Father Geek here in Austin with Robert Bernocchi reporting from Rome. Grozella from Paris, Anne Darrow from Norway and James Bartlett from London with another wonderful edition of our long running Euro-AICN column. Grozilla covers alot of fun flicks from the Gerardmer Film Fest. Its a great group of genre flicks that you can't go wrong seeing... I Know... I saw most of these at Sitges back in October and loved it. I've gone back for seconds on many of them since then. Soooooo, with no further adieu here's Robert and the report for this week...

Godzilla was at the fabolous Gerardmer Film festival... and so are we with his great report...

Hi, You may not know it, but France has its fantastic & horror film festival, too. As enjoyable by the mood as Bruxelles's, San Sebastian's, Montreal's, Fantasia's (all really good festivals). Because it's got an « official » label, the festival of Gerardmer offers though each late January some kind of wide panorama of films for this genre. Here's a review of the 2003 edition in a capsule mode, because one of the guest directors has many things to say to me that I in turn pass on to you.

Darkness

Remember Jaume Balaguero's Los sin nombre/ The nameless ? Well, continue to keep it in mind : his second effort looks like an all-you-can-eat of clichés. Blasting lights, shaken frames, sudden explosion of sounds, etc, etc. Add a story with taste of déjà-vu and a very bad cast. Strangely the last ten minutes are brilliant. Was there another director on board than the spanish one for the previous hour and half ?

Dark Water

Hideo Nakata keeps saying that he doesn't like doing ghost movies. Indeed : Dark Water is a wonderful melodrama using horror theme. Maybe that's why it' s such a good film.

Dead end

Two young french guys sent a script to every french producers : no one cared. So they went to america and directed this very-low budget. A car driving in some no man's land, members of the family aboard begin to be killed by some ghostly menace. Huge buzz à la Blair Witch Project of the festival. Dead end doesn't deserved it : small film, small ambitions (sometime great kinky ideas) but real fun. Could be a smart direct to video product.

Doctor Sleep/ Hypnotic

Good title indeed. How not to sleep in front of this so boring thriller, who seemed to be escaped from the crypt of old cheap ITC televisions films, about a doc investigating on missing children ? Boredom boredom boredom and one burst of laugh when seeing shakesperian diva Fiona Shaw with a awful make-up revealing she's in fact some kind of Torquemada possessing a female body.

The eye

Oxide and Danny Pang giving their version of asian ghost story.. As usual the Pang are smart counterfeiter, able to do some remake of Sixth Sense and being original. Efficient but not the great chiller expected, though this could be the passport to Hollywood for these two.

The grudge

A.k.a Ju-on. I'm sure it would have been better welcomed if audiences hadn't seen in a row before this japanese flick, Dark Water, The Eye and Ring, scheduled here in a retrospective. Shimizu's film is some next of kin to all these films, so, of course, it can 't be seen as original stuff. Anyway, if it shows agains ghosts with dark floating hair and haunted kids,The grudge has his very scary moments. It has of course been seen before, but this is very goof material for audience. The script could have been improved though (the part supposed to happening years later isn't easy to get)

Maléfique

For two years now, two french producers tried to attend a genre cinema revival in a collection of low bugdet films called Bee movies. For now they produced absolute crap (Bloody mallory, Samourais, Requiem) that even Troma wouldn't buy even for free. Fortunately the last chapter of the collection is very good. Because it doesn't try to be smarter than its purpose, doesn't give in parody style (oh god, one day we'll learn how the Scream touch injured the horror genre). Four guys in a cell founding some lovecraftian book who may include a spell able to make'em escape. Sharp, wery well written and acted. Very good stuff. After the competition screening, William Friedkin, president of this year's jury has himself called the director Eric Valette to congratulate him. Alongside last year Florent Emilio Siri's Nid de guêpes, Maléfique is another proof than serious genre film can be made in France. Good news.

May

Second time seeing this wonderful tale of loneliness by Writer-Director Lucky McGee. I just can't avoid being heartborken by that very last scene. This phantastic, neurotic, female version of Frankenstein sews parts of Ghost World and Tim Burton's cinimatic moodiness together with great success. A new kind of horror film.

28 days later

Even if I enjoyed Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, I found Danny Boyle overestimated. For the first part of his zombie flick I was ready to reconsider my opinion. Good script, Dark mature tone, daring use of video. Then the second part came copycating Romero's day of the dead. Could someone explain to Boyle the difference between plagiarism and hommage ? Too bad.

Cabin Fever

I was excited by the buzz around the Eli Roth's flick. Not anymore after its screening. Yes it's gorey and funny, but except picking parts in Evil Dead, Night of the living dead, Friday the 13th and others, where's the director's point of view here ? Cabin fever is to horror movies what root beer is to alcohol. Perfect for midnight movies pot smokers crowd because of its emptiness, not for a wide release.

Cypher

Seconds meets They Live meets The usuals suspects meets James Bond meets any perfume ad.. There was more room in Cube for Vincenzo Natali to express his own identity. Huge disappointment, good performance from Jeremy Northam though.

Deathwatch

Invisible monster eats english soldiers trapped in WWI trenches. Good basis idea for a film. Quickly buried by a lazy script. Director Michael J.Bassett confessed here that he couldn't filmed all he needed. Well, indeed. Weak effort but director to be watched. Good perfomance from Andy Serkis as some mad soldier.

Dracula Pages from a Virgin's Diary

Guy Maddin is still reinventing the silent movie era. This time with Bram Stoker's infamous story crossed with ballet. Better than the FF Coppola's work. Daring, smart, camp, imaginative. Could Maddin be a elegant heir of John Waters ? Yes he could.

This edition's winner was Hideo Nakata (three prizes : best film, Youth jury prize, European critic prize) for Dark Water. I had the luck to meet him and sit down for a nice talk....

French critics always refered to Jacques Tourneur about your work. I don't agree with that. What was your film background ?

As a child my first contacts with movie was television. I saw there many europeans films. Before college I began to go to movies, alone or with friends. At this time my favorite directors were David Lean and François Truffaut. Later I began to appreciate american cinema. I was very fond of Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah or Don Siegel's films. At last I discoverd japanese movies by attending the class of Shigeriko Asumi at university. He fed my film culture by showing me many classics, Japanese or foreign ones. I assume these class had deep influenced my work.

Isn't there a misunderstanding about your films ? Aren't they stories on female condition using genre ?

I don't do it consciously but I found making films about female characters more incentive. In the absolute, my films are portraits of women fighting to the extreme for surviving. Even if, in Ring my main character has to sacrifice his father for his son to live. In Dark Water, I don't think the mother gives her daughter up : she chooses to stay with the ghost so her child could stay alive.

With the triumphal success of Ring, you became an influence for many directors.

I absolutely didn't expect the success of Ring. I was very worried when it was released in Japan than it could ever gain enough money to cover its production costs. Learning its triumph in Hong-kong then in europe, that hollywood want to do a remake even if the film wasn't released in theaters there comforted me. As up as today I'm glad to be worldly known as the director of Ring but this horror director label also bothers me. Paradoxically it the international success of US Ring's remake that will allow me to direct films from other kinds of genre. I'm now in talks to do another kind of film I'll direct in USA, I'm lucky that my interlocutors there had seen not only Ring and Dark water but also Chaos or others of my films which aren't horror films.

The ring isn't the only remake of your films in preparation. How do you deal with this american réappropiation ?

I've done eight films. The remake rights of four had been bought. This is excessive but demonstrates how Hollywood lacks of original, interesting projects, new ideas. When John Sturges did The 7 magnificents from Kurosawa' s 7 samouraïs, he gave birth to a film rooted in the western american culture, different from its inspiration. To me that's the good way to go. If it's about doing copycats of foreigns films, I'm afraid that in the end films will be standardized. I'd like Hollywood to do films revealing a truly american identity.

Those last years, occidental producers get an huge interest in asian movies and talents. According to you, why ?

More than some exotism, it has revealed the greed of american cinema, who after using europeans directors at the Studios era, like Hitchcock or Fritz Lang, tried to renew it seraglio by seducing next european generation of directors like Luc Besson or Renny Harlin. Then, they esteem it wasn't enough and went picking in the asian breeding ground. This phenomenon extend beyond Hollywood to lead to some kind of globalization. Now co-productions between studios and countries are needed to finance blockbusters or huge films. That leads movies to be tasteless, countries identities being erased. This begins to happen in Asia : My latest movie, The last scene, is japanese by heart but entirely produced by korean money.

Were you consulted on the US's Ring ?

Only about the scene where Sadako steps outside the TV set. The american crew wanted to know how I shot it. The japanese production system doesn't allow the directors to express any opinion on their films remakes, or to the sell of their remake rights : we don't own them. Maybe it will be diffrerent on the american remake of Dark Water : I 've been asked to direct it. Although I'm définitely not interested in doing the same film again I'm not sure this is the will of the studio producing it.

How do you explain that there are scenes in your Ring, and the american one that look exactly the same but don't produce the same effect of terror ?

Filming in the same way and same technical means a women brushing her long dark hairs or water won't have the same impact according to who is filming. Just because of their meanings : in my country, ancestral values makes that long dark hairs equals some fear from beyond, water remembers the fear of Japan to be flooded over. It's some kind of genetic heritage, then logical it appears when in a Japanese films whereas because of his culture it won't affect a westerner filming the same things.

Does being now known worldy gives you the artistic freedom you want ?

Absolutely not. Nowadays the ghost stories fashion is fading in Asia. Even if I anyway got proposals of work from other countries in Asia or from Hollywood, I'm labeled horror film director so I got difficulties to work as I wish. I know I won't have much freedom of manouvre with my first american film. I will reach it only if it has enough success. To my ideal, I'd like to work in both Japan and America.

Few days after this conversation, when Nakata-San went to get his first award, he tried to explain to audience that he was fed up with ghost storys. When he went for the third time on scene he announced that he has agreed to do another one for his japanese producers. I felt some irony, almost melancholy in his words.

Til' next

Grozilla

In one of the latest Euro Aicn columns, Ann Darrow talked about an upcoming Dogma movie, called NU. Now, we have her review...

Travelling by train through rain and snow down to Sweden, I finally got to see the new Danish film "NU" (which means "NOW" in Danish and Swedish) which Lars von Trier's company Zentropa Film produced.

I saw "NU" at the Göteborg Film Festival in Sweden (held last week), which is Scandinavia's largest film festival with many interesting films and a very "local" atmosphere - though many international guests such as Paul Thomas Anderson and "About Schmidt" director Alexander Payne were in attendance.

I was lucky to see some Scandinavian premieres for US films, but since they've already been reviewed here on AICN many times, I'll stick to reviewing "NU/NOW" by the Danish director Simon Staho:

The screening was completely sold out - maybe because guest of honour was Erland Josephson, who stars in "NU" and is a legendary Swedish actor who has appeared in many classic films by Ingmar Bergman, Andrey Tarkovsky and Peter Greenaway. "NU" was then introduced by the director, who seemed surprisingly young (late twenties?), and who told us a little bit about the filming and the scriptwriting process (the script was written by the guy who co-wrote "Breaking The Waves" by Lars von Trier).

Anyway, the film is about a love triangle in 1960 between two men and a woman. The story is told by one of the old men as he lays dying in 2002 and wonders if he made the right choice back then: Should he have stayed with his wife and baby daughter - or was he right in devoting his life to his new lover?

"NU" starts with the old man (Erland Josephson) lying in a hospital bed. He is very sick, very lonely and close to death. The door opens and another old man (Henning Moritzen, who played the father in Thomas Vinterberg's "Festen/The Celebration") enters. He sits down next to the dying old man and touches him lovingly. This was a very beautiful scene, I thought, which showed that there are still deep emotions, and maybe even love, between these two old men.

But the old, dying man doesn't want anything to do with the other man, because the dying man longs for his young wife and baby that he left in 1960. And as if by magic, his young, beautiful wife suddenly appears and the old man is transported back in time to 1960, when he was a young man in love with her. The film continues to tell the story of their marriage and what went wrong between them - and it also reveals how the man found his new lover right after his wife gave birth to their baby daughter.

The story in "NU" was, at least to me, dramatic and powerful: at times, it seemed almost like a Greek tragedy in the way the love triangle leaves all three characters with loss and regret - except that one of them gets revenge at the end of the film! However, I thought that there were also some wonderful moments both between the two old men, who still remember the love they felt for each other in the past, and between the young married couple who try to make their relationship work.

The story is told in flashbacks, which I found worked well. The flashbacks are not just telling what actually happened, but are told in the way that a dying, old man would remember them. Visually, the film looked stunning, but more in the way that a film by Antonioni or Tarkovsky looks stunning - not in the standard glamourous Hollywood way!

"NU" was very well-received at the festival, but I'm sure that it's not a film for everyone. It's probably closer to an arthouse film but if you enjoy those, then I would definitely recommend "NU" when it appears at a festival near you.

Extra note: In the scenes taking place in 1960, the two men are played by Scandinavia's two most popular "hunks" (Mads Mikkelsen & Mikael Persbrandt), who are well-known here because of their macho roles and sex appeal. Casting these two actors as lovers is a great and very subversive choice, like seeing an affair between Benicio Del Toro and Brad Pitt in a Hollywood movie (unthinkable, I know!)

That's all for now. I apologize for my less than perfect English but since I live in Norway, I'm hopefully forgiven! I might be back with some reviews of other European films I saw at the Göteborg film festival...

"Ann Darrow"

Last but not least, a Punch Drunk Love review by James Bartlett. As usual, I'd like to say that many american movies arrive very late in Europe, so please don't start posting about this fact...

SPOILERS AHEAD....

Punch-Drunk Love

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman 94 mins... Certificate 15... Selected Release

We meet Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) at the beginning of a very strange day. As he gazes round a quiet street, a car skids, flips over and rolls down the street - and then a cab screeches to a halt in front of him, drops a harmonium on the pavement and drives off. Soon after that, he meets Lena Leonard (Emily Watson).

Barry is a misfit of a man; he's a lonely and shy person, the only brother to seven sisters. These sisters are pretty merciless towards him; they nag him, tease him and basically fuss over him and hassle him about his job, his lack of a girlfriend and so on.

But there's something more than that; something more than Barry obviously having had a really hard time in his family set-up. Barry has a temper - a lightning fast, violent temper - and he is thinking about seeing a psychiatrist: "Sometimes I don't like myself".

Barry's latest scheme is to collect free air miles - a misprinted offer will allow him to collect a million air miles for only £3000 of food, which is why he has hundreds of chocolate pudding cartons in his office. But what is Barry going to do with these air miles? He doesn't really know.

Needing to talk to someone and clearly unable to talk to his family, Barry calls a phone sex line. It's a bad move, as the operators behind the line also work a blackmail scam and Barry ends up being threatened by the "Brothers from Utah" and having to withdraw $500 from an ATM to pay them.

Soon after, Barry and Lena meet for a first date, but, as ever, sister-based gossip about Barry is aired and it hits his nerve - he excuses himself politely and goes and smashes up the bathroom.

Despite this, this odd couple seem to be getting on; Barry even throws caution to the wind and flies to Hawaii because he knows Lena is there on a business trip. Now, suddenly, Barry seems to be coming into his own; his awkwardness and shuffling demeanour fade as he is energized by love.

But there's a downside to his new confidence; Barry calls the sex line operators and says he wants his $500 back. In a scary and angry phone call Barry and Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman) argue - and we know that something bad is going to happen.

Punch Drunk Love has had an enormous amount of press coverage; "redefining the genre," said some, "pretentious crap that makes no sense," said others. Coming from Paul Thomas Anderson (director of Boogie Nights and one of the best films I have seen in recent years, Magnolia), Punch Drunk Love is indeed an oddity.

It's exceptional use of sound (just listen to it), its frequent shots of the back of character's heads (courageous, as we can't see how they are reacting to what is happening) and it's total disregard for the rules of a conventional story are to be applauded, but overall it does feel a bit like an experiment.

Sure, it's an experiment that I couldn't help but like and admire in parts, but it still didn't quite work. We can't love a hero whose temper is on a knife-edge and it's hard to root for Lena, as her desire for Barry seems borderline obsessional. But then as misfits go, I guess they deserve each other.

Owing much to the work of Robert Altman - it even uses a song from an earlier film of his - Punch Drunk Love is not revolutionary or genius, it is just the work of a new, different director who is brave enough to try and do something different - and that should always be encouraged.

As for Sandler and Watson (it's virtually a two-hander), Sandler impresses with his shuffles and awkwardness - and his ability to turn from wimp to a psycho in a moment. Watson, shot in close up most of the time, works hard too; her wrinkles and flaws are literally on display, but she still seems to hide something under Lena's skin.

We never find out what it is though, as Barry and Lena's future is something that we never get to see, as the film seems to end two thirds of the way through - kind of a good summary for the film itself, especially as it is only just over 90 minutes in length but can really drag at times.

James Bartlett

That's all for today See you next week

Robert Bernocchi

Caltanet