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LEEDS
FILM FESTIVAL 2003 / SHEFFIELD “CINEMADAYS” EVENT
report
by Neil Young
official
websites : Leeds Film
Festival & CinemaDays
SECTION
ONE : Sheffield / Leeds
Thursday
2nd October (Sheffield) : Kill Bill Vol. One, Mystic River,
S.W.A.T.
Friday
3rd (Leeds) : The Coast Guard, Aro Tolbukhin – In the Mind
of a Killer,
Shangri-La
(Japan Goes Bankrupt), Ju-On -The Grudge, Visitor Q
SECTION
TWO : Sheffield / Leeds
Saturday
4th (Sheffield) : Love Actually, Alien - Director’s Cut,
A Mighty Wind
Sunday
5th (Sheffield) : The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen;
(Leeds) They’ve Got Knut
SECTION
THREE : Leeds
Friday
10th : All About My Father, Dead End
Sunday
12th : Time of the Wolf, Undead, Bubba Ho-Tep
Friday
10th October
Leeds
Film Festival
ALL
ABOUT MY FATHER
5/10
Alt
Om Min Far : Norway (Nor/Den) 2002 : Even Benestad : 75 mins
(seen
at Leeds Art Gallery – video projection)
Innocuous
stuff, and a mistake to give it a title so close to Almodovar masterpiece
All About My Mother.
Pedro himself would be intrigued by the subject matter, however: son interviews
father and other family members, main subject is father Esben’s transvestisism
– appears as self (dead-ringer for Richard Carpenter) and as ‘Esther Pirelli’.
Doesn’t cause much of a stir in anything-goes Scandinavia, and really
why should he? Watchable but very so-so combination of home-movie + student
graduation film + family therapy session. Familiar hand-held ‘style’ of
direction, with some arbitrary visual effects deployed to jazz up what
is essentially a series of talking heads.
DEAD
END
6/10
France
(Fr/USA) 2003 : Jean-Baptiste ANDREA & Fabrice CANEPA : 85 mins
(seen
at Hyde Park Picture House)
At first, title
seems to be a misnomer – film takes place on apparently endless back-road:
travelling to annual Christmas stay with in-laws, dad (Ray Wise) decides
on whim to take different route. Bad move: turns out to be apparently
never-ending road to nowhere, and family soon plagued by scary visions
of ghostly young woman cradling infant. Events rapidly take grisly turns…
In fact, calling movie Dead End is exactly right - film occupies
sub-genre of cinema that is itself complete dead-end: the twist-picture.
Many viewers will spot ‘surprise’ ending not long after start – will spend
remainder of movie seeing what directors come up with on way to inevitable
denouement. And while finale not quite what we expect, is less
than satisfactory – botched climax and lame coda by far weakest sections.
Unfortunate, because plenty of worthwhile stuff along the way. Usual Christmas
tensions among dysfunctional family sharpened by the nightmarish context
situation. Much effective deadpan humour (highlight: dad turns on radio,
hideous spectral wailing is heard – dismissed by pop as “one of those…
radio talk-shows.”) Cast much better than usual no-budget B-movie standard:
Alexandra Holden turns in very droll performance as mother Marion – until
going ga-ga at midpoint. Ray Wise solid – this horror-comedy perhaps what
his other current release Jeepers
Creepers 2 should have been like. Directors makes inventive use
of limited resources: lovers of technique known as “poor man’s process”
will have field day (as detailed in the DVD commentary on The Fog,
p.m.p.simulates motion when shooting inside static vehicle). Several impressive
aerial shots of car speeding through desolate nightscape. As in Swedish
sci-fier The Unknown,
directors save money by showing characters’ reactions to nastiness, rather
than revealing the nastiness. Amusing variation on technique: deranged
Marion mother produces drawing of earlier off-camera episode involving
gruesome dismemberment. Atmosphere of old Twilight Zone episodes,
though stretched to bare-minimum feature length – works better as very
black comedy than out-and-out chiller, but no less enjoyable for that.
Sunday
12th October
Leeds
Film Festival
(all
films seen at Hyde Park Picture House)
TIME
OF THE WOLF
8/10
Le
temps du loup : France (Fr/Austria/Ger) 2003 : Michael HANEKE
: 113 mins
On
my way to seeing this movie, I bought the new edition of David Thomson’s
Biographical Dictionary of Film. Turning to the H section, I wondered
what he’d have to say about Haneke – not included in previous volumes,
but now one of the more prominent European directors after Funny
Games, Code Unknown
and The Piano Teacher.
Haneke is again absent: Thomson goes from Christopher Hampton to Tom Hanks.
Joining him in the ‘salon des refusees’ are Patrick Keiller, Victor Erice,
Otar Ioseliani, Christian Petzold, Thomas Vinterberg and Gaspar Noe –
along with Haneke, the top half-dozen in the semi-serious ‘Euroleague’
I compiled earlier this year, in which I attempted to rank the continents
current active directors. This may say more about my perversity than about
the book’s omissions, but still it’s a little rich for Thomson (who finds
room for Jan De Bont) to comment that Pauline Kael “rather neglected foreign
films.”
Haneke
must be in the next edition – this is a serious, intelligent artist
who happens to use cinema as his medium. His uncompromising austerity
isn’t to everyone’s taste, of course – and Time of the Wolf, a
typically searing post-apocalyptic nightmare, is unlikely to win him many
new converts. Reviewers haven’t been kind to the movie, denouncing its
relentless grimness and the fact that many scenes are underlit to the
point of invisibility. What they don’t seem to have grasped is that a
post-apocalyptic world is going to be grim and underlit, especially
if, as here, electricity is no longer available. Not that we ever find
out exactly what’s gone on – the film is laconically, ostentatiously evasive.
But the fact that safe drinking water is in short supply – added to the
fact that Haneke’s camera twice shows us an Albrecht Durer print featuring
what looks amazingly like a mushroom cloud on the horizon – suggests that
the disaster is of a nuclear type. The subject, however, is never discussed
by the characters: everyone seems to be functioning in a state of traumatic
shock.
There
isn’t very much in the way of plot: a bourgeois woman (Isabelle Huppert)
and her two children see their husband/father shot before their eyes,
and wander the countryside until they end up at a derelict railway depot
where they join an ad-hoc community of fellow survivors. There are dramas
along the way, but not a great deal actually happens – right up to the
typically low-key ending. Instead, we have to be alert to the tiniest
details in the dialogue and the visuals: the latter complicated by the
fact that, as previously mentioned, ligh levels are often very low. They
approach near-total darkness in one astonishing scene, in which Huppert
goes in search of one of her children at night, while the other is left
tending a fire – which ends up a tiny dot of light in the corner of the
otherwise empty frame. This is virtuouso film-making, and while Time
of the Wolf is undeniably a bleak, depressing experience, Haneke’s
skill and commitment to his vision make it very bracingly so.
UNDEAD
5/10
Australia
2003 : “Spierig Brothers” (Michael and Peter SPIERIG) : 104 mins
After
Time of the Wolf, a diametrically different ‘end of the world’
movie: the Australian take on apocalypse is (predictably) as different
thematically from the Austrian as it is geographically. Ramshackle comedy
horror on a restricted budget, though special-effects often surprisingly
impressive. Overlong, amateurish, good-natured and intermittently very
funny zombie picture with non-stop muzak to cue the laughs and jolts.
Small outback town: usual alien-takeover/zombie stuff. Band of hardy survivors,
including hardy survivalist Marion played by man-mountain Mungo McKay:
taciturn bloke, dry delivery in Clint / Snake Plissken style. Looks like
hairy cross between David Boreanaz and Emir Kusturica, but lacks acting
ability of either. All others around him wildly overact with occasionaly
tiresome results (hysterical inept cop, yelps his indecipherable lines).
Larkish, midnight-movie material. Characters often required to strip off
for various contrived reasons. Baffling finale lets it down somewhat,
typical of ah-fuck-it-mate-that’ll-do ambience.
BUBBA
HO-TEP
7/10
USA
2002 : Don COSCARELLI : 92 mins
Cutesy
plot: senior citizen who thinks he’s Elvis (Bruce Campbell) - and may
in fact be correct - befriends senior citizen who thinks he’s JFK (Ossie
Davis) but, as he’s black, is almost certainly deluded. Together they
try to stop a mummified ancient Egyptian soul-sucker who’s offing their
fellow care-home residents. Transcends the cutesiness by really being
about old age: doesn’t really matter who these people are, or who they
think they are – important thing is seeing them regain the will to live,
albeit in ludicrous circumstances. Aches and pains of growing old: body
lagging behind brain and sex-drive – real “horror” in this “horror comedy”
is the terror of becoming decrepit and helpless. One last adventure for
this feisty duo – suitably lurid and unlikely. Campbell predictably amazing
as “Elvis” – Davis wisely downplays sidekick role as “JFK”. Very entertaining
and enormously likeable, even if the plot is rather thin and cobbled-together.
Highlight: flashback to Elvis in the 70s, in which Campbell plays The
King and also “Sebastian Haff”, the Elvis-impersonator who supposedly
switched places with the real thing and inconveniently died. Phantasm
auteur Coscarelli nimbly overcomes the fact that Presley estate must
have refused use of actual Elvis songs and movie-clips. Excellent guitar
score by Brian Tyler, miles better than the usual plangent-indie stuff
in films like The
Station Agent. Prequel planned (“Bubba Nosferatu : Curse of the
She Vampires”), though unlikely to feature Campbell/Davis – somebody must
write another Elvis movie for Campbell, of course.
For
the full review of this film click
here
by
Neil Young
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