Some may remember director Chee Keong Cheung from his work on independent and fiercely low budget fight flick Underground which hit DVD last year and won a good amount of attention for what Cheung and company managed to accomplish on a tiny budget.  Underground certainly wasn’t breaking any new ground and it had some significant weaknesses but there was clearly some talent at play there and a good amount of promise for the future.  Well, the future is now and we’ve just been passed the brand new trailer for Cheung’s new film - the martial arts drama Bodyguard: A New Beginning.

‘A New Beginning’ focuses around the story of Leung, the bodyguard of a Chinese Triad boss, Wong, to whom his loyalty is unrivaled. Living in Hong Kong, Wong requests that his bodyguard travel to the UK to protect a young British woman, whose true identity is known only by Wong himself. Even his own errant son, Yuen, is kept in the dark, which leads to a betrayal that threatens to destroy the family and all that his father has worked hard to protect.

Fight fans are going to recognize a few familiar faces in there and the fight work is obviously very good but what’s really going to stand out are the huge strides forward in story telling and cinematography.  There has obviously been more attention paid to story this time out and DPs Matthew Beecroft and Henry Chung obviously know what they’re doing behind the camera.  This thing looks absolutely gorgeous.  Very, very nice.  Check it out below the break in the Twitch Player.

Continue Reading "A Trailer For Chee Keong Cheung’s BODYGUARD: A NEW BEGINNING"...

It may not be the biggest film.  It may not be the flashiest film.  But Kankuro Kudo’s Shonen Merikensack is, without a doubt, one of my most anticipated films of 2009.  Why?  Well, first of all Kudo is a flat out brilliant writer.  Zebraman. Ping Pong.  Yaji and Kita.  All Kudo-penned films, all of the showcasing a remarkable ability to create compellingly nuanced characters in the midst of sheer, flat out madness.  When it comes to blending the surreal with the comic it’s my opinion that Kudo is one of the top three film makers in the world right now and anything he is involved with is worth paying close attention to.  Second, young star Aoi Miyazaki.  Miyazaki is, without a doubt, one of the finest actors of her generation and in Kudo’s hands she’s getting the chance to shed her oh-so-serious indie darling image and get flat out goofy.  And judging from a series of behind the scenes videos from the set of the film she’s having an absolute blast doing it.  Third?  Aside from being one of Japan’s top writers, comedians and directors Kudo is also part of a very successful band so when he sets out to create a comedy about a group of fifty-something (as in age, not number) punk rockers you just know he’s going to come up with something special.

I checked the film’s official website hoping for a trailer the day before yesterday and had no luck but nothing gets past Kevin over at Nippon Cinema who spotted it immediately once it did arrive.  This one’s very much a teaser, with minimal footage from the film but as teasers go it’s pretty tasty.  Check it in the Twitch Player below the break.

Continue Reading "Glory!  A First Teaser For Kankuro Kudo’s SHONEN MERIKENSACK!"...

Has this news come out before? Because it’s so very, very odd that I can’t believe I missed it first time ‘round.  Tucked away into a Variety article detailing the distribution of future Marvel Comics films is word that Kenneth Branagh has been confirmed as the director of the upcoming Thor film.  To which I can only say ... whu?  I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense if Marvel is hoping Branagh will bring his Shakespearian sensibility to the character - probably the only way to avoid it being horribly, horribly bad as Thor is, in my opinion, probably the most difficult character to bring convincingly to the screen in any sort of contemporary setting - but, really?  Branagh?  What’s he EVER done to show that he can handle effects and action on this scale?  That’s just weird ...

[In accordance with the book of “Things Todd Lets Us Get Away With” this post will remain here on top of the page for, well, most of the day. Please scroll down for today’s news.]

Some people look weathered, but few people look leathered!
I don’t know what Danny Trejo has been doing with his skin to make it look like that, but I’d hate to try it myself.

With a face that transcends conventional opinions about “beautiful” and “ugly”, the man has been a walking special effect since his near-accidental tumble into the film industry in “Runaway Train” at age 40, and from the start he has been almost lethally recognizable and continuously typecast.

But instead of wearing out his welcome Danny Trejo only became more popular, especially after Robert Rodriguez started to use him to great effect in his movies.

Even though he is by all accounts a very nice guy these days, Mr. Trejo has had a rather, eh… checkered past, so to speak, spending nearly all of the sixties behind bars in a wide selection of famous prisons. Funnily enough he still gets asked at auditions if he can play a convict.

Next year he’ll turn 65 but there’s no sign of him retiring yet. In fact the man is almost insanely prolific: in 2008 alone Danny Trejo was already visible in more than 10 films, another 10 are scheduled to be released later this year, and he did television work too!

Anyway, Danny Trejo’s face almost seems created just for the purpose of being zoomed-in on. Which means that once again I’m going to use a turn in the Twitch-O-Meter to do a gallery of 5 close-ups.
Guess which 5 movies they’re from. No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDB. Because he always looks more-or-less the same I’ve kept it relatively easy and stuck to movies which have opened wide. So forget about those titles which were released Direct-To-Video only, these shots come from real movies with real budgets!

The 31st Mill Valley Film Festival ("MVFF") is set to begin this Thursday, and since posting my first program overview, we’ve seen two new films added to the line-up.  The first is Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire—arguably the film with the biggest buzz from this year’s Telluride and Toronto festivals—and the other is Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, the Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz-starring The Brothers Bloom.

What follows are (mostly) quick takes of nine MVFF films I’ve had the chance to preview in recent weeks.  The first three were screened for press, and the remainder were seen on DVD screeners.  Wendy and Lucy and Lemon Tree are due for U.S. release and therefore restricted to 75-word hold-reviews.

Continue Reading "2008 MVFF31—Michael Hawley’s Quick Takes"...

Daisuke Goto’s A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn aka Cowshed of Immorality (2003) is a pink film about a senile man who mistakes his daughter-in-law for a cow. The description and title alone are enough to grab some immediate sales, but the film offers a bit more than subversive thrills. 

Continue Reading "BEHIND THE PINK CURTAIN Retrospective: Daisuke Goto’s A LONELY COW WEEPS AT DAWN"...

I remember once my Mother expressing fearfulness over her own mortality when one of her favorite movie stars passed away. At the time I thought she was being a bit melodramatic—after all, movie stars are only human beings, right?—and yet with the recent news of the death of Paul Newman, and my 55th birthday right around the corner, I suddenly felt my breath clutch in my chest. Losing one of the true stars in the firmament, the remaining few decades of my own existence now seem irrevocably less illuminated. Sure, there are new actors glittering up the horizon with each new issue of Entertainment Weekly; but, few of them shine consistently like the true stars of yesteryear, let alone guide the way for the rest of us—like torches held aloft to ward off encroaching darkness—icons to emulate.

I have four specific images of Paul Newman which wing to mind. The first, him lying flat on his back with the impression of dozens of eggs pushing out from his stomach, projected larger-than-life on a drive-in screen in Twin Falls, Idaho. Such madness! That sequence impressed me so much as a young man. I got as far as six boiled eggs one time; but, never as many as Cool Hand Luke! Could one ever be as cool as Cool Hand Luke? No. But one could try to be.

Then I think of him as Brick Pollitt resisting the advances of “Maggie the Cat”; Elizabeth Taylor at her most voluptuous. Only a star of Paul Newman’s stature could resist the likes of Liz Taylor in a white slip lingering seductively on the edge of a bed full of rocks. She talked about him making love to her with confident aloofness and—as an impressionable young male—that set a standard for masculine behavior. Even later, when I learned that the role had been adapted from Tennessee Williams’ original intent to guise Brick’s insinuated homosexuality, it didn’t matter. Gay or straight, Newman set the bar for provocatively aloof masculinity.

He expressed the flip side of that as well with his portrayal of Hud. Confident, assertive, and hazardously attractive; the epitome of every crash-and-burn type I sought out during my wild years. I completely understood how it took every bit of moral turpitude for Patricia Neal to resist that naturally sleek body and those baby blues. He proved beyond a doubt that beautiful butch men were sheer hell.

And yet the final image I have of Paul Newman is a description I read in an interview with Joanne Woodward. Woodward was asked what it was like to be married to such a simmering beauty? She was quick to stress that it wasn’t his looks that made her devoted to him; but, the fact that he could make her laugh. And with that one statement masculinity was reconfigured all over again for me and the way was lit for me to follow.

I’ve no doubt that I’m going to stumble now and then in the next 20-30 years I have left. It shall have to be the memory of radiance that wards off darkness now. The memory of blue eyes lit up with mirth, sensuality, intelligence, defiance, humanity.

Continue Reading "TCM—PAUL NEWMAN COMMEMORATIVE MARATHON"...

The Korean DVD cosmos has been a tad slow this summer, what with the Olympics and the fact that, well, the market is dead. Still, this Fall season seems to promise not too badly, if the beginning is of any indication. In the coming weeks we’ll be dealing with a pretty decent array of titles, mixing mainstream with arthouse and even some possible surprises.

First we start with the biggest name, Kwak Kyung-Taek (and Ahn Kwon-Tae)’s 눈에는눈 이에는이 (Eye for an Eye), quite a solid actioner with a top notch performance by the great Han Suk-Gyu. Not a great film nor anything which will stand the test of time, but overall an accomplished genre picture, and particularly recommended to fans of the leads. You can read our review here. Much better and a treat for the eyes is Choi Ik-Hwan’s interesting 그녀는 예뻤다 (Life is Cool), Korea’s first ever film to use the same rotoscoping artifices Richard Linklater adopted in is Waking Life. As we noted in our review, the peculiar thing here is that we’re getting the live-action footage with the DVD, boom mike operators and blue screens included (with, apparently, the possibility to change angle, although I don’t know if they’ll let us choose via remote or just offer different, separate versions).

A rather unexpected but pleasant surprise is the release of Zhang Lu’s 경계 (Desert Dream). Zhang is a third-generation Korean-Chinese director, and is rapidly making a name for himself as quite the solid auteur, after his excellent 망종 (Grain in Ear). DVD is a rather barebones affair with a mere letterbox transfer, but hey. I’ll take that over nothing. You can click the link below to preorder.

Why is growing up such a traumatic experience in Quebec cinema ? From Léolo to C.R.A.Z.Y., the number of movies showing childhood as a hard step in one’s life is surprisingly high and filmmakers don’t seem to get tired of this theme. Philippe Falardeau’s C’est pas moi, je le jure ! (It’s Not Me, I Swear) is a new addition to the subgenre, but even knows it follows a familiar path, it remains a powerful psychological drama and a fine exemple of the best the province had to offer this year.

Continue Reading "A review of C’EST PAS MOI, JE LE JURE !"...

Pandora’s Box by Yesim Ustaoglu won two awards in San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, including the top award, Golden Shell. The best actress prize award went to Tsilla Chelton, famed with her role in the 1990 French movie Tatie Denielle. She learned Turkish for her part in Pandora’s Box, an Alzheimer’s afflicted mother of three mid-aged siblings who decide to bring her into the city from the Black Sea village she lives after learning about her developing condition. Chelton, whose performance had already received praises in early reviews is accompanied by Derya Alabora, Ovul Avkiran and Osman Sonant.

Pandora’s Box recently has been shown in North America, in the Toronto International Film Festival. Below is the synopsis from the film’s page on TIFF web site. A collection of clips from the movie can be found at San Sebastian Film Festival’s site, linked below.

Pandora’s Box is a story of alienation and isolation. It is a story of individuals whose lives have been shaped by a sterile, middle-class morality, a story that many people touched by the inevitable combination of capitalism and modernity can identify with. It is a kind of human landscape, both universal and singular at the same time…

So, sitting here on the couch when I see a note over at Bloody Disgusting that they’ve got the brand new poster for DreamWorks Korean horror remake The Uninvited.  “Hey!”, I thought, “I didn’t know anyone was remaking The Uninvited!” So I hopped over to check it out.  And what do I learn?  This Uninvited is the American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters.  So, yes.  The producers of this film bought the rights to one Korean film, decided they didn’t like the original title and retitled it with the name of another Korean horror film.  Irony ahoy!

The indie horror film Deadgirl emerged from nowhere to a world premiere as part of the Midnight Madness program at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival in mid-September.  To say that the film, which plays like a mixture of Larry Clark and Jorg Buttergeit, set some people off would be putting it mildly. Much to the likely chagrin of detractors, however, Deadgirl is proving it has staying power. For example, various distribution deals for the film are in discussion and festival screenings continue to fall into place. Deadgirl picked up the second place prize in the AMD Next Wave Competition at Fantastic Fest 2008.  The next screenings will be part of the “New Visions” competition at Sitges in October. Screenings at Leeds International Film Festival and Stockholm International Film Festival will follow. Screenwriter Trent Haaga shared his thoughts with Twitch about the film’s origins, development and public reception. He also commented on his career, including past and present projects.

Continue Reading "An Interview with DEADGIRL Writer Trent Haaga"...

Su-chang Kong’s The Guard Post gets a UK DVD release from Cine Asia on the 13th October. A gory mystery/shocker/war movie hybrid from Korea, the film centres on the discovery of a more than slightly distressing massacre at a border guard post:

When communications with a secret guard post situated on the North-South Korean border unexpectedly fall silent, an army platoon headed by a military investigator is dispatched overnight to re-establish contact with their fellow soldiers, one of whom is the son of the army’s Chief of Staff. On arrival at GP506 they discover the aftermath of a gruesome bloodbath and one lonely survivor who they hope can provide the answer to the mystery behind the massacre. Shocked by the horror of the event and eager to cover up the incident, the top brass at Army HQ order the incineration of the guard post and the destruction of any evidence relating the incident. With just hours to go before the order is due to be executed, the investigative team finds itself in a race against time to uncover the truth, which they believe must be hidden somewhere within the remote outpost and its maze of underground tunnels. But the countdown to dawn proves to be the least of their concerns when it becomes apparent that the deadly effects of the terror lurking within the guard post have only just begin.

Special Features include: The Briefing Room (behind the scenes); The Barracks (set design); Guard Post Head Office (special effects and make-up); storyboards; trailer gallery.

A pleasingly not-safe-for-work trailer can be found below the break.

Continue Reading "The Guard Post (aka GP506) UK Region 2 DVD: New Trailer"...

During the hubbub and all around busy-ness of this years Toronto International Film Festival, there was one film that I found the perfect combination of smart, inventive and entertaining.  I liked it so much that I managed to two screenings of it, a rarity (actually a first) during the scheduling and logistic complexity of that festival.  Perhaps, the worlds first semiotic zombie flick, yet its less than usual storytelling style actually goes back to old-school horror filmmaking, (in that there is much more implicit than explicit) and as a bonus is in no short supply of regional (Canadian) flair.  The sly reference to Herk Harvey‘s Carnival of Souls (and for that matter, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead) cannot be overlooked.  I believe the film is ready to have some cult-love bestowed upon it, a la Ginger Snaps, Cube and Black Christmas (or more maybe more appropriately Deathdream).  After hogging the Q&A during the first screening and still asking questions during the second (yes, the film is more textured and just as fun the second time around), why not hit up a few of the guilty parties with a more (or less) formal Q&A. 

Tony Burgess is the author of the novel (”Pontypool Changes Everything”) on which the film, Pontypool, was based. He also wrote the screenplay and appears in a tiny cameo in the film to boot (or get punted as the case may be).  We talk about the nature of the film and language, and lest folks be worried about the whole *spoiler* aspect of things, perhaps Tony’s own words sum up talking about Pontypool without spoiling things, “We had to satisfy that it is most certainly happening and it just might not be so.”

Continue Reading "An Interview with PONTYPOOL author Tony Burgess"...

The Global Film Initiative announced today ten award-winning narrative, feature films from Argentina, Brazil, China, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Morocco and Mozambique that will headline the Global Lens 2009 film series.

“This year’s lineup of films, from Central Asia to Latin America, is artistically strong and well balanced—it’s one of our best yet,” says Susan Weeks Coulter, Board Chair of The Global Film Initiative.

Global Lens 2009 features three North American premieres, The Photograph, Sleepwalking Land and Songs From the Southern Seas, and one U.S. premiere, I Am From Titov Veles. Also included are critical favorites Getting Home (Ecumenical Jury Prize, Berlin International Film Festival), Mutum (Directors’ Fortnight) and Possible Lives (Pavilion les Cinémas du Sud, Cannes Film Festival).

I Am From Titov Veles and Possible Lives were produced with support from The Global Film Initiative’s granting program. I Am From Titov Veles is also Macedonia’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 2008 Academy Awards.

Global Lens, now in its sixth year, will premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on January 14, 2009 before embarking on a yearlong tour of over forty cities across the United States. For screening-dates and locations, please visit: the Global Lens calendar.

Continue Reading "The Global Film Initiative Announces Global Lens 2009 Film Lineup"...