Father's Day - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011

Father's Day (2011) dir. Astron-6
(Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney)
Starring: Conor Sweeney, Adam Brooks, Matt Kennedy, Brent Neale, Amy Groening, Meredith Sweeney, Kevin Anderson, Garret Hnatiuk, Mackenzie Murdoch, Lloyd Kaufman

****

By Greg Klymkiw

"Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind. toward some resolution which it may never find." - Robert Anderson from his play, I Never Sang For My Father

A father's love for his son is a special kind of love. As such, Dads the world over face that singular inevitability - that peculiar epoch in their collective lives, when they must chauffeur the apple of their eye from a police station, for the third time in a month, after said progeny has undergone questioning upon being found in a motel room with a dead man covered in blood, après le bonheur de la sodomie, only to return home after dropping said twink son on a street corner, so the aforementioned offspring of the light-in-the-loafer persuasion, can perform fellatio on old men for cash, whilst Dad sits forlornly in the domicile that once represented decent family values and stare at a framed photo of better times, until he succumbs to unexpected anal rape and as he weeps, face down and buttocks up, he is doused with gasoline and set on fire, then frenziedly tears into the street screaming, until collapsing in a charred heap in front of his returning son, who reacts with open-mouthed horror as the scent of old penis, wafts, ever so gently, from his delicate twink tonsils.

For most fathers, all of the above is, no doubt, a case of been-there-done-that - not unlike that inevitable fatherly attempt at understanding when Dad gently seeks some common ground with the fruits of his husbandly labours and offers: "Look son, I experimented when I was young, too."

So begins Father's Day - with the aforementioned, AND some delectable pre-credit butchery, an eye-popping opening credit sequence with images worthy of Jim Steranko and a series of flashbacks during an interrogation with a hard-boiled cop. This is the astounding feature film (the second completed feature this year) from the brilliant Winnipeg filmmaking collective Astron-6 (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney) who have joined forces with the legendary Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma Entertainment to generate a film that is the ultimate evil bastard child sprung from the loins of a daisy chain twixt Guy Maddin, John Paizs, early David Cronenberg, Herschel Gordon Lewis and Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer.

Father's Day is a triumph! It happily combines the effects of asbestos-tinged drinking water in Winnipeg with the Bukkake splatter of the coolest artistic influences imaginable and yields one of the Ten Best Films of 2011.

It is the seed of depraved genius that's spawned Astron-6 and, of course, with the best work in Canadian film, it has been embraced by an entity outside of Canada - the glorious aforementioned sleaze-bucket uber-mensch nutters who gave the world The Toxic Avenger. This collective of five (not six) brilliant filmmakers (including the above named quartet and Steven Kosanski, the F/X wizard, writer and director of Astron-6's MANBORG) are part of a new breed of young Canadian filmmakers who have snubbed their noses at the government-funded bureaucracies that oft-eschew the sort of transgression that normally puts smaller indigenous cultural industries on the worldwide map (including its own - Canada only truly supports such work grudgingly once it's found acceptance elsewhere). In this sense, Astron-6 has been making films under the usual radar of mediocrity and steadfastly adhering to the fine Groucho Marx adage: "I refuse to join any club that would have someone like me for a member."

Imagine, if you will, any government-funded agency (especially a Canadian one), doling out taxpayer dollars to the following plot: Chris Fuchman (Mackenzie Murdoch), is a serial killer that specializes in targeting fathers for anal rape followed by further degradations, including torture, butchery and/or murder. Our madman, Fuchman (substitute :k" for "h" to pronounce name properly), turns out to be a demon from the deepest pits of hell and a ragtag team is recruited by a blind infirm Archbishop of the Catholic Church (Kevin Anderson) to fight this disgusting agent of Satan. An eyepatch-wearing tough guy (Adam Brooks), a young priest (Matthew Kennedy), the aforementioned twink male prostitute (Conor Sweeney) and hard-boiled dick (Brent Neale) and a jaw-droppingly gorgeous stripper (Amy Groening) follow the trail of this formidable foe whilst confronting all their own personal demons.

This frothy brew of vile delights includes some of the most graphic blood splattering, vicious ass-slamming violence, gratuitous nudity, skimpy attire for the ladies, 'natch (and our delectable twink), morality, evisceration, hunky lads, delicious babes, compassion, rape, fellatio, chainsaw action, wholesome content, cannibalism, hand-to-hand combat, gunplay, family values, sodomy, immolation and monsters. It's all delivered up with a cutting edge mise-en-scène that out-grindhouses Tarantino's Grindhouse and delivers thrills, scares and laughs all in equal measure.

The film's sense of humour, in spite, or perhaps because of the proper doses of scatology and juvenilia is not the typical low-brow gross-out humour one finds in so many contemporary comedies, but frankly, works on the level of satire, and as such, is of the highest order. It stylistically straddles the delicate borders great satire demands. Too many people who should know better, confuse spoof or parody with satire and certainly anyone going to see Father's Day expecting SCTV, Airplane or Blazing Saddles might be in for a rude awakening. Yes, it's just as funny as any of those classic mirth-makers, but the laughs cut deep and they're wrought, not from the typical shtick attached to spoofs, but like all great satire, derive from the entire creative team playing EVERYTHING straight. No matter how funny, absurd or outlandish the situations and dialogue are, one never senses that an annoying tongue is being drilled firmly in cheek. Astron-6 loves their material and, importantly loves their creative influences. Their target is not necessarily the STYLE of film they're rendering homage to, but rather, the hypocrisies and horrors that face humanity everyday - religion, repression, dysfunction - all wedged cleverly into the proceedings.

Clearly a great deal of the movie's power in terms of its straight-laced approach to outlandish goings-on is found in the performances - all of them are spot-on. Adam Brooks IS a stalwart hero and never does he veer from infusing his role from the virtues inherent in such roles. Hell, he could frankly be Canada's Jason Statham in conventional action movies if anyone bothered to make such movies in Canada on any regular basis. Conor Sweeney as Twink is a marvel. Not only does he play the conflicted gay street hustler "straight", he straddles that terrific balance between genuinely rendering a layered character, but also infusing his performance with melodramatic aplomb. Not only is this ideal for the character itself, but it's perfectly in keeping with the style of movie that is being lovingly celebrated. Anyone who reads my stuff regularly will know my mantra: Melodrama is not a dirty word - as an approach to drama, it's a legitimate genre. There is good melodrama and bad melodrama, like any other genre. End of story. No arguments. Luckily, the Astron-6 team has the joy of glorious melodrama hard-wired into their collective DNA and Sweeney's performance is especially indelible in this respect. Brent Neale as the hard-boiled cop is, quite simply, phenomenal. Will someone out there give this actor job after job after job? The camera loves him and he knows how to play to the camera. He is clearly at home with the straight-up and melodramatic aspects of his role and most importantly, he is imbued with the sort of smoulder that makes stars - he's handsome and intense.

Astoundingly, not a single actor in this film feels out of place. Whether they're emoting straight, slightly stilted, wildly melodramatic or, on occasion (given the genre), magnificently reeking of ham, this is ensemble acting at its absolute best.

The entire movie was made on a budget of $10,000 and once again, for all the initiatives out there to generate low-budget feature films, Father's Day did it cheaper (WAY CHEAPER) and better. The movie uses its budgetary constraints not as limitations, but as a method to exploit what can be so special about movies. The visual and makeup effects as well as the art direction ooze imagination and aesthetic brilliance and it's all captured through a lens that puts its peer level and even some big budget extravaganzas to shame. Imagination is truly the key to success with no-budget movies. The Father's Day cinematography is often garish and lurid, but delightfully and deliciously so - with first-rate lighting and excellent composition. The filmmakers and their entire team successfully render pure gold out of elements that in most low-budget films just looks cheap - or worse, blandly competent (like most low budget Canadian movies). It's total trash chic - trash art, if you must.

I attended this spectacular event in France many years ago called the FreakZone International Festival of Trash Cinema which celebrated some of the most amazing transgressive works I'd ever seen. When I expressed to the festival director that I was surprised at the level of cinematic artistry, he just smiled and said, "You North Americans have such a limited view of trash culture - for us, trash is not garbage, we use the word to describe work that is subversive." This was so refreshing. It felt like a veil had been lifted from over me and I realized what EXACTLY it was that I loved about no-budget cinema - as a filmmaker, a teacher, a critic and fan.

Making a movie for no money that is NOT subversive on every level is, frankly, just plain stupid. What's the point? And Father's Day is nothing if it's not subversive. Besides, I've seen too many young filmmakers with talent galore ruined by initiatives that purported to celebrate the virtues of no-or-low-budget filmmaking but then forced the artists to apply the idiotic expectations of "industry standards" - whatever that means, anyway. This has been especially acute in Canada, but to be fair, in other non-North American countries also, where bureaucrats make decisions and/or define the rules/parameters of filmmaking.

Father's Day and the entire canon of the Astron-6 team should be the ultimate template for filmmakers with no money to seize the day and make cool shit. That's what it should always be about. And in this case, it took the fortitude of the filmmakers, their genuinely transgressive gifts as artists AND an independent AMERICAN producer to ensure that they made the coolest shit of all.

What finally renders Father's Day special is just how transgressively intelligent it all is and yet, never turns its proverbial nose up at the straight-to-video-nasties of the 80s, the grindhouse cinema of the 60s and 70s and the weird, late night cable offerings of the early 90s. It works very much on the level of the things it loves best. This is real filmmaking - it entertains, it dazzles, it makes use of every cheap trick in the book to create MOVIE magic and finally, it's made by people who clearly care about film. They get to have their cake and eat it too by having as much fun making the movies as we have watching them.

Father's Day was unveiled at Toronto's premiere genre film event, the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011 where it won several awards: the grand prize of Best Film, Most Original Film, Best Hero, Best Kills, Best Trailer and Best Poster - all voted on by the thousands of attendees of the festival. It will be released theatrically in early 2012 by Troma Entertainment and will be followed with the usual forays into home entertainment formats.

The Idiots

The Idiots (1998) dir. Lars von Trier
Starring: Anne Louise Hassing, Bodil Jørgensen, Jens Albinus, Troels Lyby

****

By Greg Klymkiw

To spass or not to spass; that, is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of the bourgeoisie, or to take arms against that which is a shallow sea of hypocrisy, and by the spassing, end them.

With assistance from the Bard of Avon, I ask you: Hast thou found thine inner idiot? No? Well then, get cracking, fool. In The Idiots, Lars von Trier's only official Dogme film - the movement he founded in 1995 during the 100th anniversary of movies with fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg to create pure, unfettered cinema - we are introduced to a group of young people who stage a perverse form of theatre in the arena of life itself where they enter any number of public places and pretend to be mentally retarded. Drooling, screeching, screwing up their face and engaging in overtly aberrant behaviour, these want-to-be activists engage in a theatre of cruelty. Their nastiness in exploiting those who are mentally ill and/or challenged to expose the nastiness of those they accost is lost on them, until a new member to their group begins to question their motives.

Interview segments of the participants which hint at eventual discord amongst the group punctuate several set pieces wherein our ragtag group spass or, in the colloquial parlance of the politically incorrect - "spazz out", have sex, argue, make up, break up and spass with abandon.

Few movies have made me laugh as hard as Lars von Trier's The Idiots. There is no question that the wholesale slaughter of sacred cows has always been a hallmark of the brilliant bad boy from Denmark, though I suspect none of his films are as gloriously, unabashedly, delightfully repugnant in rubbing an audience's nose in the putrid fecal matter of their own prejudices and repressions generated by their holier than thou pretence to political correctness. It is a cinematic declaration of war on bourgeois values, but it cuts much deeper than the surface - Lars von Trier digs his lens like a bayonet into the foul intestines of the bourgeoisie, rips them out and tosses them to the dirt for all to see. That said, those he skewers are also those who believe they are acting in defiance of said bourgeois values, but are as much a part of the problem as they believe they are the solution.

The movie begins brilliantly in an upscale restaurant where a snooty waiter takes an order from Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), a melancholy young woman who scales back her culinary desires due to a lack of funds. Around her are couples and quartets of affluent diners - quaffing expensive wine with their opulent brunch selections and occasionally cleansing their vile bourgeois palates with overpriced mineral water. Karen's eye roams to a corner of the dining establishment where a caregiver tries to control a table of her mentally retarded adult charges. They spit up their food, whine and grunt, then - much to everyone's dismay, two of them get up and begin wandering around the restaurant. One of the retardates is relatively benign - going up to each table, smiling and saying "Hi!" The other charges about in a fury. Hands are wiped on tablecloths belonging to other diners, baskets of bread rolls are removed from others and the caregiver is quite overwhelmed trying to control her charges. When the snooty waiter insists the caregiver control her group for the sake of the other diners, it simply becomes too overwhelming for her. When the benign retard approaches Karen's table, she is touched by his innocence and purity and accompanies the group as they're forced to leave the restaurant.

Up to this point, one is compelled to laugh quite uproariously - not AT the mentally challenged people, but WITH them in their innocent flouting of bourgeois convention and the stuck-up diners who are shocked by this behaviour.

Once everyone is bundled into the cab, it becomes clear that none of them are retarded - especially when they laugh about how they were all able to dine in a fancy restaurant without paying. As it is finally established that these people are engaging in a big practical joke, the laughs the film elicits are very different indeed. Now we laugh at the darkness of this group's actions. Not only do they spass in public, but do so in private as well. Spazzing-out delivers a sense of inner peace, but also a perverse sense of accomplishment that their actions are affecting a change in society. It's somehow even more viciously funny when we discover they're all lounging about on the family estate of the one member of the group who is much a member of the club he, and the group seek to condemn.

The Idiots is a film which belongs to a long and noble tradition of cinema that seeks to shock and provoke - to downright anger an audience. That said, the real anger should be directed at those who ARE angered BY THE MOVIE ITSELF and, of course, for all the wrong reasons. I think it's safe to say that this tradition exploded in full splendour with Luis Bunuel's L'Âge d'or, the scathing 1930 indictment of bourgeois values and, for good measure, the Catholic church. Since the release of The Idiots in 1998, the great Ulrich Seidl stomped about similar stylistic territory with Dogdays and I'm even compelled to include Tom Green's universally reviled, but stunning and vastly misunderstood bit of nastiness Freddy Got Fingered.

What Lars von Trier and those others prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is that if you're going to eviscerate something, it can't be done timidly, or in half measures. As always, pure disembowelment of the bourgeoisie MUST be bold. That's probably why I love Lars von Trier - he's always about being bold. And that, frankly, is what makes for great cinema!

This month, the work of the Danish bad boy genius of cinema is being featured in a TIFF Bell Lightbox retrospective entitled "Lars von Trier: Waiting for the End of the World" running until November 19. The Idiots is just one of several pictures in this series (including his latest masterpiece Melancholia) and this movie in particular will be playing Saturday November 19, 2011 at 8:00 PM - on a big screen and projected in glorious 35mm.

Rocky Horror Picture Show

Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) dir. Jim Sharman
Starring: Tim Curry Susan Sarandan, Brian Brian Bostwick, Richard O’Brien, Meatloaf

***

By Alan Bacchus

I like musicals, but don’t much care for rock operas, that is, the brand of song and dance motion picture which emerged in the 70’s and featured reworked pop rock tunes instead of traditional broadway style numbers. So this is not really my cup of tea, but if there was one film I could appreciate in this subgenre it would this gleeful, irresponsible and audacious cultish schlockfest.

Susan Sarandan is Janet Weiss, a virginal small town girl betroathed to the equally nerdy and virginal Brad Majors (Bostwick). The night of their engagement they find themselves with a flat tire and stranded in heavy rain. Their nearest respite is an old haunted castle-like mansion off the beaten path. They are quickly welcomed to a group of Transylvanians singing the Timewarp song.

The leader of this cooky gang of strange and swinging group of men, women and trannies is the ultimate tranny Dr. Frank N Furter (Tim Curry), who has just finished creating his own gay version of Frankenstein’s monster, an Apollo-like beefcake figure named Rocky, who will serve as his own personal sex slave. After Frank, in disguise, beds both Janet and Brad, Janet discovers her own repressed carnality and goes sexual haywire. Then Janet and Brad’s old high school teacher Dr. Everett Scott shows up only to get killed and served for dinner to Frank’s guests. Then it turns out the Transylvanians are actually aliens from another galaxy and eventually blast off into space in the castle-cum-spaceship.

Predictable is not the word to describe the effect of watching Rocky Horror Picture, fucked up quaalude trip or ecstasy bomb might be more appropriate. The plot seemingly gets made up as the film goes along, but mostly it’s a parody of classic b-movie sci-fi of the 50’s, with a lot of gay sex.

I forgot how gay the film was actually. And I forgot how liberal the 70’s were, in comparison to the decades of the 80’s and 90’s when material like this would have been scared off by the AIDS epidemic. Few commercial or even remotely mainstream films are as graphic and shamelessly explicit.

For straight dudes, we get to at least marvel at the stunning beauty of Susan Sarandan, her saucercup eyes and ample bosum which is featured prominently in that white cross-your-heart bra she wears through most of the film.

Stylistically, Jim Sharman’s direction and camerawork embrace all the shlockiness it’s trying to parody. There’s little aesthetic continuity going on. Sharman moves between extreme camera lenses, to rough handheld work, to traditional locked off photography. As with the story, anything goes.

Though the Blu-Ray looks sharp on my 42 inches, the small screen is just too small, and insular to really capture the magic of this film. Rocky Horror should be a shared experience, preferably at midnight, in a dingy old rep theatre on Halloween night in ful regalia and chemically enhanced. Happy Halloween!

Rocky Horror Picture Show is available on Blu-Ray from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Enter the Void

Enter the Void (2009) dir. by Gaspar Noé
Starring Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta


***

By Blair Stewart

KRAZEE CREDIT SEQUENCE! STROBING LIGHTS! LOUD NOISES! TOKYO BUZZING AT NIGHT! MOST LIKELY FILMED AROUND SHINJUKU AND SHIBUYA! PAZ DE LA HUERTA AS THE INCESTIOUS SISTER! THAT NATHANIEL BROWN GUY CAN'T DELIVER HIS DIALOGUE FOR SHIT! "FREAK" BY LFO IS A GOOD SONG! 'THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD' AS YOUR THEMATIC CENTERPIECE! MAN, WHENS THE LAST TIME I SMOKED WEED? THREE YEARS? I SHOULD HAVE SMOKED WEED FOR THIS! STROBE LIGHTS! GUNSHOTS! PAZ DE LA HUERTA NAKED....YEAH! TONS OF CGI! 'POWER. SEX. MONEY.' IS A CLEVER NAME FOR A STRIP CLUB! MORE STROBING LIGHTS! NOW MY NOSE IS BLEEDING, THANKS GASPAR! COMPARISONS TO MONTGOMERY'S 1947 "LADY IN THE LAKE" SHOOTING-STYLE IS NIFTY AND ALL BUT I'M ALSO REMINDED OF BIGELOW'S UNDERRATED 1995 CYBERPUNK FLICK "STRANGE DAYS"! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT BROWN FELLA SMOKING? DMT? YOU CAN SMOKE THAT? I'M GOING TO BUY THE FILM SCORE BY THOMAS BANGALTER OF DAFT PUNK, HIS WORK IS STERLING! I HOPE DAFT PUNK'S SOUNDTRACK FOR THE NEXT "TRON" MOVIE BUSTS SOME HEADS AND TAKES SOME NAMES! TONS AND TONS AND TONS OF CRUNKED-OUT BASS LINES! WHY IS EVERY WOMAN IN THIS FILM A LUSTY BABE AND NAKED AND SCREWING EVERYONE?

OH WAIT SAME THING GOES FOR THE DUDES IN THIS! WALL-TO-WALL SEX! IS GASPAR NOE A DRUG-MUNCHING RABBIT? THANK GOODNESS THERE ISN'T ANY BRUTAL RAPE SCENES LIKE NOE'S REVILED/REVERED "IRREVERSIBLE"! BECAUSE OF GASPAR NOE'S ENFANT TERRIBLE NATURE LIKE ANY NEW WORK BY TARANTINO OR VON TRIER OR PARK CHAN-WOOK HIS FILMS ADD AN ELEMENT OF DANGER AND SPECTACLE TO THEATERS THAT A 100 BASHFUL SUNDANCE INDIE DARLINGS CAN'T MATCH! OUTSIDE OF THIS WORK WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SEX IN MATURE MODERN CINEMA, BOTH MAINSTREAM AND ART-HOUSE? THE BY-GONE DAYS OF "DAMAGE" AND "LAST TANGO IN PARIS", YOU KNOW? I BLAME THE INTERNET!

SOME OF THE DIALOGUE IN THIS FILM IS AWFUL,
YET LOTS OF SHINY, SHINY LIGHTS!

DIMETHYLTRYPTAMINE!

GRAPHIC CAR CRASH! PAZ DE LA HUERTA NAKED ONCE AGAIN! WAIT, I PUFFED ON A JOINT OUTSIDE OF THAT 'COOL' BAR IN SHOREDITCH A YEAR AND A HALF AGO WITH THAT HIPSTER GUY FROM SPAIN! THAT GUY WAS A HORSE'S ASS AND TWICE AS DULL! GREAT SET DESIGN BY MARC CARO OF "DELICATESSEN" ACCLAIM AND HIS CREW! NOW OUR P.O.V. IS THE BROWN GUY'S SPIRIT FLOATING THROUGHOUT HIS SHORT LIFE AND OVER/IN/AROUND TOKYO! "ENTER THE VOID" BUDGET COST ABOUT 1/10TH OF WHAT WAS SPENT TO MAKE "AVATAR", BUT I FIND THIS FILM TO BE MUCH MORE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS TECHNICOLOR DAY-GLO SPLENDOR!

HOORAY FOR CINEMATOGRAPHER BENOIT DEBIE AND BUF COMPAGNIE'S VISUAL EFFECTS!

PAZ DE LA HUERTA NAKED....YET AGAIN! SOME OF THESE CHARACTERS ARE STOCK AT BEST, BUT THE FILM SEEMS TO BE BUILT FOR EXPERIENCING ON AN ENTIRELY EMOTIONAL LEVEL INSTEAD OF AN ANALYTICAL LEVEL, OTHERWISE IT'S QUITE FLIMSY! I MUST ADMIT THOUGH, IT IS AN EXPERIENCE! THE DIRECTOR'S CUT IS THREE-AND-A-HALF HOURS LONG! I WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO STOMACH THAT VERSION!

PEOPLE WHO SAY YOU'LL EITHER LOVE OR HATE "ENTER THE VOID" ARE FULL OF SHIT, IT HAS GLARING FLAWS AS I'VE MENTIONED ABOVE BUT IT HAS ITS QUALITIES TOO! YOU COULD SAY THE SAME ABOUT MANY OF KUBRICK'S FILMS, HIS "2001" WAS A BIG INFLUENCE HERE! PINK FLOYD'S "THE WALL" BY ALAN PARKER IS VASTLY OVERRATED IN STONER CIRCLES!

SOME MORE DISTURBING IMAGERY, ITS RATED 18A FOR A REASON, YOU WERE WARNED! NEON TWINKLING TOKYO! ORGIES! PAZ DE LA HUERTA MIGHT BE AN EXHIBITIONIST!

I JUST WANNA DANCE! RIDICULOUS FINAL MINUTES, BUT APPROPRIATE AFTER WHAT'S PRECEDED IT! DESPITE MY ISSUES NOE'S LATEST TRIP IS A GREAT LIVE-ACTION DRUGGIE TRIP ON PAR WITH GILLIAM'S TAKE ON "FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS"!

I JUST HAD AN ACID FLASHBACK, AND I'VE NEVER TAKEN ACID!
DO YOU HAVE ANY WEED?

HERE COMES THE EPILEPSY!