Fessenden's Skin and Bones

I'm a huge Larry Fessenden fan (as those elite few who took part in this year's "Hidden Gem" film fest and were subjected to my Habit pick are well aware) and have been wanting to see his latest offering, Skin and Bones, for some time now.  However, as it was part of last year's made for TV series Fear Itself, (generally considered to be a low-rent version of the Masters of Horror project, though they share the same creator and many contributors) the chances looked slim that this would find its way to DVD as a solo release.  Well, Fear Itself is coming out in October as a complete season, and there look to be a few intriguing entries (from Stuart Gordon, Mary Harron and Brad Anderson); however, the shining star in the set seems to be Fessenden's film, and after clicking around on LF's production company's site, I discovered a link to the film online!  Free!  I've only watched a couple minutes so far, but thought I'd share the info with anyone who might be interested in following the progression of this unique voice in modern horror cinema.

Kris' Back Hits the Big Time

As you'll see in today's Globe article.  Thanks to Linda for the heads up.

Poster Love

Just perusing one of my more frequently checked blogs, the always intriguing and titillating Popcorn and Sticky Floors (run by TIFF's Midnight Madness programmer extraordinaire Colin Geddes), and was inspired to start snooping around the internets for some cool film posters. I came across some real gems, as you'll see below. Click on the images for high-res glory - I swear you won't get Rickroll'd.

First up we've got a lurid and powerful Spanish-language one sheet for the 1971 Spielberg-helmed made for TV thriller Duel:

Next, we've got the rather beautiful Garden of Eden-inspired original 1922 Swedish poster for cult classic Haxan:

A couple of thought-provoking and striking Polish posters for a pair of Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan and Onibaba, respectively:

And finally (for now), a Gustav Klimt-inspired poster for the 1970 Italian production of Dorian Gray, run through a psychedelic lens:

This is some serious gourmet shit!

I rewatched Pulp Fiction tonight for the first time since it's initial release 15 years ago, wondering how well it had aged. Would it retain the vitality and pulsing energy I remembered? So much has been written about this film in the intervening years that I feel I've seen it more than once but to my recollection this is only my second time through.

Precious few stones remain unturned relating to Pulp Fiction's plot, dialogue and unusual timeline. It's been analysed, dissected, reviewed and summarized to death. That being said, I've not read much about how it fits into the tapestry of film history - specifically with the benefit of some hindsight now - so I thought I'd take a stab at assessing its longer term influence, how it relates and compares to other films that enjoyed huge success on their initial release and what, if anything, is Pulp Fiction's legacy.

Film making moves in cycles. Styles change, plot devices evolve, scope and scale expand and contract moving in and out of popular film making convention. Big films can nudge the film industry in a different direction, giant films can change that direction on a dime. Some films find huge audiences at the end of a cycle and become representative of that period winding down. Gone With The Wind comes to mind. Others are the catalyst for a new direction and represent the start of a new chapter in the movies. Star Wars. Some gigantic films don't fall in either camp and seem to exist outside of the Hollywood dream factory assembly line becoming brilliant creative cul-de-sacs. Apocalypse Now.

I'm not sure where Pulp Fiction fits in these terms. It certainly influenced a great number of subsequent films but it hasn't been expanded on in that way Blade Runner and Alien built on the Star Wars phenomena. I'm tempted to put Pulp Fiction in the same category as a Bonnie and Clyde. Both films were shockingly violent to their respective audiences and changed how graphically violence could be presented. In retrospect, both seem tame in relative terms by today's standards. Which brings me to a couple of observations about Pulp Fiction from my second pass last night. Firstly, it is far less visually violent than I remembered. The gruesome Uma Thurman adrenalin money shot to the heart is actually played off-screen. I could have sworn that we saw the needle going in, but Tarantino uses the reactions of the others, plus the earlier shot of Vincent shooting up (where we do) and a touch of Rosanna Arquette's prior piercing discussion to make us think we've seen the needle driven deep into Uma's heart. We haven't. I had the same sense that we were exposed to far more gore when Vincent accidently shoots the guy in the back seat. There's almost nothing of that on screen. It's strange how we rework scenes in our reflections on film to suit what we think we saw rather than what we did see.

To be honest, I was a little surprised how well Pulp Fiction has stood the test of time. Dialogue remains central to the film, so much so that I'm not sure exactly what its genre is. It isn't really a crime film, although crime and gangsters are central to the plot line. It isn't really a black comedy, a thriller or a drama either. It sort of defies categorization. We enter (and exit) the story in the middle of the plot, although the dialogue and story arc are contiguous. The actors are nearly flawless throughout including the insufferable Tarantino himself, who uses his extended cameo as a vehicle to project how much he loves actors. He fawns over Harvey Kietel's cleanup man, The Wolf. Travolta briefly has his magic back. Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis have never been better. The film, however, belongs to Sam Jackson, who delivers in the role of a lifetime as Jules.

I'd argue that Pulp Fiction remains the film that has changed cinema the most in the last two decades. It is probably the masterpiece of our time and I'd be interested to hear any suggestions on other recent films that challenge this contention. I think it's interesting that it was released in 1995 too. It might be said that Casino, also from 1995, marked the end of a 20+ year cycle that started with The Godfather and Pulp Fiction ushered in the next gangster cycle. As I write this I'm tempted to expand upon the idea of films starting and ending cycles in a separate piece. There seems something to that.

If you haven't seen Pulp Fiction in a while, do yourself a favour and revisit it. You might be surprised just how well made it is. It might be a little early to define its final legacy, but Pulp Fiction is distilling into our generation's Citizen Kane, and with good reason.

Sporgey

A tale of two sports

I checked out a couple of new sports-themed films last weekend, one a doc, one a feature, both superb. The doc, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, takes its title from a Harvard newspaper following the match, and is a gripping re-telling and remembering of an epic 1968 college football game between (surprise!) Harvard and Yale. Both teams had gone undefeated in the regular season and were to play a tie-breaker to determine playoff status (I think). Through a series of interviews with surviving players from both sides and actual game footage spliced between, director Kevin Rafferty (of Atomic Cafe fame) weaves a suspenseful tale that leads to the near-laughably unbelievable conclusion. The game footage is fantastic, but what sticks are the interviews with the one-time players. We are shown a range of personalities from Ivy League lawyer types to working class heroes, all lifted to glory on the gridiron, but somehow faded and human in present day. There is, in that sense, a bit of nostalgic melancholy to the interviews, but it never veers into saccharine territory. The film is well-paced, and you don't have to be a football fan to appreciate it as a wonderfully crafted narrative that a thousand Hollywood hacks could only dream of scripting. Well worth the time investment, and highly recommended. Immediately after I finished watching, I went and bought a copy for my dad, who is a big football fan, and with whom I'm certain the film will resonate much more. I can't wait to show it to him.
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The other film I watched is the highly acclaimed baseball drama Sugar, which charts the rise of a young man through Dominican baseball and into American professional ball. I admit I picked this up only because of the baseball theme, but as I watched, I realized that the focus is less on the sport, and more on the man, and the film has far less in common with Rookie of the Year than it does with Latin American films El Norte, City of God, and Maria Full of Grace. An excellently acted drama that just flirts with sentimentality, but never crosses the line, mainly due to the performance of Algenis Perez Soto, who plays Miguel 'Sugar' Santos. The cast of side characters comes and goes fluidly, and the brief glimpses of simple kindness shown to Sugar had me thinking a bit of Wendy and Lucy. I liked the honesty (or, rather, what I can only imagine to be honesty) of the scenario - not every rising star makes it to the top. In fact, far more often fizzle out far before they even catch a glimpse, whether due to personal demons, lack of talent, lack of confidence, or a combination thereof. Yes, Sugar has an upbeat ending, but it's probably not what most people would expect. Because of that (and a bit of swearing and a very tame, show-nothing sex scene), I fear it's gonna be a tough sell - increasingly permissive (though, oddly, not at home) parents will likely balk at the PG-13 rating, and serious film fans will likely shy away from what they perceive (wrongly) to be "just a sports film". Both sides lose, though, because Sugar has much to offer - a touching and truthful drama where "going to the show" isn't always getting to the big leagues, and in which the main character comes to the hard realization that sometimes dreams are simply just that.

Inju

What an amazing pulp movie. Anyone seen it and care to comment?

Dropkick is: The Reader Beater

The Reader is one of those films that is good enough that you won't turn it off before its conclusion, yet bad enough to make you feel like you just wasted two hours on mediocrity.

The Reader is your run of the mill Academy Award fodder. The script is melodramatic and unrealistic. The characters don't react naturally to any situation given to them but rather do what would seem the most dramatic. The music is droll. The cinematography is pretentious. And the acting is heavy handed. Mix all these elements up with just a dash of some good ol' German Holocaust guilt and you got yourselves an award winner baby.

Kate Winslet won every film award on the planet for this performance and certainly she is the best part of the film but this is far from her best work. Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind is a great example of her range as an actress. Her character in The Reader (Hanna Schmitz) is neopolitan acting its finest. When i say neopolitan i speak of the ice cream of course, there is a range of three different emotions, that Winslet can blend together if she likes but also does a great job of seperating them enough to make us feel like we were served three seperate scoops from three different places.

I wanted to watch this film because i wanted to get a better sense of our new release wall as of late, as i've been finding it harder to recommend films to customers. Most people want their films to meet 3 critera.
1. They want something recent
2. They want something in English
3. They want something that has at least one well known actress or actor in it

So in conclusion this is the perfect film to recommend, its boring and long, and quite meaningless. It gives one the idea they watched something with substance while what you're really getting is one long excercise in vanilla filmmaking.
The Reader is like if The Lives Of Others was made with British actors putting on annoying German accents and rather than being more sensitive with the material were all trying to win Oscars.
yeah, recommended for the callow.

"And you know what the worst part is? I NEVER LEARNED TO READ!!!"

When in Rome.... as they say.

With English-language TV here limited to Bloomberg and CNBC, we grabbed a few movies at a local used DVD store to watch in our spare time, the first being the biggest box office success in French history, Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis ('08). We've got a copy of this at both stores but hadn't got around it watching back at home.

It's a little hard to figure out why this film became so popular in France. It's pleasant enough but not much else. The story revolves around a postal manager from the south transferred to the north of France, a kind of Franco-Newfoundland where everyone lisps and says “Schticks” instead of “Sticks”.

It's a a somewhat cliched fish-out-of-water tale that doesn't translate all that well to other languages because the running joke is tied to the strange dialect of the region. You manage to get the drift well enough but there just isn't enough meat on the rest of the movie to sustain interest. It's sweet, a little bland and a lot sentimental.

Because I'm a giant loser, I spent a little time scanning DVD's at a couple of shops, including the huge Virgin Mega-Store on the Champ Elysees and couldn't find much that wasn't available at home. Those titles that were new to me didn't have subtitles so it would have been a little pointless getting them. I find this lack of subtitling a real head-scratcher considering the size of the German/English/Spanish language market. How hard would it have been to add a few subtitle tracks? A poser.

Sporgey

Dispatches

Paris – a city in love with cinema

Cinema is everywhere in this city. On any given day, upwards of 600 different movies are playing in hundreds of theatres and forums around the city. There are 108 English-language films playing today for example, from Carrie ('76) to Cheri ('09). Cult favourites from The Bride of Frankenstein ('35) and The Fearless Vampire Killers ('67) to Taxi Driver ('73) and Psycho ('60) are playing... but so are a block of relatively obscure movies such as Robert Aldrich's Grissom Gang ('71), the excellent Karl Malden- directed Crisis ('50), and The Music Lovers ('70), a strange Ken Russell-directed film about Tchaikovsky's life and music.

The French seem to be in love with the Americana represented in film while simultaneously despising all things American. It's one of those infuriating and wonderfully hypocritical French things that has no rational explanation. This is a culture old and strong enough to withstand the onslaught of endless American marketing, taking exactly what it wants from other cultures while maintaining its own. There are, for example, somewhere around 25,000 pizza joints and 300 Irish Pubs in Paris but no Italians or Irish people to be seen. American film would seem to fall into the same category.

French Cinema is a separate and sacred thing. It's odd how the national film industries of other countries raise and fall but the French just never stop cranking out quality films, year in and year out. That so many of the great film makers have hailed from this country is a testament to the nurturing and supportive audience that exists here (and the uncontested government funding that naturally follows).

With Cannes and TIFF coming to represent the two premier yearly film festivals, it's interesting to compare the two cities and how they approach film. The fact that Cannes is held 650km from the Paris is telling. Parisians just don't need the attention (even though they're at the epicentre of French film culture, their festival is at the beach) whereas Torontonians are validated by TIFF and thrilled to be the centre of something for two weeks every year. That being said, Toronto might just be the film festival capital of the world. It's become our forte. In a nutshell, I think Parisians are film fans and Torontonians are festival fans.

Unfortunately, TIFF has been changing over the last decade – from a festival that showcased film, to a festival that showcases celebrity. That isn't to say that Toronto isn't knee-deep in interesting and unique films for those 2 weeks (because TIFF continues - though sheer volume and it's interesting side-programming - to attract a terrific mix of the best and worst that cinema has on offer), but rather to point out that the focus of the festival (and perhaps more importantly, the media coverage surrounding it) has morphed into a star-gazing event that has made the festival financially stronger, but culturally cheapened it. Cannes seems mired in its own set of problems lately.

As Toronto continues to develop into a centre of film appreciation, we could take a page or two from Paris. TIFF's excellent Cinematique is a step in that direction offering up year-round access to a terrific cross-section of important films from various directors near and far, past and present. What we seem to lack is a mix of commercial theatrical screenings of films from the past offered for the sole purpose of enjoying the film. Toronto just doesn't seem to have the cultural gravity to see something from the past as worthy of money from the present. Andy from the Fox Theatre in the east end says they tank every time they do a classic other than Casablanca. Can you imagine how many would show up for The Grissom Gang? It's possible that we Torontonians favour watching our classics on DVD instead of out at the theatre but I'd hazard a guess that the new-is-better consumer culture of North America plays a big role too. We've all had people ask why some $60.00 Criterion title isn't a $0.99-for-a-month rental. “But it's so old?....”

We've got a little ways to go in T.O. to catch up to the vaguely preposterous French in terms of film sophistication. Every major city in the western world seems to have a hugely successful Film Noir festival except the city where festivals work best, our own. Once we build an greater appreciation for films from the recent and distant past, we'll have it all. One step at a time.

Sporgey

My mats better be straight.....

Just wondering if the mats are in a giant heap outside the FBW door. Hope you're all well.

I need a mat-cam.

We entered Terminal 3 at Pearson and popped out of the Paris Metro 150' from our hotel 10 hours later without ever going outside. My phone automatically works and we're listening to Jazz FM from Toronto on iTunes 5997km and 6 time zones away.

Got a cat feeding update on my phone from Aleks tonight.

Man, the world just keeps getting smaller.

Sporgey