Fantastic Fest wrap

Well, the festival ended tonight, we gave our awards at the wrap party- which will be posted to the website tomorrow. I caught Pan's Labyrinth yesterday and the Fountain today (as well as a nice new print of Fantastic Planet that Darren Aronofsky chose to play beforehand, which I must admit garnered him lots of bonus points with me). Both movies were technically accomplished and I enjoyed them in viewing (I have to say that the space travel sequences in The Fountain were especially beautiful. They chose to go with composited microscopic and other various fluid photography as opposed to straight CG and it really shows). Neither of the films had the character to unseat my previous favorites Bug and The Host, however. Both had a certain humor and believability that left me thinking about them long after I left the theater.

Now, for some sleep. If everything works out I'll have some great news in the next few weeks.

Lunch

Lunch, originally uploaded by weevil.

Tue 09/26/2006 14:19 09262006(001)

The Will to Destruction : BUG

William Friedkin's Bug is a brilliant, unsettling, perfectly timed film that checks the pulse of a rapidly disintegrating national consciousness. The film was stunning and disturbing, and the performances were breathtakingly well played. It's a return to form for Friedkin, and I've got a big, black, drunken scrawl on my arm telling me to look up the work of Tracy Letts, the playwright whose work the film sprang from. This movie touches on a lot of things I worry about personally.. The world we live in really seems to spawn paranoids now. Whether they are right in their assumptions or not is unimportant, because they're tormented either way.

Here's Michael Shannon from the Q&A afterwards:

(I shot this on my phone, so it's a bit compressed, sorry)


After Bug came The Host, A great Korean film that was a nice balance of horror and comedy with intelligent writing and surprisingly good effects. These are my current reigning picks of the festival, along with the incomparable Funky Forest.



I bailed out of the midnight screening tonight for the first time and went and saw Art Brut at Emo's, had a few beers, and now it's time to collapse.

Fantastic Fest day 4

Today's highlights were Ab Tak Chhappan, an Indian crime film set in Mumbai with a morally ambiguous lead and an engaging story- and The Living and the Dead, an interesting drama from Great Britain about the fall of an upper-class family. The Quay Brothers' film Piano Tuner of Earthquakes was technically masterful but somehow seemed as drab and humorless as their always-muted color palette. Their shorts have always been visually strong and witheringly intelligent, but their features so far haven't emotionally engaged me at all.

Funky Forest

I skipped out on Mel Gibson's surprise movie 'Apocalypto' to see Funky Forest, and I definitely made the correct decision in which culture to side with. I am now a citizen of Pluto. I'm not going to bother with the obligatory hand-wringing "this movie is not for everyone" statement to qualify my love for this freakshow. It's my favorite film so far of the festival, and if you are unable to enjoy it you are my enemy. You should have been dropping acid in high school like the rest of us, so you would have the organic damage necessary to enjoy the crunchy sound of minds shattering.

More notes

Lifeblog post, originally uploaded by weevil.

Sat 09/23/2006 17:54 09232006(003)

A couple of quick notes from my phone, elaborated on at home-



Frostbite A very fun and inventive Swedish vampire movie with a modest budget of about three million that looks like it was made with six times that- the film has a wit and sense of humor that is completely missing from American horror films and has been for some time. My top recommendation so far after the completely mind-blowing Funky Forest.

Unrest can't seem to escape from genre conventions (and cliches) but it does flirt in its first half with some of the real existential dread that must come with a surgeon's first pondering of life and death while disassembling the human machine. Dissections and corpses lend a genuinely creepy atmosphere that owes a lot to the fact that the director is a former surgeon. Unfortunately in the last act it falls prey to formula.

A Quiet Love seems glacially paced in a genre film fest, but it does a great job of setting a mood, and I really love the lead's understated performance. Great photography and sound design as well.

Christian Hallman

Christian hallman, originally uploaded by weevil.

Sat 09/23/2006 15:30 09232006(002) Producer of frostbite

Fantastic fest day 3

Fantastic fest day 3, originally uploaded by weevil.

Sat 09/23/2006 15:19 09232006 Day three of solid movies, i havent had a chance to get to a computer (writing from my phone), so far my favorites have been frostbite and tideland. Lots of split audience reactions on some of the films, especially Tideland. More later.

Gearing up for Fantastic Fest

Tomorrow my vacation begins! All I have to do for 8 days is watch a crapload of movies at Fantastic Fest! I'll be posting a lot about all the movies I see, so check back often. It's so exciting to actually get to go to a whole festival again and not just one or two movies. Hopefully some day soon I won't be tied to a desk anymore and can actually pursue the things I care about again.

Divya Srinivasan

My friend Divya is an extremely talented artist, animator and photographer. She's best known for her artwork on Sufjan Steven's 'Illinois' album and her animation was one of the best things about Waking Life. She's added an online portfolio to her already existing art site that showcases a lot of her new work.

Cinematexas 11 - Mike Plante's Lunch Show

The Zellner Brothers' short "Pardon My Downfall" will be playing this Saturday in the Mike Plante Lunch Show, part of this years Cinematexas.

Link

BFI presents 'The Birds' by Camille Paglia

I started reading this excellent piece of film criticism by Camille Paglia a few days ago on the suggestion of a friend. I had mentioned in passing that The Birds was my favorite Hitchock film and he insisted I read Paglia's book on it and passed me his copy. The Birds has always been a favorite film of mine for it's apocalyptic air, it's uncompromising insistence on avoiding Sci-Fi exposition, and its amazing bouts of subtle psychosexual jousting between the main characters- the gathering emotional storms that they manage to control and focus into the lightning of biting remarks and sublimated angst seems to drive nature around them into an uncontrolled murderous fury. It's heady stuff, especially for the time in which it was made.
Paglia's book is juicy and thrilling. I've harbored a secret dream to try my hand at serious film writing, but I've always been put off by the Marxist-flavored grad school prattling that seems to pass for most film criticism. Paglia completely sidesteps the academic circle-jerking of most film theory and bites right into the meat of the film, getting her hands dirty in it without ever compromising or hiding her formidable intellect. Other than her idiosyncratic habit of comparing just about every single prop that wanders into Hitchcock's frame to genetalia, this is a voice that I would love to have as a writer. At the very least it's going to make me completely re-examine all of the pet-project writing that I've been brooding on for years but have never been able to complete.

I was doubly excited to see a review of the book on its Amazon page by brilliant pervert and social critic J.G. Ballard:

...Paglia brings her characteristic blend of autobiography, psychoanalysis, kinky vampirism, 1960s radicalism, and contempt for scholarly jargon to her discussion of The Birds, Hitchcock's vision of Mother Nature's vengeance on the humans who have desecrated her. Paglia says she has loved the movie since it first flew into theaters in 1963: "Overwhelmed by the film when I saw it as an impressionable teenager, I view it as a perverse ode to women's sexual glamour, which Hitchcock shows in all its seductive phases, from brittle artifice to melting vulnerability.... In this film, as in so many others, Hitchcock finds woman captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature, but she is the chief artificer in civilization, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception."

Link

Octopus Project tonight at Emo's inside, Midnight

I'll be running video tonight for The Octopus Project at Emo's Austin, inside at Midnight. Tokyo Police Club and Enon are opening and The Polyphonic Spree will be playing outside.

Video: Herzog, Bale in 'Rescue Dawn' Q&A at TIFF06

Youtube clips of a Q&A after a showing of Rescue Dawn at TIFF 2006. Courtesy of BlogDance
Link

Anybody got IMDB Pro?

If any of you out there have an IMDB Pro account, could you look up Susan Tyrrell's contact info for me? I have something I want to see if she'll autograph.

Done. Thanks Josh!

Character Sketches

My friend Sharon in Vancouver is curating a show of artwork by Elizabeth Milton- Each piece is a drawing done by the artist as a child, accompanied by a photograph where the subject is recreated with costumes, props and poses.

Character Sketches are a series of photographs that explore how fantasies of the self are realized through the act of drawing and painting in youth. In an attempt to animate the characters and stage the narratives of her own childhood sketches, Milton enters processes of re-enactment that include a return to the suburban landscape of her adolescence, a reconnection with her childhood friend, Melissa Johnson, and the utilization of her family home as a site for artistic production. Using props and costumes found on site, Milton and Johnson theatricalize their childhood drawings and play with the notion of inhabiting the performative plain of the sketch. Milton's interactive processes of parody and impersonation emphasize the collaborative nature of identity formation while exploring the lived performance of the self in consumer culture.

Link

Three Stories of Self-Distribution

NEWS > NEWS ARTICLE > FEATURE: The Final Frontier of Filmmaking: Three Stories of Self-Distribution On the stories of Mutual Appreciation, Date Number One and Head Trauma.
Thanks Sujewa!

LA Weekly - My So-Called Rotten Life

I may have posted this a few years back when it originally ran, but it's such a great article, and in light of seeing Nightmare Maker on thursday, I thought I should link to this amazing LA Weekly article about Susan Tyrell again:

Spend any time with SuSu, and you fall into one of those endless rabbit holes of reminiscences that would be asterisked on anybody else’s life calendar, but that seem to have accrued to her as a function of who she is. Mention her Oscar nomination and the career opportunities it must have afforded, and she’ll relate in great detail how she instead fled to Morocco, where she lived in a black tent atop a Leyland Tiger double-decker bus surrounded by driftwood furniture and Moroccan rugs, fell in unrequited love with a Berber whose genitals had been deformed by syphilis, set out on a caravan up the Atlas Mountains, jamming pointed sticks into the rectums of the donkeys to edge the procession toward the top, where her fellow expatriates planned to process the recent hash harvest in the olive-oil presses, and where she contracted a hideous, wrenching illness that resulted in her being dragged on a mat of leaves behind one of the donkeys, until some Bedouin villagers fed her a tea brewed from the grass that was growing everywhere, which left her, miraculously, well again.

Link
Thanks for finding it for me, David

A Butcher, A Baker, A NIGHTMARE MAKER

Last night's movie at Terror Thursday was amazing. If you didn't already know it from The Forbidden Zone, this movie confirms it: Susan Tyrell is a fucking comedy genius.