of powerful independent film.  And, really, that's one of the coolest things about MM - unlike the big galas at TIFF, you might find a director or actor in line next to you, waiting with the same anticipation to see something new and exciting.  And often you can simply walk up to a legendary director, put your arm around him and smile like a big, dumb kid.

-the coelacanth

Midnight Madness 2010 day 8: The Butcher, The Chef and The Swordsman (2010)

The Butcher, The Chef, and The Swordsman is a highly entertaining comedy set in ancient China.
Before the film, director Wuershan humbly told the audience that many jokes may not cross over in translation and he's sorry if we don't enjoy it.
He had nothing to worry about as the whole theater was howling within the first 5 minutes.

The story is a Tarantinoesque romp following different characters and related back stories that all focus on different aspecst of the human psyche. For example, one story opens up with the title card; "greed" and what follows is the story of The Swordsman and his desire to become the greatest swordsman in history. The one thread that keeps the stories tied together is a meat cleaver that was forged from the finest black iron. This cleaver changes hands throughout, the character brandishing it has great power yet unlike Spiderman most forget the great responsibility part.

Visually the film is quite striking; the colour scheme changes with the story and frequent dream sequences are kaleidoscope like visions. There is also a sense of childish imagination implemented to the film, a feeling that anything is in the realm of possibility. For example nearing the conclusion of the story the end titles start to roll, however the butcher is not satisfied and cuts the credits apart demanding a more satisfactory ending for himself. What follows is video game fight taken right out of Mortal Kombat, complete with health bars and special moves. The Midnight Madness crowd screamed their approval.

The Achilles heel of the film is the high number of jump cuts used in the editing, especially during fight sequences. The film has several fights peppered throughout yet none are actually shown. Using a series of quick cuts and splashes of red images we piece together the details of these bouts ourselves which is fine if executed a couple of times in one film but not for every fight sequence. Nearing the end of the film the edits began to feel disorienting.

The Butcher, The Chef, and The Swordsman is an entertaining crack up of a film that doesn't have much substance to it. An endlessly fun and fast paced picture that lacks discipline in some aspects of its storytelling, but then again, this is one of those films that doesn't really care what you think.

-dropkick
--------------------------------------------------------

Ah, such tasty delights were offered up last night at the Ryerson.  In MM's first mainland China screening, we were treated to song, dance, martial arts madness, top notch physical comedy, and food, glorious food.

Wuershan's The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman was, quite simply, an absolute treat.  The narrative follows a powerful meat cleaver made out of the melted down iron of the five most powerful swords that links the three titular characters, but beyond that, TBTCATS kind of defies description.  I know, I know, that's a huge cop-out, but at this point, that's all I've really got to say.  The one problem I had with the film was some of the editing.  I swear the editor must have been on some heavy speed during the first 5 minutes, shit was literally getting cut mid-sentence.  I was getting kind of frantic, thinking, "if the whole movie's gonna be like this, I don't know if I can take it..."  Thankfully things calmed down a bit after the frenetic intro.

If you liked the zany genre mash that was Happiness of the Katakuris, you'll find something to latch onto in TBTCATS.  If this ever makes it to DVD (doubt it will hit theatres, but you never know...), just watch it.  Trust me.  You'll love it.  And then you'll want to head straight to Chinatown to feast.  Kris and I hungered for some Chinese delicacies after the film, but eight crazy nights of staying up waaaay past our bedtime were starting to take their toll.

- the coelacanth

Midnight Madness 2010 day 7: Red Nights (Les nuits rouges du bourreau de jade) (2009)

Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud are two french men who call Hong Kong home. For the past decade they have together been writing scripts for Chinese films. The most notable being Johnnie To's Running Out of TIme.
Now the two have made their first feature Red Nights a French/Chinese thriller with a taste of the erotic.

Being both French and Chinese the film feels distinctly like two films running at the same time and as such I'll review both parts separately:

The French version
The film follows a French woman who is wanted for the murder of her boss/business partner. Trying to make the best out of an unfinished deal her and the late boss were in the middle of finalizing she decides to continue alone. She quickly finds that all previous business partners don't trust her, now on the run from both police and criminals she must prove that she's not to be messed with. Very reminiscent of Le Samurai (for one, she wears the woman's version of Alain Delon's trenchcoat) this portion of the films is all guns, cigarettes, and money.

The Chinese version
The film follows an artistic wealthy Chinese woman who has an extreme fetish for death. When a deal she had made with a previous partner falls through due to his death she decides to steal what she was bargaining for from his assistant. This artifact is actually a poison that she believes belonged to the Jade Emperor's executioner. It's a poison that paralyzes your body while intensifying all your nerve endings, so that pain is beyond extreme and a kiss feels like an orgasm. She intends to use it on her self but not before she uses it on some unfortunate souls she comes across first. Being a ruthless, eccentric criminal has it's price as police and rival thugs start to close in around her.


Together the film is a mix of styles and genres from across Europe and Asia. Thankfully, the conflicting styles work very well together, arriving at something that feels like what Melville would have delivered if he had shot Sex and Zen.

The big issue is that this film is screaming to be longer. The 98 minute run time doesn't do the story or characters any justice and turns a well paced film into one quickly trying to tie up loose ends. If only this was at least two hours long, it may have been the masterpiece it wanted to be.

-dropkick

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last night, MM gave us the bewitching Red Nights, which, for my money,  may wind up being one of the sleepers of the whole programme.  Directed by two Frenchmen living in Hong Kong (and go-to screenwriters for masters Johnnie To, Tsui Hark and others), Red Nights is a bold vision which leaves an indelible impression in the darkest furrows of your mind.  Vague plotlines aside, the film creates an insular, whispery world of intrigue, kink, and dread.

Unlike day 6's film, Red Nights slyly incorporates its influences into a refreshing, unique whole, and the references come off as nods rather than direct rips.  Even the DePalma-stroking split-screen scene plays wonderfully well, and is used to create a palpable tension rather than simply for cheap gimmickry.  There are a few scenes that don't "make sense" in the traditional sense of the term, but work because of the visual aesthetic and atmosphere they give the film.

Best viewed as a stylish, sexy, dream logic thriller, something that given different circumstances might have been the product of a collaboration between David Lynch and Dario Argento, Red Nights is a night time run through the streets of Hong Kong, neon everywhere, plastic, sound, colour.  Oh, colour!  The film really, uh, gets under your skin. 

A terrifically menacing ambient score from Seppuku Paradigm ties the package up neatly with a bow.  A feast for the eyes and ears, Red Nights is a wonderfully chilling mood piece, and while a credible plot certainly does exist here, I feel it's best to simply let the film wash over you, absorb you, tempt and seduce you into its dark, terrifying world.

- the coelacanth

Midnight Madness 2010 day 6: Insidious (2010)

James Wan, director of Saw showed off his new film Insidious last night at Midnight Madness. Prior to the screening the director himself claimed the film was a throwback to The Shining and Poltergeist and would deliver "no fake scares" too bad he forgot to mention the film would also be light on delivering real scares.

The film starts off as a haunted house story. We follow a family moving into a big old house and weird things start to happen. As soon as this concept starts to settle in the inevitable stereotypical couple fight about the house begins wherein the wife moans about feeling unsafe and the husband pats her on the head like a dimwit and tells her it's just in her head. However in Insidious the husband instead feels sympathy for his wife and decides to move.... ok.... so maybe this isn't a haunted house film.

When their son slips into some sort of coma that defies medical science they call on some goofy paranormal professionals to figure out what's going on. It's explained that their son has slipped into "the further". Oh god! Not the further, anything but that! What is the further? I don't know and quite frankly, I don't want to know.

When the film first mentions this concept of "the further" - some distant realm you reach by pushing astral projection too far-  your imagination makes up what the place might be like. Something horrifying beyond human comprehension was what i was thinking. I was also thinking it was too bad this film didn't have the budget or the chops to show this place off. Well, didn't I eat crow as ten minutes later the husband is floating around "the further" which to my surprise looks the same as everything around you only in blue tint.

The saving graces of the film are the strong performances from the two leads, especially Rose Byrne. The strong soundtrack by Joseph Bishara is a classic example a terrific horror score, too bad it wasn't in a better movie.

Insidious is a film with an identity crisis. It doesn't know what it wants to be and while they are sequences of great promise, the whole ordeal feels uneven. This one's a renter (from us, of course).

-dropkick
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Fear is one funny motherfucker.  What scares one person might make another laugh, and for every person up late at night with the lights on, there is another soundly dreaming.  If you go by Twitter, last night's screening of James Wan and Leigh Wannell's Insidious was PURE. FEAR.  If you go by me, it was anything but.

Wan (director) and Wannell (writer) shot to notoriety with their very decent microbudgeted debut feature Saw, which launched a horrible franchise.  Next up for the duo was the troublesome but ultimately underrated Dead Silence, which provided a decent handful of good scares along with a menacing atmosphere.  Wan went it alone (well, sort of - he had help from Death Wish author Brian Garfield for the source material) for his next effort, the minor cinematic achievement Death Sentence.  While that film lacked the emotional heft of the Bronson original, it was a competent product that deserves to be seen, if only for the masterful nearly two and a half minute single take in the multilevel parking lot and for John Goodman's scene-mastication.  Now Wan and Wannell have rejoined forces for haunted house chiller Insidious, which perhaps would have prepared me better had it been titled Insipidness.

Both gents brashly boasted before the screening that it was a real throwback to old school horror (hmmm, I'm starting to see a theme here), and cited works such as Poltergeist, The Exorcist, and The Shining as key touchstones and influences on their new film.  Bull. Shit. Bullshit.  The main difference between the new film and those now established classics of the genre is that they were SCARY, and this is not.  I mean, yes, there were a few SCARES, but the film WASN'T SCARY.  Big difference.

The movie starts out promisingly enough, and I was digging the pacing and the slow build, and then, everything gets dumped on its head (and not in a good way), conventions are tossed by the wayside (and not in a good way), and the plot takes two or three completely unseen left turns (AND. NOT. IN. A. GOOD. WAY).

Copping badly from Lucio Fulci's The Beyond and from the aforementioned screamers, and with a Demon that was less frightening that the one in the faux-religious tv adverts in James Gunn's Super, Insipidness is a mess of a film.  Quite frustrating, really, given the promise of a haunted house film from two of the genre's bright stars.  I so, SO wanted to love this one (the premise and the leaked stills from the flick are right up my alley), but I just couldn't force myself to.  I said that there were some scares, and yes, there were, and some genuinely creepy moments, but they were too fleeting, and were all but enveloped by the seething mass of cheese that was the film's second half, in which:

After a boy falls into a coma, some sort of psychic is brought in and informs his parents that their son is some kind of child prodigy and can astral-project.  The child's parents (the Yogi Bearers) are in disbelief, but after the psychic conducts a gas mask-clad seance, and some fucked up "otherworldy" events happen, they start to believe.  Then the father (Patrick Wilson) learns from his mother that as a boy HE TOO WAS ADEPT AT ASTRAL PROJECTION! GASP!  And the only way to get the son back into his corporeal form - and to stop these pesky demons from trying to inhabit his son's otherwise uninhabited husk of a self - the father must astral project once more in order to pull the son out of the shadowy netherworld known as "The Further".  But, but...if it's so "further", why does it resemble the house in which they live, and why does the main demon's lair look like it is a set from Pee-Wee's Playhouse decked out in accoutrements from Martha Stewart Living's Halloween Issue?

At this point I had lost all interest in the film, and my mind kept wandering to the impending long bike ride from the Ryerson back to Parkdale, and I simply wished to get home ASAP so I could crawl in bed and go right to sleep.  But again, if Twitter's anything to go by, Insipidness kept a lot of people up last night.  Like I says, fear's a funny thing.  So far, the three "horror" films that have screened have been the weakest of the lot; a bad sign for the future of the genre, or simply programming conflicts?  After all, A Horrible Way to Die, Cold Fish, or Miike's new film would have slotted in nicely.  But I guess you can't please everybody, all of the time...

-the coelacanth

Midnight Madness 2010 day 5: The Ward (2010)

John Carpenter returned after a lengthy hiatus last night with The Ward. A genre film that evokes a sense of a simpler time when horror movies relied more on psychological scares rather than CGI ones.

The story opens with a woman (played by the beautiful Amber Heard) setting fire to a house. She is subsequently arrested and put in a psychiatric ward with four other women. Feeling she doesn't belong there she attempts to break out only finding a conspiracy of missing patients that leads her to uncover something much more sinister that is at work in the ward.

While certainly far from being a masterpiece The Ward is a great looking film with a good cast. The music is stellar, rings true with 70's and 80's classic horrors; John Carpenter co-wrote it so you know you're in for some great sounds.

This one falls short of Raimi's return to form with Drag Me to Hell, instead it fells like a completely tolerable early 90's horror... it's just too bad John Carpenter hadn't made this one back then.
I give it a pass but, it'll probably get torn to shit when it hits wide release.

-dropkick

------------------------------------------------------------------

Last night I was incredibly excited for our MM film, John Carpenter's The Ward.  Less so for the film, and more for the opportunity to be in the presence of and hear speak one of the directors I admire most, John Carpenter.  The man is a living legend, and his films have helped shape me into the horror-fiend I am today.  So you can imagine my dismay when it was announced during Colin Geddes' intro to the film that Carpenter could not be with us because he had been called for jury duty in L.A. God motherfucking damn.  The rest of the cast was in attendance, and they all looked lovely in their short skirts with legs that went from the ground to the neck.  And Carpenter provided a very funny video intro to the film, but it was all cold comfort for something I had been anticipating for so long.  Kris even had on his Fright Rags They Live t-shirt and was in the front row, camera in hand, ready to throw his love at Carp like that overly-amourous prisoner in Silence of the Lambs, but alas...

Anyway, onto the film, which at this point seemed like an afterthought.  Funny thing is, it wasn't all that bad.  Actually, it was kinda sorta decent.  The Ward stars Amber Heard as Kristen, a young girl who we first see running through the woods, then setting fire to a farmhouse.  She is promptly arrested and tossed into the titular institution, wherein reside half a dozen similarly pretty young things.  We soon learn that all is not right in this ward, and that there may or may not be malevolent forces at work as girls start disappearing.  Is it the work of experimental psychiatrist Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris)?   Perhaps a vendetta job on the part of surly Nurse Lundt (Susanna Burney, in a role that gives Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched a run for her money)?  Or is something more sinister, more supernatural, at work?

Carpenter mentioned in his intro that this was "an old school horror film from an old school director".  He must have been referring to the '80s as old school, and not the '40s (Geddes mentioned in his Q&A after ther film that it hearkened back to the works of Val Lewton, but I didn't see that at all.  At least it didn't remind me of any of the half-dozen Lewton films I've seen).  In any case, Carpenter keeps things practical, and the visual effects provided by the team of Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger (genre fans might recognize those names) were super effective and creepy.  The story, and the scares, had a very '80s/early '90s feel as well, and what we have here is essentially the same template that Carpenter applied to Halloween, or, as Geddes referred to it, "a reverse The Thing".  Regardless, the film wasn't the disaster it could have been.

Carpenter hasn't made a feature film in nine years, and his last works - not counting his two enjoyable TV episodes for the Masters of Horror series - were Ghosts of Mars and Vampire$, not without their charm, mind you, but a far cry from the master's halcyon days.  It's reassuring to see a director whose glory days are gone but can still deliver the goods, even as many of his contemporaries fall into laughable self-parody irrelevance (cough, darioargentogeorgeromero, cough).

The Ward isn't groundbreaking, isn't great, but it is a solid, well-crafted film, nicely shot and with a score that recalls Carpenter's own superlative work.  Toss in some fun scares and creepy atmosphere, and you've got a solid little Friday night pizza and beer scarer.  I saw parallels to recent films Shutter Island, Drag Me to Hell, and, as Kris mentioned afterward, Identity.  I think it will ultimately be remembered as one of Carpenter's minor works, but that fact that it was not a complete failure is a success in and of itself.  It may sound like I'm being a Carpenter apologist, but that's not really the case.  While it is not yet safe to say that Carpenter is "back", it's reassuring to know that the old boy still has a few tricks up his sleeve.  With The Ward, Carpenter cautiously re-enters the cinematic realm and the genre, not with a bang, but with a sly grin to knowing audiences, issuing a concise statement declaring, "I ain't dead yet..."

- the coelacanth