Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a pair of reviews from the nearly 2 dozen movies I saw at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
TAXIDERMIA
Good God, this movie is so fucked up. Barring a big theatrical release stateside (which ain't gonna happen), I guarantee this movie will be at Fantastic Fest. This is the kind of fucked up, no holds barred bizarrely pornographic hilarious fantasy that Fantastic Fest strives to program.
I don't know really know where to begin... There's so much to talk about, but so much I'd hate to ruin. I remember when I saw ICHI THE KILLER for the first time at the Vancouver Film Festival in 2001 there was a sense, while watching the film, that I was witnessing something too weird and unique... I wasn't prepared for it. I couldn't guess what was coming next. I was out of my safety zone. The formula of filmmaking was completely different.
Same with this flick.
It's a Hungarian film about 3 generations of incredibly fucked up people. We start with a young hair-lipped soldier who is hornier than anything that has ever lived. And his perversion knows no bounds. The movie opens with close ups of him seductively breathing in the flame of a small candle, running his fingers through the fire, moving it over his skin close enough to burn the body hair. The whole time his breathing became more and more rapid. Then we get to watch him jerk off... graphically... until he cums, which results in a 10 foot flame shooting out of his dick.
And that's the least fucked up thing in the first act. There are sex acts involving little girls, chickens, pig parts and fat grannies.
His child becomes the focus of the 2nd act, a morbidly obese speed-eating champion who we get to see him vomit enough to fill, I'd wager, a dump truck. There's a bizarre love triangle that forms between two obese speed-eaters and a female speed-eater, also fat.
The next generation is a disgrace to his fat father. He's a skinny... creepy skinny, like Gareth from the UK OFFICE, but even creepier... taxidermist who is so creepy he has nothing else in his life but to deliver 800 candy bars to his chair-ridden crazy fat father (think that blob of a man from BLADE), feed his father's giant cats bricks of lard and taxidermy.
As fucked up as the movie is at the beginning, the ending is so glorious... God, I can't wait to see it at an Alamo Drafthouse with an Alamo Drafthouse audience.
If your tastes lean towards the fucked up, this movie is so for you it's not even funny. If you luck out and see it playing near you, seek it out. I guarantee it's like nothing you've ever seen before.
FIRST SNOW
I was still at Sundance when Santa Barbara had it's big opening night with FACTORY GIRL (although I caught it in LA shortly after the fest ended), but this was the other Guy Pearce movie to play the fest. It's a weird little tale about a yuppie businessman (Pearce) whose car breaks down in the desert. As he's waiting for it to be fixed he finds a guy working out of his trailer as a palm reader. J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson from the SPIDEY flicks) plays this desert rat psychic, who is clearly the real deal.
Simmons begins his reading, predicting financial success in the near future... the usual stuff. But then he starts freaking out and drops Pearce's hand, asking him to leave. Pearce thinks it's all part of the act and demands more for his money, finally prying the drive of the movie out of the fortune teller. Pearce is going to die. Soon. But his vision isn't more specific than that... just that Pearce dies in the snow. So as long as it isn't snowing, he's safe.
Needless to say, Pearce completely blows the old coot off until some of this lesser predictions start coming true.
The movie is about obsession, in this case it's Pearce's obsession with his own mortality. He's going to die and he knows it. It's not some mystical far off "some time in my elderly years" thing for him, but as close as the first snow. He starts obsessing over every little thing. Will it be the guy he laid off that does him in? What about an old friend who was just released from prison? What about neither? Or is the old coot full of shit? The flick is an interesting look at how we can devolve, both mentally and physically, with knowledge of imminent death, whether it's perceived or real.
FIRST SNOW marks the directorial debut of Mark Fergus and is written by Fergus and Hawk Ostby (CHILDREN OF MEN and the upcoming IRON MAN) and is a solid debut. There are some pacing issues, but nothing serious enough to pull me out of the movie. They pad the movie with enough interesting characters that you're easily distracted by Simmons or Pearce or William Fichtner whenever the forward momentum of the story kind of drops.
This one has a late March release planned. It's worth a watch, especially if you're a Guy Pearce nut.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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