Posts Tagged movies
EXIT’s World Premiere
Is there anything more frightening than the words “BUY TICKETS” next to the title of a movie you wrote?
As we announced last week – after keeping quiet about it for far, far too long – EXIT will soon have its world premiere at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal.
And even better, EXIT will be the closing night film of Fantasia’s Camera Lucida spotlight. Programmer Simon Laperrière has said that the first Camera Lucida spotlight was based on a question:
“What is genre cinema today? And to answer it, I said we have to look at genre film in its most iconoclastic form, in all its differences.”
Last year – the first of Camera Lucida – included Quentin Duplex’s killer tire movie Rubber and Hirokazu Koreeda’s poetic, absurd Air Doll. This year, it opens with William Eubank’s avant-garde sci-fi Love and closes with the world premiere of EXIT on August 4.
Their description of EXIT begins like this: “According to legend, there exists at the heart of the city a door that opens upon a parallel universe. No one knows its origin or where it leads.” It calls EXIT “one of the best science fiction films of the year, merging a small budget with big ideas.”
(Is EXIT a science fiction film? I think that’s a very interesting question, actually…)
You can read Fantasia’s full description here, as well as watch our trailer and buy tickets for the premiere. The director Marek Polgar and I will be guests of the festival, too, and we can’t wait.
Is VHS the New Vinyl?
Blow the dust off your old video player, rummage around for a VHS copy of your favourite film, insert it and listen to it grind to life. Once you’re used to high definition, your enormous LCD television probably looks like someone’s coated its screen in vaseline. Could the particular qualities of the VHS tape ever become prized in the same way that vinyl’s attributes are today?
The following is a piece I recently wrote for The Big Issue. I dedicate it to the much loved, widescreen, pre-‘special edition’ VHS copy of Star Wars I have somewhere around here.
David Herbert's sculpture "VHS" (2005). http://www.davidherbert.com/
Vinyl simply produces a better sound than a CD. While music websites are still bursting with arguments about this statement – most punctuated with frequencies mapped on angrily-spiked graphs – the idea has been around for so long it’s now almost considered common sense.
“Vinyl’s just a superior sound than digital,” says DJ Andee Frost. He’s been collecting vinyl since he was sixteen and until recently ran Melbourne’s ‘vinyl boutique’ Hear Now. “There’s something more human about it. A CD is too crystal clear. Music needs the same warmth that it had when it was recorded.”
Warmer; softer; somehow more human. When asked if he could imagine someone praising video for the same attributes, Andee’s not so convinced. “I don’t know whether you’d find too many people claiming VHS is a superior format. How many people do you know who still use VHS? That’s the real question.”
Meet Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. She’s a cinema researcher with a frighteningly large (and ever growing) collection of VHS tapes. “Initially,” she explains, “it was because I never throw anything out. I never got rid of my player, because I always had stuff on video that I needed for work.”
It helps that Alex’s interest is in exactly the kind of obscure horror movies likely to be considered disposable. Her first book, Rape-Revenge Film: A Critical Study, will be published later in 2011.
“Most of what I see on VHS is stuff that’s never been put onto DVD – so I like the treasure hunt of finding it. Now I buy more VHS than I buy DVD. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I just like the look of VHS better. A video will play even if the tape is chewed and curled. It deteriorates more organically. The colours and the sound wash out, and it fades more like a painting.”
“Sometimes I don’t like the crisp HD look. It’s too harsh,” says Cassandra Tytler, a Melbourne artist working in Paris but soon taking up an artistic residency in Finland. Her work often has a pulpy, purposeful lo-fi look. “For one of my early films, I re-shot scenes right off the TV to give it a real ‘videoey’ quality.” Cassandra mentions Trash Humpers, the latest feature by cult American filmmaker Harmony Korine. Korine purposefully shot with the cheapest VHS camera he could find to give his film the authentic feel of a lost object.
As Cassandra points out, though, “I would say the real question is what format things are shot on, rather than whether it’s DVD or VHS.” Trash Humpers might’ve been shot on video – and Korine even made it available to buy on VHS – but most fans will still end up watching it on DVD.
And that ‘videoey’ quality is appearing more and more in popular culture. Just like every second music video was once filmed on Super-8 to give it that opening-credits-to-The-Wonder-Years glow, it’s now common to see the soft focus and horizontal static-lines of VHS. Mark Ronson’s new music video for the single ‘Somebody To Love Me’ looks like it’s composed of archival video footage. Even before you realise you’re meant to be watching a young Boy George, the specific quality of the image generates instant nostalgia. Is that retro appeal all there is to lingering affection for VHS?
Vinyl and VHS share another thing that separates them from their digital counterparts, and that’s their undeniable bulk. “You’re actually buying something, investing in something, when you buy a piece of vinyl,” says Andee. “And you’re getting beautiful cover art. It takes up more room; that’s how it becomes part of your life.” Alex waxes equally lyrical: “I love the materiality of VHS. I love that tapes are big black monoliths like in 2001. That’s the same with vinyl – you spend your money, and you get an art object. DVDs aren’t art objects. They’re consumer products.”
Could VHS ever make a comeback like vinyl? Andee says there’s one all-important difference: vinyl never went away. “Vinyl’s always been there,” he says, “and vinyl will still be here after CDs have gone. When no one even remembers what a CD-R was, you’ll still be able to buy records.”
Alex, however, doesn’t hesitate. “In certain circles, we’re there already. I strongly recommend that you jump on eBay and try to buy some VHS. I just thought I’d get a copy of Dario Argento’s Deep Red for a dollar or two, but I ended up paying $35 for it from a guy who only sells VHS. These people already exist. They’re out there.”
A version of this story first appeared in The Big Issue #374. I’ve edited out the embarrassing bit where I was fooled by the authenticity of the ‘Somebody To Love Me’ clip mentioned above. Damn you, Boy George!
The Hulk as Hamlet
“I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”
That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)
Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.
Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.
No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)
It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?
Frankly, I’m not sure why.
It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.
The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.
Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.
Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.
And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.
A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?
Thirst: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of the Chan-wook Park’s wetly disturbing vampire film, Thirst, from the latest jmag. (And yes, I did later plagiarise my own line about “sparkling and non-sparkling vampires”, and I apologise to myself for it.) It’s finally getting a DVD release in Australia next month after some sadly limited festival screenings earlier this year.
THIRST
Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Ok-vin Kim
Anyone who’s witnessed the five-star, what-the-hell-am-I-watching? spectacle of Oldboy knows that Chan-wook Park’s films are rollercoasters: funny, scary, and violently melodramatic.
His latest, Thirst, isn’t just a vampire movie; it’s also the weirdest literary adaptation you’ll ever see. It’s inspired by the decidedly non-vampiric Émile Zola novel “Thérèse Raquin”, but twisted into a slow-boiling, genre-smashing story of an infected priest and the temptations of bloodlust.
Thirst is being hailed as everything that Twilight isn’t. (Personally, I think vampire lore is big enough for both sparkling and non-sparkling varieties.) Thirst is missing the momentum of some of Chan-wook Park’s other films, but manages to make vampires feel fresh again.
Did I mention wetness? The impeccable sound design makes this one of the schlurpiest films in cinema history, all blood and snot and seawater. Sam Raimi’s recent Drag Me To Hell was obsessed with horrible things happening to mouths, but Thirst will make you long for simpler times when people just used to get stabbed in the eyes.
Other reviews this month: Away We Go, Coraline, and Where The Wild Things Are. (Here’s something of an extended 12″ remix of my Wild Things review.)
Issue #35 is on sale now.