Posts with tag PhiladelphiaFilmFestival
Posted Mar 13th 2008 7:32PM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Action, Animation, Comedy, Foreign Language, Horror, Independent, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Noir, Mystery & Suspense, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Philadelphia Film Festival
Damn this makes me happy. The
Philadelphia Film Festival has always been known for some very fine "genre-style" programming, from U.S. horror fare to the oddest of offbeat imports. So when programmer Lewis Tice dropped me a press release on the 2008 selections, I dove into the email with much enthusiasm. (More specifically, I muttered "Oooh" and then I read the email.)
As much as I hate re-posting press releases with little or no commentary, the truth is that I'm knee-deep in SXSW awesomeness, so I don't have much time to commentate. And since I certainly wasn't going to let someone ELSE post something about
PHILLY, the sad truth is that you're getting rooked here. Just movie titles and synopses, with none of that oh-so-awesome Weinberg insight. Try not to hold it against the Philadelphia Film Festival that I'm so lame. Check out the list of films after the jump ...
Continue reading Philly Film Fest Announces 'Danger After Dark' Slate!
Posted Apr 20th 2007 5:06PM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Foreign Language, Horror, Thrillers, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
Prolific "J-horror" machine
Takashi Shimizu presents (yes, another) collection of creepy kids, contorted creeps and convoluted chaos with
Unholy Women (aka
Kowai onna), a three-part horror anthology that (thankfully) is just entertaining enough to make us forgive the general air of familiarity that permeates two of the three stories. The best thing about these anthologies (and believe me, there are a lot of 'em) is that if one section doesn't blow you away, you won't have to wait very long for it to be over. Taken on a segment-by-segment basis,
Unholy Women is A) not bad, B) very amusingly bizarre, and C) snail-slow and uneventful.
Story one is
Keita Amemiya's Rattle Rattle, and it's an enjoyably simple story about a young woman who gets dropped off by her boyfriend one night, only to spend the next several hours being chased by a really freaky (and amazingly persistent) poltergeist of some sort. The tale moves quickly enough and offers a double-twist ending that doesn't make a whole lot of sense ... but at least it's interesting. The spooky effects are the highlight in this section, although they're nothing an astute J-fan hasn't seen before.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: Unholy Women
Posted Apr 20th 2007 11:07AM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Foreign Language, Horror, Tribeca, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
I can think of a lot of adjectives that could adequately describe
Gyorgy Palfi's Taxidermia: absurd, ugly, disgusting, surreal, confusing, arcane, difficult, ponderous, and (intermittently) fascinating. I've no problem admitting that I just didn't "get it," which doesn't mean that I'll blindly dismiss the thing and call it a rotten movie -- nor can I find much praise for the film, either. It's a truly "out there" experience, I'll give the movie that, but unless you've got a pretty strong affection for Hungarian films that deal with sexual deviance, non-stop vomiting, ridiculous obesity and "creative" taxidermy I can't imagine you'd bother with the whole film.
Entirely lacking in what you'd call a "traditional narrative structure,"
Taxidermia is actually sort of an anthology, and the only link between the three stories is the fact that we're dealing with three generations of the same family. (If there's any connective tissue between the miniature trilogy, feel free to let me know what it might be.) I "get" that all three sections deal with the act of expelling things from one's body -- be it fluid, food or vital organ -- but beyond that I'm stuck firmly in head-scratching country. At least Palfi knows how to frame a stylish shot when he needs one ... which is often.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: Taxidermia
Posted Apr 19th 2007 9:02AM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Drama, Horror, Independent, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
The always-reliable
Timothy Hutton is front and center in the Spanish sci-fi production
The Kovak Box -- but it's 78-year-old veteran character actor
David Kelly who steals the movie whole. That's not to imply that the pair of performances is all that
Daniel Monzon's flick has to offer; on the contrary, it's quite the nifty little mind-bender that I'd heard it was. Sort of a feature-length
Twilight Zone episode that gets progressively stranger and more aggressive as it plays on,
The Kovak Box is a low-key, compelling and surprisingly crisp little experience.
Hutton plays a famous science-fiction writer named David Norton. He and his girlfriend are attending a conference at a swanky hotel on the island of Mallorca. Things go more than a little haywire after Norton's girlfriend (actually, fiancee by this point) leaps out of the hotel window and splatters herself all over the street. (I'm not spoiling anything; this scene arrives within the first seven minutes.) Meanwhile in another section of the island, a young woman called Silvia picks up her phone, hears a tinny recording of Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday," and promptly leaps out her own window. Unlike Norton's fiancee, Silvia survives her plummet.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: The Kovak Box
Posted Apr 16th 2007 1:01PM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
A darkly amusing, strangely insightful and very well-acted French romance drama,
Olivier Masset-Depasse's Cages is about how far one person will go to hang on to a passionate love affair that, for a variety of unimpeachable reasons, has simply run its course. It's a movie about that panicky feeling you get when you know the romance has died and, as such,
Cages is almost too personal and painful to truly "enjoy" in the traditional sense, but Masset-Depasse keeps the story moving along briskly -- even if his third act destinations seems ported in from a weirder and less interesting film.
Anne Coesens plays Eve, a paramedic who's madly in love with her bar-owner husband Damien, but when a horrific ambulance accident leaves Eve with a seriously pronounced stutter, she retreats into herself and becomes a silent and self-pitying shell of her former self. After a year passes and Eve is still struggling to form full words, Damien drops a bombshell: He's worried that Eve is no longer than woman he once fell in love with ... oh, and there's a seriously sexy beer distributor called Lea who just might have caught Damien's eye.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: Cages
Posted Apr 15th 2007 9:04PM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Horror, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
You want a movie that'll really test your limits for Japanese genre weirdness? Here it is: Torico's
Wicked Flowers, or as I like to call it: "What
Saw 5 might look like if it were co-directed by
David Lynch,
Rod Serling and the
Pang brothers." Here the target is not merely a group of slacker teenagers, but the the generation as a whole. Yes, all you Xbox-addicted, bong-smoking, living-off-your-parents'-income S.O.B.s ... director Tirico has something he wants to say to the whole lethargic lot of you, and he'll use lures like pretty girls and free video games to get you in the front door.
Here's the simple synopsis: An aimless young guy eats some poisoned pizza, logs into a mysterious online video game, and awakens to find himself in a "real life" video game, where the contestants and the prizes are real -- but unfortunately so are the kills. The kid's given a bunch of crazy rules about dice rolls, puzzle solutions and his competitors, and then it's off to the grungy playing field full of dead bodies and, well, some really weird hosts. Plus, everyone's poisoned, a bunch of machine-gun-toting freaks populate the scene ... and there's this really creepy automated bunny rabbit who tells you what game level comes next.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: Wicked Flowers
Posted Apr 12th 2007 10:07PM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Action, Drama, Foreign Language, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
Exiled is a movie that demands you pay very close attention for the first fifteen minutes, because the flick doesn't stop to deliver big blocks of exposition or early character development. We open with a half-dozen gun-wielding men. We don't know the good guys from the bad guys or why they're all wielding those guns. An elaborately hectic gun battle breaks out ... and then the surviving combatants drop their weapons and begin renovating an apartment. Yes, seriously. Don't mistake
Johnny To's Exiled for a convoluted or indecipherable affair, though; it's actually quite a simple little story -- but the veteran filmmaker seems to be having some fun by dropping us into the mix without a map and commanding us to keep up.
It's a pretty engrossing first act, I can tell you that much, and if the rest of
Exiled doesn't quite live up to its early promise, there's still more than enough mayhem to keep the gangster fans entertained. Plus it kind of turns into a western in Act III, which I found bizarre but also quite entertaining. The meat of the story is fairly basic: A bunch of childhood friends, now on opposite sides of warring families, must band together to avoid a common enemy. Picture The Dirty (Half) Dozen of Asian mafioso types, and that's pretty much
Exiled to a tee. It's a fast-paced and surprisingly amusing piece from a stunningly prolific Hong Kong moviemaker who really knows his genre stuff.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: Exiled
Posted Apr 11th 2007 9:02AM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Drama, Horror, Independent, Thrillers, Theatrical Reviews, Cinematical Indie, Philadelphia Film Festival
Last September I was thrilled to sit on the film jury for Austin's awesome
Fantastic Fest. My jury cohorts were Swedish movie producer
Christian Hallman and Texan actor
Wiley Wiggins. I mention these things not to get pointlessly nostalgic, but to let you know what we decided was the
Best Picture of the festival: It was
Simon Rumley's bizarre, chilling and strangely hypnotic
The Living and the Dead -- which isn't a "horror movie" in the most traditional sense, but is a thoroughly disturbing experience all the same. And by "disturbing," I mean: Really twisted, unique and fascinating to puzzle through.
What's most engaging about the decidedly off-kilter
The Living and the Dead is the way in which writer/director Rumley mixes the realistically tragic with the darkly absurd. This is a horror movie about mental illness, drug abuse, loss of parents, fear of abandonment, and the ways in which cancer can erode a whole lot more than just one person's body. The film takes place in a fascinatingly dank and isolated mansion, one that's populated by only three people: Defeated patriarch Donald Brocklebank, his mentally-challenged son James, and his cancer-afflicted wife Nancy. Strapped for cash and with the family estate on its last legs, Donald must travel away from his crumbling estate in an effort to raise some much-needed health-care money. The plan is for Nurse Mary to check in and tend to Nancy's needs, but the over-medicated James has, ahem, other plans. Suffice to say that James sees himself as a completely reliable member of the household, when the truth is actually that ... he's not. Like, at all.
Continue reading Philly FF Review: The Living and the Dead
Posted Apr 10th 2006 7:00AM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Foreign Language, Horror, Independent, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Mystery & Suspense, Festival Reports, Other Festivals, Cinematical Indie
My favorite component of any given film
festival should be pretty obvious by now. Sundance calls it
Park City After Midnight. Toronto calls it
Midnight Madness. Over at
SXSW, the program's known as
'Round Midnight, and here in the
beautiful city of Philadelphia, our local film festival calls it
Danger
After Dark. No matter what you call the program and no matter what city you happen to be in, any half-decent
film festival will always offer a colorful variety of horror flicks, cult-type comedies, and genre fare that's not
easily classifiable, but will undoubtedly appeal to the more intrepid movie geeks out there.
So while the
Philadelphia Film Festival is obviously not on the same
playing field as a Toronto or a Sundance, that doesn't prevent
Danger After Dark programmer Travis Crawford
from cobbling together one heck of a genre display, year after year. And while it seems unlikely that a professional
festival-goer would call the Philly Fest "the finest in the country," there's little denying that the
Danger After Dark program gets more exciting (and more popular) with each passing year. Basically what I'm
saying is: The festival as a whole is a darn good time, but if genre fare is what you're after, make sure you get down
to Philadelphia next April! (We're one of those shiny spots right near New York, Baltimore, and Atlantic City.)
My first Philly Fest was in 2003, and while I was psyched enough to see all the "regular" movies, my
eyeballs kept focusing on the
Danger After Dark lineup, which back then included titles like
Sympathy for
Mr. Vengeance,
Dark Water,
Eternal Blood,
Love Object,
Mimic: Sentinel, and
Beyond Re-Animator. Nothing too staggering, but I got a good introduction to Chan-wook Park and Hideo Nakata,
and a few DTV Dimension titles that, despite common sense, I always get a little psyched for.
Continue reading Philadelphia Film Festival: Dark & Dangerous!
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