Film Festivals

The Independent Film Festival 2005 is coming: April 21st through April 24th. Tight schedule. Just about all the narrative movies look good, and I hear great things about the documentary Murderball (original). I’m also intrigued by The Fall of Fujimori (original). OK, let’s rough out a schedule, here… Friday 5:15 PM, Somerville: Abel Raises Cain (work permitting) 8 PM, Somerville: Blackballed (Rob Corddry stars) 10:30, Brattle: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things Saturday 2 PM, Coolidge: Spew: The World of Competitive Debate (original) ...

I’m being a completist, yeah. Before One Missed Call, we saw trailers for Gozu, which was completely weird and stylized; Haute Tension, except it was under the nom de plume Switchblade Romance and dubbed into English (ick); a samurai movie which I badly want to see, but which I did not catch the name of, so all I know is that there’s a young woman who apparently trains to be a samurai when her… brother? is killed; Memories of Murder, a Korean movie that looks like it’s about a bunch of friends who share a terrible secret; and Dead and Breakfast, a zombie comedy. Looks like David Carradine is in Dead and Breakfast. ...

The San Francisco International Film festival film schedule is up. There are a lot of movies I wouldn’t miss if I lived in San Francisco; in particular, I’d recommend Layer Cake and Murderball (based on word of mouth), but it all looks good. Via Twitch.

The Brattle begins their LA Noir film series tonight with Los Angeles Plays Itself. It’s a documentary/clip show about the way LA has been portrayed in film over the decades. In a weird kind of a way, it sounds like Ackroyd’s London in cinematic form; Los Angeles is a character in this movie, not just a subject. Also showing over the course of the next week or so: Chinatown (Jack), Criss Cross (not the boy band), This Gun For Hire (Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd), Point Blank (Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson), Collateral (Tom Cruise), and To Live And Die In L.A. (everybody Wang Chung tonight). Sweet lineup. Must viewing.

Here’s the plan: FanTasia 2005 (original) takes place from July 7th to July 24th of this year. I’m going for either one or two weeks of that period; haven’t decided which yet, won’t decide until the schedule is out, which will be sometime in June. I’ll be renting a furnished one-bedroom near the venues, and anyone who I know and don’t mind sharing space with is welcome to come crash there for any or all of my visit. I figure it’s my God-given duty to inflict weird and fantastic movies on people, see. ...

Every now and again I really miss living in San Francisco (original).

For the curious, the Butt-Numb-A-Thon schedule this year as of around 3 AM in total: Willy McBean & the Magic Machine A Series of Unfortunate Events The Black Swan Blonde Venus Miss Sadie Thompson Phantom of the Opera (2004) The Mutations Toys Are Not For Children Layer Cake Ong-Bak Kung Fu Hustle Can’t say I’m kicking myself for not trying to make it this year. Decent program, but perhaps not worth the physical cost.

I gotta remember that two Takashi Miike movies in quick succession can have unusual effects. Fortunately, Deadly Outlaw Rekka wasn’t the disturbingly transgressive experience that One Missed Call was, so I survived the doubleheader without too much pain. One Missed Call first. The theater was packed. The first hour of the movie was a straight-faced satire of the Japanese technohorror genre ( Ringu, Ju-on, Uzumaki, etc.). One by one, the cell phones belonging to a group of attractive college students ring. The call comes from three days in the future and was made by the person getting the call at the exact moment they die. No matter what they do, at the moment the call was placed, they die. The imagery is stolen from the rest of the genre with glee: we’ve got the tight focus on the medium of horror, the long flowing hair appearing from off-frame, the half-seen spirit in grainy photos (this time from the cell phones) — all that good stuff. ...

I have achieved very little of the Boston Fantastic Film Festival, to my regret: two weeks of extended brutal workload at work is to blame. I was late to Infernal Affairs on Friday, late enough so that I decided to recover instead of seeing the movie — I was up late Thursday thanks to Saw. and since I didn’t leave work until 11:30 PM on Wednesday I had no reserves. I skipped Appleseed and The Bottled Fool on Saturday in hopes that I’d have some margin left today. I may have been wrong. ...

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is scheduled (original) and for a second-tier fantastic film festival, this is a very impressive lineup. My thoughts on what’s worth seeing for who will come later, but I do want to note in particular Infernal Affairs and Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. I’m also very intrigued by the Nesbit adaptation, Five Children and It, which stars Kenneth Branagh and features Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.