audition Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Onion AV Club is unquestionably my favorite entertainment-focused website (other than Cinematical, of course!). Their outstanding coverage of all things pop culture suggests an indie-leaning Entertainment Weekly, and I consider that a very good thing. They always do a great weekly list, and one of their recent offerings is no exception. Check out "Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful to Watch Twice." The first movie I thought of when I saw that title was Requiem for a Dream, so it's fitting that they put it in the #1 spot (not sure if these are in order of "most painful" or not). I saw Requiem for a Dream in college -- on a double date! So imagine not only suffering through one of the toughest movies of all time in a theater, but suffering through it with a hyperventilating girl you're trying to get to first base with! Needless to say, it didn't work out.

Though I don't think it's a "great film" by any stretch of the imagination, I can certainly see why Irreversible (#13 on the list) was included. I don't know if I physically could stomach that one a second time. I remember convincing my friends to come see it with me by telling them "It's supposed to be just like Memento!" It was not just like Memento. I still shudder when I walk past a fire extinguisher. I must be a masochist, because I either would watch or have watched several of the movies on their list more than once -- United 93, Million Dollar Baby, Audition, Leaving Las Vegas, etc. There's a lot of good rental ideas for those with a taste for challenging fare, so fire up your Netflix queue and head on over to the link. Just don't plan any parties around these flicks! How about you guys, what is a great film you could never sit through a second time?

Men are stupid. We grab hold of a romantic notion and won't let go. We become instantly enraptured by someone's face, body, voice or written words and move forward in rabid pursuit, ignoring evidence that the other person is already involved in a relationship, wants nothing to do with us -- or is a total psycho. Audition helped make Takashi Miike known to a wider international audience in 2000, though he'd been making films for television and the direct to video market in Japan since 1991. His prolific output, and especially his sometimes sensationalist subject matter, influenced a raft of younger filmmakers, including Eli Roth, who gave him a cameo in Hostel. But don't blame torture porn on Miike.

Though I missed Audition when it played in theaters, I picked up the unrated director's cut as soon it became available on DVD. A recent viewing reaffirmed its capacity to shock. Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) sits in a hospital room and helplessly watches his beloved wife die. Seven years pass and he is nothing but a hollow shell of a middle-aged man, lonely to his core, rotely performing his duties at a video production company. Even his teenage son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) can see that he "looks old" and encourages him to remarry. While having drinks with his producer friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), he listens to Yoshikawa bemoan the sad state of the film industry and expresses his own desire to find a nice girl to marry. With the mind of a producer, always seeking to solve problems, Yoshikawa quickly decides that they should hold an audition.

Talk about guts! This kid submitted this video to Stanley Kubrick way back in 1983 when Kubrick was having open auditions for Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick had advertised around the U.S. for young actors to send in audition tapes to be considered in the casting process. Brian Atene, aged 20 at the time, sent this tape in and was apparently never heard from again, as least by Hollywood. That is until this video started making the rounds on the web.

Now, Mr. Atene can be accused of many things, but being shy about his "acting abilities" sure isn't one of them. He compares himself to a young Alec Guiness, and calls the Juliard School where he is a student, the "finest acting institution in the world". Although he says this, "not as a statement of conceit, but humbly as a statement of fact." He calls Kubrick one of the greatest directors of all time while rolling his eyes to the heavens, although tells him that he isn't quite as good a director as Michael Curtiz, who directed The Sea Hawk (which is apparently Atene's favorite film) in 1940.

After taking Kubrick to task for not directing 2010, he goes on to let him know that his favorite composer is Erich Wolfgang Korngold (he composed the music for The Sea Hawk, of course), that he won a puppy for 50 cents when he was 12 years-old, and his favorite color is green. Oh, and he's a Trekkie. He then performs a short "cutting" loosely based upon on The Outsiders, by which I think he means the book, and not the film, since that came out the same year that Atene was recording the tape.

This is probably the best video definition of the word hubris that I've ever seen. See for yourself after the jump. Once you've seen that, check out the parody update of Mr. Atene, aged 43.

I'm a film critic and I love horror movies. According to the studios, I do not exist. This year they have decided that horror movies (among other types) don't need reviews, and they have opened some dozen of them without press screenings, the latest batch being Pulse, Snakes on a Plane and The Wicker Man. Now, it may be that these movies are terrible. Or perhaps they just require a certain sensibility to understand them. In any case, they deserve a shot, and to show the studios that we critics are capable of getting horror movies, I worked on a list of the seven best from the past seven years. Surprisingly, my master list came out to more than 30 titles, which I painfully pared down to this final seven (I even had to leave out Saw and Ravenous!). Significantly, each of these films was made available to the press prior to their openings.

1. Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
This, the scariest movie I've seen in years, gave me the creeping tingles. Like Lynch or Bunuel, Kurosawa has the power to tap right into our most nightmarish fears, but does it subtly, normally, like something lurking just outside the periphery of our everyday existence. Released in the U.S. in 2005.

2. Land of the Dead (2005, George A. Romero)
Romero adds another chapter to his legendary, brilliantly masterful zombie series, evoking all manner of classical imagery to build a harrowing portrait of the way we live today. And that's really scary.

3. Audition (2001, Takashi Miike)
Three words: watch the bag.

4. The Blair Witch Project (1999, Eduardo Sanchez, Daniel Myrick)
Pushing through the hype, the money, the buildup and the backlash, one can find at the rocky center a really good, quite imaginative and gripping film done with an eye on the unseen and the unknown.

5. The Descent (2006, Neil Marshall)
The second-scariest movie I've seen in years features incredible use of total darkness as well as a surprising look at the darkness of the soul.

6. Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)
This underrated, barely noticed film is perhaps the most intelligent haunted house (or rather haunted hospital) movie I've ever seen.

7. The Devil's Backbone (2001, Guillermo Del Toro)
This creepy flick, improbably set in an adobe school smack in the middle of the bright Spanish desert, may be Del Toro's finest hour.