Accident

This TIFF inclusion from 2009 finally emerges on Canadian soil for public consumption on Blu-ray via Shout Factory almost three years later. While not widely known, Soi Cheang's film has one of the most clever conceptual plot hooks since 'Infernal Affairs': a group of assassins-for-hire specialize in elaborately choreographed murders made to look like accidents, thus absolving their clients and themselves of persecution or retribution. It makes for a stimulating, small-scale thriller ripe for a bigger, more spectacular Hollywood remake.

Accident (2009) dir. Soi Cheang
Starring: Louis Koo, Richie Ren, Shui-Fan Fung, Michelle Ye, Suet Lam

By Alan Bacchus

Hong Kong star Louis Koo plays Ho Kwok-Fai, the brain of the team, a foursome not unlike something we'd see in a Mission Impossible film. They're introduced overseeing their latest orchestration: a car accident on a busy Hong Kong street. Seemingly random details, such as a rogue balloon flying in the air covering up a street camera and a blinding flash of reflected light from a mirror, combine to create a perfectly constructed domino effect that results in their pre-planned fake accident. But on their latest job, when a bus seemingly runs out of control, killing one of Ho's colleagues, Ho suspects he might be the target of someone else's accident orchestration.

Director Soi Cheang keeps the action and plotting contained, making Accident a relatively small picture and focusing in on Ho's character and his obsession, paranoia and isolation. Not unlike Gene Hackman's Harry Caul from The Conversation or Leonardo Di Caprio in Inception, Ho's life of clandestine deception has altered his perception of reality. This boils over into a paranoia-fuelled search for his assassin. He rents an apartment directly below his suspect, maps out his floor plan on his ceiling and listens in on his telephone conversations. Doubt and confusion create an obsessed mania akin to the destruction of Hackman's apartment in The Conversation or Guy Pearce's tattooed notes in Memento.

Louis Koo's performance is delightfully intense and focused, portraying Ho as a broken man plagued by the nightmarish memories of his wife's fatal car accident (or potential murder). Koo's attire complements this intensity, as he wears constricting clothes, a form-fitting jacket and large, industrial sniper glasses.

Cheang imbues a distinct visual palette using long lenses almost exclusively to convey a voyeuristic feel and visually compressing the world around Ho.

If anything, where Cheang leaves us short is in detailing the procedural aspects of his characters' schemes, something a Hollywood remake, as made by Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese, would map out and visualize with greater fastidiousness and care. But the work presented here is still an intriguing conceptual film that stands on its own, a sharp little gem to find in the glut of other new home video releases.

The Shout Factory Blu-ray features a decent making-of documentary and curiously, a faulty 2:35:1 anamorphic transfer, which appears as a vertically stretched 16x9 full frame aspect ratio. It's difficult to say if this fault applies to all the Blu-rays in circulation, however.

***½

This review first appeared on Exclaim.ca

Branded To Kill & Tokyo Drifter - Seijun Suzuki X 2

Tokyo Drifter (1966) dir. Seijun Suzuki
Starring: Tetsuya Watari, Chieko Matsubara, Hideaki Nitani

***1/2

Branded To Kill (1967) dir. Seijun Suzuki
Starring: Jô Shishido, Kôji Nanbara, Isao

****

By Greg Klymkiw

Nobody. Seriously. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody - and I'm dead serious - NOBODY ever or will ever make crime pictures like the supremely stylish and (possibly) clinically insane Japanese maestro of strange gangster shoot-em-ups - Seijun Suzuki. In the span of just over a decade, Suzuki directed 40 - count 'em - 40 B-movies for Japan's Nikkatsu studios.

Suzuki's favourite setting was against the backdrop of the Yakuza and his pictures just got increasingly delirious as he continued to grind out one after another. He hit his peak with Nikkatsu in 1966 and 1967 with, respectively, Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill. The latter picture was so confounding, so over-the-top, so disinterested in narrative logic, that the studio fired him - even though he delivered consistent product that made money for Nikkatsu.

He successfully sued the company for wrongful dismissal, but his high ideals and legal victory effectively blacklisted him from making a movie for over ten years.

Tokyo Drifter, shot in lurid technicolor and scope a pure visceral rollercoaster ride of violence and - I kid you not - musical numbers. Even John Woo in his Hong Kong prime NEVER delivered such inspired nuttiness.

The plot, such as it is, involves a loyal hit man, Phoenix Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) who respects and acquiesces to his mob boss' desire to go straight. However, Tetsu is one bundle of trouble and every rival gang is drawn to creating a nightmare for his boss. Tetsu does the only thing honour will allow - he imposes a strange self-exile and becomes a drifter; a man without a country, so to speak. Loyalty, only goes so far, however, and when he realizes he's been set-up as a fall-guy, there is hell to pay.

One action scene after another is shot in near-fluorescent colour with lurid, yet stunning backdrops. The guns blaze and the blood flows freely. I'm also happy to declare that the climactic shootout ranks way up there with all the greats.

Oh, have I mentioned yet that there are musical numbers?

Tokyo Drifter made absolutely no sense to the top brass at Nikkatsu and they demanded that Suzuki tone it down for his next movie.

He agreed.

And he lied.

The next picture was the hypnotically demented Branded to Kill. Shot in glorious widescreen black and white with wall-to-wall sex, violence and tons of delectable nudity, it told the tale of hit man Goro Hanada (Jô Shishido) who is currently rated as Killer #3. When he screws up a job, his status in the Yakuza is threatened and soon, he finds himself the target of several hit men and hit ladies (including his mistress and wife). And soon, he is embroiled in a cat and mouse dance of death with the almost-ghost-like Killer #1.

Like Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill has absolutely no need or respect for issues like continuity and narrative clarity. Suzuki can barely acknowledge the plot and in its stead, stages one brilliantly shot and choreographed action set-piece after another.

If Luis Bunuel had been Japanese, not even he would have approached the surrealistic heights that Suzuki ascends to so dazzlingly.

Branded to Kill is populated with some utterly delicious babes - all of whom sport guns and remove their clothing a lot. Our hero Goro, is played by the suave, ultra-cool Jô Shishido. With his odd puffy cheekbones and wry expression, Shisedo invests his role with steely intensity. The movie oozes with style like lava chugging out of a roiling volcano. The stunning black and white photography is worthy of John Alton's great noir work and the movie is driven by a terrific score that blends ultra-cool jazz styling with Ennio Morricone-influence spaghetti-riffs with crazed orchestral action genre music as if performed by the Kronos Quartet on crack cocaine.

If the picture has one crowning glory (and frankly, it has many) it surely must be Goro's fetish for the smell of boiling rice. Any excuse Suzuki can give his hero to demand it and then sniff away with abandon he manages to find it. Sometimes, there isn't even a good reason for it. Sometimes, it's just the thing to do. Sometimes, a man's just got to sniff boiling rice.

This, I understand. I hope you do, too.

If not, go to Hell.

"Tokyo Drifter" and "Branded To Kill" have been released with mind-bogglingly stunning Blu-Ray transfers on the Criterion Collection label. Both films are replete with fine added content, but ultimately, it's the movies that count. These are keepers and belong in any self-respecting cineaste's collection.

The Moment of Truth

The Moment of Truth (1965) dir. Francesco Rosi
Starring: Miguel Mateo 'Miguelín', Linda Christian, Pedro Basauri

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

It's probably a "cultural thang", but I just don't get bullfighting. It's a vicious, cruel and morally reprehensible "sport" (if you can even call it that) that involves teasing, torturing, then murdering a bull for the enjoyment of blood-lusting plebes (I include the "elite" here too) in mostly Spanish-speaking countries. Actually, I'll go further - call it ethnocentric or even racist if you will (and I will care less) - but anyone who would engage actively or enjoy watching this odious "art" (if you can even call it that) has got to have something seriously wrong with them. Yes, I'm aware of bullfighting's historical "importance" to Spanish "culture" (if you can even call it that), but why and how this crime against animals can continue in this day and age is beyond me.

And yes, I consider the teasing, torturing and wanton slaughter of animals a crime. Just because it's "cultural" doesn't mean reasonable, thinking people must accept its existence.

There is a long tradition of bullfighting movies; the most well-known being the various versions of Blood and Sand (most notably the silent 1922 Rudolf Valentino version and Rouben Mamoulian's 1941 effort for Fox) and Budd Boetticher's studio butchered and recently restored The Bullfighter and the Lady. The above films are not without merit as films, but none of them can hold a candle to Francesco Rosi's The Moment of Truth.

I hate this movie, BUT The Moment of Truth is important on three fronts. First of all, it's dazzling filmmaking. Secondly, it reflects the society and politics of Spain in the 1960s in ways that also shed light on the macho-blood-lust culture that would so proudly continue to extol the virtues of this heinous activity. Finally, it is an exquisite addition to the canon of the brilliant Italian director Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, Hands Over the City, The Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano) and, in fact, is a perfect melding of his Neo-realist and operatic tendencies (and influences).

The movie does not glorify bullfighting, but rather, it takes a no-holds-barred look at the entire world of the "sport/art" - behind the scenes and in the public spotlight. Rosi's film charts the rise of bullfighter Miguel Mateo 'Miguelín', an aimless young man who desperately seeks a better life and painstakingly learns the bullfighting ropes and rises to the top of the game. In spite of his stardom, he's still a simple country boy at heart and his handlers push him to ever-dangerous heights - exploiting him with absolutely no regard for his well-being. Miguel kills the bulls, but the men of influence kill his spirit and, in so doing, further feed the the centuries-old blood-lust of the "people".

Rosi's mise-en-scène is phenomenal. Attacking the tale with a mixture of classical, yet baroque shots reminiscent of his mentor Luchino Visconti, yet training his eye on the proceedings as a neo-realist storyteller and documentarian, this is a film that clearly springs from the loins of a born filmmaker. Sequences involving the running of bulls through the streets as their hides are pierced with ribbon-adorned harpoons, the dank basement of the bullring where Migeulin is trained by retired bullfighter Pedrucho (Pedro Basauri), the dusty rings themselves - surrounded by hordes of slavering, blood-crazed fans - these images are clearly unforgettable and, most importantly, are the real thing.

When we see fear in Migeulin's eyes as he faces an angry, snorting bull, this is not acting - it's the real thing. No rear-screen projection or opticals a la Blood and Sand are used here. It's real bullfighters, real swords, real gorings and real bulls.

While it is clear that Rosi's intent is to expose the macho myths of this world, I still find it sickening to watch. Even though it's SUPPOSED to be sickening, having to watch it is not unlike what it must be for non-pedophiles to watch real kiddie porn. Filmmakers who must take horrendous things to extremes in order to expose truth (like Kubrick, Pasolini, Scorsese, Friedkin etc.) do so within the realm of recreating violence. In The Moment of Truth, violence, pain and suffering happen for real and Rosi captures it on film with all the power and panache one would expect from a great filmmaker.

For Rosi to tell this story and explore the theme of the violent exploitation of man and beast - for him to break-down the perverse sense of masculinity that infuses the lives of those on both sides of the bullfighting world - he must, like all great artists avoid any sense of morality that will interfere with the horrors he seeks to display.

I understand this, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

The most upsetting thing is seeing animals being teased painfully with the harpoons and to witness these beasts actually being stuck with swords, to watch - mouth agape - as real blood gushes out of these poor animals and worst of all, to bear witness to these animals having their spinal columns crushed with the cold steel of the torero's sword (and see even more blood gushing out of thee animals) is, frankly, more sickening than watching the re-created scourging and crucifixion of Our Lord in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

In spite of my revulsion, I cannot deny that Rosi is at the top of his game here. This is brave and brilliant filmmaking. However, in order to expose exploitation, Rosi must also exploit his human and animal subjects. It's even more detestable that he focuses his camera so astoundingly and unflinchingly upon the balletic grace with which the bullfighters taunt their quarry and then kill it.

There's no two ways about it.

I admire this film and I respect it.

I also hate it and wish it had never been made.

"The Moment of Truth" is available on an exquisitely mastered Bluray on the Criterion Collection - a widescreen Technicolor print that's a perfect example of a terrible beauty. The release includes a new English subtitle translation, a handsome booklet and an interview with Rosi himself.

The Bad Seed

The Bad Seed (1956) dir. Mervyn LeRoy
Starring: Patty McCormack, Nancy Kelly, Henry Jones, Eileen Heckart, Evelyn Varden, William Hopper, Gage Clarke, Joan Croydon

***1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

"I thought I'd seen some mean little gals in my time, but you're the meanest." - Henry Jones as Leroy in THE BAD SEED

Movies about kids who kill is a most noble tradition.

It's yielded a cornucopia of depraved little buggers who've sliced and diced their way through a variety of thrillers and horror films with all the requisite aplomb required to deliver maximum visceral impact. Few will forget the shot of little Michael Myers in John Carpenter's Halloween, standing ever so still in the front yard of the quaint suburban home in the leafy innocence of Haddonfield, Illinois, grasping a butcher knife, staring with the eyes of a shark and splattered with the fresh blood of his nubile teenage sister who was previously lolling about in post-coital bliss. Damien, the pubescent Antichrist from Richard Donner's The Omen remains one of the more memorable killers in movie history - especially the magnificent moment when he pedals furiously on his tricycle and knocks his pregnant Mom off her plant-watering perch and sends her crashing to the floor from the balcony. Then there's my personal favourite of all kids-who-kill pictures, Alfred Sole's criminally neglected 70s thriller Alice Sweet Alice which features some of the most repulsive killings imaginable. It matters little that the true murderer appears to eventually be someone else - for most of the film's running time, we're convinced the killer is sexy tweener Paula E. Sheppard and we do get to see her, with the most sickening smile imaginable, grabbing a kitten by its neck and strangling it in front of its owner, the disgustingly corpulent, unwashed Mr. Alphonso, adorned in piss-and-shit-stained pants, and screaming in falsetto, "You little bitch! You've killed my cat!"

The cinematic patriarch of this delightful genre is, without question, Mervyn LeRoy's still astounding late 50s film adaptation of William March's bestselling novel and Maxwell Anderson's hit play The Bad Seed.

Opening with the departure of Col. Penmark (William Hopper, "Paul Drake" from Perry Mason) for an extended business trip to Washington, we're introduced to his beautiful, love-starved wife Christine (Nancy Kelly), who pleads with him to come home soon and their insanely precious daughter Rhoda (the unforgettable Patty McCormack), adorned in a frilly white frock, tap-dancing delightfully into everyone's hearts, her blonde pigtails bobbing, her smiles ever-so warm, her language precise and formal and greeting all who enter the home with a curtsy.

Rhoda is the perfect child for the perfect All-American family.

Wrapping her arms around Daddy, she chirps: "What will you give me for a basket of kisses?"

Daddy responds, as he clearly does every time she asks: "Why, I'll give you a basket of hugs!"

Rhoda is perfection incarnate.

She's also spoiled, jealous and a sociopath.

With Dad out of town, Christine begins to notice a few oddities in Rhoda's behaviour (odder than usual). Her daughter expresses the most vitriolic banter about a schoolmate, little Claude Daigle who has won the penmanship medal at the exclusive private school she attends. Rhoda is convinced she deserved the medal and obsessively natters on about how Claude was singled out for favouritism - pure and simple. There might be some truth to this. Rhoda is almost insufferably aware of her perfection and Claude is an adorable young lad from a "lower-class" family who have sacrificed and scrimped to get their boy into a good school.

At a school picnic, the unthinkable happens. Claude drowns. Foul play isn't suspected, but there are some very odd crescent-shaped marks on his face. We eventually learn these quarter moons are identical to the steel plates affixed to the soles of Rhoda's tap shoes. As the tale progresses, Rhoda engages in behaviour that becomes ever-more nasty and self-centred. Christine discovers a few surprises in Rhoda's room and also learns how she herself was an adopted child - that her own birth mother was, in fact, a notorious serial killer.

Uh-oh!

Is Christine's own flesh and blood afflicted with the bad seed?

Was that previous accidental death in the town they used to live in, all that accidental? Was little Claude Daigle murdered? Who tossed lit matches into the basement storm shelter, locked it and listened to the blood curdling screams as the suspicious caretaker burned to a crisp?

Not much of this is presented as mysterious. We know pretty early on that all is not right with Rhoda and soon, her Mom knows it too. What we're presented with is not so much a thriller, but a delicious melodrama. And who better to deliver the goods than the brilliant Mervyn LeRoy? Retaining much of the claustrophobic atmosphere of the play and its original Broadway cast, he lets the actors emote as if they were on stage and renders many of their key moments in closeup so that the melodrama is heightened further.

LeRoy, of course, delivered the goods on some truly great melodramas from his old studio days: the grand amnesia romance Random Harvest, the weepy tale of orphans Blossoms in the Dust and one of the finest tear-jerkers about the effect of war upon the women who are left behind in his great remake of Waterloo Bridge. He also presided over the nobility of Margaret O'Brien suffering in Little Women, the grand melodrama of Christians being led into the lions' den in Quo Vadis and, lest we forget, Edward G. Robinson croaking out his final words in Little Caesar, "Is this the end of Rico?"

With The Bad Seed, LeRoy acquits himself magnificently. There are a few tiny clunky moments, but they're easily forgiven. When the movie is working at the peak of its power, it has few equals. The subplot involving Claude's alcoholic mother is especially heart wrenching. Played by the brilliant Eileen Heckart, her handful of appearances in the film are accompanied by one of the most astonishing pieces of music from Alex North's score. (I highly recommend the soundtrack album - in particular, the piece referred to which is titled "No More Children".) Heckart's performance is bigger than big - she suffers and stumbles through her scenes with all the passion required AND a mordant wit. One of the movie's great lines is when the booze-soaked Heckart matter-of-factly quips, " It's a pleasure to stay drunk when your little boy's been killed."

Henry Jones as the demented, half-witted borderline pedophile caretaker is also a high point of the picture. Jones oozes creepiness and slime with such abandon, that he might well have rendered one of the greatest on-screen villains of all time. He recognizes the evil in Rhoda because he feels it within himself. It's implied that he might well have eventually sexually assaulted Rhoda, so his death, while shocking, also feels strangely justifiable.

The movie's pace, at first deliberately slow, but deliberately amps itself up to a shattering climax and a very weird conclusion - tacked on by the Hays Code so that Rhoda doesn't get away with murder. Strangely enough, this censor-initiated coda seems even more horrific than what was there to begin with.

The Bad Seed is completely and utterly over-the-top. Some have suggested it's a product of the time it was made. I'd dispute this vigorously. The movie is a melodrama, and as such, is GREAT melodrama.

At one point, Eileen Heckart remarks: "Children can be nasty, don't you think?"

Indeed they can. And nasty children deliver first-rate entertainment value.

The Bad Seed is available on Blu-Ray from Warner Home Entertainment. It's a great transfer and includes a terrific commentary track from Patty McCormack.

The Divide - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011

The Divide (2011) dir. Xavier Gens
Starring: Michael Biehn, Laura German, Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Eklund, Rosanna Arquette

***1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

We've seen it before, but we all know it's the ride that counts, and if nasty, darkly humorous, character-driven dystopian science fiction is what you're into, The Divide is one chilling, hair-raising, white-knuckle roller coaster charging into the horrors of a crazed post-apocalyptic Hell. In fact, the primary setting for the film is beneath ground in the laundry and storage rooms of an apartment building that's been otherwise levelled in a full-scale nuclear attack upon the city of New York.

It's Hell, alright. Though we're without the traditional trappings of Hades hellfire and bubbling lava, there's certainly plenty of roiling emotion within the ravaged, terrified, paranoid and even sociopathic minds of those who find themselves trapped in this coffin below the inferno of radiation and mass destruction.

Mickey (Michael Biehn) is the wired and wiry cigar puffing ruler of the roost - the building's super who lives in the basement and has equipped it with all the elements necessary to survive in the event of a Post-9/11 attack that makes the destruction of the Twin Towers seem like a zit-burst. He agrees to take in a few survivors, but as the story progresses, he clearly seems sorry he bothered. After all, this is his home, his own personal safe harbour and he expects compliance and downright subservience in accordance with his rules and manner of living. Alas, some of his charges are live wires - questioning his moves and motives every step of the way.

In this role, Biehn is nothing short of brilliant. In the late 80s and early 90s, he was one of the most exciting young actors in American cinema and poised to be a star with considerable leverage and longevity. As the stalwart hero in several James Cameron classics; The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss, as well as his complex and electrifying performance in William Friedkin's criminally neglected courtroom thriller Rampage, Biehn eventually became a solid working actor - appearing in a lot of crap - always doing fine work, but ultimately rising as far as anyone could above substandard material. Exceptions to this were his appearances in Bereavement and Planet Terror, but his performance in The Divide is not only dazzling, but rendered in a movie worthy of his considerable talents. It's not quite what you'd call a comeback role, since he's never really been gone, but I'd still say it's a breakthrough performance and one that makes me hope he'll be on the receiving end of increasingly better roles. (I'd happily, for example, donate my right testicle to science to see him opposite Michael Shannon in a new William Friedkin picture. Hey, a boy can dream, can't he?)

Happily, Biehn is surrounded by a terrific cast in a movie that's directed with all the pizzaz and unyielding aplomb of the talented Xavier Gens (I loved Hitman). With Gens at the helm, The Divide is one splendidly horrific tale that features a microcosmic look at humanity under duress. We have a young, married couple on the brink of divorce, a tough-minded African American who senses their protector is hiding something, a middle aged Mom (the welcome presence of Rosanna Arquette) with a terrified young daughter and two foul bad boys who get a whole lot badder than we're prepared to imagine.

And then there are the armed, weird-ass scientists in protective garb - kidnapping surviving children and performing the most horrendous experiments upon them.

And, lest we forget, there's the septic system. Once the ragtag band of survivors are literally welded into the underground coffin with no means of escape, we discover that a swim through a tunnel of fecal matter is the only way out. Any guesses whether someone eventually wades through the gloppy, glistening, stench-ridden tunnels?

As tensions rise, so do the acts of inhumanity - bullying, beatings, murder, torture, and even forced sexual slavery. If you're looking for a shred of hope, you might not find it in The Divide, but like all well constructed drama of this kind, the thing you look for in earnest amidst the depravity, comes from the unlikeliest places at the least expected moments. Yes, humanity is buried deep within this pit of horror.

Without question, the tense human conflict and emotion of this film is charged to the max. Gens seldom lets us rest easy as an audience. We always have to be on our toes - evil lurks around every corner and the movie jolts us time and time again. This is not to say the exploitative elements are paint-by-numbers. They're earned. They're rooted in character and story. The movie terrifies, dazzles AND moves us tremendously. Most amazingly, we almost NEVER leave the confines of the basement. Lesser films blatantly use this as a cost-cutting measure, but in The Divide, it never seems like a story rooted in a machine-tooled setting to yield maximum production value for minimum dollars. So many lower-budgeted genre films are too self-aware of these limitations and we're taken out of the drama because of it.

Not so, here.

To coin a phrase from George Romero's Dawn of the Dead: "When there's no more room in Hell, the Dead will walk the Earth." In The Divide, it's the other way around. Hell is above ground and the living dead walk BELOW the Earth.

And in this Hell, there's plenty of room for the living dead.

The Divide will hopefully receive a proper theatrical release soon. In the meantime, it screened as part of the first-rate Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011, delivering yet another triumph for the premiere genre event in Canada.

Absentia - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011

Absentia (2011) dir. Mike Flanagan
Starring: Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, Morgan Peter Bell

***1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

There are horrors - everyday horrors - that we all hear about. If we have never experienced them ourselves, all we can do is try to imagine what they must feel like. But that's all we can do. Imagine. When movies delve into the horrors we hear about everyday, the best of those pictures probably come as close as any of us would want to get to experiencing the real thing.

Perhaps the one thing that's worse than knowing a loved one has died - especially in a fashion of the most heinous variety - is the horror of a loved one disappearing without a trace. It's knowing the truth that offers the most meagre shred of solace, or at least, acceptance. Not knowing, though, is the real horror. It's what we imagine that could, can and would haunt us forever.

Absentia is a micro-budgeted independent horror movie that plays on these fears. Tricia (Courtney Bell) has lived for seven long years never knowing how or why her beloved husband Daniel (Morgan Peter Bell) has simply vanished. Time has healed many of her wounds, but even now, on the verge of awaiting a death verdict for her husband - in absentia, Tricia harbours feelings of heart aching sadness and frustration. Though her financial and legal affairs will have a clean slate once a death certificate arrives, she will always be haunted with never knowing the truth.

Though frankly, once the truth rears its ugly head, she is wholly unprepared for the horror to follow. This is especially draining as she has been attempting to rebuild her life - she's having a baby and is in love with a kind, gentle man.

Her younger sister Callie (Katie Parker) arrives to assist her in coping with this loss and the impending arrival of the baby sired by her lover Mallory (Dave Levine), a detective who has been investigating her husband's missing person file for many long years. Callie is haunted by her own demons. She's a drug-addict in 12-step recovery mode. Tricia copes with her horror and sadness with both Buddhism and psychotherapy. Callie has found Jesus and jogging.

Together, on the cusp of a death certificate being issued, the sisters begin confronting a series of strange, creepy and decidedly horrific occurrences. I'm going to avoid being too specific. Seeing the movie with a fresh perspective (as I was lucky enough to do) is what will yield maximum impact.

In the 1940s, when RKO Studios was on the verge of bankruptcy, they hired the brilliant Val Lewton (producer David O. Selznick's former right hand man) to head up a new horror division to make them flush. Lewton employed a brilliant strategy. Up to this point in movies history, most horror was rooted in the past and had a fairy tale quality to it. Lewton decided that the real horror was in the modern world. Using supernatural backdrops with lurid titles such as The Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Seventh Victim and Curse of the Cat People as a lure for audiences, Lewton told a series of mostly contemporary tales that dealt with everything from crumbling marriages, childhood loneliness, madness and, among other real-life themes, religious cults. He also felt that what scared people was what they couldn't see - that horror was found in shadows and darkness.

With Absentia, writer-director-editor Mike Flanagan employs a similar strategy in telling an often scary horror picture which, when it works at the peak of its powers, jolts us with what we cannot always see. What we DO see, WHEN he allows us to see it is numbingly terrifying.

Tricia is haunted by dreams - or are they? - of her husband appearing around virtually ever corner - emaciated and stricken with both grief and anger that she is finally "letting go". Callie, on the other hand, experiences strange appearances of weird people and strange noises in the mountain tunnel crossway just down the street from their Glendale home.

There is, finally an indisputable connection between the two sisterly experiences and as the picture edges along, we're suitably creeped out. The movie is so intelligently written, skillfully directed and magnificently acted that for much of its running time we're on the edge of our seats. Unfortunately, the narrative begins to spin its wheels in the final third and what could have been a great horror movie falls just short of that.

In spite of this, it's an effective and original approach to the genre and the film's subtle slow-burn is finally so horrifying that the flaws in the latter portion of the narrative are almost voided by the overall effect - one, I might add, that lasts long after the film is over..

In this day and age of torture porn masquerading as horror and John Hughes-styled teen romance pretending to be vampire/werewolf thrillers or worse, endless awful Hollywood remakes of great Asian scare-fests, it's nice to experience something so eerily, creepily quiet. It's not only what we don't see, but what we can't quite hear. The silence and deliberate pace renders more than enough scares and for some, it will be just what the doctor ordered to soil more than a few undergarments.

Absentia played at the 2011 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. It will soon be available on VOD and other home entertainment venues, but if you get a chance to see it on a big screen with an audience, you'll be in for an extra special horror treat.

Real Steel

Real Steel dir. Shawn Levy (2011)
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lily, Karl Yune, Olga Fonda

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

"Battling Maxo, B2, heavyweight, accompanied by his manager and handler, arrives in Maynard, Kansas, for a scheduled six-round bout. Battling Maxo is a robot, or, to be exact, an android, definition: 'an automaton resembling a human being.' [...] This is the story of that scheduled six-round bout, more specifically the story of two men shortly to face that remorseless truth: that no law can be passed which will abolish cruelty or desperate need - nor, for that matter, blind animal courage." - Rod Serling's introduction to Steel, written by the legendary Richard Matheson in Season 5, Episode 122 of The Twilight Zone, the greatest television anthology series of all time.

There is virtually nothing original about Real Steel, an amalgam of Rocky, The Champ and based partially upon Richard Matheson's short story and Twilight Zone teleplay Steel, and in spite of the fact that it's cobbled together by as many old parts as its hero, a fighting robot, this is one of the most entertaining, satisfying, uplifting, thrilling and, uh, original movies to hit the multiplexes in ages. Even its most "original" element, however, isn't even all that original, but given the state of current American mainstream cinema, it's fresh as a daisy.

The element I refer to is one that seems to have many reviewers' tits/nuts in a wringer. Many of them are whining about how unsympathetic the central character Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is. Cry me a river.

Oh woe is me, the hero is a prick!

And yeah, for a good chunk of the film's running time, Charlie is no poster boy for sympathy. He's a washed-up former boxer in a not-too-distant future where humans have been replaced in the ring by mega-robots and controlled by human beings at computers. Charlie owes money left, right and centre. He owns a ramshackle robot that he tours on the rural rodeo sideshow circuit - competing in sleazy affairs where rednecks cheer as hunks of metal pummel animals with their steely fists.

Unfortunately for Charlie, also an inveterate gambler and womanizer, the tables turn and a 2000 lb. bull destroys his robot in the ring while our "hero" is flirting with some corn-fed inbred babe in the audience. Broke, in debt well beyond his means to any number of thugs and bereft of his only means of money, he's more than delighted to find out that his ex-wife has died and that his 11-year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo) needs him. Well, if Charlie didn't need dough. he'd ignore the order to appear in court and let his flesh and blood be taken in as a ward of the state. Luckily, he knows his wealthy in-laws desperately want to adopt the child so he grudgingly shows up and makes a back room deal. He "sells" his son to the in-laws for $100,000.

Alas, he must agree to take the kid for the summer as the in-laws have a previously scheduled and very extended European vacation ahead of them. With a whack of cash in hand, he hightails over to his on-again-off-again girlfriend Bailey (Evangeline Lily), the owner of a ramshackle robot training gym and robot mechanic. His plan is to dump the kid in her care while he buys a new robot to hit the circuits again.

What a guy! He's a loser, a gambler, an itinerant no-account AND he's happy to abandon his kid after the death of his mother - not just once, but twice. And this is just the first twenty minutes or so of Real Steel. Plenty of running time for more uncaring, anti-social behaviour. BUT, also plenty more running time for - YOU GUESSED IT!!! - REDEMPTION!!!

Yeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Here's the deal. Within the context of contemporary American studio pictures, characters like Charlie almost never exist. Oh sure, there's occasionally a few meagre nods to "darkness" in such recent boxing pictures as Warrior and the overrated The Fighter, but Charlie is truly a character whose soul belongs to that great era of 70s cinema where central male characters could be major pricks, but we kind of liked them in spite of this.

And sure, while even Real Steel charges predictably to those inevitable moments where he re-connects with his child, his girlfriend and with the help, love and support of both, clambers out of the gutter and eventually becomes a winner again, what keeps it going is a first-rate script, great performances and superb direction. More importantly, it's a BIG picture - bigger than life!!! Big emotions! Big battles! High stakes! It has the scope of a great studio picture, but it actually feels like it's been made by people who know and love movies.

Watching the movie, I had two odd feelings pulsing through me - one, that I was loving every second of the picture and two, that I KNEW it was the kind of picture - exactly the kind of picture in terms of plot, theme AND craft - that I'd have absolutely loved as a kid. It's a wonderful, tingly feeling to be watching a big studio picture as an adult that allows you to experience a flawed mature central character against the backdrop of pure fantasy - engineered with precision and heart.

The Real Steel screenplay does not only tap into familiar territory in terms of great uplifting boxing pictures of the past, but it also comes from the seed of a very dark place - THE TWILIGHT ZONE! The picture's inspiration is from one of the greatest episodes of Rod Serling's extraordinary television anthology series. From his own short story "Steel", Richard Matheson - arguably one of the best, if not THE best genre writer of the 20th century - wrote the sad, dark tale of a washed-up ex-boxer (played by Lee-FUCKING-Marvin) who, like Hugh Jackman's character in Real Steel is trolling the dregs of a robot boxing circuit and has to make some tough decisions when faced with the possibility of losing what precious little he's got. It's an astounding episode - one that devastated me as a kid when I first saw it, haunted me for years and still gets to me whenever I see it again.

Where this new feature film parts company with the original source, however, is that it's set in a world where people have become bored watching human beings fight and actually prefer seeing machines do the battle. Matheson's story is set in a future where human boxing matches have been outlawed altogether. The latter, while plausible to Hollywood Liberals in the 50s and 60s and, in fact to many of those watching at the time, would not work as well in a contemporary context since it's become so clear that the Great Unwashed will never really tire of watching destruction, but in a world of cel phones, computers, the internet, Playbox, Wii, Twitter and other electronically mediated forms of living, I'd buy that people could get bored and stupid enough to want to see huge cool-looking robots kicking each others steely butts.

And it's the fight scenes of Real Steel that provide all the necessary set-pieces to give us some rock 'em sock 'em action (not unlike the old Rock' Em Sock 'Em Robots we all used to play with as kids) on a mega scale. The robots have personality and are designed so brilliantly that they are completely recognizable as distinct entities (unlike the mish-mash of robots in the Transformers pictures). This probably has a lot to do with the fact that the robots are puppets controlled by humans with digital enhancements and are not PURELY digital, but in fairness to director Shawn Levy, his cinematographer Mauro Fiore (Avatar) and editor Dean Zimmerman, the Real Steel fight scenes are gorgeously choreographed, shot and cut. We actually get to see the choreography of the fights instead of all the close-to-medium-shot herky-jerky shooting and cutting so many films resort to.

Most importantly, the screenplay by John Gatins is NOT action packed with just fight scenes. It has - gulp - characters, a compelling (if familiar) tale and what's surprising - especially given the two-hour-plus running time - is that it's never boring and seems actually much shorter. The bottom line is that the movie has enough well-etched breathing space to allow for action scenes that have emotional resonance to the characters and plot (and hence, for us) instead of serving merely as grinding, noisy, visceral thrills. That said, it also hits the sort of satisfying demographically-influenced check-marks to ensure big success. Jackman is a driven handsome tough-as-nails prick hero in need of redemption, his girlfriend is a babe, the villain (mouth-watering Olga Fonda) is a babe and the kid - yeah, he's cute. Real cute - especially when he does hip-hop moves with the robot. On paper, something like that would sicken me, but in execution, it works.

These, of course, are hallmarks of great studio pictures in any age and I'm actually pleased to see they're not abandoned. It's all part of a great package. We get an uplifting action picture for the whole family - for kids AND kids of ALL ages.

For me, the true revelation in Real Steel is Hugh Jackman. He's a terrific actor with definite screen presence, but the "negative" characteristics of his character are what he attacks with a vengeance. He's such a prick that we hope he won't be. At times, he embodies the sort of figure that might have haunted John Huston's world of tank-town punch-drunk losers in Fat City and yet, here he is in a movie from the director of (!!!!!) Night at the Museum, executive produced by Spielberg and from a division of Disney Studios.

That's pretty fucking cool.

TIFF 2011 - Killer Joe

Killer Joe (2011) dir. William Friedkin
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon, Thomas Haden Church and Juno Temple

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

"I don't think I'll have to kill her. Just slap that pretty face into hamburger meat."
- Jim Thompson dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing

At one point during William Friedkin's Killer Joe, an unexpected roundhouse to the face renders its recipient’s visage to a pulpy, swollen, glistening, blood-caked skillet of corned beef hash. Said recipient is then forced at gunpoint to fellate a grease-drenched KFC drumstick and moan in ecstasy while family-members have little choice but to witness this horrendous act of violence and humiliation.

William Friedkin, it seems, has his mojo back.

He’s found it in the muse of Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts. The two collaborated in 2007 on the nerve-wracking film adaptation of Bug, a paranoia-laden thriller with Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd. Set mostly within the dank, smoky confines of a sleazy motel room, both dialogue and character was scrumptiously gothic. The narrative was full of unexpected beats, driving the action forward with so much mystery that we could never see what was coming. Alas, Letts lost command of his narrative in the final third, veering into predictability. In spite of this, Bug was still one of the most compelling and original works of its year.

Killer Joe is a total whack job of a movie, and delightfully so.

Set against the backdrop of Texas white trash, the picture opens with a torrential downpour that turns the mud-lot of a trailer park into the country-cousin of war-torn Beirut. Amidst tire tracks turning into small lakes, apocalyptic squalor and lightning flashes revealing a nasty barking mastiff, a scruffy Chris (Emile Hirsch), drenched from head to toe, bangs on the door of a trailer. When it creaks open, a muff-dive-view of the pubic thatch belonging to his ne'er do well Dad's girlfriend Sharla (Gina Gershon) leads Chris to the bleary-eyed Ansel (Thomas Haden Church).

Chris desperately needs to clear up a gambling debt and suggests they order a hit to knock off his Mom, Ansel’s ex-wife. She has a whopping life insurance policy and its sole recipient is Dottie (Juno Temple), the nubile, mentally unstable sister and daughter of Chris and Ansel respectively. Once they collect, Chris proposes they split the dough.

To secure the services of the charming Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) they need to pay his fee upfront. Father and son propose Joe take a commission on the insurance money once it pays out. This is initially not an acceptable proposal until Joe catches sight of the comely Dottie. He agrees to take the job in exchange for a “retainer” – sexual ownership of Dottie.

Father and brother of said sexy teen agree to these terms, though Chris betrays some apprehension as he appears to bear an incestuous interest in his dear sister.

From here, we’re handed plenty of lascivious sexuality, double-crosses, triple-crosses and eventually, violence so horrendous, so sickening that even those with strong stomachs might need to reach for the Pepto Bismol.

Basically, we’re in Jim Thompson territory here. It’s nasty, sleazy and insanely, darkly hilarious.

This celluloid bucket of glorious untreated sewage is directed with Friedkin’s indelible command of the medium and shot with a terrible beauty by ace cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.

Friedkin, the legendary director of The French Connection, The Exorcist and Cruising, dives face first into the slop with the exuberance of a starving hog at the trough and his cast delivers the goods with all the relish needed to guarantee a heapin’ helpin’ of Southern inbred Gothic.

This, my friends, is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore.

Trust William Friedkin to bring us back so profoundly and entertainingly to those halcyon days.

Oh, and if you’ve ever desired to see a drumstick adorned with Colonel Sanders’ batter, fellated with Linda Lovelace gusto, allow me to reiterate that you’ll see it here.

It is, I believe, a first.

Killer Joe is being unveiled for North American audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011).

TIFF 2011 - Paul Williams Still Alive

Paul Williams Still Alive (2011) dir. Stephen Kessler
Starring: Paul Williams, Stephen Kessler, Johnny Carson, Karen Carpenter, Richard Carpenter, Barbara Streisand, Dick Clark, Kermit the Frog, Angie Dickinson, Peter Lawford, Telly Savalas, Tony Randal, Jack Klugman, Burt Reynolds, Ed McMahon

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

1975 was the best Christmas of my life. I was 15 years old and I saw Brian DePalma’s satirical rock musical Phantom of the Paradise at least 20 times over a period of two weeks. I saw it so many times afterwards, I still have no idea how many times I’ve seen it – not just on home video, but mostly – throughout the late 70s and early 80s on BIG SCREENS.

I wasn’t the only one.

At least not in my hometown – my glorious winter city.

The movie was a huge flop all over the world – save for two cities; Paris, France and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

In Winnipeg it played first-run, non-stop, six performances a day in a 1000-seat movie theatre for several months. Even when Phantom of the Paradise ended its first-run engagement, it was held-over, moved-over, re-released and revived in one-screen stand-alone suburban cinemas and drive-in movie theatres all over the city. It was played endlessly at Winnipeg repertory cinemas, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Manitoba Museum Auditorium, all the University film series and wherever, whenever movies were screened publicly on film. Hell, once I got a chance to program a repertory cinema all on my lonesome, I not only played the movie to packed houses, but watched it on occasion in the very cinema I was running.

Why?

It’s a great movie, to be sure. DePalma’s delicious trash sensibilities and style hit more than a few chords with me and others of my generation who grew up – in our very formative years – being raised on Universal Horror, Hammer Horror and Roger Corman horror pictures. The movie tapped into everything that made horror movies so special – working not just on the level of satirical humour, but like any great satire, it worked on the same levels as the thing that was being satirized. Even cooler was it’s story – a very special amalgam of Phantom of the Opera and Faust, but with rock music.

(Another reason was definitely Jessica Harper. What 15-year old boy DIDN’T have a crush on her as the sexy songstress Phoenix and what 15-year-old girl DIDN’T want to be Jessica Harper?)

Why Winnipeg?

Well, believe it or not, it was a pretty cool city in those days. On the surface, a sleepy Midwestern Canadian city in the middle of nowhere on the flat prairies, but with a heavy concentration of the coolest counter-culture in a four-to-five-block area downtown – GREAT record shops, comic book stores, pinball parlours, head shops, grind houses, greasy spoons, sleazy manor hotels (by law – men only in both the rooms and the bars) and this entire childhood playground of COOL included a bevy of porno cinemas and massage parlours. In spite of all the “nastier” elements, it was a surprisingly safe place for kids to go on their own by bus. (At the age of 12, I was watching Hammer horror, motorcycle movies and beach party picture triple bills in grindhouses stinking of urine, cum and vomit – staring wide-eyed at ratty old screens filled with large-breasted Swedish women baring their milky necks for Christopher Lee's fangs while toothless hookers gave gum jobs to old men all around me.)

I also think Winnipeg’s physical and cultural isolation played a big part in all this. Genre appreciation is big with kids everywhere, but in Winnipeg, there was NO American television and many of us didn’t get cable television in our homes until we were already in our mid-teens. Well, there was ONE American station – a border town on the USA side one-hour south – Pembina, North Dakota to be precise. A tiny independent television station called KCND-TV set up shop to beam its way to the greedy rabbit-ear antennae of Winnipeg boob tubes to cleanup on advertising dollars. With no network affiliations, the station ran old horror movies whenever it could – especially on Saturday nights after syndicated broadcasts of Perry Mason re-runs on every Winnipeg kid’s favourite show, Chiller Thriller.

Winnipeg was also a cool music town. Some were old enough to have seen Neil Young or The Guess Who – live: in Winnipeg, in their burgeoning years. Even if we didn't, we knew they were Winnipeggers. Neil went to Kelvin High School while Burton Cummings went to St. John's. Randy Bachmann's folks lived around the corner from my house. Burton Cummings Mom worked in the downtown Eaton's department store. All the school dances and sock hops and coffee houses featured live music from soon-to-be-rock-legends and all those others who should/could have been. (My Dad even gave Burton Cummings an early gig playing a riverboat cruise with the legendary Toilet Rockers Gary and Blair MacLean.)

The ‘Peg was – “shakin’ all over” big time.

Young 'Peggers were (at least I like to think) so genre and music savvy at just the right time in just the right place to turn Phantom of the Paradise into a huge cult film.

The prime ingredient of Phantom of the Paradise that connected with all of us was none other than the astounding music composed by Paul Williams.

His score was so popular in Winnipeg that the soundtrack album went Gold in Canada – solely from its sales in Winnipeg. (I still have MY mint condition sealed vinyl as well as an original well-worn copy - both of which I purchased at Gambles, the long-dead discount department store in Winnipeg's north end.)

Williams’s score was boss and spun at many high school dances and on local radio stations. Like DePalma’s cinematic approach to the material, Williams satirized so many beloved genres of rock music and, sounding like a skipped record here, great satire rides the delicate line between parody and the thing being satirized.

It’s a score that works on its own as truly great music.

Winnipeggers – initially through Phantom of the Paradise – became the most rapturous fans of Paul Williams. A few months after the movie opened and went through the rough, a hastily arranged series of sold out Paul Williams concerts played at Winnipeg’s majestic Centennial Concert Hall. Williams must have felt like Jesus Christ on the Second Coming – or, better than Jesus, The Beatles. That’s no exaggeration.
Phantom of the Paradise was our way into Paul Williams. He not only wrote the score that Winnipeggers drove to Gold Record status, but he starred in the movie as Swan, the slimy music promoter who signed his clients to deals with the Devil himself. And we loved him. He wasn’t so much the villain you loved to hate, but the villain you loved to love.

WHY Paul Williams became such an idol in Winnipeg is beautifully explained in Paul Williams Still Alive and it also happens to explain why director Kessler was a rapturous fan - so much so that he was driven to craft this extraordinary documentary.

And Paul Williams was ubiquitous. He was fucking everywhere. We now had cable TV all over the city and there he was – endless appearances on endless popular AMERICAN programs: Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Police Woman (getting blown away by Angie-hubba-hubba-Dickinson), The Odd Couple, Sonny and Cher – the list went on.

No luck finding Paul Williams on the CBC, though. Canada's national public broadcaster was too busy producing and programming shows featuring inbred East Coast fiddlers and, God Help Us! - Hymn Sing. (That said, we kind of loved those too. Winnipeg's water pipes were lined with asbestos for more years than most of us are too frightened to acknowledge.)

Some of us even went so far as to dig into his back catalogue of song writing and were stunned that he wrote hit music for Three Dog Night AND The Muppets. And while not all of us might have been as enamoured with his hits for The Carpenters, Helen Reddy and Barbara Streisand – we sure never begrudged him that – especially not when he began recording and performing his own renditions of the songs which, I can assure you we all preferred.

Paul Williams was so high on the radar.

Then he dropped off.

This is what precipitated and inspired the terrific new feature documentary by Stephen Kessler, Paul Williams Still Alive. Kessler, as he explains in his heart-felt narration had an equally rapturous adoration for Williams until eventually life moved on and Williams became a fleeting memory. A chance Internet surf brought Williams back onto his radar. He eagerly wanted to know more about his childhood idol. What happened? Where was he now? What was he up to?

What does a fan do in such circumstances? He makes a movie about it.

Kessler was in a good position to do so. He wasn’t a mere fan-boy with a camcorder – he was a bonafide filmmaker with a successful career as a TV commercial director, an Academy Award nominated short drama and two features which, for me, place him in the pantheon of one of the strangest filmmakers who should have been well on the road to some kind of greatness. I actually love Kessler’s first feature Vegas Vacation with Chevy Chase. What can I say? I loved all the Vacation pictures (except European Vacation) and the Vegas instalment especially made me soil myself with laughter. Then he made The Independent, one of the strangest features to NEVER find an audience, an oddball mockumentary about a Grade-Z moviemaker played by Jerry Stiller that, at the very least, should have become far better known than it is to geeks everywhere.

Great documentaries tell stories. Imparting information A&E Biography-style is mind-numbingly dull. That said, great subject matter (which Paul Williams assuredly is) ALSO do not make for great documentaries. Every year at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto I hear people extolling the virtues of documentaries because of what they’re about. Sorry wags, pundits, critics and worst of all, commissioning editors – just because the subject matter is great doesn’t mean it’s great FILMMAKING.

Grab a fucking brain, people!

Kessler, however, is a real filmmaker and this documentary not only tells a great story but it is first-rate moviemaking!

First and foremost it does all the stuff it needs to do – we get all the biographical details past and present and we most certainly get a keen sense of WHO Paul Williams was and is. If that is all you want out of the picture, it is most certainly there and then some.

What makes it special is not just what it is, but what it became during the filmmaking process and most importantly because Kessler is a real filmmaker who ultimately knew he had to grab the opportunity – if not on a conscious level at first, certainly at a gut level due to the fact that he’s the real thing and not one of these lunkhead losers with either an agenda and/or lucks into a great subject, grabs a camera and stumbles into a movie that connects with people who should know better.

This is a movie about friendship. We see it happen before our very eyes. We see a director who clearly loves his subject matter. As he begins the film, Kessler THINKS he knows where to take it, but because of his innate cinematic sensibilities, his fumbles become a part of the story (like his interrupting Paul Williams while he tells a great personal story to cleave out his own agenda and, in the process, pissing his subject off). At one point, Kessler is forced to follow Williams around from a distance. It’s a hilarious scene and kind of touching because as the shaky-cam pathetically captures its subject we can hear Williams and those with him commenting on Kessler’s doggedness. Williams is both annoyed and strangely grudging about the fact that Kessler means business.

In a very cool moment, Williams finally just tells Kessler to be in the movie with him because it’s the only way he feels comfortable participating in the project. Kessler wisely jumps on this. He is, in his own delightful geek-fan-boy way, a pretty good subject himself.

So now, not only do we get a chance to follow Paul Williams on his current gigs, meet his friends, associates, family and others, but also we see a friendship developing between the two men. We learn – within the context of this developing friendship – about Williams struggle with drugs, alcohol and personal relations. This is what gives the movie that added frisson because it’s not just about the relationship between two artists, one exploring, the other revealing – but we see two men getting closer as the movie progresses and we eventually get a central subject who lowers his guard and responds – not as a subject, but a friend.

One could argue all documentary directors, and to a certain extent news reporters, operate. Well, they do. It takes a real filmmaker to propel it to cinema.

By the end of the film, one learns as much about Paul Williams as one does about Kessler and because of this we get a far more evocative portrait of one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century.

And guess what? He’s still alive, he’s still performing and he’s still writing music.

Hell, we’re in a new century now. Who knows what will happen next? The movie gives a sense that whatever it is it’s just beginning, but that it’s all good.

It’s a great story!

Paul Williams Still Alive is being unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011) and will no doubt be theatrically released very soon.

TIFF 2011 - W.E.

W.E. (2011) dir. Madonna
Starring: Andrea Riseborough, James D’Arcy, Abbie Cornish, Oscar Isaac, Richard Coyle and James Fox

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

The King’s Speech gave me pathological hemorrhoids.

Thankfully my piles receded after seeing Madonna’s W.E.

This vaguely feminist fairytale crossed with fashion porn is a wildly stylish, dazzlingly entertaining and sumptuously melodramatic flipside to that horrendous Oscar-baiting nonsense.

Instead of Colin Firth spluttering with nobility as King George VI in television director Tom Hooper’s painfully earnest snooze-fest we get an exuberantly acted reverie into the life of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the snappy dressing American divorcee who wooed King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) into her boudoir, forcing him to abdicate for the woman he loved and thus allowing his stuttering, half-wit brother to mincingly don the Crown of Jolly Old England, hoist Blighty’s sceptre and eventually provide inspiration for the aforementioned hemorrhoid-inducer.

Madonna and co-writer Alek Keshishian (with script consultation from Madame Ciccone’s ex-hubby, Rock n’ Rolla helmer Guy Ritchie) make the deliciously daffy choice to tell the love story through the eyes of Wally (Abbie Cornish) – named thus by her Wallis Simpson obsessed mother. Wally is married to a philandering, alcoholic, abusive psychiatrist (Richard Coyle) and spends her days wandering through the Sotheby’s public viewing of Wallis and Edward’s soon-to-be-auctioned worldly goods.

Here she meets the dreamy Evgeni (Oscar Isaac) a brilliant Russian musician moonlighting as a security guard. He’s an olive-skinned, high-cheek boned Fabio with a Slavic accent and a great Jason-Statham dome. He tinkles the ivories with passion and reads Rainer Maria Rilke.

He’s a catch!

Instead of immediately plunging herself onto Evgeni’s schwance, she mopes about wondering why her hubby dinks around on her whilst sticking herself with hypodermics full of progesterone – hoping that she’ll get herself a bun in the oven.

And then there’s Sotheby’s. Here she ogles Wallis and Edward’s finery and slips into dollops of their passionate love story – even occasionally getting visits from the ghost of Wallis who dispenses Miss Lonelyheart's advice.

Okay, I bet you’re thinking this all sounds kind of stupid.

Well, it probably would be, but Madonna’s insane, passionate direction yields a movie experience that is pure romance. Via cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski, Madame Ciccone allows the camera to glide and whirl its way through the dress and décor of the filthy rich with such abandon that she creates a magical world that we’re very happy to be a part of.

And I reiterate – this movie is, at its peak, pure, joyous romance!

Take, for instance Wallis and Edward’s first meeting. Madonna stages the ballroom dancing with such sweep and form that she has us soaring as high as her subjects. Or in another instance, Edward gets so pissed off with his party guests snoozing through a Chaplin film screening in his sumptuous parlour that he and Wallis serve up champagne spiked with Benzedrine to liven up the proceedings – and liven up they most certainly do.

Then, there’s my favourite scene of all – Edward gets Wallis to engage in a super-sexy dance with a Nubian sex goddess and Madonna stages the entire sequence with The Sex Pistols blasting out “Pretty Vacant” on the soundtrack.

Why? You ask?

Why the fuck not? I retort!!!

Maybe it’s the old punk in me, but I loved how Madonna is clearly enraptured with Wallis and Edward. She paints a portrait of a Man Who SHOULD Be King. He’s cool. And so, especially, is Wallis. Madonna clearly has little use for the simpering brother who eventually places his butt on the throne and his nasty, controlling harridan wife. (At one point, I even imagined King George's buttocks on the throne and wondered if his farts stuttered too. But I digress.)

I genuinely believe Madonna IS a Monarchist, but she seems to be suggesting that it was the British government and the idiotic protocols imposed upon someone like Edward that destroyed the Monarchy. What it needed most was a King and Queen who were cool. And man, the portrait Madonna paints of these fun-loving lovebirds is cooler than cool.

Madonna even has the audacity to create a loving portrait of the late Dodi Fayed’s father, Mohammad al Fayed. Again, I say – why the fuck not? It’s so obvious that the Monarchy had Princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed knocked off. Things might have been very different if Edward had been able to tell everyone to fuck off, marry Wallis AND keep his crown!

Okay, maybe I have a bit of a bias here. Now this might not sound like much of a compliment, but believe me – it is. It’s very heartfelt. I used to have the sweetest, cutest, friendliest white and honey-coloured Shih Tzu. I loved her big time. I named her Wallis after – guess who?

Why? Why the fuck not?

For so long people made such a big deal of what Edward gave up to marry Wallis, but you never heard much about her side of the story. Oddly, this was one of my own personal obsessions and I was delighted that it’s a central thematic question that drives this movie and the character of Abbie.

As I write this, I have yet to read any reviews, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that it gets mercilessly savaged. Everyone, no doubt, has his or her knives sharpened to gut Madonna – mostly, I imagine – for being Madonna.

Many critics and maybe even the movie business at large are ready to pounce. In this day and age, when it’s harder and harder to finance a movie and next to impossible to get a movie directed by a woman off the ground, an easy target is someone who is as rich, famous and powerful as Madonna. Oh well, of course, they’ll all be saying (or at least thinking) – she got her movie made BECAUSE she’s rich, famous and powerful.

There’s a reason she’s rich, famous and powerful. She has exceptional style, savvy and talent.

Most of all, making a movie about Wallis and Edward and focusing on Wallis is – dare I say – something we’d ONLY see from a female director.

So it’s Madonna.

Why the fuck not?

She’s been the primary fuel behind an astounding career and one with considerable longevity – driven by a brilliant ability to artistically reinvent herself. With W.E. she not only reinvents herself as a filmmaker to be reckoned with, she does so with audacity and aplomb.

A few boneheads out there will probably attack the movie for being campy.

Is the movie campy?

You bet it is.

Since when can’t camp be art?

If anything, I wish the movie didn’t spin its wheels in its last ten-or-so minutes and I especially wish it didn’t resort to being so on-point in these final minutes about the consideration of Wallis Simpson’s point of view, and for that matter, a woman’s point of view. All of this was there in spades and didn’t need to be so emphatically, obviously reasserted.

That, however, is a minor quibble.

I might also add that only the style end of things, I am so delighted to say that the movie is replete with characters who smoke cigarettes. Watching good looking people smoking on the big screen is almost as pleasurable as smoking. When will people learn that smoking is cool - at least on celluloid.

Damn! W.E. is one of the most entertaining movies I've seen all year.

I feel like a virgin all over again.

W.E. is being unveiled for North American audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011) and will be released theatrically in North America by e-one Entertainment.

The Terminal Man

The Terminal Man (1974) dir. Mike Hodges
Starring: George Segal, Joan Hackett, Richard A. Dysart, Jill Clayburgh, Donald Moffat, Matt Clark, Michael C. Gwynne, James B. Sikking and William Hansen

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

Forces increasingly dominate us beyond our control. In this respect, Mike Hodges’s brilliant 1974 science fiction thriller The Terminal Man, adapted from Michael Crichton’s chilling novel of the same name, seems more scary and necessary than ever.

A few nitpicking details from when the film was made over 35-years-ago – outmoded robots and doctors puffing away on cigarettes in a hospital – are not enough to seriously date it.

The Terminal Man is a movie that displays a keen ahead-of-its-time sophistication in both execution and subject matter.

Harry Benson (George Segal) is a brilliant young computer scientist. He suffers from epileptic blackouts wherein aberrant behaviour, including vicious uncontrollable acts of violence lead to criminal incarceration. Adding to this mix is Harry’s paranoia-fuelled mistrust of computers themselves – an especially queer fear for someone considered above the curve in terms of his research.

In seeming desperation, Harry agrees to become a human guinea pig for a group of surgeons who believe behaviour can be controlled by implanting chips and electrodes in the brain, which, in turn, are connected to a mini-computer within the body.

Like any great Frankenstein tale, shit goes wrong - horribly wrong.

What makes The Terminal Man such a terrific picture is screenwriter-director Mike Hodges. Working at the peak of his powers (having just rendered Get Carter, the extraordinary and deliciously nasty British crime thriller with Michael Caine), Hodges infuses the movie with an ultra-creepy mise-en-scene that, for its first half, keeps you super-glued to your seat, eyeballs locked firmly on the screen.

What gets to you is how quiet the movie is – the hollow, late evening reverberations permeating the hospital wherein much of the movie is set, slithering so deeply into your guts that every sound you DO hear is fraught with urgency and where the hushed tones of doctors and nurses infuse everything with paranoia.

One of the stranger cutaways in the picture is when Hodges occasionally directs us to a group of proletarian orderlies guffawing as they disparage their charges. It’s an odd visual and aural juxtaposition between opposite ends of the hospital hierarchy – those on the “bottom” are upfront about their contempt while those on “top” hold their proverbial cards close to their chests. On one hand, this seems like an obvious directorial touch. It is obvious. Importantly it doesn’t take you out of the drama, but forces you at the proper juncture in the story to come to this juxtapositional conclusion and, in fact, adds to the overall feeling of manipulation that is directed at Harry. It also suggests that the world is increasingly fraught with a lack of caring and where self-preservation and contempt are perfectly comfortable bedfellows.

There is also no traditional musical score save for the occasional use of Glenn Gould tinkling his creepy ivories with one of the Goldberg Variations and a brief moment when hospital Muzak filters onto the soundtrack and into Harry’s brain as he is wheeled into the operating theatre. Lack of a full-bodied orchestral score for a thriller was – even in the 70s – a brave, unconventional move. These days – when every thriller is replete with herky-jerky cutting and bombast – such a touch is virtually unheard of (much, I think to the detriment of the genre, audiences and cinema on the whole). Val Lewton’s thrillers for RKO in the 40s were a perfect example of how true horror could be found in the dark and by what you didn’t see. With The Terminal Man, it’s what you don’t HEAR that adds to the terror.

One of the more grotesque elements of Hodges’s terrific picture is how so much of the film is set in a hospital, but even more intense is the inclusion of a brilliant sequence when the operation itself is performed upon Harry. He keeps his lens trained on virtually every pre-op, post-op and during-op moment – the sweat, the rubber gloves, the clamps, the needles, the scalpels, the blinding lights, the fluorescent glare and the ever-present view of white-coated officials viewing the proceedings from above behind glass.

The look of the film also adds to the creep factor. The movie is drained of primary colour – white rules, as does the darkness, the black shroud of evil. The only colours to ever punch out are (appropriately enough) red (during several shocking punctuations of blood-letting) and a typically sad 70s climax/conclusion set amidst the grey tombstones in a lush, green cemetery. Hodges's compositions are straight forward and many of the shots play long - allowing for maximum dramatic impact. One of the more chilling shots that recurs throughout the film is an eye through a peephole, surrounded only by pitch black and framed so that our eyes are drawn immediately to the exposed image and stay there - almost as if we were one the other side being examined.

The cast is first-rate. The gorgeous Joan Hackett provides a bit of offbeat warmth as a psychiatrist who doesn’t trust the operation being performed on Harry. She is surrounded by stalwart 70s character actors like Richard A. Dysart, Matt Clark, Michael C. Gwynne, James B. Sikking and Donald Moffat all delivering their cold, calculating best as the raft of bureaucrats, doctors and scientists. There’s a terrific cameo from the great William Hansen as a doctor from the “old school” who delivers a stirring condemnation of the use of surgery for mental illness and a very young and hot Jill Clayburgh briefly lights up the screen as Harry’s sex kitten girlfriend.

As the title character, George Segal is the true revelation. He was the go-to guy for 70s romantic comedies – in fact, a whole whack of great comedies, my favourite being the thoroughly insane black comedy Where’s Poppa where Ruth Gordon pulls down his pants to kiss his “tuschy”. Segal was, and still is, a great actor and certainly, as he proves in this picture, no mere lightweight. He always had an edge that many comic actors lacked. His performance as Nick in the Mike Nichols film version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf proved that in spades. Here, he blends his edgier qualities with his lighter leading man qualities to present a character we’re with from beginning to end.

The Terminal Man suffers slightly from inevitabilities inherent in both the genre and narrative itself – it’s a Frankenstein story, after all and only a matter of time before Harry runs amuck and must be hunted down. The journey to get there, however, is tremendously compelling.

Mike Hodges is a tremendous underrated director. Not only is it worth seeing The Terminal Man, but I highly recommend the aforementioned Get Carter, his strange crime comedy Pulp, the wonderful, Flash Gordon, a joyous 80s celebration of sci-fi cheese with a score (no-less) by Queen and one of the best British films of the past couple of decades, Croupier.

The Terminal Man is available via on-demand special order from Warner Home Entertainment via the Warner Archives collection. You’ll also find it for sale or rent in specialty video stores. In Toronto, Canada the only places that carry a wide selection of these titles are the flagship store of Sunrise Records at Yonge and Dundas and the newly resurrected Starstruck Video at Dundas and Tomken. As per usual, it’s a simple on-demand package. It features the movie and the trailer. The transfer is from best available materials. One can see the reel change markers every so often, so it has obviously been taken from a solid archival print. The colours – when Hodges allows them – are vivid and the whites are suitably stark. I was especially impressed, as I have been with many of the Warner Archives transfers, with the grain. It’s there!!! And it’s doing its magical dance as only grain can. I’m thankful no over-zealous control room hack has taken the time to mute it.

I’m disturbed, however, that Warner Bros. has chosen not to release this film properly. It’s a sci-fi picture that the core audience – especially of a certain age – absolutely love. Those who missed it the first time round (I was a 15-year-old genre geek when I saw it first-run in the 70s on a big screen), will love it. As well, a whole new generation of geeks deserves to experience it. Given that director Mike Hodges, stars George Segal, Richard A. Dysart, Michael C. Gwynne, Donald Moffat and Matt Clark are all still alive and also given the film’s many admirers (one of whom is Terrence Malick), I’m sure there would be a huge audience if the movie was properly transferred to Blu-Ray (where I think it would look magnificent) and featuring a solid Laurent Bouzereau-styled documentary and one or two commentary tracks. Warner Home Entertainment: ARE YOU LISTENING?

Under the Sun of Rome: Sotto il sole di Roma

Under the Sun of Rome - Sotto il sole di Roma (1948) dir. Renato Castellani
Starring: Oscar Blando, Liliana Mancini, Francesco Golisari, Maria Tozzi, Ferrucio Tozzi, Gisella Monaldi and Alberto Sordi

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

At one point in Renato Castellani’s strange neorealist comedy-drama Under the Sun of Rome, the layabout teen hero Ciro (Oscar Blando) and his hard-working beat cop Dad (Ferrucio Tozzi) are sleeping not-so-soundly during the day for very different reasons.

Ciro busily toils day and night doing nothing – save for occasional forays into mischief with his equally lazy pals. Pops, on the other hand, is on perpetual night shift – patrolling the dark streets and punching in tediously at the requisite check-in points. The son is only at risk getting caught for petty thievery. Pops is at risk every night keeping the eternal city as safe as possible.

One works, the other doesn’t – but as the sun of Roma beams through the windows of their tiny walk-up – both men on this particular morning, are getting no sleep.

Roly-poly Mamma (Maria Tozzi) is multitasking like only a mother can and berating both of them – at the top of her considerable lungs.

In a brief moment of respite from her justifiable haranguing (she works harder than the two of them together – multiplied, no doubt, to infinity), bleary Ciro calls out to his equally groggy Dad asking if ALL married women are like his mother.

Dad sighs with resignation and replies, “All.”

Ah, the eternal chasm ‘twixt man and woman.

Luckily, for the not-so-gentle sex, they have each other.

Under the Sun of Rome unfolds its episodic coming-of-age tale during World War II, but for a good portion of the picture, we’d never know it. Ciro and his buddies busy themselves with the fine rituals of doing nothing. Our hunky hero, adorned in a sporty new pair of white shoes and to-die-for shorts that outline the supple form of his delectable posterior and swarthy gams – Yes, GAMS! They’re that gorgeous – is supposed to be getting a presentable haircut for his new job.

Ciro has other plans. He rounds up his buddies for a day of slacking. Wandering through the crumbling Coliseum they come across Geppe (Francesco Golisari) a lad of the streets who makes his home there. Ciro and Geppe hit it off immediately and the new pal joins the layabouts for a dip in a secluded creek on railway property.

When rail company bulls show up to intimidate trespassers, Ciro loses his new shoes and the money Mamma gave him for a haircut. Nor has he bothered to go to work as promised. Terrified with the severe beating he’ll receive, Ciro does what any young lad would do – he doesn’t go home and instead, spends the night with Geppe in his magical little Coliseum hideaway.

This affords both young dreamboats the opportunity to gaze intently at each other’s fresh, lean man-boy perfection – replete with gentle digital gesticulations. Here Castellani directs veteran cinematographer Domenico (Ossessione) Scala’s camera in loving compositional directions to highlight the bountiful facial and physical attributes of both actors. (Larry Clark – eat your heart out.)

As time moves on, the picture recounts several entertaining incidents in the life of Ciro – stealing shoes from a shopkeeper (the great Alberto Sordi of The White Sheik and I Vitelloni fame), an on-again-off-again relationship with Iris (Liliana Mancini) the proverbial girl-next-door, dabbling in black marketeering once the German army enters Rome, dallying gigolo-like with the BBW-splendour of Tosca (Gisella Monaldi) a married-woman-cum-streetwalker and eventually crime that leads to the expected tragic ending.

Castellani’s storytelling technique and, in fact elements of the story itself, are delicately odd. I suspect his approach is intentional, though it is, at times slightly off-putting.

First of all, there is the first-person narration, which I think, IS exceptional. It’s literary AND literal. Often the voiceover will describe a physical action just before or during its execution as well as describing characters whom we see as described during said descriptions. Further to this, we will often hear narration to the effect of “So-and-so said…” and we’ll then hear the character recite the line of dialogue. The basic tenets of Screenwriting 101 suggest you should NEVER do any of the above. This, of course, is why the self-appointed scenarist gurus the world over are so often wrong. If it works, it works and IT does so splendidly here.

Secondly, I’m not so sure Castellani’s perspective on his female characters is as deep and sensitive as it could and should be. Even in I Vitelloni, the pinnacle of all male layabout films, Maestro Fellini is able to render strong female characters without turning them into borderline harridans as Castellani does with Mamma or worse, Iris – a harridan-to-be. (Not that the performances of the actresses are bad though – they’re as good as can be expected within the shallow dimensions they’re given to work with.)

Strangely, the female character that seems the most well rounded and lavished with the greatest degree of sensitivity is that of the plump, whorish Tosca. Even Scala’s cinematography of the women – save for the latter female character – is certainly competent, but lacking the loving detail and care so copiously drenched upon the young boys. One could argue this is intentional, but to that I say – argue away. Larry Clark rests MY case on this one – boys AND gals need equal cinematographic love. (In fairness though, there is ONE boner-inducing close-up of Liliana Mancini slowly opening the door.)

Finally, the strange element I find most appealing and flawed is the manner in which Ciro is portrayed – not in Blando’s performance, which is excellent within the parameters provided by Castellani, but the odd turns the character takes. When he is at his rakishly appealing, Ciro is a character we’re completely rooting for, but often he does and says things so abominable (for example, the way he continually professes love to Iris, kisses her passionately then hurls some invective that clearly hurts her feelings) that we turn on him so violently that it occasionally threatens to wrench us out of the drama. That said, what may feel like a storytelling flaw might well be completely intentional. In retrospect, Ciro’s eventual coming-of-age, his redemption if you will, has even greater force. The problem for me is that it’s in retrospect and not within the drama as it unfolds. Perhaps this is the film’s literary quality working, as it should and if so, I applaud Castellani’s brave choice in making such a bold series of moves.

What I love most about this picture is the craft employed in the forward thrust of its episodic narrative. The movie never feels like it’s overstaying its welcome at any point and yet, very often, it has a rhythm not unlike that of a lazy day and as such, is easily in the same sphere attained by Fellini in I Vitelloni. In fact, the slicing and dicing of editor Giuliano Betti is not only exceptional, but at times it is utterly breathtaking. Among many spectacular cuts, the one that stays with me is a gorgeous cut to a foot-level shot on the stairs in the walk-up when Ciro and Iris go into the hallway from his flat. Not only is this a cut of exquisite beauty, but also it leads us into a shot that is equally stunning (followed by a move that’s richly evocative and romantic.

Wow! This is rare cutting indeed.

Many of the cuts are suitably "silent", but only when they need to be. On occasion they knock you completely on your ass and force you to almost re-focus your gaze IN to the action on screen.

I have to sadly admit to having seen only one Castellani picture before (a weird English-dubbed public domain VHS tape of Hell in the City during the mid-80s - issued I think, to capitalize on Chained Heat and other babe-in-prison flicks starring Linda Blair and rented pour moi to satisfy my babe-in-prison fetish). Because of my Castellani-deprived state, I couldn't begin to claim that these cuts are a DIRECTORIAL trademark style of his and can only assume they were made in collaboration with a brilliant editor.

The credited editor is one Giuliano Betti. I have scoured the Internet quite extensively - including Italian sites, and found virtually no information about him. In fact, this appears to be his only editing credit (along with a bunch of assistant directing and continuity credits). Go figure. Whoever was responsible is a genius.

Under the Sun of Rome is a tremendously entertaining picture and even if it occasionally feels like a Diet Chinotto precursor to Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni (made six years before the Maestro’s masterpiece), it’s a worthy entry in the Italian neorealist sweepstakes.

The movie is playing Saturday August 6 on 35mm in the Toronto International Film Festival’s home at TIFF Bell Lightbox (as part of the delicious series “Days of Glory: Masterworks of Italian Neoralism”). Under the Sun of Rome will be a rare treat for those who make the effort to see it on a big screen as the picture still does not appear to be available on DVD other than as a non-subtitled Italian import. I Vitelloni will, by the way, screen in the same venue on Monday August 8 on a cool double-bill with Barry Levinson’s Diner. If you’re interested in reading several thousand words on the TIFF Bell Lightbox series and the Fellini-Levinson double bill, feel free to read my article at Electric Sheep Magazine.