Moments from Opera (1987)

Moments from Inferno (1980)

Moments from House (1977)

Moments from Suspiria (1977)

Sapporo Short Fest 2010

"In Dome!" As they like to say here from time to time.

Yet again I was trying to remember that Sapporo Short Film Festival was on its way, but utterly forgot about it 'til the whole thing had started. Ah well, I'm kinda sick and exhausted and so-on this year, so I might have to settle for the one selection I saw last night. It was a pretty strong one, and unlike previous years there was nothing that made me think - God I wish this guy hadn't decided to make a short film, but since he did, couldn't he have made it a little... shorter?

But that dome! Yeah, check it out:

This year's main program is going on in that white geodesic business there in front of the TV tower. I was, let's say sceptical. A big, big part of my enjoyment of going out to watch a movie is the actual ambience of a cinema building, and I've gotta say while the dome setting certainly didn't suck... it wasn't as good as previous years which were mostly in the TOHO Plaza in Tanuki Koji. Then again, how often do you get to watch movies in a screen that has actual trees growing inside?

The sound was great, and though the picture wasn't from time to time, some of that might be down to the problems with film quality that I assume comes along with some of the submissions they recieve. I really don't know what made them use the dome, perhaps they couldn't use the TOHO Plaza and this was their best option (I'm pretty sure it's the same thing they use for the Jazz Festival). So, I don't want to be too harsh, but... I was kinda looking forward to being in a cinema. That's just me being pouty though. It wasn't too cold, or too uncomfortable or anything, and the selection of six films, while being bookended by pieces I didn't much care for, was really pretty strong.

I would guess that when you set about making a short film, a short, comedy thing with an obvious punchline would probably be the most reliably... pull off-able. And certainly the most crowd pleasing. So I feel a little guilty that I thought the two best films in the selection I saw were the two short, sweet, comedy ones.

That was 'Born and Raised' directed by Eelko Ferwerda, which was great, probably especially for music makers, and the other was 'True Beauty This Night', directed by Peter Besson:

Two trailers there of course because, since they're short flicks putting them on youtube, while tempting, would be like... Well actually I don't know what it would be like. The world of short films is a fascinating enigma to me. I presume none of the festival fare kinda movies end up on the big video sites like youtube because the directors don't want to give their work away entirely for free, and thus cheapen it or whatever. Plus there is a trade for short movies that... I mean I have no idea about that either though, but there's a short film market going on to coincide with the festival, so I guess people are buying and selling them, but I have no clue where they end up. It doesn't seem to me that there are vast, unwashed mobs clamouring for the latest 5 minute Norwegian thought-provoker, and yet put one of these movies on youtube and it would reach a far, far (far) greater audience. But then, it would just feel like a five minute diversion and not... a 'film'. I really can't be bothered to think my way out of this little intersection of ideas, but I'm almost curious enough to do some research and find out what the short film world thinks about their future.

I have spent even longer ruminating on video art, believe me, and I'm pretty sure I'm never gonna make any.

Anyway! Sapporo Short Fest! Fun again, I wish I had the time and health to see more. But the Norwegian '2023' wasn't very good.

Movies: Juno and Inglourious Basterds

Again, apologies - posting from the safety of January 4th. And now that I come to think of it, I watched both of these movies after New Year, so it should be impossible for me to make comments about them on the date this post was made. That my friends, is either me being psychic, time travel or... blog magic. I'll let you decide which.


Juno was wonderful - funny and touching and better than I expected. The plot was interesting, the characters were just... implausibly likable and the dialogue (which I'd heard so much about) was playful and witty without being smug. I mean, it was smug at times, but it was meant to be smug within the banterous little universe they'd created there. It's not perfect by any means but I really liked it, and it had the best performance I've seen Michael Cera give yet. I mean, come on, I'm willing to be proven wrong here but so far in his burgeoning career Michael Cera seems to be a terrible actor. He gives exactly the same super-geeky performance in everything I've seen him in, and while that generally works and I like it well enough, it's only because the film makers are crafting the parts specifically for him. In Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist he was really fucking pushing it, playing the kind of romantic lead where the relationship - cute though it was - didn't ring true for me. I'm kind of worried about him in the upcoming Scott Pilgrim adaptation, because everything else about that seems utterly awesome.

Enough about Michael Cera. Juno was really good and the worst thing about it is the smugly twee faux indie films that have probably been green-lit because of it.


I liked Inglourious Basterds too, having finally had a chance to watch it, but I'm fairly bemused at the praise it has recieved. I mean, I liked it because it was a kind of demented pop-culture mash up - just Tarantino watching a bunch of second world war movies and thinking - man I'd love to make something like this, with Jews hiding from the Nazis and commandos in the French countryside and the tension of The Great Escape and the camaraderie and like... something to do with The Dirty Dozen... And then he just mixed all that up and slapped it together into a series of tight, very Tarantino-esque scenes and the whole thing is really kind of fun if you like Tarantino's directorial voice.

But by any kind of objective standards that I can think of, it's a terrible fucking movie.

I mean none of the characters were believable, likeable or interesting in anyway. They were mostly annoying in pretty deliberate, entertaining ways, but that doesn't really count. One would think that a lot of the drama of WW2 movies is symbiotic with the idea that the people are in real danger within... well, within World War Two. Inglourious Basterds is famously cavalier with historical facts, and I have no problem with that, but it just makes the slow boiling tension that Tarantino is trying to capture in most of the scenes seem cheap and pointless. The characters are cartoons, the setting is a cartoon... there's no reason to care about anything so it all becomes really uninvolving.

And even more absurdly by the time the finale has come around the ending is so clearly signposted that there's no tension at all! It's just a kind of Nazi bashing free-for-all which... y'know, is fine. But I didn't really like any of the heroes, and I didn't really feel like those Nazis were real Nazis so much as random baddies dressed up in Nazi uniforms, so I turned off completely.

The movie is divided into a small number of long scenes that act like mini-plays for Tarantino to basically play around with war-movie tropes. They're each kind of fun, but they make the whole thing seem very stilted and they sap any momentum the movie might have as a whole. Again, I'm sure the structure and its pros and cons were very deliberate choices that the director made, but... it really kinda sucks.

The one thing that I was technically impressed with was the way in which Tarantino moved the plot along. He used the stilted, extended-scene structure and in every scene gave you exactly what you needed to know to get to the next 'vignette', cutting away all the exposition inbetween. That - paring it down to just the long, tension building scenes that he obviously wanted to get cracking on - was a really nice way of telling the story. It's just that the tension seemed to be pointless since I didn't care about any of the characters, the whole thing seemed utterly contrived and it certainly never seemed to bear much resemblence to the actual historical conflict.

Also the music was interesting but terribly used. Really awfully used.

And despite all that griping I still liked it, but mostly because I like car-crash art, and entertaining, interestingly-bad art and there were plenty of bits that I just plain loved. All the typefaces and text throughout, the main bad guy, Mike Myers (why?), the Bowie track - all awesome. But the movie? Appalling.

I recommend it.

Moments from It's A Wonderful Life

Well, that's just one of the best movies ever isn't it?






God damn you Frank Capra - playing me like a man-sized fiddle.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Moments from Elf

I love Elf. And Jon Favreau's career as a director is constantly fascinating for me. I just always think of him as he appears in Swingers, no matter how many great films he directs.





Also Zooey Deschanel is so much better when she's underplaying the Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl role.

Moments from Bad Santa

Actually, according to the DVD case I was watching "Badder Santa: The Unrated Version". Having never seen the original I guess the difference was lost on me - I guess it was a highly profane piece of cinema, maybe there were even more F-words in this one? There certainly were a lot! Fuck!





It was good, if not great then certainly unique and entertaining enough to get a big thumbs up from me. And when Sheriff John Bunnell there turned up - that added a whole extra star on for me.

Moments from Southland Tales

Man, I'm not afraid to tell you that I was waiting to see Southland Tales for a lo-o-ong time. As one of the many people who fell head over heels in love with Donnie Darko, when I heard that Richard Kelly's second movie was going to be a crazy ensemble piece about the end of the world, starring The Rock, Sean William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar, that would be prefaced by three graphic novels I was 100%-no-refunds sold.

Then it got mauled at Cannes, scaled back, recieved what might charitably be called "mixed reviews" and most people seem to think that Kelly pretty much blew it. The only review I've read of his latest one has been bad too.

Well, y'know. I finally picked up the DVD for cheap when I was back in England and finally sat down with it this week. And of course it's awesome.

I mean, it's a mess, but it's awesome.





I've read two of the three prologue graphic novels (could never seem to track down the last one, and wasn't even sure that it came out, but now I see that it has) so the insanely rushed synopsis at the start actually jogged some memories for me and then I could pick it up pretty well, but I can understand why a lot of people might not. He just tries to pack so much stuff in there, and yes, the story is told in an confusing way, but Jesus there are two strikingly different cuts of Donnie Darko and this was easier to follow than both of them. It's just that Donnie Darko was hung around a 1980s coming of age movie, it was an underdog movie, and people were lured in by that a lot I think. Southland Tales is an apocalyptic sci-fi farce (and there was far more straight comedy than I expected) starring an ex pro-wrestler, an actor known for peurile comedy, a pulp TV actress and a pop star. Unless you like the willfully eclectic (like me, and probably a lot of other people too) it's a pretty hard sell. Worth noting that I thought all the performances - and yes, a lot of the time it seemed like people were acting in entirely different movies - were perfectly pitched for this movie.

I really did love it. I kept thinking it was going to take a nose dive into the unwatchable, but it never did. The weakest point was that terrible opening, where a whole other movie was summarised in voice over and via faux news reels. In the end that stuff played out and was essential to the story, but even I've gotta admit you're asking a lot of your audience to follow that and then jump right into part four. But once it got going the way the story played out, tricky as it was, became a real strength. Kelly wasn't sloppy in telling the story, he was just asking the viewer to keep up, and that's never a bad thing.

Moments from Crows: Zero II

Crows: Zero II - the sequel to the hit movie prequel to the popular manga series about high school boys hitting each other, was pretty good fun as far as movies about twenty-something men playing high-school boys hitting each other go. If you're a fan of cute Japanese boys I would say that the thing is a veritable jamboree, and for me as a fan of punching in the movies, it was heartily enjoyable. It was too long, and spent too much time revelling in some of the 'character traits' and rivalries that it set up in the first film, but still - fun.

Of course when there is approximately one female character in the movie (who does even less than she did in the first film) it's gonna be impossible to avoid some kind of homoeroticism:


Although that guy, front and centre, was a nice addition to the cast that allowed them to play around with that whole - men liking manly men thing. Though sadly:


And the bromance between the two leads finally blossomed too:


Yeah, bromance, I used it without blinking. Get over yourselves. The movie was basically an extension of the first, a cartoonish coming of age piece where delinquent youths try to come to terms with what it is to be a 'man.' And it was about cute boys punching each other.

That of course, less of a draw for me than it might be for some, but I am seriously considering renaming this blog "Gay For Yamada Takayuki" because seriously, that guy may be short, but he's just insanely cool:


Or maybe a "Fuck Yeah, Yamada Takayuki" tumblr? God, he's amazing. Swoon etc. Last week I was in an office where they called for a guy with the same name. Seriously, I heard "Yamada Takayuki" and almost fainted. Must suck to be that guy at the moment though.

Moments from The Ten

So. Bunny, Ben and I were galavanting around Brighton and some turn of events prompted Ben to compare the situation to "The Ten, where Liev Schreiber is buying all those CAT scan machines to keep up with his neighbour." He dropped it into the converstation so smoothly, as if this was a movie that everyone knew, so it would be an easy shared reference point - but neither of us had ever heard of the movie. In fact as he continued to outline it - the bit where Adam Brody falls out of a plane and gets embedded in the ground, the bit where Winona Ryder runs away with a ventriloquist's dummy - we just flat out started calling shenanigans. There was no way this movie could have been released without us clocking it.

Well, turns out since it was something of a flop with about half of the feedback I saw starting "this movie sucks" I guess it might have been buried a little bit. In fact when Bunny finally saw it she warned me off, saying she didn't understand how Ben could like the movie. However having now watched it twice (Yuki was intrigued, so I agreed to watch it again with her) I can reveal that... it ain't as bad as all that.




I laughed out loud about five times, which is pretty good going, but I also physically winced at some of the jokes. I liked the running gags, but often the more free associating jokes fell flat, and the musical number at the end was atrocious. That said it was a bizarrely unique piece of goofy Hollywood comedy and I would... cautiously recommend it, if you don't mind checking out something that sucks in an interesting way.

Cautiously mind you.

Englanding #16 : Extra Brighton & London Content

Well, it turns out that I have a bunch of good snaps from Brighton and London and it would be positively criminal of me not to share them with your good selves. Thus, the Brighton pier that you can't go on:


God, people must love taking pictures of that thing. I kind of want to write an action movie in while the final punch up takes place on it. Awesome. As well as a burnt-out pier, while in Brighton you may also come across the gentleman with whom I'm drinking here, Robert:


He is a scoundrel and a cad and please treat him as such. We saw Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is very good but I have no idea who it's pitched at. It's essentially an animated film in very much the same vein as Wes Anderson's other movies but made a little simpler and with no swearing... y'know, for the kids. Then again, I don't really care who it's aimed at, I really enjoyed it.

Here's where the spies live in London:


Place on the left that is. And here's my touristy tube snap:


Trains that go under the ground?! Sapristi! There could be a whole civilization down there!

Englanding #14 : Brighton = Dead Birds, Bones and Candy

Lest the comments make no sense - originally there was nothing here, no words, no nothing. That's what I get for leaving a job half done.

Brighton, jewel of the south coast, where all the Londoners go when they get as sick of London as everyone else in the country is. Brighton's cool in a lot of ways, but it is kind of like mini London and a lot of the problems that I have with it are the same. Certainly the good, good people who I know currently residing there seem to get driven a bit crazy by the place. Still, lots of good pubs, restaurants, shops and amusements - even two piers! One working, one a broken, ruined skeleton! Also the Booth Museum, which contains more dead birds than I've ever seen in my life!


There were aisles and aisles like that - just floor to ceiling cases packed with stuffed birds in what I assume were accurate dioramas. In the middle there were many, many dead bugs and at the back:


Skeletons! Isn't that the creepiest damn skeleton you've ever seen? It's a baby orangutan, brrrrr. They had a lot of other good skeletons too, if skeletons are your thing. I was pretty impressed with the narwhal head, and it was a good place to go for Halloween too y'know. What with it being a giant house of death.

Another good place to go for Halloween was the sweet shop where my sister works... after hours!


I mean, we went after hours. She doesn't work there after hours selling illegal, experimental, under the counter sweets to the seedier denizens of Brighton. At least I don't think she does. We stocked up on sweets and then Halloween night viewing was one terrible 80s horror b-movie that I can't remember the name of, and Trick or Treat, the 80s hair metal slasher flick that's actually really fucking awesome.

Oh, and the Halloween episode of Pete and Pete which, as Chris says, is one of the best pieces of television ever made.