Month: July 2006

It’s a bad sign when the promotional material for a movie spends a lot of time talking about how it was shot under adverse conditions. Say, the whole movie was filmed in 8 days several miles from “civilization” in a cabin with no electricity in the middle of the winter. Me, I’m hard-pressed to say you’ve left civilization if you’re close enough to get back via snowmobile in less than an hour, but that’s me. Either way, the shoot shouldn’t be the most important thing about a movie.

The promotional material for Subject Two also talks a lot about how it’s a new take on the Frankenstein legend, and that’s true enough. It’s the strength of the film. Mad scientists, nanotechnology, and hints of darker stuff are pretty effective. The concepts are great, and the setting is pretty good too.

However, the acting is wooden and the script doesn’t inject the concepts with life. Further, the movie squanders its sense of isolation a little more than halfway through when a visitor shows up. There’s a nasty little twist at the very end, but that’s the only place where the movie shows any sense of humor. It’s a regrettable waste of a pretty decent idea.

Grade: C-.

It’s a bad sign when the promotional material for a movie spends a lot of time talking about how it was shot under adverse conditions. Say, the whole movie was filmed in 8 days several miles from “civilization” in a cabin with no electricity in the middle of the winter. Me, I’m hard-pressed to say you’ve left civilization if you’re close enough to get back via snowmobile in less than an hour, but that’s me. Either way, the shoot shouldn’t be the most important thing about a movie.

The promotional material for Subject 2 also talks a lot about how it’s a new take on the Frankenstein legend, and that’s true enough. It’s the strength of the film. Mad scientists, nanotechnology, and hints of darker stuff are pretty effective. The concepts are great, and the setting is pretty good too.

However, the acting is wooden and the script doesn’t inject the concepts with life. Further, the movie squanders its sense of isolation a little more than halfway through when a visitor shows up. There’s a nasty little twist at the very end, but that’s the only place where the movie shows any sense of humor. It’s a regrettable waste of a pretty decent idea.

Grade: C-.

The program book makes all these wild claims about how The Echo (aka Sigaw) is the most gorgeous thing since sliced bread. If they’re to be believed, Yam Laranas, who wrote, directed, and shot the film, is a peer of Christopher Doyle in his cinematography. The praise is nigh on fulsome.

And as you no doubt knew with an opening paragraph like that, it’s pretty much accurate. The Echo is a ghost story set in a ramshackle old condo complex. It’s minimalist in cast, without ever putting too many people on screen at once; it’s one of those movies where the haunted building is perhaps the most important cast member. The cinematography has a key role, thusly. It bears the burden well. Almost every shot uses natural light, and Laranas must have had perfect timing and an unerring sense for appropriate times in order to make the long decrepit hallways and looming doorways as perfect as he did.

This is paired with a deft sense of horror. The Echo is, in fact, a pretty scary movie, which is a neat accomplishment considering that nothing ever lays a hand on our protagonist. The tension ratchets up nicely over the repeated course of a circular haunting, as if the worn patterns of the ghosts were building momentum until they must by the laws of physics break their wheel and careen into the lives of those around them.

When this played in L.A., Laranas was pretty much an instant hit. He’s signed up for a Hollywood remake, he got an agent, and from his blog (linked above) he’s pretty much on top of the world. I hope he keeps making movies with this kind of talent.

Grade: A- (and I’m not actually a big ghost movie fan).

(Yeah, it was Scandinavia night up at the old film festival.)

So Pusher 3 is advertised as a crime drama, which I guess is accurate in that it’s not a comedy or a thriller and it’s set in a criminal milieu. On the other hand, before the movie Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, told us that he was inspired by reality TV. That’s a lot more of the feel right there.

It’s a bleak night in the life of Milo, Copenhagen drug dealer. He’s attending NA meetings to try and kick his habit, cooking dinner for his daughter’s 25th birthday party, and dealing with the unexpected arrival of 10,000 Ecstasy tabs instead of the heroin he’d expected. If that sounds like there’s a comic aspect — yeah, there is, but it’s used to highlight the empty grind that’s Milo’s life.

His cooking and his human interactions are a tired hulk of a man bulling his way through an existence he doesn’t particularly enjoy. He doesn’t want to engage in the sudden bursts of violence that come later in the movie, but he’s got to do it. There’s no path that’d take him out of the swamp.

Not so much plot. It’s a slice of life; it’s reality TV focusing on criminals. Things happen, and Milo doesn’t particularly change as a result of them. It’s Zlatko Buric’s performance as Milo that binds the movie together. He’s ugly, tall, and weary in every moment of film. Refn isn’t afraid of the long wordless reaction shot; Buric bears out the director’s trust. This was probably my favorite performance of the festival so far.

Grade: A-.

Storm is an odd duck of a movie. It’s a psychological thriller about memories and childhood dressed in a supernatural, apocalyptic thriller’s clothing. The opening is a classic Matrix-inspired chase scene, right down to the tough female protagonist, and our shallow hero — DD — slips right into the Neo role. But then the midsection of the movie lurches over into Memento territory and the movie never really recovers.

The problem for me was that I couldn’t bring myself to want DD to be redeemed. Hm; the more I think about it, the more I think Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein (our writers/directors) were trying to do the Matrix all over again. But DD is no Neo, and his sins are not as easily forgivable for me as the movie might have liked them to be, which left me detached from the movie’s emotional core.

And then there’s all that comic book and video game imagery. After a lot of post-movie conversation with S., I couldn’t decide if those images were hanging on a coherent core structure, or if they were just thrown in to look cool. Why does Promise appear to have a real comic book existence? Who knows? My benefit of the doubt theory is that she and her opponent are too grand, too awesome, too angelic to be seen as they are by human eyes; that the comics and the video games are the filters through which DD and others see them. There’s nothing to prove or disprove that theory, though.

Still, it was a gorgeous movie. The sense of style was solid without getting in the way of the narrative. Apparently the whole thing was filmed on three million dollars, which staggers me. So it was enjoyable, just not entirely filling.

Grade: B-.

A special note to someone, anyone who can help:

Please to make sure the Theater Hall Concordia seats are repaired before next year’s festival. While I imagine they’re not so bad for an hour-long college lecture, they are really kicking my ass for six hours of movies in a row. Ow.

The Gravedancers is a home for bad acting, in no way saved by poor directing, a bad screenplay, and half-hearted special effects.

The bad acting was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was the regrettable tendency towards teasing direction — in a horror flick, I tend to feel that shock jump cuts should have some kind of underlying rationale. Jump cut to the monster’s perspective, jump cut to reveal a new perspective, but don’t jump cut for cheap thrills. Alas. By the time the second or third monster-eye cam shot turned out not to be a monster’s point of view at all, I’d decided that Mike Mendez wasn’t going to be particularly honest with his scares, and a lot of his tricks for scaring me went out the window.

The setup — dance on a grave, earn the hatred of the inhabitants — wasn’t bad. But it was wasted. Three monsters is too many to distinguish if you’re not even gonna begin to differentiate them until two thirds of the way through the movie. Bah.

Oh, and some of you will remember Clare Kramer as Glory in Buffy. Don’t expect too much from her. Sorry.

Grade: C-.

OK, so, you are probably thinking the same thing I was thinking, which is to say, “Ha ha ha, a horror movie about mutant cows. That’ll be a hoot. Possibly laden with mordant Irish wit.”

Do not be fooled like I was. Holy shit. Take the mutant cows very fucking seriously indeed.

It turns out, who’d have known, that when you film on a ramshackle failing Irish farm with a limited cast, and you get the classic horror tropes of disease and nature gone Gigeresque wrong and slow-mounting tension right, and you threaten the world because one stupid genetic researcher forgets that science will mess you up something fierce, and you do all that stuff? Yeah, that is pretty visceral stuff right there and it is indeed capable of scaring the crap out of you and no, the mutant cows are NOT FUNNY.

At all.

Seriously. Best monster SF/horror flick since Alien. Farm, spaceship, it’s all the same in the end, which is none too pleasant, let me tell you. It creeped me out a lot. There was nothing wrong with this movie.

Grade: I can’t grade it right now because I’m too edgy cause fuck, mutant cows. But probably an A+.

Yah, so, J-horror, long black hair as a signifier of angry spirits, everyday object as a carrier of the horror…

Red shoes, actually. Except these were more fuchsia. And yes, the idea is to evoke Hans Christian Andersen, but it didn’t work out very well. Lots of ballet, but no horrific mandate to dance forever, more’s the pity.

The twist, as seems to be obligatory in Korean J-horror influenced movies, has to do with family dynamics. Sadly, the director didn’t manage to overlap the ghost story and the family horror story at all, which meant that the last twenty minutes of the movie felt like an overdone coda: “Ah, you’ve resolved the ghosts? Now we will show you the real ending, because the dramatic tension we just built up and resolved was only the beginning!”

So I coulda done without that. I mean, it wasn’t abysmal, but it sure wasn’t good.

Grade: C+.

OK, so the whole theory about unpleasant people trapped in an unpleasant situation making for bad movies? It needs a revision. Wilderness taught me that it’s all about seeing ‘em get their comeuppance — which means, actually, that it’s all about having characters who you’re invested in, whether you like ‘em or not.

The reformatory lads of Wilderness were pretty much the latter, so there’s a lot of joy to be had from seeing them stuck on an island with something dark and terrible stalking them. Said joy was aided and abetted by excellent acting on everyone’s part.

It maybe started a little slow; I think we could have cut more quickly to the island, and the first set of fake scares was clumsy. Then again, they may have been worth it for the plot complication that resulted, and in any case things start to move really fast when they start to move. Excellent sense of tension, excellent action.

And it’s nice to see a movie that isn’t trying to be about the end of the world or superspies or any such. Wilderness is a small movie about a personal and particular set of issues. It doesn’t need to be more than that, and it cuts right to the bone. Succinct.

Grade: A.