(We're re-posting our Postal review from Fantastic Fest in conjunction with the film's theatrical release this weekend.)
There's been a little pre-release buzz on this Postal flick, most of which seems to focus on the assertion that it's either A) Uwe Boll's best film yet, or B) Uwe Boll's first good movie. Well, considering that we're talking about the guy who directed House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne, "best film yet" doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot. And as far as Uwe's "first good movie" is concerned, well, I suppose we'll have to keep on waiting for that one to show up. The only difference between Postal and Boll's other films is that this one tries to be funny on purpose (and fails), whereas the other three try to be serious while delivering huge laughs.
Based on the popular video game, Postal is about a generic schlub who gradually loses his cool and eventually explodes into a violent lunatic. Imagine the Michael Douglas film Falling Down, only the screenplay was done with finger-paints, and that's pretty much what Postal is "about." There's a whole lot of mirthless wheel-spinning that focuses on stolen dolls, goofy terrorists and freaky cults, but nothing that really assumes the mantle of "central plot." Aside from one good gag in the opening scene, a creatively bizarre closing shot, one strong performance and a (very) small collection of slightly amusing (gross-out or shock value) gags, Postal is every bit as awful as Mr. Boll's earlier output.
The last time I saw my awesome amigo Nacho Vigalondo, it was at a Sundance party during which he was A) very thrilled to have his film play the festival, B) mega-elated that writer/producer Steven Zaillian would be involved in the English-language remake of his film (Timecrimes), and C) seriously drunk and hanging out with an overworked karaoke machine. When I pressed him for additional details, he said something to the effect of "I don't know yet, but .... Steve SALE-IAN, man! He wrote Bobby Fischer and Gangs of New York, man..." To which I responded, "Yeah, dude. Damn good writer. Plus Schindler's List, A Civil Action, American Gangster,and the awesome Falcon and the Snowman!"
The drunken Spaniard's eyes went absolutely wide: "Steve SALE-IAN is remaking my movieeeee!" He was like a little kid on Christmas morning, I swear. It was an awesomely sweet thing to see. But since we weren't really sure about Mr. Zaillian's specific attachment to the remake, this fresh news is also pretty exciting. Wouldn't it be cool if the Timecrimes remake had a Steve Zaillian screenplay and a director named ... David Cronenberg?? (I've seen Timecrimes more than once, and I think Mr. Cronenberg would be a perrrrrrrrfect fit for this time-travel / serial killer material.)
The United Artists re-do is still in the very early stages, so we could see a lot of personnel changes before the American version of Timecrimes hits the scene -- but given how positive the reaction has been among festival audiences, flick-buyers, and remake makers, we might just see it a little sooner than later. In the meantime, keep an eye out for the original film, which is a favorite among the Magnolia gang, and should be getting a release some time later this year.
A few months back I was fortunate enough to meet up with a powerfully friendly Spaniard called Nacho Vigalondo. He was attending the Fantastic Fest in Austin, and he was there with his first feature film, the very well-received Timecrimes. How well-received? Strong enough that the Sundance programmers took note and snatched the flick for one of their Park City at Midnight slots! (Plus Jette liked it!) So we figured we'd grab a quick chat with Nacho before he becomes the next big Spanish sensation. Here's what the award-winning filmmaker (and passionate horror geek) had to say on the eve of Sundance 2008:
Cinematical: OK, let's start off with the biggie: What's it feel like to get nominated for an Academy Award?
NV: I used to say that that wasn't a dream come true, because I never even dreamed about going to the Oscars! If you check my short films, or if you read my scripts, you'll think I'm not the kind of director that you attach to the Oscars. Having said that, being an Oscar nominee was one of the most incredible and amusing things that has ever happened to me. And it gave me the possibility to shoot a feature film. Cinematical: Timecrimes was your first feature after a series of well-received short films. What made you switch to long-form storytelling for this particular movie?
NV: The script. I fell in love with the idea. When the Oscar thing happened, and I started thinking of myself as a feature filmmaker, I decided to shoot the impossible film, the movie you couldn't shoot in other conditions. If Timecrimes is not a common film in the US, just imagine Spain, where we don't even have a genre films market.
Cinematical: Timecrimes had its world premiere at the aptly-named Fantastic Fest in Austin last September. Since then you've screened at Sitges in Spain and several other international film festivals. What's the general reaction been so far?
NV: The movie seems to be working. We won another prize in Trieste, Italy: The "Golden Asteroid" in a science fiction festival. I love to see how the people react to the little comedy elements. And the silence of the last quarter-hour, more into suspense and horror ... What I'm most grateful about is that people keep talking about the movie after watching it, discussing what has happened on screen.
OK, I'm sharing this video clip with you despite the fact that, like most of you, I hate seeing myself on video and I hate the sound of my own voice. But the guys over at Dell Lounge were kind enough to put together a video package from my game-show hosting debut, and it just seems right that I share my humiliation on a massive scale.
The very brief and uneventful history of Fantastic Feud: About nine days before Fantastic Fest '07 began, I asked Alamo Drafthouse Lord Tim League if I could help out in some small way. "Perhaps I could host a Texas Hold 'Em poker tournament ... or some sort of horror trivia game show," is pretty much what I said. Tim loved the second idea, so I started coming up with a bunch of trivia questions. The topics ranged from "non-zombie Romero" to "old old school," but the big finale was a "name the director" marathon that I tossed together at the last minute. (I was also very worried that I didn't write enough questions, but turns out I had way more than enough.)
Anyway, the event turned out to be a massive success, thanks mainly to the beers that kept arriving every 12 minutes. Plus we closed the evening with a drunken karaoke session that must surely rank among history's most absurd evenings. My thanks to all who helped out, participated, and stopped by to enjoy the insanity. For the rest of you, we offer this degrading video spectacle that I hope to god my mom never sees.
P.S. The game-show host costume was Tim's idea. It will not be returning for Fantastic Feud II.
Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes, which won the top prize at Fantastic Fest, has been picked up for distrib by Magnolia Pictures. The film, Vigalondo's feature film debut, explores the idea of time travel through a tale about a man who travels back in time and runs into himself, thus setting in motion a chain of events with consequences he never imagined. Vigalondo's 2003 short film, 7:35 in the Morning, was Oscar-nommed, but lost out to Wasp by Andrea Arnold (who went onto make the critically acclaimed Red Road, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2006, along with a bevy of other awards).
Jette Kernion, who reviewed the film for Cinematical during Fantastic Fest, enjoyed it as much as the rest of the audience; she added the film to her viewing schedule after hearing from folks who attended the first screening that the film -- and the Q&A with Vigalondo -- was a must see. Kernion's take on the jigsaw-puzzle plot of the film:
"Many time-travel films seem to work only on that level -- when you try to think about them too hard, the premise crumbles. Timecrimes, however, is so tightly and intricately scripted that upon reflection, everything fits logically. you have to pay close attention, because every scene ends up being re-referenced later in the film. It's the kind of movie where more than once, you end up thinking, 'Oh! So that's why we saw -- ah, I get it now.'" Magnolia will release Timecrimes in 2008; in the meantime, you can read Jette's full review right here.
One of the most pleasant surprises of Fantastic Fest this year was Timecrimes (Los Cronocrimenes), which had its world premiere at the Austin fest -- and won the top prize. I went to the second screening at the festival after the audience at the first screening urged the rest of us not to miss it. Not only was the movie itself supposed to be good, but Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo's Q&A was also getting buzz. (The funniest parts are unsuitable for family reading.) The movie lived up to the hype, although the plot was almost too clever for its own good.
As you might guess from the title, Timecrimes does involve time travel, but first and foremost it's a suspense thriller. Hector (Karra Elejalde) and his wife are spending a routine afternoon unpacking furniture at their new house in the country, but things aren't quite perfect. First, Hector receives an odd phone call. Then as he lounges in the backyard with binoculars, he catches a glimpse of a topless woman in the woods behind the yard. He decides to explore the wooded area, perhaps hoping for more salacious peeks, and that's when everything starts to go wrong. A man with a bandaged face seems to be attacking him, and Hector escapes to a very strange scientific facility manned by a lone scientist (Vigalondo). I can't say any more without spoiling the plot ... I hope I haven't revealed too much as it is.
(Click on the image above to head straight to Cinematical's Fantastic Fest 2007 photo gallery)
I just spent the last seven days at the 3rd annual Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas ... and I think I need to start seeing a therapist. There's just no freakin' way that a person should be able to call this "work." But let's be honest: I'm lucky enough to attend festivals like Sundance, Toronto and SXSW -- and I do work my ass off during those weeks. But the Alamo Drafthouse's Fantastic Fest is more of a ... working vacation. Yeah, that's it.
How to explain the ceaseless deluge of movie-geek fun that was had at this year's event ... I have no idea. I suppose we could start with the people:
Fantastic Fest is the pulsating brainchild of Alamo Capo Tim League and his crack(-smoking) staff of hardcore movie geeks. Were it not for the passion, the knowledge, and the non-stop nerdiness of Zach Carlson, Lars Nilssen, Keir-La Janisse, Henri Mazza and the wonderful Karrie League, Fantastic Fest would be more like Mildly Diverting Fest. (And that's just not worth a trip across the country.) The Alamofos also have a stellar programming crew that includes the likes of Harry Knowles, Matt Dentler, Blake Ethridge, Todd Brown, and a small handful of people I'm forgetting right now but will definitely add in later once the emails start rolling in. But the bottom line is this: Call it a genre fest or call it a "geek mecca," but I can assure you that Fantastic Fest is programmed by grade-A, die-hard, 6-movie-a-day maniacs. Everything else is just gravy.
If you've seen the horror flick Hatchet, you might have preconceived notions about filmmaker Adam Green, and therefore about Spiral, which he co-directed with Joel David Moore, and which screened at Fantastic Fest a year after Hatchet played there so successfully. But you'd be wrong -- this film has very little in common with the old-school horror of Hatchet. Spiral is an odd film, a combination of indie-relationship film and thriller that stands on the precipice of gory horror and threatens to dive into a potential bloodbath.
The action -- or the hint that action might occur -- focuses around Mason (Joel David Moore), an asthmatic painter with an almost pathological lack of social skills, who appears to be harboring some dark nasty secrets. He works in a dull insurance company, where his longtime best friend Berkeley (Zachary Levi) is his boss. As Mason sits at lunch, flipping through a book of sketches of a woman who has been haunting his dreams, another woman starts a conversation with him. Amber (Amber Tamblyn) also works in his building, and slowly makes friends with Mason. She agrees to pose for paintings that he sketches out beforehand. It all seems quite sweet, the awkward guy and the cute girl ... but what happened to his previous model, and what will he decide to do about (or with) Amber?
One of the few documentaries at Fantastic Fest this year also played Comic-Con earlier this summer -- Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures. This look at the influential and extraordinary artwork from Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is engaging even if you know nothing about the artist -- like me before I saw the film.
The movie is at first glance a standard interview-driven biography of Giraud/Moebius, the French artist whose comic book illustrations appeared in Heavy Metal (the U.S. version of a French magazine Giraud helped launch), and who also worked on several movies. Moebius Redux is narrated through a voiceover by Giraud taken from interviews. The film also relies on onscreen input from people who worked on movies with Giraud like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Dan O'Bannon; and fellow comic-book artists such as Philippe Druillet, Jim Lee (X-Men) and Mike Mignola (Hellboy), not to mention H.R. Giger and Stan Lee.
Innovative director Seijun Suzuki created a string of dazzling films for the Nikkatsu Studio in Japan stretching from 1963's Youth of the Beast to 1967's Branded to Kill. The breathtaking but sometimes bewildering artistry of those films played to increasingly empty theaters and so befuddled the head of the studio that Suzuki was finally fired and didn't work again for a decade. Suzuki's story has become well known and many of his films have now been restored, screened at festivals and released on DVD.
According to film critic Mark Schilling, though, Suzuki was not the only innovative director working within the Nikkatsu Studio system in the 1960s. Based on the tantalizing evidence presented in the three rarely-seen films screened in the Nikkatsu Action Cinema Retrospective at Fantastic Fest, Schilling has a strong case. A Colt is My Passport is a vivid hitman drama that anticipates Branded to Kill, while The Warped Ones is a completely unhinged exercise that feels like 75 minutes of free jazz improvisation and Velvet Hustler masterfully deconstructs a routine crime story with color and finesse.
Schilling appeared in person to introduce the films and answered questions after each screening. Based in Tokyo since 1975, he has been reviewing films for The Japan Times since 1989 and currently also serves as Japan correspondent for Variety. He latest book is No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema, just published by Fab Press. The book was originally written to accompany a 16-film retrospective he curated for the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, in 2005, and has now been expanded and slightly revised. In the introduction, Schilling explains that his aim is "not to challenge the critical consensus -- Suzuki is a master, after all -- but to broaden the discussion." Schilling provides a history of the Nikkatsu Studio and puts Suzuki's accomplishments, and those of his peers, into perspective. The book is well-written, lavishly illustrated and highly recommended.
The last time I saw my awesome amigo 
OK, I'm sharing this video clip with you despite the fact that, like most of you, I hate seeing myself on video and I hate the sound of my own voice. But the guys over at 
