FlashPoint Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If Harvey Weinstein didn't exist, someone would have to invent him. One week his garbage gets recycled into source material for The Village Voice, the next he and his brother Bob cut a 95-film, multi-year deal with Showtime and resurrect Scream. And then he gives a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter which includes his explanation for why The Weinstein Co. created Third Rail Relasing, a new distribution label. Is it to showcase undiscovered independent gems? Introduce the world to global filmmaking talent?

No, it's for dumping the garbage. He told THR: "We should have had Third Rail two years ago, t's a good way of differentiating between what we really believe in, and what has been for ancillary value."

Third Rail recently released Death Defying Acts, with Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones, admittedly only to fulfill a contractual obligation. Other barely there releases this year include music doc Lou Reed's Berlin, Hong Kong action flick Flash Point, and Aussic croc thriller Rogue. (I really liked the latter two, by the way.) The widest release (48 theaters, per Box Office Mojo) was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, which made just under one million dollars. But I guess Harvey didn't "really believe" in any of them.

The best possible signpost to what kind of movie you're in for comes early in Flash Point, when Donnie Yen's hard-bitten cop Jun Ma is standing before the equivalent of Internal Affairs or some other review board. Apparently, one of Jun's more recent busts resulted in a perp with " ... three fractured ribs, a broken hip ... and anosmia. ..." It only took a second to translate the subtitled medical jargon and have it sink in: Donnie Yen hits melonfarmers so hard he slaps the very sense of smell out of their heads.

And after seeing Yen in action, you believe that; hell, you're amazed anyone he slugs even has a nervous system left. Yen choreographed the action in Flash Point for director Wilson Yip, and the Toronto Midnight Madness premier of Flash Point saw Midnight Madness program head Colin Geddes reading an e-mailed manifesto from Yen about how he's enthusiastically moving towards using 'Mixed Martial Arts" for better, stronger, faster fight scenes. I don't know what, exactly, 'Mixed Martial Arts" means, but having seen it, I know I like it. A lot.

Yen's one of a group of cops trying to take down a bloodthirsty band of Vietnamese 'brothers' led by crazy-mean Tony (Colin Chow) with the brutal-crazy Tiger (Xing Yu) as their enforcer in pre-handover Hong Kong; his partner Wilson (Louis Koo) is undercover with the group already. And the fun of Flash Point isn't in the plot, which is just a return to the classic Hong Kong action Woo-niverse of cops and crooks and conflicted undercover agents. It's in the fighting.

Start injecting caffeine into your veins, boys and girls, because the first eight Midnight Madness titles have been revealed for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. The biggest name title has got to be George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, in which the esteemed documenter of the dead goes back to his roots and tells a zombie origin story. Produced independently, Romero follows a kid named Jason (Joshua Close), who "obsessively films the madness" all around him as the dead return to life. I liked Land of the Dead, but I'd love to see what Romero does without studio interference.

Stuart Gordon is the other name director in the program and he's represented by Stuck. Not a traditional horror film, it's inspired by a true incident in which a nurse in Fort Worth, Texas (not far from where I lived at the time) struck a homeless man, drove home, parked in her garage, went to bed, and patiently waited until morning before calling the cops -- all with the hapless, bleeding man stuck in her windshield. Gordon has fictionalized the story, added some black humor, and cast Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea. Again, this sounds like it could be deadly good.

Also screening: Wilson Yip's Hong Kong action pic Flashpoint, starring Donnie Yen; highly-praised Japanese superhero comedy Dainipponjin; Xavier Gens' blood-soaked thriller Frontière(s); French "madwoman attacks trapped pregnant woman" suspense flick À l'intérieur; futuristic Japanese animated action film Vexille; and British gore-fest The Devil's Chair. Complete descriptions are available at the festival's site; you can also follow along with programmer Colin Geddes' blog. Two more titles are yet to be announced for Midnight Madness, which kicks off Friday, September 7.

[ Via Twitch ]