| Rotterdam 2006 : part four (including Joe Dante's 'Homecoming') |
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 Homecoming; I Don't Care If Tomorrow Never Comes; Inner Circle Line; Insiang (1976); Interkosmos HOMECOMING [8/10 TV] aka Masters of Horror - Homecoming Though originally made for the TV series Masters of Horror, Joe Dante's superb Homecoming has found much more appreciative reception as a stand-alone attraction at film-festivals (including Turin and Rotterdam) than it's so far managed on the small screen. The gore-hungry home viewers expected what the series-title promised, namely 'horror'; Dante (who's always specialised in subverting 'genre' material) instead delivers instead a raucous, consistently hilarious political satire which fondly and accurately spoofs established conventions of low-budget chillers. Dante's track-record makes him ideal for Sam Hamm's ferociously topical, audaciously bold script, based on Dale Bailey's story 'Death and Suffrage.' As narrated (in suitably B-movie style) by Washington-based 'political consultant' David Murch (Jon Tenney), Homecoming is the latest variation on W W Jacobs' 1902 careful-what-you-wish-for tale 'The Monkey's Paw.' Under fire from critics of his overseas military exploits and facing falling poll-ratings in his quest for re-election, the American president remarks that if the soldiers killed during these conflicts could speak, they'd support his hawkishness. Within hours, body-bags are being ripped open by their decomposing inhabitants - keen to make their (croaky) voices heard... Homecoming avoids using the words 'President Bush' or 'Iraq' - but a car license-plate reading BSH BABE and a brief (faked) audio-clip of the folksy 'Commander in Chief' (about whom it's admiringly said "He has a way of making stupid people think they're as intelligent as him") leave no room for doubt. This makes the implicit prospect of Bush somehow seeking a third term (Homecoming being set during the 2008 election-campaign) perhaps the project's most bloodcurdling aspect. On the whole, however, subtlety is emphatically not the watchword here: Dante and Hamm reckon desperate times require desperate responses, and the unbridled force of their assault is perhaps a direct reaction to how many media voices have been supine towards the current administration. You don't have to be a 'Bush-basher' to get a kick out of Homecoming, however - just as you didn't have to be a right-winger to appreciate P J O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptile. Dante and Hamm's brand of sick, cynical humour operates at a sufficiently inspired and consistent level - and is so packed with 'zinger' one-liners - to ensure there's something here to delight (and/or offend) audiences of all political persuasions. That said, the ideal viewership would probably comprise Democrats who know their horror-classics inside out: George A Romero and Jacques Tourneur are directly hommaged along the way. Homecoming makes no bones about following in the bloody footsteps of Romero's Land of the Dead. But - and perhaps because of its 56-minute running-time - Dante's effort manages to be much more direct and focussed than its (relatively) over-ambitious, multiplex-oriented predecessor. This "film" is by adults, for adults, and, refreshingly, about adults: Tenney somehow manages to hold his own against a pair of thunderous supporting performances from Thea Gill (a hoot as 'Bush babe' June Cleaver) and Robert Picardo as fiendish spin-meister 'Kurt Rand' - whose resemblance to 'Bush's brain' Karl Rove is, of course, entirely accidental. I DON'T CARE IF TOMORROW NEVER COMES [5/10] aka Ca m'est egal si demain n'arrive pas The shadow of the Dardenne brothers hangs very heavily over the cumbersomely-titled I Don't Care If Tomorrow Never Comes, an ostentatiously downbeat, slowburning and laconic family 'drama' from Francophone Belgium that, while brief, ultimately places too many demands on its audience. Jacky Lambert turns in an intriguingly low-key, uninflected performance as Jacques, a 40-year-old bloke who has been in some serious trouble with the law. He has only limited access to his 10-year-old son (Robin Weerts) but, keen to re-establish filial bonds, contacts the lad's foster-father and arranges - in contravention to his access rules - a lakeside holiday. The pair are joined by Anne (Olga Grumberg), Jacques's ex-girlfriend who, it gradually emerges, is the little boy's mother... Very little 'happens' in I Don't Care: we're given scraps of dialogue, and moments of action, which we may (or may not) then assemble into a 'story.' An exchange involving a bag of cash, for example, suggests Jacques hasn't gone entirely "straight". And the 'climax,' in which Jacques goes swimming in a lake while his son and Anne sit together on the shore, is left open: has Jacques drowned himself? Or is this merely the moment when mother and son begin a new life together? I Don't Care was originally made for television, and this format is likely to prove a more suitable home than the cinema screen - although the latter environment does showcase one spectacular shot (captured by Nicolas Guicheteau's camera) in which Jacques and son stand on a hillside as clouds slowly part beneath them. Despite such striking moments, there isn't quite enough going on here (either on the surface or in the subtext) to justify the viewer's time, effort or money. The fact that writer-director Guillaume Malandrin (who co-wrote the script with Stephane Malandrin and Lambert) happened to co-produce the deadpan delight Aaltra (2004) is irrelevant: this new film must stand or fall on its own merits and, while far from being a total misfire, it ultimately falls. INNER CIRCLE LINE [4?/10 - walkout after 35 mins] Rotterdam walkout report: I managed about one-third of Inner Circle Line - the drab tale of a traumatised, lovelorn underground train-driver - before pressing the film-critic's equivalent of the 'emergency stop' button and making an early exit. After a jarring, gangbusters opening, the film rapidly loses steam - with increasingly dull, uninvolving results. According to the Rotterdam Film Festival catalogue, this is "an 'experimental' narrative... in which the stories of two characters, a man and a woman, are juxtaposed. Both bear the same name, Youngju. The female Youngju is a DJ in a nightclub... The male Youngju is a metro-train driver." I must admit that I didn't realise that both the main protagonists shared the same name: I presumed that the pair must have been lovers at some previous point in time: (male) Youngju finds himself haunted by memories of an ex-girlfriend, while also trying to deal with the stress of an incident in which a man committed suicide by stepping out in front of his train. 'Mr' Youngju's flashback-heavy travails are intercut with 'Ms' Youngju's DJ-ing activities: nightclub scenes filmed in the cut-happy, hyperkinetic manner which unimaginative directors habitually deploy when dealing with rave culture. On this evidence, writer-director Cho seems to have spent much time watching Wong Kar-Wai pictures - she's picked up elements of Wong's style, but, it seems, very little of the substance. After half an hour, I realised I didn't know or care what was going on, and acted accordingly. The lime-green subtitles are a nice touch, however. INSIANG [8/10] (1976) Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest Philippine films, gloriously full-blooded 1976 melodrama Insiang has lost none of its oomph three decades on. Few - if any - films can begin with such a bang: in the first second of screen-time a slaughterhouse-worker inserts his knife into the neck of a live, trussed-up cow. Gore spurts out, the animal expires before our eyes, and its carcass is messily processed into meat. The message is clear: what we're about to watch will be direct, bloody and a matter of life and death. The story which slowly unfolds - and the first half-hour is a little patience-taxing - fully lives up to this a startling, gripping curtain-raiser. Insiang (Hilda Koronel) - is a girl in her late teens, perhaps even early twenties - living with her harpy-like mother Tonia (played by an actress known as 'Mona Lisa') and various assorted relatives in a crowded, cramped, shantytown hovel on the cacophonous waterfront of a major (unnamed) city. Before too long Tonia has persuaded the relatives to move out - allowing her much younger lover, the thuggish, violent Dado, known as 'the killer' (Ruel Vernal), to move in. Once he's got his 'feet under the table,' the priapic Dado finds himself overpowered by his lust ("I'm only a man... who could resist?") for the virginal Insiang, who herself has a couple of potential beaux among the neighbourhood lads. As passions and frictions rapidly escalate in the family's cramped quarters, Insiang is propelled towards increasingly drastic action... The story of Insiang is by no means new - the characters in Mario O'Hara and Lambert E Antonio's screenplay are to some extent stock figures, motivated by factors which have been meat and drink to playwrights and authors for centuries, perhaps even millennia. But Brocka - who elicits suitably broad, wholehearted performances from his actors - breathes new life into predictable material, placing it in a specific socio-economic context that adds colour, texture, and powerful local atmosphere to what could in lesser hands have been a dry, schematic fable. As R W Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk before him realised, melodrama stands or falls on its female participants - and Insiang's trump cards are Lisa as the unbearable Tonia, her every utterance some kind of a shriek ("I suffered for you! It's your turn to help now!") and Koronel, who manages to make Insiang's transition from saintly, stoic putupon girl to calculating femme fatale both believable and sympathetic. The moment when she finally has enough of Tonia's goadings and physical abuse - returning, with interest, the latest of her mother's many vicious slaps - is a corker, setting us up for the terrific closing scenes. Brocka then (drily) rounds off with the very briefest of closing credits - "The End," and a card informing us that make-up was supplied by the firm 'O'Leary'. Because as Insiang soon learns, if you're plotting to bump off your mother's gigolo lover, it's best to ensure your lipstick is always just so. INTERKOSMOS [7/10] Though possibly too cutesy and insubstantial for some tastes, Interkosmos - a skilfully-executed faux-documentary about a 1970s Communist plan to colonise Ganymede and Titan - is an impressively idiosyncratic and strikingly confident debut from writer/director/producer/star Jim Finn. Its arrival on the film-festival scene is well-timed, coming soon after Russian Alexey Fedorchenko's 72-minute mini-epic First on the Moon. This cinematic 'space race' is all the more amusing as neither director was apparently aware of the "rival" project (future double-bill pairings, and perhaps even a joint DVD release, seem strongly indicated.) Like Fedorchenko, Finn's film is at heart a romance (between two of the space-explorers, played here by Finn and Nandini Khaund) which builds to a tragic/enigmatic conclusion. Around this central story Finn assembles a range of 'archive' footage in which we follow the 'interkosmonauts' as they go through their basic training; hear extracts from their in-flight conversations; see a charming Clangers-ish stop-motion animation from 'contemporary' GDR TV ("The Little Space Pig"); while a German-accented 'expert' (Ruediger Van Den Boom) narrates pseudo-scientific explanations of how the colonies would form "a secret archive of Communism in space" in the event of a capitalism-triggered "global inferno." Despite the fundamentally serious nature of the stuff Finn is satirising, Interkosmos is a whimsical, fluffily endearing affair: parts works brilliantly (the 'Trolley Song' gag and its 'kindergarten of boneless children' coda mark a particular highlight,), most works OK, and a small amount falls flat (an over-extended, sub-Busby-Berkeley sequence involving two sets of Communist hockey-players.) The tone is of genial goofiness, executed with a light elan and a unified, restrained visual aesthetic, that is very hard to dislike. And the eclectic score - by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke - is so evocative and perfectly-judged it deserves a CD release <SEE BELOW!> of its own: this is the best krautrock-spaceopera soundtrack that Can never wrote. And while the main 'action' ends at the 62 minute mark, remaining seated throughout the jokily over-extended 'exit music' is a pleasure, not a chore. <<<<< STOP PRESS : INTERKOSMOS SOUNDTRACK IS NOW AVAILABLE (17.12.07) >>>>> Neil Young 12th February, 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HOMECOMING [8/10 TV] : aka Masters of Horror - Homecoming : USA [TV] 2005 : Joe DANTE (1947) : 56m (timed) TV episode (video) seen at Cinerama, 29.1.06 (press show; section Cinema Regained) I DON'T CARE IF TOMORROW NEVER COMES [5/10] : Ca m'est egal si demain n'arrive pas : Belgium 2006 : Guillaume MALNDRIN (1968) : 69m (timed) feature (35mm) seen at Cinerama, 30.1.06 (public show; section Sturm und Drang) INNER CIRCLE LINE [4?/10] : Naebu soonwhansun : South Korea (SK/USA) 2006 : CHO Eunhee : c92m feature (video) partially seen (walkout at 35 mins) at Cinerama, 31.1.05 (press show; section Sturm und Drang; world premiere) INSIANG [8/10] : Philippines 1976 : Lino BROCKA (1939-1991) : 93m (timed) feature (35mm) seen at Cinerama, 4.2.06 (public show; section Cinema Regained - Noel Vera) INTERKOSMOS [7/10] : USA 2006 : Jim FINN (1968) : 71m (timed) feature (video) seen at Cinerama, 28.1.06 (press show; section Sturm und Drang) More details on these titles - and all others shown at the 2006 Rotterdam Film Festival - can be found at the IFFR official site ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A full alphabetical index of all films seen at IFFR 2006 can be found HERE  |
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