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.

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!

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

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.

I thought I’d explain what the hell I meant.

Over at The Millions, Jeff Martin admitted that the film itself left him cold, but the trailer “remains to be a revelation”. He’s right: the first trailer for Wild Things is a thing of pure awe. Its combination of imagery and music has a voodoo-like power to make grown men burst into tears.

(Other men, I mean. Other men less manly than me.)

“I’ve come to think of the full-length film the way I think of those indulgent overlong director’s cuts that always seem to show up on DVD,” says Martin. “[Spike Jonze] has created one of the best (and certainly most expensive) short films in the history of cinema. And I, for one, am thankful.”

The first third of the movie was pretty much what I was expecting from that trailer. Maybe not packing quite as much emotive power, but still gorgeous, sad, and capable of generating near-nuclear levels of nostalgia. Max flees from the conflict of his home life, finds a boat, and travels to the island of monsters where he’s declared to be their king.

It’s what happened after the Wild Rumpus that surprised me. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but this isn’t a movie for children. It’s a movie about childhood, just like Scorsese’s King Of Comedy is about humour without being funny. That’s why adults should be less concerned about the movie scaring their kids – though, yeah, it probably will – and more concerned that it’ll bore them stupid.

As the film continues, Max finds that the same fears he faced at home have infected this new world, too. His escape into a fantasy world of giant monsters becomes more complicated; our attempt to retreat into some kind of warm, wild, uncritical nostalgia with him also fails. The movie seems to stall, overwhelmed with doubts. The promised fun and freedom evaporates, and Max is left desperately struggling to understand his place in this world, just like he was in the last.

In the words of Buckaroo Banzai: no matter where you go, there you are.

The first note I scribbled after coming out of the movie was this: “SADNESS IS UNAVOIDABLE”. (Sigh.) A little later, though, I began to think about superhero stories – the ‘grim and gritty’, sex-and-violence kind, usually seen as starting with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. In his book How To Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock points out that “comic books were now expected to tell stories for adults using the building blocks of children’s literature”.

Just like some think it’s wrong to, say, turn a goofy superpowered criminal called Doctor Light into a full-blown rapist for some ‘adult’ thrills, I see how turning a classic of childrens’ literature into a slow, difficult film about unavoidable sadness might be missing the point.

Did we need to see Maurice Sendak’s untamed monsters bursting into a flood of self-loathing tears? I don’t know. I just know I won’t ever forget it, and that’s enough for me.

I hate star ratings.

Seemingly immortal film critic Roger Ebert – when accused of handing out stars like candy – said that he’s always happy for people to disagree with what he said about a movie. If you want to disagree with how many stars he gave it, though, you “can mail your opinion to where the sun don’t shine.”

He’s right. No one expects opera, or dance, or novels, or elaborate and pretentious modern art to be summed up in one to five stars. People are expected to read the reviews instead. We use star ratings over at jmag where my reviews are only around 170 words a piece. I swear it’d barely take more time to pick out the key words than to count the stars under the title.

Maybe it’s because movies are “show business” – the emphasis on that last word and not the first. People just want to know if I movie is worth their money; so a movie ticket is thought of as a less complicated commodity than other kinds of art. (Music is, too.)

I’ve never been much of a thumbs-up / thumbs down critic. One editor once said they still couldn’t tell if I actually liked the movie after reading my take on it. I suppose I try to point out some things that I thought were interesting about the movie; maybe the things that I think made it worth seeing, so if you value those things – a great performance, a kick-ass action sequence, a clever genre twist – then you’ll like it.

That means a 2.5 star movie might be A) an amateurish, clumsy, disappointing film with one gobsmackingly amazing performance right in the middle, or B) a perfectly competent film that takes no risks but is a pleasant way to waste an hour and a half. Is that fair? Is there any kind of metric with which you can accurately compare a schlocky-but-smart teen horror flick with a desperate-for-Oscars costumed tragedy? I don’t know.

When I first needed to use star ratings, I found myself agonising over them. (“Two? Two and a half. No, two. Two. Three? Two and a half.” This could go for hours.) Now I just tell myself that there’s at least a full star margin of error and leave it at that. Still, though, I find myself trapped in weird inconsistencies: I’ll happily give a film 4 stars if I really enjoy it, but 4.5 seems lightyears ahead; two stars might still be enjoyably mediocre, but 1.5 is pretty damn terrible.

The New Yorker just profiled one of the anonymous ‘inspectors’ from the Michelin guide: one of the most prestigious restaurant guides in the world. You’d think that food would be more like opera and dance than movies and music, but no – there’s a long tradition of ranking restaurants with stars. The New Yorker writer – given rare permission to tag along with the inspector he called ‘Maxime’ – asks her what she liked about her latest meal:

“It’s not really a ‘like’ and a ‘not like,’” she said. “It’s an analysis. You’re eating it and you’re looking for the quality of the products. At this level, they have to be top quality. You’re looking at ‘Was every single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?’”

It’s a fascinating approach to criticism: either something is correctly cooked, or it’s not. Yes or no. Zero or one.  It’s a way of thinking that’s completely foreign to me.

Look, I can’t even make myself rate my songs in iTunes. (It just feels rude.) I give you permission to entirely ignore my star ratings in the future. My opinions, however, should of course be followed as if chiselled into stone tablets by an angry god.

A SERIOUS MAN

Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Aaron Wolff, Richard Kind

Remember seeing the last Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, and wondering: what the hell was the point? Or their film before that, No Country For Old Men, with its bamboozling, creepy non-ending? Now the Coens have taken that same sense of pointlessness and transformed it into their best screenplay since The Big Lebowski.

A Serious Man is impossible to do justice to in a plot summary. (Okay, fine. “Larry Gopnik, head of a Jewish family in 1960s suburbia, who loses his faith as his life inexplicably falls apart.” You happy now?) Larry, played by mostly-unknown Michael Stuhlbarg, is utterly sympathetic as a man trying to do what’s right while slowly succumbing to hysteria.

It’s funny, awful, and heartfelt. Like an absurd episode of the Wonder Years, maybe, if Kevin’s grown-up narration was actually the Voice of God and had gone mysteriously silent. It’s been true for two decades now: when a Coen Brothers’ film is firing on all cylinders, there’s nothing else like it.

Other reviews by me this month:  Dead Set and Crank 2: High Voltage on DVD, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in cinemas.

Issue #34 is on sale now.

High concepts can quickly curdle, though. The movie blog I Watch Stuff crystallised this for me while discussing the poster for the latest Jackie Chan film Spy Next Door. The headline: “Actual Spy Next Door Poster Marks End of Spoof Movie Posters”. Take a look. It’s hard to argue the point.

For me, it’s the recent Bruckheimer blockbuster G-Force that hurts. A squad of celebrity-voiced, crime-fighting, wise-cracking 3D animated guinea pigs? When the worldwide landslide of promotion began, I thought: “You’ve got to be kidding.” Actually kidding, I mean – because G-Force looks exactly like one of those fake movies that act as an easy in-joke inside real movies.

The clip made available of the fake sitcom “Yo Teach!” was perhaps the single best thing about Judd Apatow’s recent (and disappointing) Funny People. It’s freakishly plausible. The script, the set, the laughter. You could drop it onto prime time TV and no one would notice. The same goes for the “MILF Island” clips featured on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. It barely even functioned as a joke; more an only-minutes-away-at-best Reality TV prophecy.

(In both these cases, you can easily argue that the fake shows are cultural artefacts that are far more likely to exist in the real world than the actual shows that spawned them.)

This confusing play of reality-versus-parody leaves me suspicious of satire. Consider how studies seem to show that the reason Stephen Colbert is beloved by all sides of the political spectrum is that his refusal to break character makes him unpindownable. He’s a Rorschach blot in a classy suit.

I keep thinking of a quote from Steve Aylett’s faux-biography of science fiction writer Jeff Lint. In it, he writes that “satire was like scrubbing tombstones with a toothbrush, but honourable nevertheless.” Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whose tombstone Colbert’s cleaning.

And if Colbert’s fanbase can leave me feeling bewildered, something like G-Force mostly just leaves me feeling old. (You kids and your confusingly parody-tinged entertainment! Turn that music down!)

Old, that is, until I think back to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It began as a parody of Frank Miller’s Ronin, but its stars became bona fide pop-culture heroes. When the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters inevitably appeared on comic book shelves soon after, I don’t remember batting an eyelid – despite the logic puzzle of parody squared staring back at me.

So to all the wise-cracking, gun-toting, celebrity-voiced guinea pigs out there? I may not understand you, but I salute you nonetheless. Just make sure you’re not struck by lightning.

MOON

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey

Almost every interview, article, or casual conversation about Moon must mention that its first-time director, Duncan Jones, is the son of David Bowie. (Hey, just like I’m doing now! Weird!) His film, though, is good enough to stand on its own.

Moon is a callback to the cerebral sci-fi of the 1970s. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is serving out a three-year mining contract on a moonbase, alone except for a friendly robot named GERTIE (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Sam seems to be going understandably mad, leading to an accident and an impossible identity crisis.

Moon is almost a one-man-show, leaving Rockwell to carry the film on his twitchy shoulders. He pulls it off, too. Yes, there are some snags in storytelling logic, and an intrusive soundtrack by the usually capable Clint Mansell (Requiem For A Dream). When most sci-fi cinema has been co-opted by CGI spectacle, it’s always a pleasure to see one putting ideas ahead of explosions. Jones’ next film should be a doozy.

Other reviews by me this month: (500) Days of Summer, The Mighty Boosh box set, and Van Diemen’s Land. (You can read that last one over here).

Issue #33 is on sale now.

Inside the building at 372 5th Avenue Brooklyn, there’s a secret door. (I won’t say where because it’s a secret.) Behind it, there’s a large room where children sit and finish their homework, get help from tutors, or embark on ambitious extracurricular creative writing projects. When I visited, posters from their most recent batch of films were hanging around the walls. This is 826NYC.

Others have explained the make-you-all-warm-inside, bring-a-tear-to-your-eye, maybe-the-kids-will-be-alright-after-all charity work done at 826 National. There are seven locations around America, each fronted with its own theme. San Francisco has the Pirate Supply Store, Los Angeles has the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, and Chicago’s Boring Store does not sell spy equipment for secret agents. No sir.

But it’s the Brooklyn store that also houses the Superhero Supply Co., providing everything a young superhero needs to combat neighbourhood evil. As the sensibly-lettered sign outside says: “Costumes. Eyewear. Invisibility. Instruction Manuals. Dastardly plots will be foiled. Underground lairs will be found. ‘Ever vigilant, ever true.’”

There are X-ray goggles, wrist-communicators, industrial strength suction-caps, and secret identity kits – in case you need extra documentation to prove that you’re actually Ruben Fletcher, 46, an appliance salesman from Iowa City. There are other products that are a little more conceptual, too, just a jug of pure chaos from Bugayenko Laboratories.

There’s a selection of capes – and a cape-tester to see how it looks billowing dramatically behind you – and a Devillianizer machine in case you need to work on those occasional villainous tendencies.

I love the attention to detail, the utterly convincing graphic design, and the quips scattered around the store for those who are paying attention. (“Please ask a clerk for assistance with products on the higher shelves. Do not levitate, hover, or stretch.”) I love that you’re required to give your superhero name and recite the Vow of Heroism before leaving the store with your purchases. They frown on irony, too, so be prepared to say it with gusto.

Most of all, I love how democratic it all is. Too much fantasy seems to requires that its heroes are born special. Secret royalty; chosen one after chosen one; you know the drill. The division between who’s worthy and who’s not seems impossibly wide. Once you’re one, you can never be the other. Batman and Iron Man might be self-made heroes, but they’re the exceptions – and still chosen by tragedy. If you want superpowers just to help people, have fun, and save the world? You haven’t earned them. Look at anyone who takes Mutant Growth Hormone (in the Marvel Universe) or joins Lex Luthor’s Everyman Project (over at DC). It never seems to end well.

It’s also what made me wary of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, even though I rank his earlier Iron Giant as one of my all-time favourite movies. It’s difficult to root for the stars when you know you’re just one of the mundane many who are holding them back from their heroic destinies.

I’m more of a sucker for the end of the good-hearted and much-maligned Mystery Men from 1999. The last thing these misfit heroes do in their film is assure everyone out there that they too have got what it takes:

“I think we would all like this victory to go out to all the other guys… and I’m talking about the people in this city who are super-good at their jobs, but never get any credit. Like the lady in the DMV. That’s a rough job.”

“For the people that remember jingles from tons of old commercials!”

“And for people who support local music and seek out independent film.”

Besides, at the Superhero Supply Co., they don’t look down on you just because you can’t fly. You don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that you were born special. Why wait for an origin story? Go and get one!

You might have to cough up some spare change for the gadgets and tights out the front, but it’s all to raise money for 826NYC’s free programs out back – and that means just by wanting to become a superhero, you’ve already made the world a better place.