Van Diemen’s Land

Moody, extremely well photographed and about cannibals, Van Diemen’s Land can’t help but remind me of 1999’s Ravenous–only, you know, good.

Where Ravenous was hokey and sensationalized–a “bad guy,” double-crosses, boppy music behind life-and-death chase scenes–Van Diemen’s Land looks spooky and subtle, so much so that you might not even catch after one viewing of the preview what the movie is actually about. Which is awesome.

Out now in Australia, no date is set for a US release, and I’m not expecting one. But definitely something to look out for on DVD. Any movie about eating people where I can use the word “subtle” is more than okay in my book.

*And the award for Unbridled Tagline Awesomeness goes to: “Hunger is a strange silence.” Ughhh, poetic and simple like a shiver.

Broken Embraces

I haven’t seen enough of Almodovar’s work. “Almodovar.” Some might say that giving yourself the 1-word name self-branding treatment is unspeakably pretentious (I might agree), but with the kind of respect the artist formerly known as “Pedro” garners from his movies, I’m pretty sure he can do just about whatever the hell he pleases.

What I love about Almodovar’s stuff is how color-oriented it is, the bold reds and blues, always easy to look at. You can even see it in the poster. And there seems to be a duality going on in Broken Embraces that celebrates that, one between reality and fantasy, or maybe memory and present day, where each side warrants its own style, one light and fresh and grounded, pretty, and the other broken and disjointed, cold steely hues and a steady cam.

But it’s not only that; I haven’t seen enough of Penelope Cruz‘ work, either. She’s an absolute monster in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and seems to really be reestablishing herself lately, becoming a regular with Almodovar, working with Woody Allen, playing next to Ben Kingsley in Elegy. There’s something about powerful female leads. I can’t put my finger on it but they almost seem to have some kind of extra layer that men don’t have, something more surprising, maybe. Am I alone on this?

Broken Embraces has already made rounds (to rave reviews) at festivals and will be in US theaters (in NY and LA) later this year. If you don’t live there, well, besides being square, you should probably make it a Netflix.

The Attic Door

Child actors are so hit or miss with me. The little girl in The Fall? Brilliant. Anikan in Episode I? Well…that’s too easy. But you get what I mean.

Kids are rarely great performers and almost never seem like actual kids. And that’s what I worry about in The Attic Door. But besides their two iffy lines of dialogue, the atmosphere coming off this thing is killer and leaves me literally aching to see what in the name of all things holy is up in that attic.

What the filmmakers call on their blog a “haunting and romantic story about growing up,” the teaser for The Attic Door is deliciously vague–carnivorously vague. What we get are these disjointed tidbits of information: 1) the kids are alone, by themselves in an empty house tucked away in a sandy, golden, empty part of the world, and 2) there’s something they’re afraid of. A ghost, maybe. Or whatever’s in the attic. Or whatever.

I honestly can’t find a date to expect The Attic Door, even in limited theaters. This is a tiny, tiny movie and it seems from the creators’ site that they’re scraping whatever money they can together to get it distributed. So keep an eye out.

Until then, you’ll just have to get your jollies from the puffy shirt that kid’s rocking in the still above. Pretty sure that makes him the first pirate.

Runner Ups (click the titles for trailers):
Pirate Radio
Not that this looks bad, but biopicish-type films just usually aren’t my cup of tea. That being said, Phillip Seymore Hoffman stars, and in my book, he’s hands down one of the best working actors today and maybe the most intense living actor of our time. I’ll at least consider anything he’s a part of. And plus, it’s a cool story. The very idea a ship full of people infected with a case of stickittotheman neosis sailing off to rock feels more like a righteous fable in today’s age of factory-line pop than anything else. In theaters this Friday.

Antichrist
The only reason I’m not including this in the main list is because it’s already out in limited markets. Nowhere near me, of course, but I’m sure in Chicago and NY it’s available. Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (The Science of Sleep, I’m Not There) as “He” and “She,” Antichrist is about, well…it’s hard to say: a psychiatrist, a patient, nature, religion, sex. The trailer is surreal and darkly beautiful, telling of a woman’s imagined (or maybe not) journey toward the Garden of Eden. Before the Garden, though, are the woods, and “Nature is Satan’s church.” This movie looks trippy and bodacious.

I found this trailer and these amazing stills literally over half a month ago and still haven’t posted them. Don’t ask me why. I could tell you I was busy, sorting out old student loans or tuning up my car, but the truth is that I probably just didn’t know what to say about them. And maybe I still don’t.

On a personal level I could tell you that I always imagined animation getting dark and serious one day. And not like Coraline dark. I’m talking depressing, no-irony dark. I envisioned the style serving as some kind of metaphor for maybe the falseness of a character’s life, how, to that character, everything might feel forced and fabricated, plastic–pixalated. The image I had–and don’t ask me why–is of a gritty cartoon man sitting on the edge of his bed, shirt off, his sheets tangled and crumpled behind him. He’s slumped over with his head in his hand. He’s looking around, examining the dim yellow light leaking from his closet door, the blue glow of the blocky numbers on his alarm clock. The silence. The fibers of who knows what in his carpet.

I don’t know. This is just always what came to mind when I thought about animation’s new breed–Animation: The New Class–when a big-time director would take on an animated film and everybody would be shocked.

To be fair, animation has changed, is really always changing. Digital design obviously redefined everything when it came along, and then there’s claymation, and stop-motion, and rotoscoping, semi-big names like Richard Linklater using it to wax philosophic in things like Waking Life. Or just look at the beginning 10 or 15minutes of Up, just how surprising and powerful and sad it is. Check out Wall-E, with its jaw-droppingly impressive visuals and more mature and risky dramatic techniques (like how much in the movie is expressed through wordlessness). And then there’s the raunchiness of something like a Team America: World Police, or the relentlessly depressing nature of a Grave of the Fireflies.

So this is me acknowledging the other side of the scale. Changes have been made. They have. But still…not the changes I’ve always kind of wanted. You can say all day that something like Wall-E isn’t strictly a “kid’s” movie–and I’d probably agree, maybe it’s not–but it’s not an “adult” movie, either. And that’s what I’m talking about. The change I’m waiting for is one that will make animated films not just “adult enough” but “adult – period,” something that will stop me from always lumping animated movies, no matter how much I love them, in with other animated movies. Stop me from thinking about them differently.

I’ve always been of the mind that anything can be good, that if you don’t like an entire genre you just haven’t seen the exception yet, that the idea of girls liking “chick flicks” and guys liking explosions is bogus. So why then do I still have a faction set up in my mind, animated movies on one side and everything else on the other?

This big tonal change I’m thinking of, it’s not just about something being deadpan or cynical, either; I don’t need an ending to go all existential on me, suggest that morality and God and love don’t actually exist, or for a script to explore human consciousness for me to qualify a cartoon as “adult.” But if something did go that way, it’d be a total paradigm shift for the genre (if you could call animation a genre), and I’d be taken back. And there’s nothing like being taken back at the movies. That’s when material really sinks in.

So I do think there is a place for Bergman themes and Gilliam surreality in animation. And I don’t know if Metropia will be the one to find that place, make us believe that the content really does warrant the form, but I’m hoping. Because, really, these screenshots are just incredible.

I know I really didn’t say much about this particular movie, but what’s there to say? It’s from Sweden; it features voice acting from Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis; it has an adult rating; it’s set in a dystopia. But it’s the pictures that are important. Just look at them; they articulate far more than I or any description ever could.

Here’s the trailer. Despite voice work from American actors, no US release is set.

This trailer’s from awhile ago but here’s money that it’ll be the craziest thing you see today. As always, video attached at the bottom.

Speaking of incoherent messes of psychedelic gibberish…

I finally rented and watched Fear and Loathing in honor of my recent trip to Vegas. It seemed like the perfect time to do it, the perfect excuse to sit down and finally acquaint myself with a film that’s been on my list forever, its title on Top Whatevers left and right, deeming it a American staple. It’s one you almost have to see if you consider yourself any kind of film buff–but not because it’s a masterpiece. You see it more for a certain understanding of artistic merit that you might not have otherwise, to see how much balls Terry Gilliam has and how everything about his movie was a risk, and how he made it anyway. That’s the real achievement here, an achievement that, despite its good intentions, to me feels mostly technical and cold.

In all the movie’s confusion and noise, the non-plot and nonsense, there is a point to be made. It speaks about the degradation of the American Dream and the utter failure of so many movements in the ’60s, how so much hope and energy devolved so quickly into complacency and addiction. Johnny Depp’s character sums it up perfectly in 1 of the 2, maybe 3, pieces of substantive dialogue in the entire piece. He looks out of his hotel window seriously. His voice gets less cartoonish:
–
“And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
–
He closes out the film, too, with another powerful monologue. But that’s it. The rest is a trip, a blur of various events and exaggerated stages of being. And that’s the point – I get that. These are the “failed seekers,” the “generation of cripples.” It’s not supposed to make sense – okay. But to me that just doesn’t seem a worthwhile enough revelation to warrant sitting through a 2-hour-long social statement, another one of Gilliam’s cinematic experiments of weird where I’m expected to play the part of the willing guinea pig.

On some level, Gilliam’s films are always interesting–there’s no doubt about that. The more of them I watch, though, the more I can’t help but question the honesty of his style, seeing his visuals as more “art for art’s sake” than simply eccentric, his hyper-reality as over conscious. I respect what it is he’s trying to do with Fear and Loathing, but there comes a time when you really have to take a step back and remind yourself that good film should be a constant balancing act between aesthetic as well as intellectual stimulus. Fear and Loathing, however, feels more like a give and take with long droughts in the middle of Del Toro’s incomprehensible mumbling and Depp’s paranoia, aesthetic as intellectual stimulus that only goes so far–paint speckled canvases that we’re supposed to gawk at. And they bore me.

To preface, let me first say that I think I may be the only person on the planet who didn’t go crazy for Adaptation. Really, I didn’t even like Being John Malkovich all that much. To me, they were over-meta and over-clever. There was just something about them, something that turned me off and didn’t ring true. I know, heresy, blasphemy. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t respect them (it’s hard to disrespect anything Charlie Kaufman puts out). And despite being underwhelmed by those two, Spike Jonze’s first two features, I can’t help but be oddly enamored with the looks of his third, the children’s book turned anti-CGI fantasy film, Where the Wild Things Are.

I look at the book cover and I know that I know it. I know I should have some memory of being in the elementary school library with my juice box in one hand and Where the Wild Things Are in the other, red juice stains lining my lips as I skipped the words in favor of the pictures–but I just can’t place it. Now, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, that’s cemented in there; The Hungry Caterpillar, no problem. But this one’s lost somewhere between a memory of throwing a birthday for the letter T in kindergarten and my very first act of rebellion, whispering instead of sleeping on that red and blue mat during nap time every afternoon. And it’s driving me nuts.

This just-released full trailer, though, conjures something up in me, more feelings than memory, but something. In a way, it’s kind of amazing. It’s got this incredible sense of youthfulness and dreaming, of drifting away on that red and blue mat and for a passing few minutes being somewhere better than school, somewhere perfectly lit and in the forest. I may not have the best track record with Jonze so far but I think this may be the one to break the streak. Just the way the costumes look almost homemade, like something out of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, adds such an organic feeling to the world. And Jonze’s background in music videos comes through, too–ARCADE FIRE’s “Wake Up” feels tailor-made and perfect here.

The only thing I worry about is whether spending 90 minutes with the “wild things” would get old. The 2 and a half minutes we get of the trailer are definitely chill worthy, but once you strip away the music and quick cuts, I wonder, will it start to feel like any other kid’s movie? Knowing Jonze’s style, probably not. I guess I just worry about it being over-something again, over-cute, maybe, or possibly over-weird. But I do love James Gandolfini voicing the main monster. He always had a childlike fragility buried under all of his anger and overcompensating in The Sopranos and, like it or not, he’ll probably always be Tony to us when we see him onscreen. Having just his voice, though, should offer that certain mix of power and innocence without the drag of us constantly waiting for him to make an ice cream sundae or quit therapy again.

Let me know what you think about the trailer. The film’s due October 16th.

Here’s another promo with less dialogue and story but a lot more of an escape-into-the-imagination feel. I personally think it’s a better trailer, just not as plot or character-oriented. Click here to watch.

You know that feeling when you’re dreaming? The world is soft then, and a drugged-out man in makeup is lip syncing ballads into a worklight, making gangsters cry. Then your grandparents are banging hard on your front door but you’re trembling and too afraid to answer, so they shrink down to inches and crawl underneath the crack to chase you, hands out, smiling weird and mechanical and crazy. Know that feeling? So does auteur David Lynch. He’s been making his career on it, actually, recreating worlds in his films where nonsense and impossible are accepted givens, and emotion and reaction are what drive thought, never logic. But now, the trailblazer that he is, Lynch is moving onto music, writing lyrics for established artists to translate his surreal, dark and beautiful touch into sound.

It all started back in 2006 when Lynch wrote and produced a set of songs with the session players from the TV cult juggernaut Twin Peaks. But when the band’s vocalist/guitarist Dave Jaurequi died, they were put on the shelf with hardly anyone knowing they were even in the works. Still, Lynch’s interest was piqued. So when DANGER MOUSE and Mark Linkous of SPARKLEHORSE came together to make an indie supergroup album called Dark Night of the Soul–featuring artists from THE SHINS, THE FLAMING LIPS, THE STROKES, the PIXIES, NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL, IGGY POP and more–most people were stumped when they saw David Lynch’s name attached.

Long story short, Lynch had a hand (and a voice) in two of the tracks in Dark Night of the Soul and made a 100+ photo book that was to accompany the album upon its release, a sort of visual narrative to take in while listening. This is where it gets confusing, though.

According to DANGER MOUSE, “due to an ongoing dispute with [the record company]” the book of photographs will now be released with a blank CD-R and a note that reads, “For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.” That was about a month ago. So basically, because of issues with the record company, the album never actually came out, and the band is now marketing their photo book with a good old fashioned skull and crossbones attached.

I like it. If nothing else, the whole incident makes for a pretty good “Art vs. System” story. Even cooler, though: the band opened their album up to the public online. NPR got the exclusive first listen, and you can go to their site to stream the whole album for free, as well as get the specifics on who’s in each track. You can also go to DNOTS’ homepage to buy the book and check out some of the pictures. Pretty sweet.

So there’s that. But that’s just a taste of Lynch-lead audio. Now, FOX BAT STRATEGY: A TRIBUTE TO DAVE JAUREQUI, that’s a whole meal. This is Lynch’s 2006 shelf baby. This is the one where he’s leading the charge, with the band from his old series, and his own production and his lyrics.

“This is what I call ‘modern ’50s’ music,” Lynch describes the album. “I love that ’50s feel of innocence and pain mingling.”

And it’s easy to be taken with the kind of music Lynch is talking about, the kind he uses in his films. They’ve always reminded me of a disturbing kind of distorted nostalgia, a dreamy and hypnotic kind of dying. I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing that resists being put into words. But I can say this: even though Lynch won’t be performing in FOX BAT STRATEGY, if it ends up sounding anything like his tracks in Dark Night of the Soul, or the tunes in his movies, then I’m expecting trance-y and disorienting things–the stuff of dreams you hate waking from.

Dave Jaurequi, to whom the piece is tributed, Lynch explains, “was not a singer. He was a guitarist, a fantastic one, but I asked him to sing and speak these lyrics of mine, because I had a hunch that proved correct: he had great phrasing, and I love the grain of his voice….I think about him a lot, and wish we’d been able to record more than the seven songs that are on this album.”

Here’s the album’s setllist, and you can listen to one track, “Shoot the Works, here, on Entertainment Weekly’s site. The album’s due out June 30th.

1. “They Go Down”
2. “Lost on Cahuenga”
3. “Almost an Angel”
4. “Shoot the Works”
5. “You’re the One”
6. “Rollin’ Down With You”
7. “I Dream of You”

Last note: Sure, Lynch is obviously no stranger to new ground. It seems with half the things he’s done in the past he’s established some kind of new plateau for others to aspire to. But recently, it’s like he’s doing it double time. His last movie, Inland Empire, was shot digitally and on the cheap. After his own disputes with his own production companies, Lynch decided that super-indie self-production was the way to go. And so he made his own studio and did so much of whatever the hell he wanted in Inland Empire, that it makes the cross-eye-inducing Mulholland Drive look like a pretty traditional art houser.

It’s just so inexpensive, so much freedom, he argues, that making and marketing through the internet will no doubt be the next frontier for all entertainment. Whether that’s true or not, you can go to Lynch’s homepage, where’s his latest filmic adventure, Interview Project, can be seen: a 70-day, 20,000 mile road trip across America, where 121 various people (found anywhere: the side of the road, in bars) were interviewed. He describes it as “something that’s human, and you can’t stay away from it.”