The end of 2008 couldn’t come sooner for yours truly. A lot of upheaval for me and mine and not enough movies. Rather than post my usual end of year list I decided to pick three items that made my year brighter and will probably be skipped over different people precisely because they have been big hits.  These three things, one for every film goer, one for every family and one for every TV watcher, are, to my mind, far more interesting and entertaining than they are given credit for by a lot of us who think foreign is synonymous with good and all three just happened to hit DVD this month.

Continue Reading "3 BIG HITS EASY TO OVERLOOK FOR 2008: WALL-E, PRINCE CASPIAN AND LOST SEASON 4"...

The current wave of female focused martial arts films - Fighter (Denmark), Coweb (Hong Kong), Chocolate (Thailand) - now has a Japanese entry in the field.  It’s titled High Kick Girl and the young starlet is Rina Takeda.  Like the others Takeda can really fight, in this case the discipline of choice being karate. The first teaser has just arrived on the scene and, yes, she kicks rather high.  Check it below the break.

Continue Reading "Quite Possibly The Most Aptly Titled Film Ever Now Has An Equally Apt Teaser."...

Oh, this makes Todd a happy boy.  Though I really love Norway’s Kristoffer Joner in straight drama - the man is not considered one of the region’s very best for nothing, after all - I have always thought that the man is particularly well suited to genre film.  Joner has a sort of washed out, wan, everyman quality to him that allows a smart director to play just about anything off of him, a quality Pal Sletaune put to stunning use in 2005’s Naboer (Next Door).  Joner hasn’t done genre since but he’s back into the fold now - and back in a big way - playing the lead in Pål Øie’s Skjult (Hidden).

Kai Knutsen fled through the woods, from his crazed mother 20 years ago. Now the woman he hated more than anything on earth is dead, and he has inherited the house in the forest. It has a cruel secret.

The first teaser for this has just arrived and it is a pretty compelling stew of stuff.  The haunted house factor is definitely in full force, as is an element of survival horror plus a healthy does of psych-thriller, all of it beautifully shot and constructed.  Yes, please.  Check the teaser out below the break.

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A little while back we ran the first news of Sandy Collora’s Hunter Prey, the new feature length science fiction picture from the director of Batman: Dead End.  Collora has a long history with practical effects, having started his career working at Stan Winston Studios when he was just seventeen, and is taking very much a throwback, build-it-and-shoot-it approach to his debut feature.  We had the chance to talk with Collora about the project recently and not only does he prove to be hugely insightful into the film making process, he is also a very entertaining read and provided us with a stack of new, exclusive images from the picture.  Read on!

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It’s not new news per se and I generally don’t dedicate posts to nothing more than poster art but the fine lads at Magnet Releasing have just released the poster for their upcoming US release of Ong Bak director Prachya Pinkaew’s latest martial arts flick Chocolate - in theatres Feb 6th and On VOD and DVD on Feb 10th - and the tag line they cooked up for the local release was enough to get a chuckle out of me.  And so I share it with you.  A us trailer should be arriving soon as well but for the time being you can find the Thai trailer - with subtitles - below the break and check the archive for Chocolate coverage o’plenty.

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Director Shinpei Hayashiya raised more than a few eyebrows a few years back with the trailer for Deep Sea Monster Reigo, his throwback tribute to classic Japanese kaiju - giant monster - films.  The trailer for Reigo got fans all in a tizzy and then the film was held up by lengthy production delays and generally slammed by those who saw it for a host of budget related shortfalls and some dodgy CGI.  But that hasn’t stopped Hayashiya from going back to the well with Deep Sea Monster Raiga in which his creature takes to the land for some serious stomping.  The first teaser has come out and impresses with its sense of authenticity - this could be a vintage Toho film - but the real hook is a brilliant nod to the big G himself.  I won’t say more than that, just check it out.  The teaser is below the break.

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Fresh off of their court victory last week - a judge agreed that Fox still owned some rights to Watchmen when Warner Brother shot the film - the suits at Fox have now come out and said that they will be seeking a court injunction to delay the film’s planned March release.  The folks at The Hollywood Reporter think this is probably posturing to a certain degree and I generally agree since as satisfying as it may be for Fox to screw Warner Brothers over on this film satisfaction won’t actually make them any money.  They want this released and released wide while the marketing is rolling hot, so it’s best to read this as leverage towards getting a better settlement.  But, still, a whole lot of people at Warners must be sweating buckets right now ...

We first wrote about Zak Forsman’s Heart Of Now all the way back in March, struck by a promotional reel for the film released at the time.  Forsman is one of the organizing forces behind Sabi Pictures, a sort of film collective that shoots heavily improvised and workshopped films Dogme style, high on intimacy and incredibly striking visually.  Forsman’s previous short, I F-cking Hate You, was a fantastic bit of work - dead solid emotionally while also being very funny, while also proving that adherence to the Dogme rules is now reason for your film to look bad because despite being all hand held and naturally lit, this thing looked amazing.  And now here comes most of that crew with a feature length effort ...

“Heart of Now” concerns a young woman (Marion Kerr) with a profound longing for a sense of family. Devastated by her boyfriend’s sudden withdrawal from their relationship, Amber’s circumstance thrusts her back into the presence of the father-figure (Kelly McCracken) that abandoned her and her dying mother nearly a decade ago. Amber confronts the deeper issues at the very heart of her suffering, and finds transcendence in a brief moment at the very heart of now.

Check the trailer out below the break.

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Yes, kids, I’ve recovered from my egg nog hangover enough to remember that we had a copy of Friky Dingo Season Two to give away and boy howdy, I’m doing just that.  Congratulations go out to Ray Salem, you’re our winner!

It’s been a while since ICeland’s first and only Oscar nominated feature director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson released a film, his last being Niceland in 2004. Since then he’s been producing mostly, titles like Guy X, Beowulf and Grendel and most recently Baltasar Kormakur’s Reykjavik Rotterdam. He has how ever been filming a documentary on the down low that will be released next January here in Iceland and is about a woman’s search for answers about her son’s autism called Sunshine Boy.

Autism is a strange disease which affects each person differently, it can completely shut a person down or transform him/her in to a some sort of genius. Did you know for instance that NASA is the largest employer of autistic individuals in the US? Why? Because they are incredible problem solvers and mathematicians. Can you imagine that individuals that most people would label “retarded” or mentally ill are the ones that put people in to outer space?
Most of today technology is designed by autistic people, it’s even thought that Albert Einstein was autistic. The problem is that despite our medical knowledge we are not really sure what causes autism or how to treat it. There are different schools of thought on this subject but this film focuses on how to get in touch with the persons trapped inside their bodies.

A english subtitled trailer has been released so you all can take a gander and it’s after the break.

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The enterprising folks at Pink Eiga have released the first two titles in a series of rare English-subtitled pinku releases: Shuji Kataoka’s S&M Hunter (1986) and Osamu Sato’s New Tokyo Decadence: The Slave (2007). The titles officially launch on January 14, 2009 but are available for purchase directly from Pink Eiga’s site right now. S&M Hunter (depicted at left) was reviewed earlier in the year on Twitch; a review of New Tokyo Decadence is forthcoming. Needless to say, both films are offensive, weird and most importantly, very entertaining.

Everybody’s doing it, so why can’t I ? Hoping to do some catch-up during the Holidays, I tried to push the publication of my top 10 as far as possible. As it turned out, I spent more time at the day job than at the theaters and ended up missing a lot of the big titles released in 2008. That won’t stop me from giving you ten titles I believe you’ll enjoy during their theatrical run or on DVD later in 2009. Let’s also use the feedbacks section to hear about what you guys liked ! 

Continue Reading "More Best of 2008 articles ! What Simon liked this year…"...

Around this time lat year I was raving about a Russian short film titled The Collector and its director, Egor Abramenko.  Abramenko showed huge promise with his short, so much so that I happily brought the film to these shores for some festivals that I was working with and compared the icy precision of his compositions to Korea’s Park Chan Wook.  It’s high praise, I know, but Abramenko deserved it.  And now he’s back, joined once again by The Collector actors Yaroslav Zhalnin and Natalia Rusinova. 

The film is titled Polaroid Love, a half hour short that mines very different territory than The Collector - this is more of a quiet drama - but is no less impressive.  In fact, the film has already won a trio of awards at the VGIK Film Festival - Best Actor, Bet Editing and Best Production.  Abramenko has made a complete, English subtitled version available online and we’ve got it below the break.

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Masatoshi Nagase is one of the great unsung heroes of Japanese film, a hugely reliable character actor with seemingly unerring taste in projects who - despite a huge body of work - remains largely unknown by name.  Tell people that you’ve got a new movie starring Masatoshi Nagase and you’ll probably get mostly blank looks.  Tell them you’ve got a new movie with the guy from Funuke Show Some Love You Losers, Sakuran, The Hidden Blade, and the Mike Hama films - in which he plays the titular detective - and then you’re on to something.

And now Nagase stars with Koji Yakusho in Gelatin Silver, Love, the much awaited debut feature from acclaimed still photographer Kazumi Kurigami.  Nagase plays a photographer hired by Yakusho to follow a hired killer played by the beautiful Rie Miyazawa.  I’ve been checking the website for this one a few times every week for the past couple months and today was finally rewarded with the first trailer for the picture.  The verdict?  It looks just as good as you’d expect coming from a high profile photographer.  Very nice.  Check it below the break.

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Yep, we say farewell to Christmas with the first teaser for Phil Claydon’s Lesbian Vampire Killers.  It’s brief but you can’t really expect them to show it all off this far before the March release, now can you?  I’ve seen significantly more of the film than what’s included in this teaser and from what I’ve seen yes, it absolutely does live up to the title.  And as this makes clear they very definitely know what sort of film they’ve made.  Check it below the break!

Continue Reading "It’s Monday Morning.  Time For Some LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS."...

Update: Alright, things should be back to normal. Let us know if you encounter any problems.

Sorry for the short notice, but we’ll be performing some routine maintenance and upgrades to Twitch tonight. The entire process should take approximately 20 minutes, but during that time both the site and the forums will be inaccessible.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

A couple years back Quebecois director Erik Canuel made a big splash here in Canada with his action comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a film that skewered language relations here in Canada but did so in such an engaging way that it became a huge hit not only in his native Quebec but also across English speaking Canada - a rare occurrence since Canadian films hardly ever get significant theatrical releases in the English speaking territories of the country and French Canadian films even less so.  And now Canuel is back, with his latest feature - the much darker, but still comedic Cadavres - due to release in February.

Cadavres is a tragicomedy about the deadly feelings that unite a brother and sister who have nothing in common. Raymond is a jealous, misanthropic couch potato. Angèle is a sexy TV starlet, childish and disillusioned. One Halloween, their mother, Solange, suddenly dies. Raymond calls his sister for the first time in 10 years. Against all expectations, she agrees to meet him and launches an investigation into their mother’s death, in keeping with her role as a police commissioner on TV. But nothing is ever simple with the Marchildons. What with Raymond’s dithering, and the ghost of Solange haunting her children, and Angèle going crazy receiving guests who are as bizarre as they are bothersome – not to mention the bodies piling up in the basement—it’s hard to maintain a dignified composure. But then again, things were always slightly twisted in the Marchildon household.

I’m not quite sure how to describe the visual mix in this but it looks simply fantastic and since we’ve got the trailer and a clip below the break I don’t really need to, now do I?

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First things first. You have to understand a few things in the Malaysian context before delving further into this review.

“Histeria” is the Malay word for “hysteria,” and in Malaysia, the word describes more than what is usually associated with it. You see, in Malaysia, hysteria is a phenomenon among young girls that is supernatural and mystical in nature. It’s not just a mere psychological condition. But that is also just what some quarters perceive, especially shamans and practitioners of mystical arts. Over the years, there have been many reported cases of teenage schoolgirls becoming hysterical in class, sometimes not just one girl but a few at the same time. More often than not, they are blamed on evil spirits that are believed to have possessed the girls.

The other thing that you need to know are the various ghost stories associated with schools. I don’t know about other countries, but in Malaysia, every school has its own ghost stories and haunted spots. It’s something you just can’t escape when you’re young. Most often it’s the toilets that get the haunted reputation, for some reason.

James Lee’s Histeria takes advantage of all these urban legends and superstitions, and tries to cook up a horror tale that is relevant to anyone and everyone who grew up in Malaysia.

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It aint showing a whole lot more than the previous teasers but a fresh - and slightly longer - teaser for the live action adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga MW has just arrived online.  And for those who only know Tezuka as the creator of the classic Astroboy, well, you’re in for a surprise because this is darker stuff by far.

What’s it about?  Here’s how Nippon Cinema summarized:

When a top secret chemical compound called MW infects an island near Okinawa, the military is sent in to kill all the victims and cover up the incident. A survivor named Michio Yuki (Hiroshi Tamaki) grows up to become a highly-successful banker, but he is slowly being driven mad by the effects of MW. After committing a series of ruthless crimes to get revenge against the people responsible for the cover-up, he decides that the only way to truly get revenge is to unleash MW on the world and exterminate the entire human race.

Continue Reading "A Fresh Teaser For The Live Action Adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s MW"...

Austrian director Götz Spielmann’s Revanche was—for me—the unexpected discovery and delight of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Its tagline inquiry—“Whose fault is it if life doesn’t go your way?”—was one I found difficult to readily answer. The film’s unexpected narrative sponsored complicated emotions that I had to sit with for a while and which I couldn’t fully articulate until I took another look at the film in preparation for its upcoming appearances at both the 2009 Berlin and Beyond Film Festival and the Rafael Film Center’s “For Your Consideration” series. Bay Area audiences are fortunate to have two chances to catch this remarkable film; Austria’s submission to the Foreign Language category for the 81st Academy Awards. If my experience is at all indicative, you might be grateful to have a double chance.

Initially I synopsized at Twitch that Revanche “starts as a slow burn, shifts from the urban to the rural, and becomes a psychological thriller of revenge held in abeyance. Negotiating by way of secrets, rage and grief are barely tempered. Violence smolders like sexuality beneath the skin and retribution is only one cruelty away.” In retrospect, I can see that by “retribution” I was circumambulating around the film’s titular double-entendre: Revanche means not only “revenge” but something like “a second chance.”

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