Category: Film Festivals

[Also written while flying home Sunday night.]

Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5 in no particular order except, well, chronological:

Haunted Gold, a very early John Wayne movie about a haunted gold mine. John Wayne hadn’t learned how to throw punches yet. There was much booing of the insanely racist dialogue.

Return of Captain Marvel, an old adventure serial. Cheesy as hell. I was not too unhappy when it was cut short for the arrival of…

Return of the King. Booyah. I talked about this already.

The General. The live band was really good. If you’ve never seen Buster Keaton, you should, cause he rules. Mel Gibson mentioned, during the Q&A session, that he could connect with Keaton in a way he never could with Chaplin, and I think that’s just about right.

Oldboy, a deeply transgressive South Korean revenge flick. It is unclear if it was good once you strip away the transgressive bits. I dunno, I liked it, but I’m pretty sure I liked it for shock value. There’s this trend of sorta torture cinema in Asia, and sometimes it’s good, and sometimes the whole point seems to be watching people suffer.

Nid De Guêpes, a French action flick. Basically a remake of Assault on Precinct 13. Really freaking cool. Good urban combat tactics, tense feel, stereotypes for characters but it’s not the sort of movie where you care. I liked this one a lot; I’m beginning to think I need to get me a region-free DVD player and start some serious exploration of modern French cinema.

Ginger Snaps: Unleashed. I haven’t seen Ginger Snaps, but the guy next to us said this was totally different in feel than the first one. I’ve gotten the impression that the original was more feminist, which I do not mean in a pejorative manner. This was still fun. Goth girl werewolf gets two thumbs up from me.

Switchblade Romance, a French horror flick. Very very tense until the plot twist; then still tense but you’re wondering about the plot holes. The actual French title is Haute Tension, which translates to “high tension,” so god knows where “Switchblade Romance” came from. That kinda bugged me all movie long, but I was getting pretty damned punchy, so you know.

Teenage Mother, a sixties exploitation flick. Don’t be seeking this one out, unless you’re a huge Fred Willard fan. We had a little “whot’s hoppening?” call going on in our row whenever ol’ Fred showed up. Also the Swedish sex ed teacher was a babe. Towards the end of the movie, in deeply explotative style, they cut in an entire five minute educational film reel depicting a real childbirth (with forceps), on the thinnest of pretexts. The bit where the doctor hauls out a pair of scissors to give the kid a little more room to come out was the worst. You may, if you are a woman, mock me savagely for my queasy stomach.

Undead, which is an Australian zombie flick filmed on about no budget at all. It should have ended earlier. I think there were about twenty minutes of endings which made varying amounts of sense and mostly wound up as unimportant anyway. Still, I liked the Australian crazy country boy backflipping pistol firing bad motherfucker.

And, finally, The Passion of the Christ. Again, already talked about this.

Oh — I should also mention one preview, for Sky-Captain and the World of Tomorrow. That movie is going to kick ten kinds of ass. The trailer will be in front of Return of the King, so you’ll all see for yourselves. And while I’m mentioning trailers, I must applaud Harry’s decision to show the Stunt Rock trailer again. Also good: the Bodyguard trailer, the one with Sonny Chiba, not the Kevin Costner thing. The entire theater was chanting “Chiba!” during that one. Booyah!

Anyway. Compared to BNAT 2, the highs were higher — Snatch can’t compare to Return of the King — but the variety of BNAT 2 was distinctly better. There was really a whole lot of gore and violence and pain this year, particularly once we got past The General. Teenage Mother was a slight reprieve after four straight hard-hitting movies, and then it was back to the blood.

Originally, Harry had Return of the King coming last. I think that would have worked better. In a lot of ways, Passion tied together the violence of the preceeding movies; it gave the cinematic gore an odd sort of context. No cheering as the blood flowed. If that sort of redemptive experience had flowed into the uplifting Return of the King, the pacing of the whole thing would have worked better. Mind you, I still would have liked a couple more comedies.

On the other hand, this is nitpicking about the color of the icing on a tasty muffin. I had a blast of a time, and I sincerely hope I don’t have to wait three years for the next one. This was absolutely unquestionably all kinds of fun.

Did I mention Peter Jackson and Mel Gibson showed up? Holy shit.

[Written while flying home Sunday night.]

Ah, Butt-Numb-A-Thon, thy name is really hard to explain to friends when they ask you where you’re going for the weekend. It’s all worth it, though.

I think rather than do the strict chronological rendition, I’ll talk about the two insane surprises first.

Yes, we saw Return of the King. It was absolutely unquestionably magnificent. It was head and shoulders above Fellowship. It’s not perfect; in my eyes, Peter Jackson didn’t quite resolve the Eowyn/Arwen/Aragorn triangle cleanly. But that is quite literally my only caveat. Everything else was perfect, perfect, perfect. At the time I write this, I still haven’t slept. I’m sure there are better words for this movie. I just don’t have them, right now. I counted seven ovations during the movie, and as it wound to a conclusion, all you could hear in the theater were people crying. Perfect.

Then Harry brought out Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillipa Boyens.

Yeah, no shit. The minds behind the trilogy, right there up on stage in a little 250 person auditorium. This surprise was met with serious approbation. The three of them answered a few questions and then settled down with the rest of us to watch The General with a live band providing music. That was pretty awesome too. Afterwards, Peter Jackson gave Harry the smoke grenade that Robert Armstrong uses to take down King Kong, and the New Zealanders all flew off to Berlin for the next stop on the press junket.

For the record, Peter Jackson thinks Bombadil fans are dumb. He also regrets leaving out the barrow-wight scene. He thinks the extended versions and the theatrical versions are both valid, and he doesn’t prefer one or the other; he cuts the theatrical versions for movie theaters and the extended versions for DVD viewing, because he thinks the experience is different. He appears to be kind of tired of talking about leaving out the Saruman death scene. And some goob asked if Peter did the battle scenes while Phillipa and Fran did the emotional stuff. The women explained pretty gleefully that Peter’s really a chick and is the most emotional of them all.

OK. About sixteen hours after that, for the final movie of the evening, we got our other huge surprise. Everyone in the theater was convinced we were gonna finish up with Kill Bill Volume 2. Tarantino’s a friend of Harry’s, it’d been a night of revenge movies and gore, so what else could Harry show?

Answer: The Passion of the Christ, by Mel Gibson. I believe we’re the first secular audience to see the thing. It’s a work in progress; he has special effects to add, and the music was temporary, and so on. Still, it was the complete story.

I’n not really competent to judge the accuracy of the controversy swirling around this movie. I was falling asleep all through it, waking up and seeing Jim Caviel as Christ being scourged on the screen, wounds covering his body. Surreal experience. He certainly depicts the Jewish leaders as cruel and merciless. I don’t think, based on what filtered through my brain, that I’d call it anti-semitic. You can’t tell that story without the corrupt establishment and the suffering of Christ. Gibson didn’t, in my eyes, use that corruption as evidence that the Jewish religion is corrupt. It’s not a preachy movie, either. It’s very much a movie about his faith, and I admired it’s honesty and conviction more than I thought I would.

After Passion, Harry brought Mel Gibson out to do a Q&A. 250 person theater, right there up on stage, yeah. I’d been more or less awake for 24 hours, and I’d just seen a brutal unflinching picture of the suffering of Christ on the cross. And Mel Gibson was up there answering questions. Surreal doesn’t begin to describe it.

He seems like a really nice guy. He’s really religous, and he’s not afraid to show it, but he didn’t preach. He talked about how everyone’s been wounded sometime in their lives, and he’d certainly been wounded, and he healed his wounds through meditating on the wounds of Christ. Passion is his meditation. He didn’t want to preach, he just wanted to talk about things that matter to him, and his God happens to matter to him a lot. And he can afford to talk pretty loudly.

Someone asked if he felt like he was getting too old for this shit, and he grinned and said it sure felt like that sometimes. I gotta say, for a deeply religious guy who’s finishing his core statement of belief, he did a great job of connecting to a pretty cynical atheistic crowd. It took balls to show us an unfinished print of his movie, but he did it.

There’s a lot more to be said about this movie and Mel Gibson. There’re plenty of things about him that disturb me. However, I am damned well going to give him credit for bringing his unfinished movie to a skeptical secular audience and volunteering to answer our questions about it. He wasn’t there to push his views on us and I can’t help but think that talking is one of the most important things we can do to bridge the gap. If Gibson has anti-semitic beliefs, he’s not going to change his mind because of the ADL. He’s more likely to change his mind because of honest conversations. OK, my preaching is done; I may write more about this later.

A while into the Gibson Q&A, me and Jamie had to sneak out to get to the airport on time. The sneaking didn’t quite work, so now I can say that Mel Gibson has made a wisecrack on my behalf.

Hm. This is intensely long, so I’ll move my play by play of the night into a separate post.

I appear to have survived Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5. Barely. Sorry to anyone who was hoping for updates from the theater; the security was exceedingly tight and I wasn’t allowed to bring in my laptop. Or my cell phone, or my pager, for that matter. I got stuck in Houston due to the New England snow storm, but I’m alive and more or less well in Boston today.

A lot of lengthy posts about what I saw and Austin and so on are coming up. In the meantime, here’s Nordling on BNAT and Harry on BNAT.

Now, this feels good. It is my great pleasure to — well, let’s be honest, to brag — that I will be in Austin, Texas on the weekend of December 5th to attend Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5.

It’s a 24 hour movie marathon, programmed by Harry Knowles. I made it to the second one after reading the report on the first one, and I had a hell of a time. I was sad to miss number 3 and I was mournful about missing number 4.

But I made the cut for BNAT 5. Can’t even begin to express how pleased I am. 24 hours of new movies, old movies, weird movies, freaky movies, and bad movies. A chance we’ll see Return of the King.

It’ll be the second geekiest thing I do all year (hey, I went to GenCon), but it’s gonna be a great time.