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AICN & Twitch Present International Eye Candy! Miike's Zebraman 2! Waititi's Boy! Besson's ADELE BLANC-SEC & Much More!
It’s the end of the year as we know it and it’s time to go out in style. Yes, kids, it’s Todd from Twitch here with the final International Eye Candy of the year! What have we got? A creepy Karel Roden! The return of Takashi Miike’s ZEBRAMAN! Luc Besson sending pterodactyls swooping over Victorian era Paris! German spies! British serial killers! Rampant gunplay on the streets of Hong Kong! And away we go!
We’ll start with the Hong Kong gunplay, shall we? Acclaimed director Derek Yee has loaded his upcoming TRIPLE TAP with both stars and bullets, the Louis Koo and Daniel Wu starring thriller being set in the world of competitive shooting. You know, where the guns are more accurate and hold more bullets. The first teaser takes a very simple approach to the material: shoot a lot of stuff.
If you prefer fewer firearms in your thrillers, then may I suggest upcoming Czech picture THE EYE IN THE WALL. Karel Roden gets out of the ‘creepy European guy’ box that Hollywood seems to hold him in when he works here to take the lead in what looks to be a smartly atmospheric, very Hitchcock inspired thriller. An impossibly craggy Jurgen Prochnow co-stars. An earlier teaser made an earlier edition of the IEC and this one returns now with the full trailer.
Trying to summarize a Gregory Hatanaka film is a bit of a losing game. His previous feature, MAD COWGIRL, featured STAR TREK’s Walter Koenig as a lusty preacher having an affair with a deranged woman on a killing spree and was an absolutely crazy mashup of styles and influences. His latest, VIOLENT BLUE, looks even stranger. I have absolutely no clue what this is actually about and I suspect that is part of the point.
It’s our first of two entries from Japanese writer Kankuro Kudo here, the man being much loved by cult film fans as the screen writer of PINGPONG and ZEBRAMAN and director of YAJI AND KITA and THE SHONEN MERIKENSACK. Kudo’s kind of a force of nature in Japan - a popular comedian and musician, a film director and an award winning playwright and screen writer. If it has anything to do with mass media, Kudo probably does it and does it remarkably well. And this effort is an odd one ...
Beginning life as a Kudo-penned stage play, KAGEROU TOUGE is a swordplay fantasy backed by a theatrical troupe known for their extreme, manga-inspired approach to theatre. A couple of their productions have been adapted into full blooded film productions but with TOUGE they went another road, filming a number of live performances in high definition, then editing them together and augmenting the results with bursts of animation. It’s not really theatre any more and not really film, either. It’s something different.
Up next is a bit of a stunt pulled by PUSHER director Nicolas Winding Refn, who unleashed VINNIE & MARIO upon the world as though it was a trailer for a new feature. Starring veteran US character actors David Proval and John Capodice – trust me, you know their faces if not their names – it’s violent, funny stuff that arrived without a word of warning, just a promised theatrical release date. Yeah, that’s not going to happen ... this is actually a Refn-directed TV ad for a Danish travel agency, the first of four that the Dane has shot, but man I wish it were real ...
Any fans of DISTRICT 9 out there? While Neil Blomkamp tends to get all the attention for the scifi feature – and deservedly so, really – there are a number of others who played key roles in the development of that South African surprise. One of them is producer and special effects artist Simon Hansen. Hansen produced and did effects work on ALIVE IN JOBURG – the short that would later be expanded into DISTRICT 9 – and is currently wrapping post on the Rutger Hauer starring feature SPOON, which Hansen co-directs with DISTRICT 9 star Sharlto Copley. Point being that this South African phenomenon was actually the product of a pretty tight knit community and while Blomkamp may be the one getting the attention now other names will soon be following.
And Hansen’s ascent may very well begin at this year’s Sundance festival, where a new short he produced and did effects work on is screening. Titled PUMZI it is a near future scifi short directed by Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu. We know what happened last time Hansen produced a short ... history may well repeat here. There is no proper trailer yet – I’m told they’ll be cutting one next week – but an extended clip is available online.
Alejandro Amenabar is having a good year. Despite a mixed response in Cannes, his epic feature AGORA is a huge hit in Spain and he is about to follow up his directorial effort with another project which features him in the producer’s role. Directed by Oskar Santos, EL MAL AJENO looks to be a slick thriller about a doctor targeted for vengeance after his treatment of a depressed woman fails and, with the director of THE OTHERS and OPEN YOUR EYES serving as producer ... well, let’s just say Amenabar knows a thing or two about creating an effective thriller.
Because putting a sword in the hands of a teenage girl, I present the trailer for BUSHIDO 16. Adapted from a popular manga, this one stars a pair of young up and comers as high school girls training in kendou and while the first teaser is very much just a tease it is also a tease that makes a clever play on Tarantino’s KILL BILL.
You may not have noticed yet but there’s an international spy revival in full swing. Or, to be more accurate, an international spy-comedy revival. The French were the first to jump on board, reviving their popular OSS 117 character to great success and now the German’s are into the game with JERRY COTTON. A revival of a character that featured in a whopping eight films in just four years in the 1960s, JERRY COTTON is a spoof on Germany’s view of the CIA. An earlier teaser has just been followed by the full trailer which features plenty of goofy slapstick but also some very clever and slickly executed action. Very nice.
Just like there can never be too many teenage girl with sword movies apparently there can also never be too many Asian teen youth gone wrong films. And in that vein I present the full trailer for Taiwanese youth gang film MONGA. Yes, this has all been done before. And, yes, it will all be done again. But that keeps happening because when done well these things are just plain entertaining and this one looks to do it rather well indeed.
Screening as a special presentation at Slamdance, UK serial killer picture TONY is an odd beast. Which is also true of its title character, I suppose. More a character study of the titular killer than anything else, this is raw but potent stuff built around a truly memorable central performance and one of the grimier presentations of London ever put on screen. I’m not particularly convinced that this is the sort of film that trailerizes well – it’s much better taken as a whole than in moments – but the trailer has arrived nonetheless.
Fans of Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Garth Jennings and Jared Hess, stop whatever else you may be doing and take a look at the trailer for BOY right now. The latest from the director of EAGLE VERSUS SHARK, this sweetly absurd coming of age tale about a Michael Jackson obsessed aboriginal boy reconnecting with his fresh-out-of-jail father will be premiering at Sundance boasts the most charming trailer I have seen all year. Easily.
Okay, everyone out there disappointed with the latest instalment of INDIANA JONES, it’s time to fall in love all over again, this time with intrepid Parisian newspaper reporter ADELE BLANC-SEC. Adapted from the popular graphic novels by THE FIFTH ELEMENT director Luc Besson, ADELE promises the sort of serialized action adventure that fans are hungry for and while Adele herself does not appear in the first teaser, what does appear is a pterodactyl swooping over early 1900s Paris.
Takeshi Miike’s stripy superhero is back! ZEBRAMAN 2 – once again penned by Kankuro Kudo – hits Japanese screens in May but the first teaser has already arrived! The original ZEBRAMAN still stands as one of my absolute favourite Miike films and this one simply cannot come soon enough. The teaser promises more of what made the original great, only on a slightly larger scale this time. It’s Zebra Time!
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