Strange to say but until this Wednesday Shane Meadows had never actually crossed my consciousness, but I was lucky enough to see the world premiere of This is England at the Toronto International Film Festival. My mind was utterly blown to see perhaps one of the best British films in years, and that it didn’t win the people’s choice award in Toronto is gutting. Todd has given it a superb review (yet again, my review is available elsewhere) and this is a film that after seeing I felt so strongly for that I instantly arranged to interview Shane Meadows. Late in the week as it was this was a short interview with a strict time limit, and Shane is such a wonderful subject who talks at such length and depth on each topic that it was almost heartbreaking to have to end the interview. However, this is a nice short discussion about the film and its meaning to him.
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[TIFF info page here.]
I’ve just found out that Death of a President (previously titled D.O.A.P. before, I don’t know, they decided it wasn’t obviously controversial enough) has just won the Prize of the International Critics (the FIPRESCI Prize) at the Toronto International Film Festival “for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth.”
I think this is a travesty. I honestly considered Death of a President so awful that despite initially being interested in it, I decided it didn’t even deserve a kicking in the press. But if it’s going to win awards for what it does, well, I guess the world needs my opinion. I’m an international critic myself!
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Last week, only a few days into the festival I was given the chance to interview Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, director and co-writer respectively of Reprise. This is an interview I jumped at the chance to perform; it sounds completely crazy, with the limited time available during the Toronto International Film Festival, but I’ve actually managed to watch Reprise twice and absolutely love it both times. Todd has given it a wonderful review (my own shorter review available elsewhere) and I’m disappointed that it’s taken me so long to transcribe this interview, but it contains some interesting discussion about the genesis of Reprise, the cast, the musical choices, and more.
(Note: The two gentlemen in the accompanying image are in fact Espen Klouman Høiner and Anders Danielsen Lie, the stars of the film.)
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This week I got a chance to sit down with S&Man director JT Petty and chat with him for a while about his new documentary S&Man, shortly before his film made its Canadian premiere as part of the Midnight Madness programme.
S&Man is a highly controversial film, so controversial that it seems to have caused even an indirect argument between myself and the Gomorrahizer right here on the pages of Twitch. I’ve given it a glowing review, and I maintain that an important part of the film as a discussion of the cinematic form is what you don’t know about it. JT, in this very interview, says, “I don’t really want to reveal too much, because it somewhat ruins the puzzle box of the movie.” He also offers many insights throughout, and you’ll be pleased to see I’ve actually transcribed it rather than just chuck up the raw audio. Todd is lazy! [damn straight - Todd]
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[Mathew finally makes his belated appearance as a member of the Twitch team at the Toronto International Film Festival with a review of the hotly anticipated and debated documentary, S&man, playing tonight as part of the Midnight Madness programme.]
[TIFF Info page here.]
S&Man is a film that has already made headlines here at Twitch, and it saddens me to say that it’s for all the wrong reasons. S&Man, contrary to assumptions which are easy to make, is not a film that should be “exposed”, and which, I lament, should never have been sold on the promise of its secrets in the first place. S&Man is a post-modern masterpiece; a documentary film in which one of the subjects is you, the viewer.
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...And it’s Neil Blomkamp. If you’re as in the dark as I was when this announcement was made, you may well know his work as the director of the Alive With Technology: The New Citroen C4 TV advert, but the only thing you really need to do to suddenly become excited about the prospect of a Halo film is watch his 2005 short film, Alive in Joburg. Depicting a version of South Africa in which aliens have become refugees, it’s an amazingly strong and creative piece of work. The clearly Patlabor inspired Tetra Vaal is another (brilliant) work of his.
I couldn’t care less about Halo (Hell, I still think the hero is called Master Chef) but suddenly I’m very interested.
Source: Insert Credit.
I’m excited to review The Five Venoms for a variety of reasons: not only is it the first film in the Shaw Brothers’ legendary series of films featuring the titular heroes (and villains); it’s one of the most popular and well known works from the Shaw Brothers’ studio. For example, The Five Venoms is the 11th film on Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 cult films of all time (the highest placed kung-fu film) and if that isn’t a sign of almost-certain awesomeness I don’t know what is!
Then again, They Live is only at number 38, so what do they know, eh?
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Well, I’ve been staring at this open word document for far too long now, not sure where to start when talking about the Shaw Brothers’ seminal King Boxer. I don’t know where to start because there are simply so many things to say about it.
Do I introduce this piece by discussing just how ground breaking King Boxer was, as the first Kung Fu film to be a hit in the west? Released in spring 1973 with the exploitation-tastic title of ‘Five Fingers of Death’, it created the Kung Fu phenomenon which continued throughout the 70’s, breaking ground for the likes of Bruce Lee and the many Shaw Brother’s productions that followed.
Or do I take a more trivial hook, and discuss the most familiar musical cue in this film, a repeating klaxon stolen from Ironside. Stolen in turn from this film by serial style-kleptomaniac Quentin Tarantino, it gained fame in his Kill Bill series, but is probably less worthy than the stirring main theme of the film.
The biggest misstep for the Hot Docs festival this year, at least from the punter’s point of view, must be the choice to agree to screen an advert for ‘platinum partner’ Cadillac’s new Escalade vanity SUV before every screening. The public response to this advert has been brutal, with at every screening I’ve seen (bar, surprisingly, Black Gold) the car booed and jeered at by a significant portion of the audience. Naturally, at this biopic of Ralph Nader, controversial presidential candidate and author of the seminal ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’, the reaction was no different.
Continue Reading "Hot Docs Report: An Unreasonable Man REVIEW"...
37 uses for a dead sheep, you say? I can only think of one, and once I’ve done that I’ll be pretty sleepy, so I wouldn’t be any good for the other 36 anyway.
That’s a joke, by the way.
I’ll be honest, though – this film does feel like a bit of a cheat really, as it doesn’t explain the 37 uses for a dead sheep until the credits roll. And even then, at least half of them remain in a different language. If we ignore the misleading title, 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep is an interesting potted history of the Pamir Kirghiz people and their travels, using the Kirghiz people themselves in re-enactments.
There’s also some dead goat polo, which was conceivably a better title.
So the first question you have to ask yourself before you decide to go and see a film about the devastating effects of the global coffee industry upon agriculture in Africa is – Do you even like coffee? Because if you don’t this film is probably only going to add to your already insufferably high level of smugness. Of course, it will do that without really giving you enough information to back this up, but it will do so in a beautiful fashion.
Just wait until the Francis brothers turn their attentions to the tea trade. Then you’re in trouble.
Since my lambasting from a regular poster of comments in an earlier review of A State of Mind, in which apparently declared my undying allegiance to Kim Jong Il or something (hey, just because I can respect a showman doesn’t mean I’m a commie, McCarthy) I’ve always been of a mind to keep my eye open for documentaries which consider North Korea one of their topics. Therefore Dear Pyongyang was one of my first picks on the Hot Docs schedule.
This film, however, isn’t really about North Korea. Not to say this is a bad film (right away, anyway) Dear Pyongyang is the sometimes touching, often glacially slow, story of a woman’s relationship with her father.
Contributor Mathew Kumar has been hard at work covering North America’s largest documentary film festival, Hot Docs, this week, and his first report is a review of the live action role-playing documentary Darkon.
When I was a child (collective sighs of the audience at the prospect of a personal anecdote) I had a book called ‘Once There Was a Knight’. I’m not sure it’s in print, but if you want to find it, you probably can. The story was some kind of perfectly harmless fluff for an elementary school mind, but the part that really captured my imagination was the included instructions on how to outfit yourself as a knight using ordinary household objects. Chain mail could be made out of the plastic rings used to hold together six packs; a mighty war hammer could be made by a cardboard kitchen roll tube, a thick sponge and some tape; and whole castles could be made using cardboard boxes. I was fascinated by this ability to turn the ordinary into the fantastic simply by having a little imagination, and Darkon is a look at a group of live action role-players, all adults, who attempt this transformation on a bi-weekly basis.
An interesting titbit of news for all you Snakes-on-a-Planiacs out there – According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film has created such a buzz on the internet that movie bosses allowed five days of additional shooting to get a tougher rating. Film bosses at New Line Cinema opted to add new scenes to the film to take the movie from a PG-13 up to an R. Among the additions to the film is the much requested rant from Jackson in which his agent character bellows, “I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!” as seen in earlier fan parodies of the film. The film-makers have reportedly added more gore, more deaths, more nudity and yes, more snakes to the finished product.
It’s really only fitting that one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long while would come to me in the strangest of circumstances.
One day I happened to find myself in the kitchen of the Director’s Guild of Canada. (It’s a story too boring to be worth recounting). Lying on the counter of the over-designed kitchen, buried underneath a fully signed copy of the 2006 Toronto Fire Fighter’s calendar, I found a copy of Otto Buj’s The Eternal Present.
It comes in a DVD jewel case with a 16mm clip of the original film in the hinge, which is probably why I was intrigued. It was also completely ignored. We all know films only exist to be watched, but as much as I wanted to just pocket it, my own conscience and the stern gaze of Toronto’s finest (uh, naked firemen are kind of like policemen, right?) ensured I simply fired off an e-mail to the director and later received a copy of the film in the post. Hey. I write for Twitch. We can do that.
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