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Daily Blog

July 19, 2010

Paris in July.

 

Heaven on a stick. Actually I am referring to the main course of my first night’s dinner. I was so impressed I had to photograph it. Vegans, please avert your eyes.

 

Wherever I go, arresting images tend to trigger scene concepts. The hanging skewer of shashlick could be the sharp handy weapon the unarmed assassin plans to be served near his victim, and so on.  I know, I’m a sick puppy…

Paris Cinema Festival staged a midnight to dawn Ozploitation section, programmed by Festival director Aude Hesbert, and I was brought in to do the introductions, kicking off with DEAD END DRIVE IN presented in the original Australian patois with French subtitles.

Trivia footnote: When we sold the film to New World Pictures, they wanted to dub Aussie accents and slang into ” American” as had been done to MAD MAX. ( I saw it once. Horrible.)  I believe an “American” version of DEDI was prepared, then abandoned, when we resisted so vociferously. Does it sit forgotten in a vault gathering dust? I have a little masochistic curiosity. For those interested in contrasting advertising approaches,  here first is a rarely seen Australian TV spot for the film’s 1986 release.

Now, here is the New World Pictures trailer for the US release.

The theater was 4 seats short of full, the audience was patient as I mangled their language, they totally got the movie and 80% stayed for the 4 am TURKEY SHOOT. The stamina of French cinephiles is legendary.

Then, on to the Czech Republic and the Karlovy Vary Festival, where a chauffeur driven Audi speeds you to screenings down narrow streets that resemble rows of wedding cakes.

 

 

A selection of Ozploitation classics, programmed by Karel Och, and accompanied by Mark Hartley’s NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, were playing through the week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Producer and old friend Richard Brennan (LONG WEEKEND)  joined me for introductions and interviews.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On our second night, we were dinner guests of another old friend,  legendary Australian critic and author David Stratton, who was on the Festival Jury. David has been a tireless supporter of the Australian film industry for 40 years. He ran the 1973 Sydney Film Festival where my first film THE STUNTMEN won Best Documentary. Richard Brennan produced over 26 movies, including exec-producing my DEATHCHEATERS. There was much discussion of the current state of Australian film. The quality and success of ANIMAL KINGDOM is certainly encouraging. Which reminds me, I ordered my first ever plate of roast goose, succulent with a guilty residue. No problem eating duck,  Donald notwithstanding. Perhaps it’s Mother Goose that gives me a twinge…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had to leave early to introduce THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, virtually unseen in the Czech Republic, now graced with Czech subtitles. So gratifying  to watch 1000 young Czechs enjoying the action and getting the satire. ( The Australian DVD is the fullest version for those that don’t know the film)

Between  Ozploitation duties, I had time to see a number of movies. Here’s four I particularly enjoyed:

I knew nothing about LA DOPPIA ORA ( The Double Hour)  before the screening started and that’s the best way to see this Italian romantic paranormal thriller. Suffice to say, I had the rare experience of not knowing what was going to happen next from the first 10 minutes to the end. Yet at each new surprise, each Ah-Huh moment, I never felt cheated by the writer. It’s a fantastic script,  directed with style and a very sure hand, that started a bidding war for English language remake rights after the star Ksenyia Rappoport won Best Actress at Venice earlier in the year. It’s a great date movie, but don’t let anyone tell you a thing before it starts. Here’s the unsubtitled Italian trailer, which manages to sell without spoiling the twists.

SOUND OF NOISE is a delightful Swedish comedy about musical terrorists.

 

 

They adore rhythm, and abhor musical instruments. Their ideology is free form drumming using everyday objects.

 

 

Their agenda is to disrupt public areas, a bank, a hospital, etc. and stage brief anarchic concerts before the police arrive. They are pursued by a tone deaf detective, who hates music, to the disappointment of his family of musical prodigies. The climax, when the musical anarchists use the city’s electrical grid as their instrument is hilarious. ( But don’t try this at home!) If the concept sounds very esoteric, it’s not.  SOUND OF NOISE is easy to grasp, charming, whimsical, and frequently laugh out loud funny.

I think it deserves to be Sweden’s contender for this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar.  Co-directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson have a comedic flair that transcends cultural borders, judging by the response of the Czech audience, and their movie could do well in the US with the right handling. At the Q & A,  Simonsson and Nilsson revealed that their inspiration was a short film they had made 6 years earlier.  So here it is. ” Music For One Apartment And Six Drummers”.

 

Terrorism Comedy would be a pretty sparse sub-genre, you might think, but there was another example screening at the Festival after its highly successful run in British cinemas.

FOUR LIONS is probably the most confronting black comedy I have ever seen.

It depicts a group of home grown Brit Muslim extremists, even less skilled with explosives than The 3 Stooges. Incendiary satirist Chris Morris ( TV’s THE THICK OF IT) walks the razor’s edge with his feature debut, but he keeps it pitch perfect throughout, with an unexpected coda of political criticism that lifts the film to another level. I would have laughed even more if guffaws from the Czech audience, aided by Czech subtitles, did not make the Bradford/Pakistani accents of the gang even harder for me to decipher.  An English subtitled version is being prepared for US release, I hope.  I’ll let this magazine piece from a Brit TV program fill you in on the issues. Personally, I think it’s one of the most important political films of the decade.

Another pitch perfect comedy of a different genre is TUCKER AND DALE VS.  EVIL.  

I’ve done a few horror comedies, so I know how hard it is to achieve the right tone on the short schedules these things are given. So a tip of the hat to first time director  Eli Craig  for grounding the satire in well developed characters, ( Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine have great chemistry as the luckless rednecks) then going on to affectionately trash every Friday The Thirteenth/Serial Killer in the Woods cliche we have known and loved over the last quarter century. But not in predictable ways.  This is a very clever piece of work.

 

 

Undoubtedly Eli Craig is headed for bigger opportunities. Good luck. Here’s the trailer.

So back to Los Angeles just in time for the opening weekend of INCEPTION. Wow! Just shows you, it is possible for a high octane movie to feed the mind as well as the senses.

June 29, 2010

Between July 5th - 9th I will be a guest of the Karlovy Vary International Festival, one of the oldest festivals in the world. It will be an honor and a pleasure to spend a few days in this beautiful city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is named after King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, who founded the city in 1370. It is famous not only for its film festival but also for its hot springs, where I intend to wallow between commitments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The reason for my invitation: this year the festival’s line up includes a section on Ozploitation (Australian genre cinema of the 70’s and 80’s) prompted by Mark Hartley’s hugely entertaining rockumentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD.

I’ll be joined by producer Richard Brennan,who will present his LONG WEEKEND, a notable suspense mystery that has developed a strong fanbase since its release in 1977. I made the original trailer. Here it is:

In addition to hosting screenings of  THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, DEAD END DRIVE IN, and TURKEY SHOOT, I plan to see as many new Czech films as possible. Czech films past and present are a gap in my education.

The first Czech movie I ever saw was Jiří Menzel’s CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS ( Ostře sledované vlaky ) at a small Sydney arthouse theater in 1967. Foreign language films were even scarcer in Australia of those days than England. But the Academy Award For Best Foreign Film guaranteed its release down under. It’s a masterpiece of human observation that gets better with repeat viewing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, followed by post-World War Two Soviet imposed repressive government, had bottled up Czech artistic expression,  but in the early sixties the cork popped, and the Czech New Wave was born.

These movies were low key, small scale stories told with wry affection about ordinary folk, like the wartime hero of TRAINS, a bumbling railway dispatcher’s apprentice desperate to lose his virginity. Predictably the 1967 US advertising campaign concentrated solely on the sex comedy aspects.

But critics did discern the subtext: that the train station was a metaphor for Czechoslovakia itself, a small pleasure loving country, often occupied and tormented by neighborhood bullies and toxic geo-politics, but a country that will bite back when pushed too far.

The Czech New Wave allowed avant-garde directors like Věra Chytilová to expand the boundaries of free form film making. She is considered one of the greatest female Czech filmmakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She is best known for Sedmikrásky (Daisies)  which follows two young girls, both named Marie, played by Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová, who engage in bizarre pranks and acts of rebellion against the world in which they live.

Chytilová underscores this rebellion by breaking every formal rule in the film grammar lexicon, and thereby creates a surreal cinematic language of her own.

Naturally it was banned by the Czechoslovakian government of the day. Lucky not to suffer the same fate was Valerie and Her Week of Wonders ( Valerie a týden divů) directed by Jaromil Jireš in 1970, perhaps because it was based on a well regarded 1935  novel.

The then 13-year-old Jaroslava Schallerová ( later a popular actress throughout the 70’s) starred as Valerie, who is dealing with the onset of menstruation and the sexual awakening. The town of Slavonice provided the early 19th century settings. In full Gothic style Jaromil Jireš portrays the heroine as living in a disorienting dream, seduced by priests, vampires, men and women alike.

I have not seen it, but this trailer makes me want to.

The most famous Czech film director to make a career in Hollywood is Miloš Forman.

The movie that got the world’s attention was his 1967  The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is set at the annual ball of a small town’s volunteer fire department, and the plot consists of a collection of anecdotes told within that setting. The film uses no actors - the firemen portrayed are the firemen of the small town where it is set. I’ll let this erudite young reviewer give you an evaluation:

Forman has always maintained that the film has no “hidden symbols or double meanings”. However, the Czechoslovak head of state as well as the censors of the time viewed it as a political allegory. The national fire department resigned in token protest.  The Firemen’s Ball ran for three weeks during the Dubcek era, but after the 1968 Soviet invasion and  crackdown, the film was “banned forever”. Now it lives forever as a deadpan comedy, and to quote critic J. Hoberman, “darkened by an unwaveringly clear-eyed view of human stupidity and deception.” Perhaps one of the unique aspects of the Czech New Wave is its sense of the absurd, a reaction to the corrupt, inept, Stalinoid bureaucracy under which Czechs lived. Here is a masterful, painfully funny sequence - the beauty contest auditions:

Forman’s subsequent Hollywood career includes ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, which won five Academy Awards including one for direction, AMADEUS, which won eight Academy Awards, and THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, for which he received a Best Director Academy Award Nomination and a Golden Globe win.  But I have a particular regard for two of his less successful Hollywood films.

His first, made in 1971, was TAKING OFF. It’s a comedy of inter-generational conflict resulting in parents rediscovering their youth.

Once again Forman’s skills at human observation result in many sequences of deadpan hilarity. I defy you not to want to see the film after watching this clip.

I have seen HAIR several times, and will continue to revisit it in the company of first timers. I never cared much for the stage musical, but Forman’s vision of Late Sixties America resonates with me, recalling my 3 months of greyhound bus touring through most states of the Union in 1968.

In 1997 Miloš Forman received the Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It will be an honor to show a few of my guilty pleasure movies at such a prestigious venue, and catch up with the latest Czech film makers.

June 25, 2010

When Le Festival Paris Cinema kindly invited me to present plus Q & A some of my cult movies for their audience on this coming July 3rd, I thought back to my early experience of French movies, and the influence they might have had on me as a film maker.  (Apologies to French readers: this software does not do accents or cedilla.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At age 9, I saw a 16mm print of Jacques Tati’s MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY, projected on a wall of my prep school library, in which Tati, as the gauche and socially inept hero, stumbles through a disaster prone August holiday in Saint Marc-sur-Mer on the Atlantic coast. Though the social satire no doubt escaped us kids, the film was largely wordless and full of sight gags that kept us laughing and still work today.

Here’s a recent trailer:

Rowan Atkinson’s character, the idiot-curmudgeon Mr. Bean,  owes a lot to Tati, perhaps acknowledged in his 2007 MR. BEAN’S HOLIDAY. But Tati goes deeper. And smarter. He keeps Hulot benign, and through him holds up a gently mocking mirror to class conflict, consumerism and bourgeois pretensions. Tati had a singular vision and stuck to it throughout his career. It brought him two Academy Award nominations, winning Best Foreign Film with Mon Oncle. It also brought him bankruptcy when his big budget PLAYTIME failed. But he never gave up, never lost sight of his dream. All Hail, Jacques Tati, comedic genius.

The next French film I saw, aged 16, was LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, screened to the Wellington College film society, who watched in respectful but perplexed silence.

Later I read that a British provincial cinema had run the movie with 2 reels out of order for most of the season, but  audiences were none the wiser till a London critic stopped by for a second viewing. Many critics regard MARIENBAD as a work of genius, others agree with its listing in Michael Medved’s book The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time. This recent trailer for the DVD release does its best to chart a path for the audience in advance, but my school film society had no such help.

Despite being more mystification than mystery, MARIENBAD has influenced many film makers. It certainly left me with a taste for tracking shots and baroque angles.

In 1994, British band Blur made this wry music video homage for their song To The End.

Perhaps re-screening MARIENBAD on my laptop in an Amsterdam hash bar would provide clarity. Or perhaps not.

I saw my next French movie because it was raining… But it was the title that reeled me in. OF FLESH AND BLOOD. Two time honored movie ingredients for late adolescents.   Literal translation of the French title LES GRAND CHEMINS might not have done the trick. I took my seat as a man pursued a woman home and with scarcely a word they started making passionate love.

The woman was Anouk Aimee.  She exuded an earthy yet brainy sexiness, and she immediately became my goddess. In her subsequent work I always enjoyed how emotions played across her unique visage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I happened by sheer accident to speak to her on the phone of one of her friends in 2005, I think I reverted to 18 year old fanboy. The male lead was Robert Hossein. He projected a raw masculinity that was less present in British leading men of the early sixties. As a director, Hossein is also one of France’s undervalued auteurs, who infused standard genre vehicles like LE VAMPIRE DE DUSSELDORF, and J’AI TUE RASPUTIN, with deep themes and imaginative staging. I would love to find his spaghetti western UNE CORDE, UN COLT.

OF FLESH AND BLOOD, directed by fellow actor Christian Marquand, was described by a derisive reviewer as Dostoyevsky meets Roger Corman . Works for me. This was a dish of Gallic Noir, in vibrant color, and I liked the flavor.  French films were a new world for me, clearly more daring than English language films. I was hooked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My next French experience was  AIMEZ-VOUS LES FEMMES? ( US title: A TASTE FOR WOMEN), a dark comedy set in a vegetarian restaurant about a gourmet cannibal sect that eat women in celebration of their beauty. I went in not knowing anything about it and was entranced by the wacky idea, the wit of the subtitles, and the glittering black and white Franscope photography, courtesy of Sacha Vierny, who co-incidentally shot LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The director Jean Leon was also the 1st Assistant director on MARIENBAD. (Strangely, this is the only film he ever directed. A pity, based on this work.) The names of the writers held no significance for me at the time: Gerard Brach and Roman Polanski. With hindsight, I recognize a similar impish sense of humor in Polanski’s THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, OR EXCUSE ME, BUT YOUR TEETH ARE IN MY NECK. All I can find is a tiny poster and a still. Where is this forgotten gem now?

Soon after, I went hitchhiking through France from Le Havre to Eze-sur-Mer and back. Whenever possible, each night I would find a cheap pension near a cinema. Being a child of World War Two, WEEKEND A ZUYDCOOTE was a must see.

This French perspective on the evacuation of Dunkirk was the first time I experienced Jean Paul Belmondo’s casual rugged charm. Here’s a TV spot.

And the staging by director Henri Verneuil was spectacular. I have admired many of his  films, particularly CENT MILLE DOLLARS AU SOLEIL,  GUNS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN,  THE BURGLARS (LE CASSE) also starring Belmondo, with whom he did 5 pictures. And THE SICILIAN CLAN with Alain Delon. I would eventually see Delon and Belmondo together in BORSALINO, where, rumor hath it, their respective contracts required they would get equal close up coverage in their scenes together. Verneuil was not a critics darling in France, but his work was always solidly commercial, and easily the equal of many Hollywood directors of the period. Here are 3 trailers that show he was the master of any genre cocktail.

Mafia drama:

Belmondo does his own stunts:

Buddy comedy for truckers:

In Grenoble I met up with a friend studying there, Julian Beaumont, ( funny how you can remember 45 years later where and with whom you saw a film that made an impact) and we saw LE GENTLEMAN DE COCODY (IVORY COAST ADVENTURE), starring the great Jean Marais, directed by Christian-Jaque, another undervalued genre director (pictured below).

Despite my one-in-every-five-words comprehension of rapid fire French, ( Ah, by dint of repetition, I guess la bagnole means the beat-up old vehicle) I remember being swept along by the fast paced action comedy. The audience around me clearly loved it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COCODY became one of the 15 top grossing films of 1965 with over 2 million admissions, yet this poster is all I can find of it. Nothing on UTube. Love to get hold of a subtitled copy. Christian-Jaque made a number of handsomely staged costume dramas, which I subsequently sought out. Here’s an extract from the Italian dubbed version of MADAME SANS-GENE, in which he gives Sophia Loren’s comedic talent and abundant charm(s) full rein.

Christian-Jaque also made FANFAN LA TULIPE twice, first in 1952, then in 1964 in 70mm no less, as THE BLACK TULIP with Alain Delon playing twin brothers, for which this is the original trailer.

If there is one thing I share with Christian-Jaque it’s his fondness for viewing genre with a satirist’s eye. I’d love  to see his first film L’ASSASSINAT DE PERE NOEL, made with difficulty during the Nazi occupation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Nice I saw  L’HOMME DE RIO  and immediately became a Philippe De Broca fan. His subsequent ROI DE COEUR (KING OF HEARTS) starring Alan Bates, is hard to find, but a brilliant anti-war comedy.   33 years later he showed he had not lost his touch with LE BOSSU, great romantic fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE MAN FROM RIO was stunning in its day. Here’s a 6 minute extract of a masterful chase sequence, in a deserted Brazillian city under construction, with Belmondo once again doing all his own stunts. Today such a scene would be hyped with music, but I found the suspense is all the more riveting with sound effects alone.

The girl being kidnapped at the end of the clip was the enchanting Francoise Dorleac, sister of Catherine Deneuve.

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They both had become major European stars at the time of Francoise Dorleac’s tragic death in a car accident in 1967. What better way to end my trip down memory lane, (which I hope you have been enjoying on company time) than a joyous song and dance number from the only film the sisters played in together, Jacques Demy’s homage to the great Hollywood musicals - LES DEMIMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT.

After Paris, I will be hosting screenings of some of my early work at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, so next I’ll share some recollections about Czech cinema.

May 16, 2010

Magnolia’s bright spark Arianne Ayers invited me to the Los Angeles premiere of George Romero’s SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD. George has been a horror auteur for 42 years and is still going strong. We have met a couple of times on the festival circuit, so I was eagerly awaiting his next chapter on the apocalypse. Here’s George introducing the redband trailer.

As a practitioner of tightly budgeted genre myself, I consider SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD a bang-up job. This time George gene-splices Zombieland with The Hatfields vs.The McCoys, enabling him to riff on human folly and the senselessness of war, with wry humor, social allegory, female masturbation and exploding heads…What’s not to like?

What’s more, it has one of Canada’s finest actors Kenneth Welsh ( I had the pleasure of directing him in ESCAPE CLAUSE) who channels a bunch of Sean O’Casey characters into the vengeful, manipulative, bastard-paterfamilias you can’t help liking.

George enjoys confronting his audience with uncomfortable moral quandaries when the normal has been replaced by the unthinkable. The more overt comedic tone of his approach this time may be the source of disappointment in some of the reviews I have read. In fact, I think George has actually broadened his audience by ramping up the laughs.

But he does not neglect the boo, yuk, and shiver moments, which are greatly aided by a dynamic score from Robert Carli, a Canadian composer who will, I predict, get a big Hollywood assignment, based on his work here.

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is a fun ride when experienced on the big screen with a full house that gets it, as they did at the premiere. And Great Cannibalism, George! What about when they ate the whole….well, you’ll have to see the movie.

May 5, 2010

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s a link to Harry Knowles exclusive post of a special MACHETE trailer. Utterly amazing! Thank you, Harry.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/44943

The Seventies are back, if last night’s crowded screening of TURKEY SHOOT is any indication.  They totally got it. The New Beverly Cinema will also be bringing back my STUNT ROCK for a midnight show on June 11th. Mark your dance card…