4 movies, 7 days
The life and times of country singer Dewey Cox whose drug addictions and bigamy are all due to the result of his father disowning him after Dewy accidentally cut his more talented brother in half with a machete...
I was reminded of Dave Foley's The True Meaning of Christmas Specials while watching this. You know that the players involved are capable of more rapid-fire humour that are only tangentially connected to the Christmas Specials or Musician Biopics that they're satirizing, but any diversion from the the overall formula of either would ruin the big joke (in Foley's case his "search for the true meaning of Christmas Specials" causes him to experience every single cliche of the Christmas Special without realizing it, while in Walk Hard's case that the film is a note-for-note parody off Walk The Line with occasional sideways swipes at Ray and possibly Great Balls of Fire). As a result, I'd actually recommend you wait for the DVD since they have have been very public that the original version of the movie is close to 3 hours, and most of the stuff that they cut out since it digressed from the formula they were parodying. I suspect that there will be a ton of deleted scenes as an extra.
As it is, because they didn't ruin the big joke, the theatrical version isn't as funny as the trailer, (no punching out of Patrick Duffy, no group sex with Cox smooching a chimpanzee who's part of the action, just only a smidgen of Cox's disastrously cheesy seventies variety show).
However there is still much to savour here. Tim Meadows as Cox's drummer who always hysterically tells Cox not to sample whatever drug that Meadows himself is sampling but then proceeds to list all the drug's effects in such a positive way that Cox feels compelled to try it; The fact whenever Cox slips into a passionate tantrum he always rips a sink out of the wall, which has a great punch line; Gratuitous cameos by celebrities miscast as other celebrities they bear little resemblance to; Harold Ramis showing up as part of the cabal of Orthodox Jews who run the music industry; The mocking of scenes from the biopics that heavy-handedly try to make the music seem relevant today (such as when a coked-up Cox keeps insisting that the band play louder and faster, which the band refuses to because "no one will ever listen to music played that loud and fast with you yelling over it Dewey, it makes you sound like some sort of {dramatic pause} Punk." And, of course, the songs; which are pitch-perfect parodies that actually all almost sound like they could be actual hits until you hear the lyrics which are always a shade shy of tipping off how absurd they are.
Sadly, it seemed to have fared somewhat poorly at the box office, and I o think it's just a little too hip for the room in the sense of mocking these recent biopics like Ray and Walk the Line, which, due to the deaths of the subjects right before release have given these films an unfair sense of importance and quality when these films are as formulaic, cloyingly saccharine and guilty of cheap audience manipulation as any other biopic of your choice. Perhaps in 10 years people will catch on, but in the mean time, I suspect this film will remain the most cult-ish and obscure of the various Judd Apatow comedies we're receiving a flood of.
P.S. Bonus props to Eddie Vedder who sends up Bono's speech in praise of Johnny Cash by making even more pretentious comparisons between rock stars and Biblical figures giving us the immortal line "If Iggy Pop is the Methuselah of Rock n' Roll and Neil Young the great prophet Ezekiel"
A young University Student named Bud Corliss is dismayed when his girlfriend Dorrie reveals she's pregnant. Not looking forward to eking out a living supporting a child he does not want, he engineers Dorrie's death and makes it looks like a suicide. Dorrie's death arouses the suspicions of her older sister who investigates privately, while getting ready for marriage to her beau, Bud Corliss...
As someone who only knows Robert Wagner from such classic seventies chess like the TV series Hart to Hart, it's a bit of a shock to see him as a charismatic young sociopath here, because he's so good at it. In fact the film suffers in the second half when he isn't the sole focus anymore, as after he finally is able to achieve the death of Dorrie while making it look like a suicide, that the film suffers. Virginia Leith is fine as Dorrie's older much more capable sister (who looked annoyingly familiar to me until I realized Ms. Leith was also the severed head that is the true star of the misnomered The Brain Who Wouldn't Die), but since this is the 1950s it means there has to be a nominal male hero, and that comes in the personage of a big lummox of a police detective in Clark Kent glasses and silly pipe-smoking affectation played by Jeffrey Hunter. Hunter's a fine actor (who nowadays is more known for being Captain Pike on the unsold pilot for Star Trek instead of being John Wayne's co-star in The Searchers), but here you can't help but laugh at the guy as the character he plays is also a condescending, dense, arrogant twit...and those are presented as his good points.
Still the film is trying to be a Hitchcockian thriller, and for that first half it damn near succeeds at being as good as old Hitch. Due to all around behind-the-scenes quality like Lionel Newman's Bernard Herrmann-esque score to the lush Technicolor cinematography that features such eye-popping treats like Cherry-Red convertibles and deep blue swimming pools to the clever direction from Gerd Oswald (responsible for some of the most twisted and nightmarish episodes of the early 60s Outer Limits, as well as a later film noir The Screaming Mimi, which features a plot twist borrowed by Dario Argento and a hundred of his imitators for the 1970s cycle of giallo thrillers from Italy).
As much as I enthuse about this film, I was struck by its focus on beautiful young rising stars (to the point of gratuitous long shots of a swimsuit-clad Virginia Leith sunning herself) and not terribly complex story, that in many ways it's a predecessor to later teen-focused thrillers like Disturbia, Cruel Intentions or (god help us) swimfan
Don't let that scare you off, even with the subpar second half, this is still the best and most worth your while.
From 1999 to 2002 this documentary chronicles video store clerk Kier-La Janisse's efforts to hold an international horror film festival in Vancouver.
This had a one-night only showing at the Park Theater to promote its DVD release. As the film's director Sarah Fester explained, the film focuses on the first three years of the Cinemuerte film festival from 1999 to 2002, it took years for this to be completed due to the lengthy amount of time it took to get the rights to include clips from the various films that have played as part of the festival. Sarah Fester herself was involved with the Festival from the start and Janisse is clearly a close friend, this still does its best to not be simply as puff piece but actually focuses on the actual nitty-gritty details of how producing a film festival actually works. Though it focuses on a festival dedicated to the horror genre, it still does its best to be accessible to someone who might not be interested in horror, though the film clips chosen often feature some of the most disturbing scenes from some of the most extreme movies out there to better give the audience an idea where Janisse's vision is coming from (there's a sequence dedicated to the midnight showing of Cannibal Holocaust which shows two of the most notorious scenes of a real-live turtle being killed and the scene where the film's loathsome protagonists film one of their own who had been killed by the Cannibals: a dead woman impaled nude. We see those scenes juxtaposed with actual footage of a Cinemuerte patron fainting in the lobby, while others leave talking about how boring it is because too much happens between the gore scenes. It prompts a wonderful response from Janisse about how true horror is more than gore and those people who come for the gore aren't true fans of the genre. One person in our audience applauded, and I suspect a few more were nodding their heads in agreement like I was).
As the years progress for the festival, though still without coverage from Vancouver media and without any government funding it begins to generate a reputation that includes visits from French director Jean Rollin, New York director Buddy Giovinazzo (whose ultra-nihilistic Combat Shock makes Taxi Driver seem a reaffirming portrait of the innate goodness of humanity in comparison), and in the unique role of personally doing his best to generate interest in the festival and actually help the festival get something resembling respectabilty, Eurotrash actor Udo Kier. Who shows himself a witty and erudite gentleman who is able to get onto the Vancouver media channels in a way nobody else can and plug the festival, allowing for the documentary's upbeat ending where the Cinemuerte festival becomes a big enough hit that it can move to San Francisco (!).
Janisse is of course now involved with the programming of Winnipeg's own Cinematheque, and there's already signs of her influence coming in (an independent horror film Pop Skull is playing there 10 days from now, and there's a much greater emphasis on having the audience interact with the movies such as upcoming Power Ballad Singalongs and Saturday Morning Cartoons coming soon. (My favourite being the fact right after the showign of beloved children's Canadiana The Dog Who Stopped The War will be a chance for filmgoers to meet an actual St. Bernard named Cleo after the film's heroic canine.)
All of this suggests good times are ahead for Cinematheque. I plan on being there for at least some of them.
English Tourists Tom and Evelyn set sail for a small island off the coast of Spain to celebrate Evelyn being pregnant with their third child. They find the island village deserted except for children who smile and stare at them with out ever saying a word...
This was the second feature last night. Sarah Fester held a vote if we wanted to watch this or the Michel Hanneke written Moor's Head, and this one out. I'm glad it did as this eerie little gem deserves wider exposure even if the ending is obvious. More than a few critics have compared this to Hitchcock's The Birds, only with smiling children replacing Hitchock's feathered friends. Apparently for the longest time the opening montage that the credits play over was cut out by U.S. distributors, probably because actual footage of concentration camps, children starving in Africa, and Napalm-scorched children in Southeast Asia is a hell of a downer for the casual audience that would have caught this at U.S. Drive-Ins in the 1970s. However by removing this makes the children's revolt seem more inexplicable while with the montage it allows the viewer to infer more backstory and the theme is more deliberately emphasized. After centuries of children being killed through war, famine, and general inhumanity and cruelty, all the malignant psychic energy has begun to bubble up and infect the children who are now striking back...
This film works due to the unusual but effective staging of the scenes not in the dark but in a sun-kissed deserted village under a clear blue sky, and a willingness to not skirt away from implications of such a premise, as our heroine's pregnancy becomes her undoing late in the film. As well as the more standard fun one can have with malevolent children (such as a game of pinata played out with a corpse and a scythe...). This is actually one of the stronger horror films of the 1970s, even with it's slightly slow on the uptake main characters and an ending perhaps too heavily indebted to Night of the Living Dead.
Absolutely lovely music score too, which opens up with a child's humming tune that sounds suspiciously similar to the one that is used in every damned trailer or commercial for Pan's Labyrinth.