Chilean director Nicolas Lopez first came to Austin in 2005 for SXSW with his feature film Promedio Rojo in tow. That film was about a fictional comic-book nerd named Roberto Rodriguez who vies for the attention of the hot new girl at school while trying to bolster his self esteem. While Lopez was in town, he convinced producer Elizabeth Avellan (producing partner and ex-wife of the real-life filmmaker Robert Rodriguez) to watch the movie, and she liked it so much that she agreed to have the studio work on the CGI effects for his next feature. That film ended up being Santos, which is another tribute to geekery. It’s about a lowly comic-book nerd who grows up to become a successful comic book artist, and actually finds out that the heroes he’s been creating are real –– and that he has superpowers himself. It’s like Galaxy Quest for the comic-book set. In our full interview with Lopez from Fantastic Fest, learn why he makes his stars gain weight for their roles, why Santos had to be an international co-production, and why he wants to be the Chilean George Lucas.
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As the shit hits the fan on Wall St., a more gradual, but equally serious shake-up is happening in the world of independent film. Paul shares stories from Independent Film Week, a tumultuous clash of ideas about what the future of cinema sans Hollywood will look like.
Karina checks in to tell us about Fantastic Fest. Along with alcohol, karaoke, and BBQ, she’s enjoyed the films Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer.
Choke, the new film based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), comes out tonight. Is this Sundance alum truly provocative cinema, or just the same old thing with some extra sex thrown in?
(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
0:00 - Intro, listener feedback, what independent film of yesteryear made the scales fall from your eyes?
6:23 - Independent Film Week, state of indie film.
18:44 - Karina shares tales from Fantastic Fest.
28:24 - Choke.
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After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So––sorry––but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. That said, I find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lilly. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown-away by it––it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen this week which uses basic genre tropes to delve deeper into everyday human horrors––but if this a new trend, I’ll have more, please.
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Fantastic Fest is hosting four “Secret Screenings” of movies that haven’t been released yet, and the first one unspooled last night to a theater full of people who had no idea what they were about to see. Rian Johnson was in town with a print of his movie The Brothers Bloom, and one lucky audience got to see it several months early.
It’s hard to watch Bloom and not think about the world that Wes Anderson’s films inhabit. Places where people travel by steamship, are always immaculately dressed, and consist of extreme caricatures. Johnson’s first feature Brick had that quality, and The Brothers Bloom has it in spades. It’s a fantasy world that Johnson himself probably wouldn’t mind living in, and I’m sure he’d have a fair share of people willing to follow him. At least one theater full of people last night wouldn’t have minded.
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If distributors came to Fantastic Fest this year looking for the next Timecrimes, and badge holders descended hungry for a peek at the next There Will Be Blood, it’s interesting that one of the most talked about films on the schedule has ended up being not a world premiere, not a surprise preview of an Oscar contender, not an unknown international oddity, and not even, really, a genre film, but a documentary made by an American 25 year-old which has been on the festival circuit for nine months.
And yet, the popularity of I Think We’re Alone Now (otherwise known as The Tiffany Stalker Movie) at Fantastic Fest makes a certain perfect sense, and not just because this audience is accustomed to stories of sexual obsession (usually fictional, usually much gorier). In putting a camera in the faces of two lonely, mentally unwell adults, who are both desperate for the attention but incapable of filtering their stories, director Sean Donnelly has made what could be classified as an exploitation film. But even more appropriate for the venue, it’s an exploitation film tailor-made for anyone familiar with unrequited longing, and it wouldn’t work at all if Donnelly’s genuine care for his subjects didn’t shine through.
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Fantastic Fest announced their film awards late last night, even through we’ve still got three more days of movie watching and alcohol drinking to go. As expected, The Good, The Bad and The Weird took the Audience Award, although JCVD took third place in that category, which continues to baffle me. The much buzzed about Let The Right One In was named best horror film over Donkey Punch and Acolytes, and the Danish film How To Get Rid Of The Others took top award in the Fantastic Features category with Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer in second and third place. Thankfully they gave the wacky and fun Santos a special award in that category.
We’ll have a lot more to say about these films and much more soon, so keep checking back for more festival information and news throughout the week. Heck, I’ve even enjoyed seeing Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at this thing. The complete awards listings can be found after the break.
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In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy (and even a couple of others at this festival), but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.
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It would be an exaggeration to suggest that JT Petty’s The Burrowers goes miles deeper than the hastily-dug graves that play a central role in its plot, but it’s nonetheless one of the more pleasant surprises of Fantastic Fest thus far. Beautifully shot and tightly scripted, it’s the rare Hollywood genre film (bought and paid for by Lionsgate) that’s more concerned with human relationships and behavior than the mysterious supernatural forces that sets the action in motion. Though its narrative definitely turns on the actions of creatures from the unknown, said creatures turn out to be relatively easy to extinguish compared to prejudice and moral decay in the hearts of ordinary men. It plays less like a horror film than a Terrence Malick film, with a mythological MacGuffin designed to reveal dark truths about the men forced to deal with it.
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As Fantastic Fest gains in prominence as a must-attend spot on the festival calendar, the special events organized by Tim League and friends are becoming as notorious as the wide-ranging selection of international genre and exploitation films on the official lineup. From shooting lessons to field trips to far-flung barbeque joints, to multiple karaoke parties and totally unofficial after-after parties in the hotel suites of celebrity attendees, the only criticism of the festival that keeps coming up is that there’s actually too much fun to be had, too much to do. But this is not necessarily a Fantastic Fest-specific problem; with the Alamo Drafthouse chain itself, League has created a year-round home for Too Much Fun for not just cinema nerds, but anyone who likes to wash their pop culture down with copious amounts of beer. This became evident yesterday afternoon when, after a screening of the paraplegic serial killer film Late Bloomer (about which more, later), I snuck out of the Alamo South Lamar to head across town to the Alamo Ritz for Michael Jackson Thrill the World, a sing-a-long, dance-off and drinking contest set to the music video masterpieces of the King of Pop.
But contrary to appearances, the point of the evening, according to host Henri Mazza, was not to have fun. “I don’t care if you have a good time,” he said. “The most important thing tonight is that you learn how to do “Thriller.”
The Alamo is getting together a contingent to try to break the record for the “largest group synchronized “Thriller” Dance,” and they’re also hoping to attach “upwards of 2,000″ “Thriller”-dancing zombies to the back of next month’s Day of the Dead parade. After letting the crowd warm up with a one-minute dance contest (which the young lady above lost in spite of her sartorial dedication to the endeavor) and by singing and dancing along to videos like “Bad” and “Rock With You,” the Alamo brought out a dance teacher to train the wannabe zombies for their future engagements.
More photos, and thoughts on the videos themselves, after the jump.
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Kevin Smith has directed his most emotional film with a decidedly non-emotional title with Zack & Miri Make A Porno. Rife with penis and poop jokes, it’s not really a departure from his entire Askew-niverse, but the film does hit some emotional chords that Smith had only really hit before in Chasing Amy. Granted, I wasn’t a big fan of Clerks 2 (although I loved the original), but I found myself really liking Zack & Miri.
In our in-depth interview, Kevin Smith talks about Jason Mewes’ penis and Ben Affleck’s reaction to it, dealing with the MPAA’s obsession with poop, and how this movie came together. He also talks a bit about his next project, Red State. Don your flak vests and kevlar helmets, because there’s quite a few f-bombs in here, as well as a slew of spoilers from Zack & Miri.
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It’s been 15 years since Jennifer Lynch directed Boxing Helena, and the intervening years have seemingly cooled her directorial genes, because Surveillance is much easier to swallow, although the subject matter is still upsetting to the stomach. The film takes an interesting premise and manages it to cram it through a meat grinder until you’re left with something that you wouldn’t really want to eat in the first place. Rather than the commentary on surveillance that the film starts to establish in the beginning, you’re left with what feels like an homage to Natural Born Killers.
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Before you go into fits of apoplexy thinking that this is a review of the Tom Berenger film from 1996, rest assured that this The Substitute is a Danish film by director Ole Bornedal that just happens to have the same name (it’s Vikaren in Denmark). Fantastic Fest does choose their films with a bit more taste, although they are both about hard-assed subtitute teachers. One of them just happens to be an alien, and sadly we don’t mean Tom Berenger. Although that might have improved that movie.
In this Danish film, Paprika Steen plays a chicken farmer’s wife who gets inhabited by a spark of light from a planet far away. Her alien races lives without love, and she’s been sent as an envoy to try and find out what it is so that her race will stop destroying one another. Sounds noble enough, it’s just too bad she’d rather kill people and eat chickens whole than stay on course.
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There’s no denying that Repo! The Genetic Opera has plenty of imagination, but right now it’s still spinning around in my brain and I’m trying to decide if I like it or not. The first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I thought it was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen, despite Tim Curry’s stellar performance. Is Repo! destined for the same cult status? The only answer I can come up with is… maybe.
Based on a 10 minute opera called “The Necro-Merchant’s Debt” by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich (who plays the Graverobber in the movie), Repo! later become a stageplay, and then they brought Saw sequel director Darren Lynn Bousman on board, and now a movie. It’s an epic opera set in the future, where a corporation called GeneCo has mastered the art of creating synthetic body organs. However, they come at a steep price, and if you don’t pay up, the company will send Repo Men after you to reclaim their property. Which of course usually results in the death of the implantee.
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Believe the hype––at least, to a certain extent. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith’s all-around high score for the current decade, and as a date movie for the demographic looking for a formula of 5% genuine romance underneath 95% poop and dick jokes, it’s way more fun than the film that made Seth Rogen a plausible leading man, Knocked Up. But what’s really exciting about it is its seemingly autobiographical subtext referencing Smith’s own career –– which, unfortunately, is thrown in the flaming trash can of traditional romantic comedy in the film’s final twenty minutes, but which nonetheless makes Zack and Miri seem more heartfelt than any View Askew production since Chasing Amy.
In a working class suburb of Pittsburgh, in the midst of a realistically icy, muddy, shitty winter, lifelong best friends and roommates Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, finally proving to me that she’s a different person than Rachel McAdams) work menial jobs and are nowhere near being able to pay their bills. It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the town, everyone’s bitter and desperate to get laid. (Side note: it’s interesting that Smith, currently at his most bloated in memory––before the film, he thrilled the crowd with a story of being so fat that he broke a toilet––has made his most convincing film about the frustrations of being skint.) At their exceptionally depressing high school reunion set to the pop hits of 1998 (Marcy Playground and MASE, finally playlist bedmates once again), Zack and Miri discover from a former classmate’s porn star significant other that they (and Miri’s pair of oversized granny panties) have become accidental YouTube stars. Zack has an epiphany: if people are already looking at their asses on the internet for free, why not get paid for it?
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