It is one of the most heralded Japanese animes ever! And we’ve got less than a year until the second feature length Evangelion film comes out in Japan some time in the early Summer of 2009. It will be more anguishing months after that for the DVD release. This is only the second of four planned releases. Hurry the hell up… please.
The Evangelion web site relaunched this week and those who are more proficient in Japanese say the website… makes bold promises of Asuka’s appearance, along with new Evangelions, items, and a new story. Japanator from ANN
On my first night here in Sitges I had the good fortune to run into Spanish cult film maker Cesar Velasco Broca, he of the much loved - and Cannes-playing - short film Avant Petalos Grillados. Velasco Broca is one of the most distinctive film makers in the world today and so when he said he had to introduce me to his friend Javier Chillon, I knew I had to pay attention. And, frankly, even if Velasco Broca hadn’t been the one to introduce us it would have taken less than a minute of Chillon’s film for me to realize that these two must be close. In fact, while I haven’t confirmed this yet I’m reasonably confident that Chillon must have borrowed Velasco Broca’s vintage camera equipment to achieve the authentically grainy feel of Die Schneider Krankheit.
A mock-propaganda film, Die Schneider Krankheit is a stunningly - and lovingly - accurate reproduction of 1950s film techniques, a purported newsreel detailing the beginnings of a viral outbreak throughout Germany following the crash landing of a Russian space capsule containing an infected monkey. Shot on grainy film stock in a long-since abandoned ratio, with seamless makeup effects and brilliantly squishy creature effects that could easily be the product of some forgotten 1950’s b-film, Die Schneider Krankheit perfectly captures the ‘We Can Do It’ attitude that marked the 1950s, an era when we still believed that technology would be the solution to all of our problems despite obvious evidence that it was actually a major cause of many.
Chillon has passed us a series of five lobby cards from the film for your perusal and enjoyment. The images used on these are in color while the finished film is black and white, so they’re not precisely what you get in the film itself but it’s more than close enough to give you a good feel for it.
It seems that Russia-set three-quel 28 Months Later... has settled on a director. And that fellow is The Cottage director Paul Andrew Williams. Now this franchise is one of those rare ones where the sequel outdoes the original. Much like the Alien franchise the change in directors (Danny Boyle, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) over entry has been a benefit. The question is whether or not the franchise is malleable enough to find a third entry. Probably. Likely. And the smart thing to do is the develop the world rather than shoe-horn in the recurring characters from entry to entry. If only more franchises would understand this very simple concept.
A little side note before I go on to write about Nicolas Lopez’s superhero comedy Santos. I am often asked why Twitch runs multiple reviews of films on the site rather than adopting some sort of official party line and then sticking to it. The answer is quite simple: because the group of us who write here have different tastes and different opinions and we often disagree wildly on the relative merits of certain films. And Santos is certainly one of those films. To say that Mack took a dislike to it when it screened at Fantastic Fest would be an understatement. A rather large understatement in fact - I don’t think I’ve ever seen him react this strongly to anything before. I, however, just caught it at the Sitges Festival and, though it’s not without it’s little bumps and warts, I was rather taken with its goofy charms. And with that out of the way, on we go ...
Continue Reading "Sitges 2008: SANTOS Review"...
I tried to resist. I tried to avoid. Really, I did. But, you know ... train wreck, rubberneck, it’s that sort of thing. It’s the two teasers for the Dragonball movie, a movie that Fox reportedly considered shutting down in mid-production and simply eating the financial loss on because they had so little faith in it. Remember when Chow Yun Fat made good movies? I miss those days.
Check two versions of the trailer - if you dare - at the link below.
The world is a better place because of films like Taiwan’s Thrilling Bloody Sword and better still because people like Colin Geddes - who owns and has preserved the print screened here in Sitges - and Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs and Andy Starke - who presented it to audiences - are here to point the way to find them. A ludicrously unauthorized remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Thrilling Bloody Sword has everything you could possibly want in a cult film: technicolored painted backdrops, evil magicians, a beautiful girl hatched from an egg, palace intrigue, a talking chicken, one-eyed demons, fire breathing nine headed serpents, dwarfs that are nothing but adult men walking on their knees and an invulnerable villain that can be killed only by stabbing him up the bum. I can’t say conclusively that director Cheung San-Yee was consuming large amounts of acid while making this film but it certainly seems that way.
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Once my favorite animation house in Japan things have been relatively quiet on the Production IG front in recent days. Sure, they’ve been busy contracting out on a number of projects but the amount of original material they’ve been working on has dropped off and what they have been doing - with the obvious exception of Mamoru Oshii’s Sky Crawlers - hasn’t been of any great interest to me. But that changes with their announcement of two brand new feature film projects.
Up first is The Abandoned Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, a children’s oriented fantasy film. IG are making a big deal over this one because it is the first feature to be developed using software developed by the company to convert 2D drawings into 3D animation - which sounds like an intriguing process as it should keep all the quirks and details of hand drawn animation intact - but I’m far more interested because it is to be directed by Shinsuke Sato, who directed the live action martial arts flick The Princess Blade a few years back. Anybody who’s seen that film can tell you that Sato’s style is very well suited to the anime world and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.
Their other big upcoming project is another family-oriented fantasy film that does not appear to have a title yet but is being directed by Hiroyuki Okiura. Okiura, for his part, previously directed a little film called Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade that I happen to think is one of the greatest animated films ever made.
We reported all the way back in July that Jennifer Lynch - daughter of David and director of Boxing Helena and Surveillance - was headed to India for her next film, a musical mystery story titled Hisss with a strong fantasy / horror element revolving around mythical Indian snake women known as nagin. Lynch recruited legendary effects man Robert Kurtzman to create the effects that would transform Mallika Sherawat - very much a woman, and not an ugly one - into the snake creature and the first shots of the finished effect have just appeared online. Very tasty. Very tasty, indeed. I still find it very odd that Lynch is doing a Hindi-language musical but my anticipation for this has just risen considerably.
At first Flick feels like a role call of British TV actors - Michelle Ryan, Liz Smith, Mark Benton, John Woodvine are all here. Then, joy of joys, no less than Bonnie Parker herself - Faye Dunaway – appears as a one armed detective from Memphis. First time director David Howard and producer Rik Hall have done an admirable job in uniting a wonderfully characterful cast to populate their trippy, nostalgic, comic book horror.
Continue Reading "Raindance Film Festival Review: Flick"...
A key part of analyzing Paco Limón’s Doctor Infierno is understanding how the film was made. Limón came up with the idea for Doctor Infierno in 1996. He made a twenty-minute short film based on this idea in 2000. In 2003, the short became the first twenty-minutes of a full-length feature. Over the next few years, Limón shot film on weekends with limited cast and crew. Once the production was finished, various people, none of whom the director met until recently, contributed music, computer modeling, and other elements based on their enthusiasm for the original short. The result of these efforts is a black-and-white do-it-yourself (D.I.Y.) sci-fi/horror epic that is a testament to cleverness and persistence in the face of limited means.
Continue Reading "Fantastic Fest 2008: Paco Limón’s DOCTOR INFIERNO"...
Ask me how much fun life is when your plane has been delayed five hours. Go ahead, ask me! Oh, okay, I’ll tell you: not much bloody fun at all, that’s how much. The plus side to my lengthy delay, however, is that it has given me the chance to check my email wherein I found the first teaser for Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 20th Century Boys 2!
Now, I’ve been pretty outspoken so far about how - though I’m generally a big fan of Tsutsumi - I found the trailers for part one of his massive trilogy more than a little bit underwhelming. I’ll be seeing the film in Sitges in the next few days and I’m hoping my opinion will change when I see it on the big screen but those trailers just didn’t do it for me. This one? Well, it’s in grotty-as-hell YouTube-vision - no sign of it on the official site yet - but, allowing for that, it looks a whole lot better. As in a WHOLE lot better. Now, this is a teaser that’s doing it’s job ‘cause I’m itching to see this one. Check it out, along with the trailers for part one, below the break.
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Want to hear people yelling each other’s names in True-HD? Well, from February 2009 onward you’ll be able to, both in Japan and the US-of-A!
The Akira BluRay has been on many a person’s wish-list, me being one of them, but previous attemps all failed for one reason or another. Bandai Visual announced and cancelled a United States release last year, and the planned Japanese release three months back was postponed to fix some quality issues. A practice I applaud, by the way: better a few more months of waiting than having a bad version out with a double-dip years later.
Now, finally, there are actual dates announced: 20th of February for Japan, and the 24th of February for the US.
Fingers crossed…
Confirmed are both Japanese and English soundtracks, a variety of subtitles, and some extras.
A shout-out to AnimeNewsNetwork who had the news.
Has this news come out before? Because it’s so very, very odd that I can’t believe I missed it first time ‘round. Tucked away into a Variety article detailing the distribution of future Marvel Comics films is word that Kenneth Branagh has been confirmed as the director of the upcoming Thor film. To which I can only say ... whu? I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense if Marvel is hoping Branagh will bring his Shakespearian sensibility to the character - probably the only way to avoid it being horribly, horribly bad as Thor is, in my opinion, probably the most difficult character to bring convincingly to the screen in any sort of contemporary setting - but, really? Branagh? What’s he EVER done to show that he can handle effects and action on this scale? That’s just weird ...
During the hubbub and all around busy-ness of this years Toronto International Film Festival, there was one film that I found the perfect combination of smart, inventive and entertaining. I liked it so much that I managed to two screenings of it, a rarity (actually a first) during the scheduling and logistic complexity of that festival. Perhaps, the worlds first semiotic zombie flick, yet its less than usual storytelling style actually goes back to old-school horror filmmaking, (in that there is much more implicit than explicit) and as a bonus is in no short supply of regional (Canadian) flair. The sly reference to Herk Harvey‘s Carnival of Souls (and for that matter, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead) cannot be overlooked. I believe the film is ready to have some cult-love bestowed upon it, a la Ginger Snaps, Cube and Black Christmas (or more maybe more appropriately Deathdream). After hogging the Q&A during the first screening and still asking questions during the second (yes, the film is more textured and just as fun the second time around), why not hit up a few of the guilty parties with a more (or less) formal Q&A.
Tony Burgess is the author of the novel (”Pontypool Changes Everything”) on which the film, Pontypool, was based. He also wrote the screenplay and appears in a tiny cameo in the film to boot (or get punted as the case may be). We talk about the nature of the film and language, and lest folks be worried about the whole *spoiler* aspect of things, perhaps Tony’s own words sum up talking about Pontypool without spoiling things, “We had to satisfy that it is most certainly happening and it just might not be so.”
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The film scene in Turkey is expanding so quickly it’s just scary. Turkish arthouse film has been carving out a solid reputation for a few years now thanks to the likes of Akin and Ceylan but Turkey - notoriously - produces more than its share of pulp as well. And the undisputed champion of populist film? Without a doubt it’s hugely popular comedian Cem Yilmaz who had a massive international hit with his Mel Brooks style scifi comedy G.O.R.A. a few years back. And now Yilmaz is back with A.R.O.G., a sequel to his earlier film that inverts the entire premise. No future space battles for his hero this time out, no - this time they’re going back in time and the results look hilarious.
We posted a three minute sequence from the film a while back and now a quarter of teasers from the picture have arrived. Check them all out below the break!
Continue Reading "T-Rex and Cave Men and Yeti, Oh My! Four Teasers For Cem Yilmaz’s A.R.O.G.!"...
