Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I’m heading to Austin later this month for my first Fantastic Fest, and in the meantime, I’m loving every single one of these reports we’re getting in from guys at the Toronto Film Festival. And in particular, there’s the always-great Anton Sirius, back for the 74th consecutive year. I’m seeing at least one of these later this month, and considering how much I loved A BITTERSWEET LIFE, color me excited about it...
I have been 'asked', upon pain of enhanced interrogation technique, to pimp the official Midnight Madness blog. There's some good stuff in there, including video of intros and Q&A sessions from the screenings themselves. Also, if you're a Crackb... err, Facebook user like me, remember to add me as a contact (Anton Sirius in the Toronto network) if you want advance peeks, pithy status updates or to ask me where's a good place to eat in Toronto. Or just email me if you're still stuck in 2004.********************************** The Good, the Bad & the Weird (2008, directed by Kim Jee-woon) For all their over-the-top plots, the best of Kim Jee-woon's previous films (stuff like the Foul King and A Tale of Two Sisters) have always had at their heart compelling, sympathetic characters. The stories he told mattered because the people he was telling the stories about mattered. At least they used to. Kim chucks that formula in the bin, and the result is the best movie of his career. The Good, the Bad and the Weird is an absolute triumph of style over substance, an Eastern that features overlapping train robberies, opium-drenched brothels, exploding horses and lots and lots of extremely inventive shootouts. The three main characters are relatively two dimensional, and conform to the templates laid down by Sergio Leone, while the supporting cast tends towards the 'one defining characteristic and loads of charm' end of the scale. Just like the Clint original, the whole thing is a glorious mess, a mad romp through the Chinese wilderness in search of buried treasure and/or a chance to settle old scores. One of the great(er) things about the movie is the way in which Kim shoots action inside-out. Most directors will shoot an action scene or beat from the point of view of the person performing the action. Think of a random Michael Bay shot, for instance (Michael Bay being, for better or worse, the alpha and omega of modern action conventions). He puts you inside the car with Will and Martin; he sits on top of the bomb and follows it down to the deck of the ship below. Instead of following that convention, Kim takes a step back and puts his focus on the person about to receive the action. When the gang led by Chang-yi (the Bad) raids the home of Tae-goo (the Weird)'s granny, Action Movie 101 says that you should keep the camera tight on the characters inside the house, so that when a window smashes in it surprises both them and the audience. Jee-woon says, in effect, 'fuck that noise', and points his camera out the window, so that you can see one of the gang members fire a crossbow-mounted grappling hook, catch it on the roof, and then swing across to smash through the window while Weird and his buddy obliviously talk away. By taking the wider shot and changing the focus, he substitutes a cliched 'jump' for delicious anticipation. It's the old 'see the car coming before the actual collision' trick, adapted to every situation. And it's freaking brilliant. Are there problems with the movie? Yup. Jung Woo-sung, who plays Do-won (the Good) can't hang charisma-wise with JSA's Lee Byung-hun (the Bad) or the Host's Song Kang-ho (the Weird) and gets by far the least-developed role, which dangerously unbalanced the trio in a way the team of Eastwood, Wallach and Van Cleef never did. And as he did with Tale of Two Sisters, Jee-woon has trouble pushing through to the actual climax of the film. Towards the end of the movie there is a hilariously fantastic running battle in the desert between Chang-yi's gang, a group of nattily-dressed Mongols, Do-wan and Tae-goo, and the Japanese army which plays out like a fusion of the Road Warrior and the Battle of Five Armies from the Hobbit, but it goes on forever and too much bouncy horseback camera work just left me thinking, "We know there's a standoff coming between the three leads over the treasure... get ON with it already." But those really are little more than nitpicks. The Good, the Bad and the Weird is, above everything else, a balls-to-the-wall trip. If you're looking for subtext-free crazy-ass mayhem, man is this the film for you.***************************************** Deadgirl (2008, directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel) Deadgirl tackles head-on the one ethical question that has tormented young geeks for centuries: you're a high school loser, never made it with a lady, and you find a hot naked zombie chained up in the basement of your local abandoned mental asylum. What do you do? What DO you DO? According to Deadgirl, not a whole hell of a lot. You know what the most frustrating thing about this movie was? The fact that the screenwriter and the directors had the balls to come up with that awesomely sick premise, and then didn't have the balls to follow through on it. I mean fuck, I don't mean to go all Harry on you people, but there isn't a single red-blooded male on the planet in that situation that wouldn't experiment with making and fucking new orifices. You'd be stabbing, shooting and gouging on that cold hot skin just to see what it felt like to pound the holes made by different objects ("Hey, JT, hand me that corkscrew!"). And let's not even get into the logistics of sticking to the same old boring vag and ass penetration over and over and over again. Do we once see anyone mopping the splooge out of her, for instance? No, of course not. Eww, that would be icky! Goddamn pussies. Having wasted the potential for full-on zombie porn, the brains behind Deadgirl also failed to capitalize on the other delicious possibility the film had to offer, that of turning it into a cheesy 90210-ish spoof that happens to contain zombie sex. They got off to a good start, by casting guys in the lead who looked old enough to actually have been bit players behind Dylan and Brandon (OK, to be fair, I imagine there might have been legal difficulties with hiring actual 15-year-olds to fuck a zombie), and the dialogue is certainly horrendous enough, but for the most part the movie actually takes itself seriously, unbelievably enough. There's a ten minute stretch in the middle that hits the necessary heights, when two jocks beat the crap out of a couple of the zombie fuckers in the school parking lot (Ricky, the morally conflicted zombie fucker, has had a crush on the girl one of the jocks is dating since they were about nine, because she was his first kiss. You know earlier, when I called the characters losers? I wasn't kidding) and then the ZFs turn the tables by showing the jocks their zombie ho and telling the jealous jock the zombie gives good head. Cue the penis nibbles! Other than that sequence though, the whole thing lays there like a used, full condom, making a sticky mess on the floor that no one particularly wants to touch. After two killer Midnights, I guess we were due for a flaccid one.*********************************** Every Little Step (2008, directed by James Stern and Adam Del Rio) Every form of storytelling has its moments of self-reference. There are plenty of excellent novels about the writing process, and it sometimes seems as though there are more movies about movie-making than you could watch in a lifetime. With all due respect to Singing in the Rain and all the old "hey, let's put on a show kids!" chestnuts though, there is really only one musical about musicals. And that's A Chorus Line. Every Little Step uses the excuse of the latest Broadway revival of Michael Bennett's classic to examine why it became such a phenomenon and why it had such a profound influence on so many people. At the core of the documentary lies the original tapes Bennett made of an all-night gab session with a group of dancers, a free-wheeling conversation about their backgrounds and dreams and heartbreaks that Bennett developed over long months into the characters and storylines of the musical. The doc also gained unprecedented access to the auditions and casting process of the revival, allowing them to follow the performers from a cattle call of thousands down to the final callbacks, and mixes those two threads with archival footage of the original production and interviews with those involved in it. The result is extraordinary. This isn't a doc that simply tells the story of the process of making a musical. Instead, Every Little Step tells the story of A Chorus Line itself, in a whole new way. The stories on Bennett's tapes get folded into the characters in the musical, which then find echoes and reflections in the stories of the new group of performers competing for those roles. More than any nattering academic ever could, this multi-layered approach makes it clear just how real and powerful the stories in A Chorus Line really are. What the doc spells out is that the musical became a classic, not because it had damn catchy songs or fantastic choreography or a great 'hook', but because everyone on stage had already lived and breathed the characters they were playing and could bring the full weight of that experience to their performance. Whether they consciously realize it or not, every dancer has been preparing to be in A Chorus Line for their entire lives, because its story is their story. Fans of musicals, and of shows like So You Think You Can Dance (especially if they want to see what Tyce Diorio was like back before he became, well, Tyce Diorio) will of course want to see Every Little Step, but this is far more than just a reality TV show in doc form. Like all the best stories about storytelling, it gets to the root of what makes a story work and what makes it worth telling, and then puts those lessons into practice.
