Category Archives: Jay

Escape From Tomorrow

The great thing about Netflix is that you get to watch free movies online. Okay, maybe not exactly free, but once you’ve paid your negligible monthly fee, there’s a whole buffet of movies just waiting for your fat ass to partake – and it’s all you can eat! Some movies are more salad bar, and some are more sundae bar, but if you take a little of each, you’ll end up with a nicely rounded meal.

I happen to have a soft spot for independent film, but those are like the shrimps of an all you can eat buffet in Vegas. Tempting, but dicey. You never know if you’re going to score with cheap and delicious seafood, or win a free trip to the nearest toilet, where you’ll stay for the rest of your vacation. But since I like to live on the edge, I gave Escape From Tomorrow a go.

A debut for writer and director Randy Moore, it’s a black and white fantasy horror that recounts the last day of a family vacation where the father has just learned that he’s lost his job. It was shot guerrilla-style in the Disney World park without Disney’s knowledge or consent. They kept scripts hidden on iPhones and used only handheld cameras that other tourists might use. They were never discovered.

The family vacation is not like a trip to Disney that I’ve ever been on. The rides and animatronics are familiar, they seem the same parades of characters, but poor unemployed dad starts to have some really disturbing visions. Like, super disturbing.

The film makers plotted the sun’s positioning weeks in advance since they knew they couldn’t bring it lighting, but chose to render it in black and white to help ease the issue. To avoid detection, Moore felt he could risk 3 or 4 takes of any given scene at most, and he had his actors wear digital recorders taped to their bodies rather than have visible mics. The cast and crew bought season passes to both Disney World and Disney Land, and despite the fact that they rode It’s a Small World over and over wearing the exact same clothes, they never attracted attention from park staff.

Moore was so paranoid about Disney finding out, he took the film to South Korea for editing. It debuted at Sundance under shrouds of secrecy – and you can understand that a film that shot illegally in its parks and depicted the princess characters who pose endlessly for photos with your kids as high-priced hookers for Asian businessmen might be frowned upon by the house of mouse. Reviewers encouraged people to “see it while they could” but a Disney lawsuit never materialized. They have widely ignored the film, choosing not to add to the hype machine that was quickly gaining steam.

At the end of the day though, I think this movie is more fun to discuss than to watch. Yes, it’s audacious and ballsy and possibly the future of film-making. But it’s only sometimes successful in its execution, and the surreal stuff pushes the boundaries a little too far. There’s an intermission an hour in (I could have sworn it was more like 3) – and I was ready to be done. Turns out, the worst was still to come. So did this little Netflix experiment turn out to be bad shrimp? It may have made me a little queasy, but I’m glad I gave it a chance.

Ginger Snaps

3 Replies

Some horror movies take place in dark alleys, or abandoned houses, or deep woods. But others, like this one, know that real terror lives and hides in the suburbs – perhaps in your own backyard.

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), two twisted teenage sisters, social outcasts by default, are totally and completely obsessed with death. Their parents have come home to so many gruesome death scenes, no amount of blood, nor dismembered body parts, nor daughter’s corpses can faze them. The teachers at school, however, are not so desensitized. Trips to the guidance counsellor remain ineffective.

One night, at a park just like the one where you pushed your toddler on the swings, the sisters are attacked, and Ginger is mauled by a large and aggressive creature. Bigger than a dog, uglier than a bear, Brigitte just barely wrests her sister away from the blood thirsty animal, its pursuit interrupted by its encounter with a van. Creature eviscerated all over the quiet neighbourhood cul-de-sac, the sisters flee, leaving driver Sam (Kris Lemche) to guess at the impossible. Ginger’s been bitten by a werewolf, and her life (and her body!) are about to change in unexpected ways.

The film puts a twist on the classic werewolf tale by equating it in some way to womanhood. Ginger is bitten on the full moon, also the day of her belated first menstruation. “The curse,” my grandmother used to call it, though she never suggested it might accompany fur on my knuckles or a tail on my heinie. Ginger is transforming in more ways than one. With wolf blood in her veins, she is confident, more alive. She withdraws from her sister as she enjoys this new feeling of self-determination. Though she confuses her new need to hunt as a new need for sex, she manages to satisfy both, sometimes in one go. Her wolf side is like her newly discovered sexuality, both grant a marginalized young woman a certain power over men, and that’s an intoxicating feeling no matter how tragic the consequences.

John Fawcett’s film is clearly low-budget; even for 2000, the effects are unimpressive. Yet it forces him to explore the theme in creative ways, defining womanhood and femininity in new terms. There is a subversive, feminist filament running through this film, with generous deposits of coal-black humour and diamond-sharp wit.

There is a beast inside each woman, and she’s hungry like the wolf.

Check us out on Youtube.

FrightFest: Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

4 Replies

So, full disclosure, I’m a chicken shit when it comes to watching scary movies. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t watch them. It just means that I sound like a woman in the late stages of labour when I do. Lamaze is my friend. This one’s classified as a “zom-com” and while it’s got some good laughter blasts, make no mistake: by the 13 minute mark, you’ll have seen some shit.

The movie’s intro does a fairly decent job of catching us up if we haven’t seen the first, but in case you’d like some details, SPOILER ALERT: the 2009 original is a Norwegian zombie splatter film directed by Tommy Wirkola, who is a sick, sick individual. He sends 7 students to a remote cabin in the woods, because that’s what the horror movie template tells you to do. A lone and mysterious hiker interrupts their partying with a local tale of a Nazi occupiers who looted the village until the villagers fought back, killing many and forcing survivors to flee into the woods. The next day the students find two things: the hikers dead body, and a cache of treasure. What’s more terrifying than a Nazi? A Nazi-zombie, obviously. Nazi zombies start popping out of the snow, and they whittle down the students, one by one, until Martin, who has had to chainsaw-off his own bitten arm, returns the box of treasure to them. Back in the safety of his car, he discovers that he’s still got a gold coin in his pocket…

Cut to, Dead Snow 2. The Nazi-zombies are super mad about the one who got away. Martin (Vegar Hoel) wakes up in a hospital bed with a new arm…a severed zombie arm that’s now been attached to him and is intent on doing evil zombie things! So now Martin’s fleeing the zombies as well as his own dark impulses, and he enlists the help of an American zombie squad to get the job done.

Turns out, though, that the zombie squad is actually just a few nerdy kids led by Judd Apatow muse Martin Starr. But at least they believe him.

Plot is not the strong point here, as the story is a fairly by-the-book horror list where every item’s been checked off. Unabashed bad taste abounds, and the special effects team does their best (worst?) to offer up escalating gore. Seriously, the organ budget alone must have outstripped the first movie’s entire budget, with an all-you–can-eat-wings wrap party for the crew and their plus-ones thrown in. These guys do things with intestines that you can’t unsee. There’s scalpings and head stompings and no mercy whatsoever even for babies, or the disabled. If you wanted a feast of blood and guts, you got it.

Confidential to Matt: projectile vomit warning, 38 minute mark.

The Bear

1 Reply

The Bear: a movie that actually relies on trained and tamed “wild” animals to do all of the acting. As you might expect, there’s very little dialogue.

It charms you from the first, the orphaned baby bear tugging at your heart strings. You want to put your arm around him even if his paws and claws are distinctly visible.

But then: hunters. Bear-hunting hunters, of course. A scene of them skinning animals around a campfire hammers how their imminent threat.Good thing lil’ orphan bear cub (B.C.) makes a reluctant friend in a bigger (adult) bear (B.B.). They’re going to need each other.

Sure it’s a bit of a schmaltzy premise, and kind of a fuck you to mother nature; in the wild, an adult male bear would very likely eat the cub. In fact, to make sure the bear actor didn’t eat the cub, they made him play with a similar-looking teddy bear to prepare him. It must have done the trick as there were the-bear-3-1 no known hasty bear funerals on the set.

But the rest is carefully orchestrated so that you feel as though you are watching real bears in the wild, going about their business, in a slightly anthropomorphized way. But the film is quite an achievement and must have required an awful lot of patience on the film maker’s part. Bears are not natural actors. I can’t help but feel that perhaps the bears too were exercising a great deal of restraint. The Bear is a singular experience in movie-going history. Disney’s got some documentaries that come close, but this is another thing altogether.

ParaNorman

11 Replies

Norman is a seemingly normal 11-year-old boy living in small town Massachusetts, isolated from his parents and peers because of one small detail: he sees and talks to the dead. No one believes him of course, except for a deranged uncle (John Goodman) who saddles him with a hefty spiritual responsibility to appease a witch who’s been haunting the town for decades.

Prevented by doing so by the same bullies who torment him by day, the witch raises zombies from the dead to chase the townspeople, who fight back viciously.

This movie turns out to be a parable about fearing what is different, and about not judging others. This lesson has to be harshly delivered, because nothing ever comes easily in the movies, and is all the more powerful when the message is delivered from the kids to the adults. But in its heart, it’s still a ghost story, a horror suitable for children, and it benefits a lot from its New England roots.

ParaNorman is stop-motion from the same animation team who brought us Coraline, capitalizing on the pioneering techniques from that film, and reaching new heights with full-colour 3D printing. It also happens to be the first mainstream animated film to feature a gay character, and was the first-ever PG-rated movie nominated for a GLAAD Media Award.

I have an enduring love for stop-motion because the building of real puppets and sets, and using actual cameras to film them gives the animation a detailed glossiness that I never get enough of. In one scene, I noticed that the sunlight was almost making Norman’s ears translucent, they glowed with the light behind them, and I was struck by how real it looked.

I also love smart scripts, and this one’s endlessly quotable. It’s a family movie, but you don’t have to be a kid, or have kids, to enjoy it. The visual jokes and wit add another layer of appreciation onto what’s already a solid movie with not a small amount of magic to it.

The filming, however, can be quite technical. First the animators record videos of themselves giving the performances, in order to use as reference. The directors give them notes on these tapes. The animators then animate a “rehearsal”, which is a very rough version of the scene shot with only half the frames. The directors then look at the rehearsal and give notes before the scene is shot for real. Animators usually turn in 5-8 seconds per week, depending on how many characters are in their scene. That’s gruelling work! To create the ghost effects, they did twice the work, filming each frame once with the ghost puppet and once without, layering them on top of each other to give it an ethereal look.

ParaNorman used 178 puppets in total, and over 31,000 individual face parts were printed for the production. Thanks to the face replacement technology created by the 3D Color Printer, Norman has over 8,800 faces with a range of individual pieces of brows and mouths allowing him to have approximately 1.5 million possible facial expressions. That’s already a huge leap over their work on Coraline, and the Laika studio has taken it even further with their more recent work, The Boxtrolls. Sean, Matt and I saw several of these sets and puppets when we visited Universal studios this summer. I love seeing all the craftsmanship that goes into these movies!

I definitely like the spirit of ParaNorman. It has respect for its young audience – but I have the feeling it might also be a gateway drug of sorts to lots more horror down the road.

Corpse Bride

8 Replies

Victor (Johnny Depp) is the son of nouveau-riche fish merchants and Victoria (Emily Watson) is the daughter of aristocrats who are down to their last dollar. Their upcoming marriage will give legitimacy to Victor’s parents while savings Victoria’s from the indignity of poverty. But Victor and Victoria have yet to meet – and neither are keen on marrying a stranger. All that changes when they finally do clap eyes on each other, instantly falling head over heels.

True love doesn’t make Victor any more facile with words, so when he fumbles his way through the rehearsal, he’s admonished to the woods to practise until perfect. Unfortunately, he unknowingly recites his vows to the corpse of a woman murdered on the night she was to elope, and Emily (Helena Bonham Carter) rises from the dead to claim him as her husband, and drag him down to the Land of the Dead.

Victor is mortified, as he should be – will he ever make it back up to the Land of the Living to reclaim the woman who holds his heart?

Tim Burton breathed his magic into this 19th century Russian folk tale, co-directing on the tails of Big Fish, and simultaneously with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He held the vision, and co-director Mike Johnson followed up with the crew, making sure the tone and emotion were realized.

A beautiful example of stop-motion, the puppets themselves, built by Mackinnon and Saunders, were about 17 inches tall and animated on sets built three to four feet off the ground with trap doors allowing animators access to the sets’ surfaces to manipulate the puppets. Victor, Victoria and Emily were outfitted with heads the size of golf balls that contained special gearing to allow the animators to manipulate individual parts of the puppets’ faces.

Burton, on casting Johnny Depp in both movies he was working on at once: “It was weird because we were doing both at the same time. He was Willy Wonka by day and Victor by night so it might have been a little schizophrenic for him. But he’s great. It’s the first animated movie he’s done and he’s always into a challenge. We just treat it like fun and a creative process. Again, that’s the joy of working with him. He’s kind of up for anything. He just always adds something to it. The amazing thing is all the actors never worked [together]. They were never in a room together, so they were all doing their voices, except for Albert [Finney] and Joanna [Lumley] did a few scenes together, everybody else was separate. They were all kind of working in a vacuum, which was interesting. That’s the thing that I felt ended up so beautifully, that their performances really meshed together. So he was very canny, as they all were, about trying to find the right tone and making it work while not being in the same room with each other.”

Like the best of Burton, this is macabre yet whimsical, and the visuals here are still arresting today. It’s definitely worth digging out for Halloween, and for whenever.

The Truman Show

3 Replies

The Truman Show came out before the reality TV craze really set in, so its prescience is commendable and chilling.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) is a man who’s been filmed since birth, and for 30 years, the world has watched him round the clock. The only person who doesn’t know that Truman’s a big, big star is Truman himself, who believes himself to be living a normal life. An entire town has been hired and created to convince him of this, but everyone’s in on it, everyone’s an actor with their own motives and agendas. When Truman does begin to catch on to the ruse, no one is more keen to stop his leaving than his director of 30 years, Christoff (Ed Harris).

When Sisken and Ebert reviewed The Truman Show, they gave it an enthusiastic two-thumbs-up, but also gave an unprecedented on-air apology to Jim Carrey for having said that he would never have a career when they hate-reviewed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective just a few years earlier.

The Truman Show wasn’t just a hit at the box office, it became a cultural phenomenon. In 2008, Popular Mechanics declared it one of the 10 most prophetic science fiction films ever. Big Brother debuted just a year after The Truman Show hit theatres, and the popularity of other shows like it probably predict the downfall of humanity, but the fact that so many people flocked to the movies to see that same thing satirized has to be a good sign, right?

The Truman Show is studied in lots of Media Ethics courses. Of course they look at Truman’s creator, Christoff, the director who stalked unwanted pregnancies and eventually trapped an unwitting human in a very big but very fake bubble. But they also look at Marlon, Truman’s best friend, and Meryl, his wife. These of course are simply actors playing a part – Meryl (Laura Linney) basically prostitutes herself for the role and is willing to bear Truman’s child, who will be a star of a spin-off.

Even more interestingly, psychologists are reporting real people experiencing the “Truman Syndrome” or the “Truman Show Delusion”, basically people believing they are the unwilling stars of their own reality TV shows. Some people may be happy about this fake fame, others tormented. But they believe cameras are secretly following and filming them around the clock. One such person traveled to NYC after 9\11 to check that the towers had indeed fallen; this person believed that it was perhaps just an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another such person climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty believing his long-lost high school girlfriend would meet him there, and he’d finally be released from the show.

I’m betting\hoping The Truman Show was a little less life-altering for you than it was for some of these poor people, but doesn’t that just go to show the effect the media can have on our lives?

The Gods Must Be Crazy II

2 Replies

When a sleeper hit becomes an international sensation, you can’t really fault the writer-director for trying to capitalize on that success. The Gods Must Be Crazy 2 is Jamie Uys’ coat-tail ride, and while it’s not without its charms, it lacks the earnestness of the first and fails to recapture the magic. It was filmed 5 years after the first but mysteriously shelved for 5 more, only making its debut in 1989.

N!Xau, the Kalihari bushman who starred in the first film, is back. In this, he is separated from his kids while on a hunting expedition in the desert. His children are kidnapped by elephant poachers, and in his quest to find and free them (and reestablish himself as the hero), he comes across a whole bunch more notable characters, including a New York attorney and a zoologist, who are stranded in the desert. Following the formula of the first, various plot lines will inevitably converge.

Madcap whimsy? If you’re feeling generous. Amusing battle over a cup of water with a baboon? Why not. You’re only going to watch this movie if you really loved the first, and even then, maybe you shouldn’t.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

7 Replies

I’ve never seen this movie. All I know of it is that my Aunt May had a copy, VHS, in her meagre movie collection. Aunt May was not a woman known to have a sense of humour; she was known for her ill-temper and bitterness. But she wrote me letters and taped episodes of Ramona for me, so I suppose I had a special place for her in my heart and now that she’s gone and I’m an adult who’s been through a thing or two, I wonder about her, about her choices and her loneliness. And about the kind of person she was if she thought this movie was worth owning.

I thought at first I had a case of swapped DVDs: it opens on a National Geography type narration. Here is a family of simple bushmen, living lives of hunter-gatherers in their own naive way. They live in isolation, in a dry and flat land absent of anything harder than the earth and animals living in it. A plane flies overhead, a noisy bird they think, or perhaps evidence of God’s flatulence.

Then we are informed that just 600 miles south of this village is a very large city. These people have very different lives. They drive cars, go to work, and are regulated by the almighty clock.

Back with the bushmen, an extraordinary thing falls from the sky. You and I might recognize it as an empty Coke bottle, but the tribe think it is a gift from God. It is harder than anything they know, and a perfect labour-saving tool with untold uses. Except the gods made a mistake: they sent only one. Suddenly this tribe that has never had anything worth owning, thus no sense of ownership, has a sense of wanting, and of not wanting to share. Anger, hate, jealousy, and violence are soon exhibited. One of the tribesman resolves to throw it off the end of the earth and goes in search of it, coming across a new teacher to Botswana, a despotic revolutionary, and an inept biologist.

Not quite a mockumentary I suppose, but a pretty smart comic allegory all the same. The more they dead-pan make fun of the bushman’s simple ways and juxtapose them with ‘modern life’ that sounds increasingly nonsensical. At times a bit too farcical or slap-sticky for my taste, it still managed to win me over with its sincerity.

This South African film was world’s biggest non-US box office hit during its release; it played for 532 consecutive days at the Oaks Theaters in Cupertino, California, setting a record for the longest uninterrupted run of any movie in Northern California. It was pulled only because the film reels fell into disrepair and a large section caught fire!

Despite the film’s gross of over $100 million worldwide, Nǃxau (who played Xi, the primary bushman) reportedly earned less than $2,000 for his starring role. Before his death, director Jamie Uys supplemented this with an additional $20,000 as well as a monthly stipend – still a pretty crap bargain.