Aug
12
2008
Interview with HOME SICK, POP SKULL director Adam Wingard
Posted by Collin Armstrong at 8:42am.
Posted in Interviews , Thriller, Cult, Drama, Horror, USA & Canada.
It’s no secret we here at Twitch love up-and-coming director Adam Wingard’s low-low-budget shocker Pop Skull. On the eve of the release of his freshman feature, Home Sick, in a feature-laden special edition courtesy of Synapse (the disc streets August 26th, 2008), I had the opportunity to speak with Wingard about his work thus far and what fans can look forward to from him in the future.
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For 90 unbridled minutes Dance of the Dead, director Gregg Bishop’s lovingly over-the-top riff on the ever-malleable zombie genre, had the Alamo Drafthouse crowd in a persistent, giddy state of beer-fueled uproar (the first round of drinks having been provided by the savvy filmmakers themselves). The film is a pulpy, blood-drenched gas from beginning to end, hitting the ground running and never looking back or kowtowing to common sense.
Another boutique label is making the jump to Blu-Ray. Dark Sky Films, an increasingly potent outfit responsible for a spread of interesting releases including Jim Van Bebber’s legendary underground epic The Manson Family and the highly-regarded French thriller Them (Ils) has formally announced plans to release Tobe Hooper’s seminal shocker The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in high definition.
Bill Lustig and friends announced a while back they had designs on jumping aboard the high def band wagon. Said designs have finally come to pass - through Blue Underground’s homepage, the company has trumpeted some of the titles to be included in their initial wave of HD releases, pictured to your left. No dates have been set yet and special features are still up in the air, but it looks as though BU is jumping head-long into Blu-Ray with at least six discs in production, all updates of previously-released titles including Lustig’s own Maniac and Vigilante, latter day sword and sandal epic Fire and Ice, Argento’s Bird with the Crystal Plummage and The Stendahl Syndrome, and the WWII time travel actioner The Final Countdown. As further specs come down the pipeline, we’ll pass along word…
I had the opportunity to speak briefly with legendary filmmaker Stuart Gordon on the eve of the release of his new film, the psychological suspense / comedy / horror hybrid Stuck (due out in limited release on 5/30/08).
The Criterion Collection goes next-gen this October as the company is set to release its first wave of high-definition Blu-Ray titles.
The characters of debuting writer/director Thomas Callaway’s rustic noir Broke Sky exist in a world perched somewhere between everyday reality and a slightly heightened, off-kilter pastiche of rural Americana. They booze it up at the local saloon, obsess over talent pageants, and dream of movin’ on up from a single- to a double-wide trailer; they also find themselves caught up in murder and near-operatic levels of personal disaster. Against the odds Callaway’s script (co-written with four other writers) melds its incongruent elements into a subversive, satisfying whole. Broke Sky assembles a unique world through cleverly deconstructing overworked genres, resulting in an original and highly rewarding low-key thriller.
The modern historical epic – ushered in stylistically during the early ‘90s by the likes of Dances with Wolves and Braveheart - has long been one of film’s least malleable sub-genres. Whether the action strictly adheres to history or bends it at will (more often the case), certain beats and rhythms persist across films, around the globe. Even the idiosyncratic, frenzied mash-ups favored in South Korea can’t overcome the traditional, lock-step approach to large-scale storytelling (see Musa and The King and the Clown for serviceable examples). That in mind, it comes as little surprise that the Russian / German / Mongolian / Kazakhstani co-producition of Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, an exciting and involving epic depicting the formative years of Genghis Khan, bears little cultural imprint beyond its narrative.
There’s dark humor, and then there’s the obsidian comedy that pervades Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200, a look at slices of Russia’s population as the country took its first awkward steps away from Communism toward Capitalism in the mid’ 80s. Filtered through the grim details surrounding a series of true-life murders and kidnappings committed by a local police captain and brimming with allegorical characters representing a spread of personalities and institutions, calling the film densely-layered would be gross understatement. A solid grasp of near-term Russian history isn’t required to appreciate what Cargo 200 (the clandestine code for dead Russian soldiers shipped home from Afghanistan) has to offer, but there’s little doubt a great deal more stands to be gained by viewers familiar with the country’s tumultuous turns in recent decades.
The opportunity to enjoy my two favorite pastimes in one sitting – movies and basketball – comes along once in a great while. Said fusions often take the form of lower-brow comedies like Semi-Pro, but the occasional gem like The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh or acclaimed doc Hoop Dreams shines through. The second feature-length directorial effort from Adam Yauch (better know as MCA of seminal hip-hop / punk trio The Beastie Boys), Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot lands firmly on the “gem” side of hoops / film hybrid, even if squanders opportunities to dig deeper into the fascinating issues and events it chronicles in favor of a more generalized presentation.
The short subjects in the 2008 IIFF progam “Future Imperfect” touched on a little bit of everything, from the end of life on earth to the re-socialization of an alienated populace to a world teeming with folks literally infected by the omnipresent din of digital noise. Science fiction has always lent itself to short-form treatment, and the subject matter addressed in this year’s selections showcased the genre’s ability to offer pointed commentary amid the fantastic.
Anchored by a pair of strong performances from Minnie Driver and Jeremy Renner, Charles Oliver’s Take succeeds in spite of an unnecessarily convoluted framing device that jumps between multiple fields of time as its characters’ lives careen toward one another leading up to and following a tragic turn of happenstance. One can’t help but think Oliver’s choice in splicing space-time had something to do with undercutting the picture’s increasingly grim tone as it builds toward its climax, the state-sanctioned execution of Renner’s small-time thug for his involvement in the death of Driver’s young son.
A chilly examination of decaying hope, Zack Parker’s Quench exemplifies the drive and spirit that embodies truly independent filmmaking. Shot for a song in the Midwest, the film infuses its bleak tale of a damaged prodigal’s return home with some much needed black humor and a resonant call for acceptance of its characters’ unconventional attitudes and beliefs. Brimming with the sort of honesty afforded only to pictures made on truly individual terms, the film sticks to its kinky guns throughout to consistently surprising returns.