I am shocked. Shocked I tell you, that no one here has yet told everyone about the second wave of announced titles at this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. Giddy-up Buckaroos cause this lineup is going to kick you stronger than an ornery bronco! ... ... ... okay… .... stopping with the cowboy lingo now… So what else have they added to their already stellar roster of films this year?

Chilean Superheroes? Check.
Autistic Thai Chicks Kicking Ass? Yes please.
The Muscles from Brussels? You had me at ‘the’.
Naked Lesbian Wiccan Frolicking? If there is a better type of frolicking I haven’t heard of it.

Hot damn, there is so much good stuff going on at this year’s fest. And word is there is still MORE room to fill. TWITCH will be in Drafthouse if full effect this year. I think I am going to overload my senses on the first day alone. The official press release, including titles and descriptions, is below the fold.

Continue Reading "Second wave of Fantastic Fest 2008 titles announced!"...

Long known for producing serious art-film Poland seems determined to shake their staid image with production house Vision leading the charge.  The outfit was responsible for the first Polish slasher film, Pora Mroku, earlier this year and know their poised to release a full on psycho-sexual thriller titled Unmoved Mover or Nieruchomy Poruszyciel.  Written and directed by Łukasz Barczyk this film, much like Pora Mroku, showcases a pretty compelling fusion of technical skills and Eastern European formality with a desire to go toe to toe with the west.  The trailer is a bit hyperactive in the editing and music but there’s some very compelling stuff in there.  Check it below the break.

Continue Reading "Poland Goes Psycho-Sexual In NIERUCHOMY PORUSZYCIEL (UNMOVED MOVER)"...

Per usual, this Twitch-o-Meter will remain at the top of the site for 24 hours.  New stories will appear below.

The seemingly never-ending stream of remakes continues rushing down Hollywood’s pike in the coming weeks – Paul W. S. Anderson’s Death Race (eviscerated by Todd here) and Alexandre Aja’s Mirrors premier in August, while September brings another tragic Nic Cage hairpiece to screens in Bangkok Dangerous.  When a film is judged as suitable remake fodder, it’s likely there was something to the original – maybe a kernel of transcendent storytelling or an exciting spin on something shopworn – which marked it as special.  That something tends to be lost in translation, but every so often a remake gets things right, parlaying what made the original special into something intriguing in its own right.  This ToM will look at a few remakes which do just that – managing a fresh take on revered material.

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Kicking off the “Streets of No Return” series with a screening of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), PFA curator Steve Seid outlined in his introductory remarks that hopefully—along with the series’ objective of spotlighting the work of a lesser-known pulp writer like David Goodis—would be an attempt to gain a sense (over the length of the series) of the concept of filmic adaptation of literary works; to finesse what’s left behind when novels are adapted, or what is included to make them screenworthy; and to determine if justice has been done to the writings of David Goodis.

Succinctly profiling that Goodis began writing in the late ‘30s, with a brief irreconcilable stint in Hollywood in the late ‘40s, Goodis parted ways with Hollywood to return to “a decrepit life” in his hometown Philadelphia until his death in the ‘60s.  Even while he was alive, however, non-Hollywood film directors began adapting his books and Seid boasted that all but three of those adaptations would be included in the series.

Continue Reading "Streets of No Return: DARK PASSAGE—Introductory Remarks By Steve Seid and Barry Gifford"...

A behind-the-scenes video for Mathieu Kassovitz’s upcoming sci-fi film Babylon AD with Vin Diesel and Michelle Yeoh has appear online at the official French site.  The video features some shots of the director at work from the various location, a little parkour sequence, a trainer demonstrating how to attack with guns and some big explosions.  Heres the official synopsis:

In BABYLON A.D., Vin Diesel stars as a mercenary hired to deliver a package from the ravages of post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe to a destination in the teeming megalopolis of New York City. The “package” is a mysterious young woman with a secret.

The US release date is on August 29th.  You’ll find the video on our Twitch player below after the break. 

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With the countless stories yet to be committed to film, what is it that draws Korean filmmakers time and time again to the same worn-out formulas and conventions? This and sundry other cosmological reflections are what passed through my mind as I patiently endured the two-hour running time of Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser, the thriller that held domestic audiences in thrall and is slated for a remake by Warner Brothers. However, anyone anticipating anything approaching the level of storytelling found in the Infernal Affairs franchise will be sorely disappointed. Halfway through viewing this outrageously mediocre piece of filmmaking, I had to press the “pause” button to ascertain whether the film I was watching was indeed the one that received so much critical acclaim, was invited to the Cannes Film Festival, and went on to take the prize for Best Film at the 45th Grand Bell Awards. Readers interested in learning how I really felt about this picture, read below the break.

Continue Reading "[Korean DVD Review] The Chaser (추격자)"...

This one’s for our North American brothers and sisters. We’re aware that there are those in our community who shake their angry fists at the sky whenever we announce a DVD release and it is region coded for somewhere off our shores. Rather than scold you for not having that all important all-region DVD player we do keep a watchful eye out for domestic releases as well so one day you too can join in on the water cooler conversations about international cinema.

Immensely popular in its home Japan and on the festival circuit both Death Note films and the spinoff L: Change the World have enjoyed large success. VIZ Media announced that they will be bringing the first film to Region 1 DVD this September 16.

The DVD will include the uncut 126 minute-long film in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1, the original Japanese audio track, a brand-new English language dub, and removable English subtitles. Bonus features include an interview with director Shusuke Kaneko. Additional extras TBA. The suggested retail price is $24.98.

Still want to know what all the fuss has been about? On September 16 you can find out for yourself.

With its Wait Until Dark nods, underwater sea helmut night lights, chainsaw action, amnesia, bad guys with nonstop colds and a tiny dog named Whisky all in tow, the 1974 Duccio Tessari giallo Puzzle (L’ Uomo senza memoria) manages to weave around its budget shortcomings with plenty of offbeat fun. Luc Merenda (Violent Professionals) is the central character with amnesia that has no idea what the hell is going on. He wakes up one day and slowly learns he has a wife and life, but no clue where they are. Suddenly fate kicks in and he finds himself on the run and put back in touch with his wife, played by Senta Berger (Quiller Memorandum). The title comes into play as the layers of the story slowly start peeling back revealing more and more clues, along with numerous red herrings as to why he has amnesia and why the bad guys are circling his every step like frothing vultures. No one can be trusted and no small dog, no matter how cute is safe as the film spirals into one of the more memorable giallo climaxes. For the record this is the film that finally put Senta Berger on the map for me. So much so the effect is retroactive in making you want to seek out her other titles. Duccio Tessari seems to want to give her a more everyday feeling and natural beauty to her character so that the audience can more closely follow her character arc. Duccio Tessari also directed one of the better and lesser seen Italian crime films in the 70’s in Tony Arzenta that starred Alain Delon and Richard Conte. He packs in many scenes in Puzzle with his trademark low angle framing and always creative blocking that he likes to use to keep even the most routine of situations interesting.

After the link bump we have Lars from Weird Wednesday introducing Puzzle to a packed Austin audience. Note that the DVD label Another World Entertainment has a video version of this film with an English audio track (the ending in it seems to be longer that the one in the film print).

Continue Reading "Puzzle - Lars Weird Wednesday Intro"...

Over the past seventy-odd years there have been countless Batman stories told. So many in fact that it’s a flat-out miracle we’re still not fed up with Bruce Wayne and his mental situation.

But strangely enough there are still several comic book series released each month, the television series was and is very successful, and, well…
...need I mention the movies?

With his two films “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight”, Christopher Nolan proved that there is still value in flogging this particular horse. Apparently we can’t get enough of being told the same story over and over again, provided somebody manages to put an interesting spin on the details, the designs or the viewpoint.

With this in mind Warner Brothers greenlit the “Batman: Gotham Knight” project. An anthology in six parts, it tells a story loosely taking place in the space between the two Nolan movies, and each part is made by a major Japanese animation studio. Just like five years ago when “The Animatrix” was made to whip the Matrix-fans into a frenzy prior to the cinema premiere of “The Matrix Reloaded”.

The end result has now been released on DVD, and as usual with an anthology it’s a bit of a mixed bag. There is no denying that some parts of it are brilliant, others… less so. The whole concept has some strikes against it from the start (for reasons I will explain), but If you’re a rabid Batman fan you’d be crazy to skip this.

A longer review (with many pictures) follows after the break.

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“It’s surprising that pulp writer David Goodis never named a novel Cul-de-Sac,” ponders Pacific Film Archives curator Steve Seid, “His stories conjure a dead end, littered with the wreckage of lonely losers and lowlifes. An ill fate befalls the typical Goodis fall guy, who often glimpses the high life, however fleetingly, but then through some irascible compulsion or sinister defect must stumble back to the seamy streets. Goodis’s own life follows the same pattern: at age thirty, he saw his novel Dark Passage adapted for the screen and parlayed that into a contract at Warner Bros., but his questionable proclivities made him an outcast even in Hollywood. Back in his hometown of Philadelphia, he churned out paperback originals while prowling the seedy saloons with unguarded desire. At age forty-nine, he was dead of cirrhosis. Though Goodis persisted in relative obscurity, his works falling in and out of print, filmmakers mined his shady novels for their criminal content. Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall and Paul Wendkos’s The Burglar were grim highlights of the American mid-fifties, while across the pond, cinema’s continental ops found his soiled vision most suitable for their noir knockoffs. Truffaut’s fanciful but faithful Shoot the Piano Player was the first in a lineup of a half-dozen suspects, all with a French accent. Goodis’s pulp is not about plot; it’s about the struggles of his beautiful losers to free themselves from sordid obsession and inbred failure. It’s also about Goodis’s smothering fixation with the fall—from grace, perhaps, or just from the curb to the gutter.”

Whereas Steve Seid’s curatorial involvement with the Gabriel Figueroa series might have been more administrative than creative, there’s no question that the PFA program “Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis” is Seid’s bawling baby, as he revealed when he spoke briefly with me about the upcoming series. For general information on Goodis, check out his IMdb and Wikpedia profiles. Kelly Vance gets on the horn with Elliot Lavine who helps her assess the PFA series for The East Bay Express.

Continue Reading "Streets of No Return: The Dark Cinema of David Goodis—Interview With Curator Steve Seid"...

Many thanks go out to Aaron Soto for passing along word of upcoming Mexican thriller Bajo La Sal (or Under The Salt), a dark murder mystery about to hit Mexican screens.  Starring Humberto Zurita - a leading Mexican actor of the 70s and 80s - and Blanca Guerra - who you may remember from Santa Sangre - the film revolves around a series of corpses discovered buried in a salt mine.  If the trailer is to be believed this is one seriously well made, very creepy piece of work and Warner Brothers’ Mexican arm certainly seems to think they’ve got a major picture on their hands here:  they’re running the trailer for it in front of Mexican screenings of The Dark Knight.

A series of murders leads commander TRUJILLO to Santa Rosa de la Sal a town close to a salt mine, where he meets VÍCTOR ZEPEDA - a lonely teenager who works in his father funeral home and spends his free time making crude animated horror films - who’s strange behavior seems to point at him as the culprit of the crimes.

Check out the trailer below the break in the Twitch Player.

Continue Reading "Who Knows What Horrors Lie UNDER THE SALT?"...

Wellwellwell.

As one of the people who bought the lovely Korean boxset of the two “Death Note” movies, I was eagerly awaiting the Korean release for the Death Note spin-off “L: Change the World”.
And it arrived in a nice 3-disc edition, but to my dismay without English subtitles. Darn…

But loyal forumer “TheDoug” was kind enough to investigate, risking his own wallet. And he survived to tell us all that this edition does, in fact, have English subs, and showed the screenshots to prove it.
YesAsia has even changed their listing of this title thanks to the remarks he made to them.

Stellar job, thanks “TheDoug”! Most appreciated.

“Run for your life!” is still the most exciting sentence in the English language, isn’t it? Senses start working overtime, adrenaline pumps freely, fingertips tingle.

While that sentence is never uttered in Tell No One, the idea is the film’s secret weaspon, ready to be unleashed at a moment’s notice. The story has a continental sense of quiet foreboding; tension slowly and subtly builds until, as surely as if Tom Cruise’s name were attached, the hero must flee on foot.

The French thriller, based on a novel by American author Harlan Coben first published in 2001, has earned terrific reviews and plenty of positive word of mouth since it opened in the US three weeks ago. The film (original title: Ne le dis à personne) opened in its native land away back in November 2006, subsequently winning several César Awards. Happily, Tell No One, while not a perfect film, pretty much lives up to the advance word.

Continue Reading "TELL NO ONE Review"...

While some accused director Rian Johnson of indulging in style over substance with his debut feature - the neo-noir Brick - the simple fact is that Johnson’s debut oozed both style and maturity far above his years.  Was he playing?  Hell yes, and what a game he’s capable of.  A few years later, a few years older, and Johnson is back on the scene with his sophomore film, the con-man caper The Brothers Bloom.  With a cast that just won’t quit - Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz and Rinko Kikuchi - this is smart, stylish stuff - an absolute joy to watch for any fan of classic cinema.  Here’s hoping the finished film lives up to the high standards of the trailer, because the trailer’s great.

Johnson tells the tale of the Bloom brothers, two young con men whose lives change forever upon meeting an attractive young heiress named Penelope.  While initially the brothers plan to con her, she becomes an unlikely partner in their latest scheme through an incredible twist of fate.  The plot thickens when Penelope’s beauty and brains enchant one of the brothers, threatening to break a lifelong bond of kinship.

Check the trailer out below the break in the Twitch Player.

Continue Reading "Marvel at THE BROTHERS BLOOM!"...

Hugofilm, Wüste Film West and Constantin Film are gathering their collective might to produce a film based on the 2006 novel Tannöd by German author Andrea Maria Schenkel. The story of the novel was based on a real event dating back to 1922 - Hinterkaifeck, where a family- a husband, his wife, their daughter, her two children and the maid- were all brutally murdered with a pickaxe. That crime remains unsolved. Schenkel used that event as inspiration for her own retelling of that story and sets it in post-war 1950s Germany.

Swiss filmmaker Bettina Oberli [North Wind and Late Bloomers] will be at the helm. Bettina also co-wrote the adapted screenplay with Petra Lüschow. Near as I can tell from reviews of the book it reads more like investigative journalism; along with a straight narrative of the events it also includes transcripts as eye witness accounts are recorded, not witnesses of the murder - there were none, but witnesses of the Danner family and the strains and tensions that existed within it. In one review I read the accounts include stories full of rape, incest, suicide, brutality and deception. Add a dash of religious poetry to the mix and by all accounts it makes for a very unsettling yet engrossing read.

Done right this could be could one of those films that effectively balances the horrors of the murders with the horrors revealed in the secretive lives, emotions and motives of the Danner family.

It should be noted that there is already a film titled Kaifeck Murder in post expected to be released early January 2009 in Germany.