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Posts Tagged ‘movies’

The Tunnel

Posted May 31, 2011

Crowd funded, shot on a tiny budget and released for free¹ on the internet, The Tunnel is a superb little Australian horror movie that puts bigger-budget nonsense like Paranormal Activity 2 to shame. And I can’t recommend it enough.

It’s a perfect, uncomplicated, no-frills setup for an uncomplicated, no-frills horror movie. Presented in a documentary style, like The Last Broadcast or The Blair Witch Project, it tells the story of a TV new crew chasing a story of homeless people going missing in the tunnels under New South Wales as they start exploring the tunnels themselves and quickly realising there’s something else down there with them.

What I particularly love about this film is that it doesn’t try to give you any answers. It doesn’t try to say what that ‘something’ is. Too often, horror movies try to package things up in with neat little Scooby Doo explanations: “Ahah! This so-called poltergeist was just Old Man Withers all along!” Instead, there are clever clues in The Tunnel that allow you to construct your own meaning, but the film doesn’t explain whether something is a legitimate clue and what’s a red herring. I honestly wish more films would do this.

Another thing worth pointing out is that the film was shot on a ridiculously small budget. Originally, the creators had intended to fund the film under what they called the ‘135k project‘, where they would get 135,000 people to sponsor a frame for $1 each (figuring 1 frame x 25 frames per second x 60 seconds x 90 minutes = 135,000). In the end, they only managed to raise $36,000. Rather than giving up (which is what I would have done), they went out and shot the film more creatively.

Without meaning to get too Merlin Mann, there’s an idea I keep coming back to, the idea that limitations — especially in creative projects — are often a good thing. Spielberg’s original plan for Jaws was to have the shark on screen as much as possible, from almost the first frame, thinking that this was the best way to scare people. Except the mechanical shark kept breaking down and so they had to figure out ways of generating scares without actually showing the shark. The film we love came from a limitation brought about because of a mechanical malfunction. In the case of The Tunnel, the creators managed to put their money to great use and I can’t imagine how an extra $100,000 could have helped make this film any better.

I highly recommend checking this film out. Plus it’s free, so what have you got to lose?

Footnotes

as in beer [↩]

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Listen, you Cannes-going blog-bots and would-be critics: you need to shut your flapping fingertips about Tree of Life and Terrence Malick, right now. Yes, it’s great that you got to see it, and yes, 50% of you were like “ooh, I need to see it again to know what I really think about it” (not you, Manohla dear), which is heinously annoying, especially for those of us for whom this is the Movie Event of the Year, and then you were all like, “well it’s a long, atmospheric look at big questions!” Really? You think? A TERRENCE MALICK MOVIE? And “oh gosh, it’s a big picture, sweeping, and maybe self-indulgent and no one is quite sure what to make of it!” FOR THE LOVE OF EISENSTEIN, SHUT UP.

– Over at The Awl, Choire Sicha finally says what needed to be said.

Before Sunset, Rome Edition

Posted July 28, 2010

Herself indoors was away for work last night, so I had the house to myself. What kind of wild and crazy shenanigans did I get up to? Did I throw an awesome party that will be remembered through the ages? Did I fuck. I watered the plants, put on Before Sunrise and sat down to do some ironing.

Woo! Being 31 is great!

If you don’t know this film, it’s about two people, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who meet on a train, realise they’ve got an immediate connection and decide to spend the night walking the streets of Vienna before Ethan Hawke has to fly home to America the next morning. Throughout the night, they keep coming across all sorts of interesting things, such as: late night fairs, palm readers, late night cafes, dive bars with pinball machines, churches that apparently stay open all night, bums that will write you a poem for some money. I’ll save my opinion of the actual film for another time (quick spoiler: thought it was a great film when I saw it in my early twenties; in my early thirties, however, I thought they were a pair of hateful douches). What I was thinking though is how I’d love to see that movie set in Rome. Because you know what’s open in Rome after midnight? You know what’s happening around this city once it gets dark?

FUCK ALL.

Seriously. I really cannot believe it sometimes. Most bars close around 1am – except for the ‘social clubs’ – speakeasy-type joints that are well-hidden and very wary of strangers. You could go to the coked-out clubs in Testaccio, I suppose. They’re too busy snorting and preening to notice the time. But in general, after 2am, this city is a ghost town. A really sketchy ghost town. We used to have a McDonalds near us that would close at 10.30pm. 11.00pm on Saturday nights – as an Irish man who is used to his battered sausage and curry chips after a night in the pub, this was the most painful for me: there’s nowhere to get any kind food after the bars close.

Things are only worse during August. Already, a load of bars, restaurants and cinemas are already closed in anticipation of ferragosto – a month-long celebration of whateverthefuck. I honestly have no idea what’s being celebrated. I just know that the end result is that most Romans disappear off to the beach or somewhere less oppressively hot. Which has its benefits too. Sure, more things are closed and you have to think about what shops are still open when you want a pint of milk, but the lack of crowds means that the city is a much more pleasant place to be. Still, doesn’t help my initial point: there’s almost nothing to do in Rome after dark.

I’d really love to see Before Sunrise: Rome Edition. I bet it would be a real short film.

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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Posted October 20, 2009

Last night, through an amazing and unexpected string of good luck, I ended up at a special screening of Terry Gilliam’s new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus presented by Gilliam himself.

I should probably point out that I’m a huge, huge fan of Gilliam. To the point that I’ve said that I want to be buried with my Criterion Collection edition of Brazil. So bear with me if I start to nerd out a bit.

I thought Imaginarium was terrific. After The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, which were both dark, heavy films, this is a return to the lightness of his earlier films. Don’t pay attention and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a sequel to Time Bandits. Or maybe The Fisher King. Or maybe even The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. And hell, while I’m at it, there are a few shots there that made me think Gilliam has already cast Christopher Plummer in the lead of his currently-in-preproduction The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. This film shines a spotlight on the leitmotif running through all of his previous work: the idea that imagination and invention can break the spell of monotony cast by the drudgery of ordinary life.

At this point, I should probably try to summarise the plot. Isn’t that how these things work? But in Gilliam films, this is easier said than done. And to be honest, I think this is the kind of film that works best when you come into it blind, rather than with a bunch of preconceptions about what the story might be. Or don’t. Read everything you can, if you like. Just go and see it. But before you do, just let me say that Tom Waits is incredible as the Devil¹, and Lily Cole is a surprisingly good actress. And the rewrites following the death of Heath Ledger work so well I’d bet that in 30 years, people will barely know they weren’t intentional. Like the malfunctioning shark in Jaws, sometime restrictions bring out the best in us.

There’s another aspect of Imaginarium that highlights this too: the special effects. Before CGI effects really took off, Gilliam was forced to limit himself using physical effects, which had a tremendous… well… physicality to them. Unbridled, his fantastical CGI dreamworlds look amazing and expansive, but they feel paper-thin. When people first enter the Imaginarium, they start in a pantomime forest, with cardboard trees which may have looked cheap and ridiculous, but they at least felt real and believable. As they moved further into the Imaginarium and hit the CGI-heavy landscapes, it made me wonder whether Gilliam made the right choice in prioritising epic verisimilitude over whimsy. Especially considering the film’s message of liberation through imagination.

One thing I should probably point out, which no-one has mentioned so far, is the similarity between this film and Angela Carter’s novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Both are about unbridled imagination (and the potential perils thereof), but also, and perhaps more crucially, both are about identity and choice. I dunno, maybe I’m completely off-base with this one, but I could have sworn that one of the gravestones in Imaginarium had the name “Dr Hoffman” on it. Or maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me.

(Update: Over on imaginariumofdrparnassus.com, Dave Warren, the film’s art director wrote in (in response to a link to this review – whoa) to say that the actual name on the tombstone was “Bob Hollow”. That solves that, then.)

The film opens theatrically at the end of the month and I’ll be keeping my eyes open during this scene when I go back to see it again. For me, every one of Gilliam’s films improve on repeat viewings. Gilliam told Mark Kermode that his preferred tagline for Tideland was “Tideland – It’s a different experience the second time!” I’d bet a tenner the same thing is true for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Footnotes

Although I think this is slightly lazy, obvious casting, considering what a great job he did as Kneller in Wristcutters: A Love Story [↩]

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Eden Lake

Posted October 6, 2009

Director: James Watkins, 2008, 91′ IMDB Keywords: Lake, Young Couple, Lost In Woods, Bleeding To Death, Bicycle

Sometimes it feels like my life is just a series of stupid decisions, strung together with crippling anxiety. For example, there’s the time we went camping in Tuscany. It was probably my favourite camping holiday yet – we pitched our tent on the beach. Not ‘beside’ the beach or ‘near’ the beach. We were on the beach. The waves were breaking not ten metres from our tent. It was stunning. Beautiful in almost every way. Except I couldn’t get to sleep. I was a bit restless and thought that watching one of the movies on my iPod Touch would help lull me to sleep. And so, instead of watching something like The Jerk or Anvil, I decided it would be a great idea to watch Eden Lake, a horror film about a couple who go camping on a beach and get brutally terrorized by a bunch of ASBO kids.

See? Stupid decision. I didn’t get any sleep that night.

It’s not like it’s a flawless movie. Even horror movies have a breaking point when it comes to coincidences – the screaming victim just happens to run into a cave which just happens to be the home of the big scary monster. Eden Lake gleefully ignores this breaking point and keeps layering coincidence on top of coincidence. Towards the end, Eden Lake actually felt as if it was taking the piss. Either the filmmakers didn’t get the memo regarding the suspension of disbelief, or they’re implying that this couple are the two unluckiest people in the world.

I’ll tell you what though, they’re definitely two of the smuggest, most self-satisfied cunts in the world. And this is where the film plays a blinder.

They’re so overwhelmingly unbearable that I actually started to wish them bodily harm. It’s a horror film, so you know they’re going to suffer and so I was kind of look forward to that bit of the movie. When all the bad shit starts happening, I felt better. It’s catharsis. Establish the heel, make them suffer, and everyone goes home feeling as if everything is right with the world. Did anyone go to see House of Wax to see Paris Hilton escape unhurt? No. They paid good money to see Paris Hilton get a pole thrown through her head. It’s catharsis, and everyone (including Paris Hilton, I bet) knows it. But Eden Lake isn’t quite like that, because it doesn’t stop there. It just keeps pushing through into a new level of discomfort that few films have taken me to. The brutality is so unrelenting that it’s hard not to feel bad for hating these people. I mean, I just wanted to see them get a few cuts and scrapes. Nothing that would leave any kind of permanent scar. And the film goes so much further. It was kind of like when everyone was all “Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who should rot in hell” and then they saw the video of his hanging and then they were all “Oh.” Eden Lake is like that. Only with less genocide.

And I don’t think that I can finish up without mentioning Jack O’Connell, who plays the leader of the ASBOs. He really is the star of the show, completely believable and terrifying. He basically plays a more sociopathic version of the character he played in Skins, which makes me think that he’s either a great actor who is in danger of being typecast as a grotty teen, or someone the police should genuinely keep an eye on.

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Crank 2 DVD Commentary

Posted September 23, 2009

Remember when DVDs first arrived on the scene and everyone was gushing about how great it was that they could record their own commentaries for their favourite movies? How did that work out?

Not so good, huh?

Know why? Because most people are boring as shit. When you get them talking about movies they love, they’re even worse. I’m not saying I’m above this. Put a microphone in front of me when I’m watching Kickboxer you’ll just get me either rattling off the entire screenplay or not saying a word because I fucking love that film so much.

Over on the AV Club, frequent commenter and the world’s biggest fan of ownage, Zodiac Motherfucker, has recorded his own commentary for his film of 2009, Crank 2: High Voltage. This is decidedly not boring. Imagine the forgotten love-child of Andrew W.K. and Kanye West screaming at the TV, swearing like a docker and whooping for blood, and that’s his commentary. Stupid and puerile? Sure, but so are the Crank movies, and that doesn’t stop them being some of the most entertaining movies of the last few years.

Either way, there’s no-one better to watch Crank 2 with than Zodiac Motherfucker.

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5 Movies Guaranteed to Make You A Better Person*

Posted August 25, 2009

* Not an actual guarantee, obviously

I’ve got a friend in Rome. He’s a smart guy, funny, very well-read. But there’s a problem. A big problem. Are you sitting down? He has not seen The Goonies.

I know, it’s totally fucked, right?!

In fact, he hasn’t seen a lot of movies. I think he was raised Amish or something. Whenever I catch myself saying “Did you see that movie…?” I remember who I’m talking to and say “Of course you didn’t. You haven’t even seen The Goonies.” I don’t know why, but the fact he hasn’t seen The Goonies really bothers me. I guess it’s because I love that movie to a ridiculous degree. That and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When I was 10 or 11, I would get up extra-early before school, just so I could watch one of those movies. I did this every day for more than a year. I can’t explain it. OCD or autism, maybe. I dunno. Either way, the idea that someone hasn’t seen The Goonies just stikes me as ridiculous because that, to me, is an essential movie. I will say right now, on a stack of bibles, this movie made me a better person.

So, here are the movies that I can say will make you a better person.

There Will Be Blood

Let’s start with some hyperbole. There Will Be Blood is, by a long way, the best film I have seen in the past ten years. It’s the kind of film that, when I think about it, I realise how glad I was to have been able to see this film in the cinema, in the same way as I’m so incredibly bummed that I wasn’t born to see Apocalypse Now when it came out first. It’s a huge, virtuoso film, and the fact that the filmmakers managed to contain it perfectly still shocks me. In short, it’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey of our generation. Yeah, I went there. If you haven’t seen it already, you should stop reading the rest of this article and just go watch it. Right now. There, was that enough hyperbole for you?

The Fountain

I feel sorry for The Fountain. Stuck in development hell for ages, finally limping out of the gate a couple of years later with a quarter of its original budget. It got completely overlooked. I saw it as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, and the cinema was maybe half-full. After the film, most people went home grumbling about it being a load of old bollocks. Except it’s better than most people give it credit for. It was clearly a labour of love for Aronofsky. A deeply personal film about appreciating the moment instead of worrying about the future. What could have been a throw-away piece of cheap sentiment (not that I’m against cheap sentiment) suddenly blossoms into one of the most striking and moving films about mortality that you’ll be likely to see.

Evil Dead 2

Rob: Let’s just say that I hadn’t seen it and I said to you, “I haven’t seen Evil Dead II yet”, what would you think?
Barry: I’d think that you’re a cinematic idiot and I’d feel sorry for you.

Koyaanisqatsi

Yes, I know I already wrote about this back in 2005 and I probably sound like a broken record, but it’s still breathtaking. I said at the time that it was the most extraordinary movie I’ve ever seen and one of the most beautiful films ever made. And I stand by that (even if the rest of my writing then was more than a little up my own hole).

Big Trouble in Little China

This might not be John Carpenter’s greatest movie. It might not even be John Carpenter’s greatest movie with Kurt Russell. It’s an absurd, over-the-top romp through Carpenter’s id. All flashy neon and high-flying stunts. But it knows how ridiculous it is. It enjoys the juxtaposion of “a reasonable guy” experiencing “unreasonable things”. In other words, it’s trying to say: don’t take things too seriously. Or, as Jack Burton says, “Like I told my last wife, I says, ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.’”

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Secret of the Incas

Posted July 9, 2007

I don’t think anyone actually understands how psyched I am for the release of the new Indiana Jones film next year. When I was younger and my age was still in single digits, I used to wake up extra early so I could go downstairs and watch all of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before school. Every day. For about a year. And if I had my copy here with me now, I’d probably be watching it now.

I came across a film called “Secret of the Incas“, a low-budget adventure movie from 1954 starring Charlton Heston which seems to be Indiana Jones’ most obvious inspiration. Heston plays Harry Steele (fucking awesome name), a square-jawed treasure-hunter who is determined to find the treasure of Machu Picchu in Peru. Like Indiana Jones, Steele walks around in a big brown fedora and leather jacket.

The similarities aren’t accidental either. Rumour has it that before production of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Senor Spielbergo and George Lucas screened this movie (along with China, starring Alan Ladd) for the cast and crew, to give them an idea of the kind of movie they were trying to create.

Youtube – Secret of the Incas (I) Youtube – Secret of the Incas (II) Youtube – Secret of the Incas (III)

These clips from Secret of the Incas should give you a good idea of how well Spielberg & co. managed to recreate the tone of the earlier movie. In fact, you could go further and point out specific sequences in Raiders that were influenced even by these three clips.

I’d love to see this movie completely, but it’s impossible to buy Secret of the Incas. Nothing on Amazon, nothing on eBay. Even nothing on Bittorrent. Some conspiracy theorists reckon the movie is being ‘suppressed’ by Paramount because of the similarities to Indiana Jones, reckoning that people would be up in arms if they could see how much this film influenced Raiders of the Lost Ark (although I personally think this is ridiculous: if people can’t that the Indiana Jones movies are nothing but a distillation of classic action movie staples, then these people should be banished to the wilderness immediately).

Whatever the reason, I can’t get a hold of it on the internet. Anyone got a copy of this lying around? I’d be willing to pay good (read: not ridiculous) money for it.

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New J.J. Abrams movie

Posted July 5, 2007

This awesome teaser trailer is sometimes running in front of screenings of Transformers in the States. Now, as good as Transformers was, it would be hard to keep my attention after that trailer.

It’s probably a movie codenamed “Cloverfield”, which J.J. Abrams is supposed to have been working on for a while now. No real details exist except that it’s a big, dumb monster movie. Hooray! ‘Round these parts, we loves us some big, dumb monster movies. Even the Godzilla remake, but only for that one scene where Jean Reno’s does his Elvis impression.

Cute thing – the official site, which isn’t referenced anywhere in that trailer, or on any other official sources, is tracking visitors using Google Analytics. This word-of-mouth campaign is being dissected, one visitor at a time.

Update: High-res trailer on apple.com (including HD)

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Harry Potter Theme Park

Posted June 1, 2007

Girding my loins today is Universal Studios’ announcement that they will be developing a “theme park within a theme park” based on the Harry Potter books and movies. Covering over 20 acres, ‘The Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ will be a themed ‘land’ (like “Frontierland” or “Tomorrowland”) within Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando Florida. Universal say this area will contain contain ‘state of the art attractions’ and ‘experimental shops’. Which sounds slightly ominous.

I’m a huge theme park nerd. As I said before, I don’t enjoy the rides as much as just walking around this completely artificial, fantasy world, soaking up all the simulacra. Combine this with the amazing production design of the Harry Potter movies, and you’ve got me hooked.

Click here to see the announcement video.

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