Director: Erle C. Kenton
Screenplay: Waldemar Young & Philip Wylie
Based on a novel by: H.G. Wells
Starring: Charles Laughton, Bela Lugosi, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Kathleen Burke
Country: USA
Running Time: 71 min
Year: 1932
BBFC Certificate: PG

H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau is a book that has had a troubled history when it comes to screen adaptations. Versions made in the 70′s and 90′s both had difficult productions – Richard Stanley’s rising career was pretty much killed due to the latter. The first film to tackle the subject matter though was Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 film Island of Lost Souls. Why the makers chose not to share its title with the extremely popular novel is rather baffling, and although the film’s production was fairly smooth, its subsequent release certainly wasn’t. The film was caught up in a campaign to ban horror films in the mid-thirties and between 1936-8 all horror films were hidden from public view and Island of Lost Souls, deemed especially vile, remained banned until 1958. Troubles aside, Kenton’s version of the classic tale is thought by most to be the strongest adaptation to date. 80 years later, does the work still hold up though?

For those of you unfamiliar with the source material, Island of Lost Souls begins with shipwreck survivor Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) being taken aboard a ship delivering exotic animals to the mysterious island of Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton). An unfortunate incident with the ship’s captain puts Parker on a small boat heading for this island. When he arrives, the doctor sees his new visitor as an ideal specimen for his experiments. Moreau has been developing ways of turning animals into human hybrids and sees a prime male human as a way to test his one female experiment’s instincts for love and lust.

Island of Lost Souls isn’t one of the most renowned horror classics of the era, being overshadowed by the likes of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein movies. It is still an entertaining and effective old fashioned chiller though. Running at a lean 71 minutes, the film rockets through its narrative, not wasting any time along the way. This straight to the point approach is rare these days and its refreshing to see in genre films like this. The themes of ‘toying with nature’ are actually rather prescient too – what once was considered throwaway science fiction is now becoming reality, albeit in a less bombastic sense.

It is still rather creepy too, with an expressionistic/noirish use of shadows (before film noir took off) and fairly effective creature effects. These don’t look particularly realistic, but have a patchwork style that adds to the disturbing nature of Moreau’s experiments. In the finale, their mob attacks are particularly troubling to see too, even though the viewer can share a certain empathy with their plight. The prime reason for the film’s retained horror though is through the performance of Charles Laughton. Most of the cast are rather wooden, but Laughton delivers a creepily effeminate yet quietly powerful portrayal of the cruel genius. Without his anchoring presence the film would certainly not be as effective as it is. Horror favourite of the time Bela Lugosi shows up too, but only in a minor role as the leader of the ‘natives’, which he still makes the most of. Funnily enough, although the two legends are often in the same scenes, Lugosi was only drafted in at the end of the shoot as a name for the posters and the two never physically worked together. Clever editing was used to make it seem like they were sharing the scene.

It’s not a perfect film though. Much of the film has dated. The dialogue and bulk of the performances aren’t particularly noteworthy, although there are a few quotable lines – “what is the law?” and the payoff of “don’t look back” for instance. What struck me most of all though was the lack of sound and music. A score is only used very briefly over the opening credits and very final moments of the film. This quiet lack of music adds to the unsettling nature at times, but also hinders any drama and tension. It’s a technique that Hitchcock used in The Birds, but there his ingenious use of bird noises and sound effects acted as an alternative soundtrack. Here very few sound effects are used at all and much of the film is pretty much silent away from the dialogue, which makes it feel unfinished more than anything. I guess the grand scores were still in their infancy back then, but it’s the first time the issue has bothered me in a film.

Overall it’s hard to knock the film though. It’s a lean, entertaining, yet dark affair that didn’t make a huge impact on me, but is certainly something I’d like to watch again.

Island of Lost Souls is out on the 28th May on Dual Format Blu-Ray & DVD (as well as a swanky steelbook edition) as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series. The picture and sound quality isn’t as strong as on some of their previous releases, with a soft, hazy, ‘haloed’ image at times and a bit of hiss on the soundtrack. Reading the transfer notes in the booklet it seems no negatives were available though, so I imagine this was as good as they could get the film from the surviving prints. It’s still head and shoulders above most releases of films of this era, but Masters of Cinema have their own extraordinary standards.

Being a Masters of Cinema release, we also get a 17-page booklet which contains a fascinating look at the background of the film by horror expert Kim Newman. Included in this are a host of promotional and behind the scenes stills too which are great to see.

Director: Takashi Miike
Screenplay: Masashi Sogo
Based on characters and a story by: Tatsuo Yoshida
Starring: Shô Sakurai, Sadao Abe, Kyôko Fukada
Producers: Yoshinori Chiba, Saki Fukuda, Shûichi Takashino, Kendô Kobayashi, Katsuhisa Namase
Country: Japan
Running Time: 119 min
Year: 2009
BBFC Certificate: 15

Like Crow’s Zero, which I reviewed recently, Yatterman is another example of Takashi Miike’s more commercial work designed for a younger audience that rarely travels over to the West. In my opinion this is one example that probably should have stayed where it was.

Based on the 70′s anime series of the same name, which was brought back in Japan about 4 years ago, Yatterman is a live action cartoon that ignores the trend of series adaptations to present an origin story and instead throws you right into the world well established by the TV series (which I am not familiar with). As wacky as it comes across, the film’s story is actually pretty straight forward. Yatterman is a collective superhero made up of boyfriend and girlfriend Gan Takada (Yoshinori Chiba) and Ai-Chan (Saki Fukuda). They constantly do battle with the thieving Dorombo gang, consisting of the seductive Doronjo (Kyôko Fukada) and her two bumbling mechanic henchmen Tonzuraa (Kendô Kobayashi) and Boyacky (Katsuhisa Namase). Taking orders from the King of Thieves, the Dorombo gang hunt for the broken pieces of a magic skull which is causing things to disappear. Yatterman of course must stop them and using their wealth of gadgets and a giant dog-shaped mecha they will fight every crazy invention the Dorombos throw at them.

Maybe something was lost in translation or maybe it’s because I don’t know the series, but I really didn’t get into this at all. I also struggled to see who this film is aimed at in general. It’s presented like a kids TV show with bright bold colours, goofy humour and (terrible) song and dance sequences, but there is a lot of adult humour in there too, resulting in a 15 certificate here in the UK. There are a lot of sexually themed gags including robot breasts that fire machine guns and emit rockets when rubbed as well as a bizarre sequence of mecha-bestiality!

Regardless of who the humour was aimed at, none of it worked for me. Most of it consists of a lot of mugging for the camera and the dirty jokes mentioned above. There are a few self-referential gags which raise the tone a little, but not nearly enough to lift the film beyond its base level.

I’ve seen a lot of Asian films with humour that doesn’t connect with me so I wasn’t overly bothered by this aspect, but what troubled me most was that nothing else connected. The core narrative is too basic to be of interest, the romantic subplots are rather feeble and the overall structure is incredibly repetitive, consisting of a message telling us where the next skull piece is, both teams tooling up, then their coming together for a CGI mecha-brawl. I imagine this is the structure the TV episodes shared, but in a two-hour film it makes it feel like you’re watching 4 shows back to back rather than a standalone film. It also means there’s a distinct lack of drama. Scenes just roll out one by one and I never cared what the outcome would be.

It’s not all bad I guess. The production design is impressive if a little cheap and tacky at times. It’s a colourful affair which looks great on Blu-Ray, and the detail that goes into some of the (digitally enhanced) sets such as the huge clock hall is impressive. Some of the surreal imagery and overall wackiness is occasionally endearing too, but there’s really not enough going on under the shiny veneer to keep you interested.

Fans of the series may disagree but I found Yatterman to be an over-long, tedious, lifeless affair that was nice to look at, but nothing more.

Yatterman is released on DVD & Blu-Ray in the UK by Eureka Entertainment on 21st May. Picture and sound quality is great on the Blu-Ray, although the sharp picture makes the everything look that bit more fake and tacky.

There are quite a few features on the disc. You get the standard trailer and an OTT promo made for Cannes as well as a bunch of stills to look at. More notable are two featurettes. One is a very basic affair looking at the shoot itself that is raw, but effective, giving viewers a glimpse at the shooting process of such an effects driven film. The second featurette looks at the production design and costumes, which is cheesily presented but still interesting to see the detail that went into the look of the film. Added to these are 3 interviews, one with Miike, another with star Yoshinori Chiba and another with the man behind the original series Tatsuo Yoshida. These are short and basically presented, but nice additions to the set.

A series of character posters for John Hillcoat’s period gangster picture, Lawless (Formerly The Wettest County In The World) features swanky clothing, groomed hair and brandished firearms. The bold red typesetting promises that there will indeed be blood. These are handsome, and look great as a set, but I am mesmerized by that massive part (Moses & the Red Sea) in Guy Pearce’s hair.

Perhaps the chief delight of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is that it is the most quintessential Wes Anderson movie to date. That is not to say it is his best film, or his most insightful film, or even his most imaginative film but it feels as if the quirky auteur (both in style and grace) has come as close to the Platonic ideal of what his cinema is. It makes the film a pretty good entry point for the uninitiated, while simultaneously pandering to the faithful and likely further alienating those who do not like his brand of moviemaking. My overall experience added up to the most fun and pure aesthetic pleasure upon first experiencing any one of his films; and I like them all plenty good. Upon a weeks worth of post viewing reflection, there is some apprehension on the possibility of this being the most shallow, character-wise and story-wise, of all of his films, but time and further viewings will tell that tale.

The year is 1965 and the setting is an idyllic New England island with few residents and no paved roads. Bob Balaban, channelling Bud Cort, lays out the geography of the island and warns of an impending storm. In the meantime, troubled twelve year-olds Sam and Suzy (a parenting manual shown at one point indicates, as deadpan a visual cue as any, “How To Cope with your VERY troubled Child.”) run off into the woods, him fleeing his Khaki Scout troop and her a dysfunctional family. This leaves the lovers on the run in the deep woods, infected with a highly mannered case of l’amour fou leavened with meticulous camping skills, while the local police (Bruce Willis), the girls parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, children services (Tilda Swinton), a gaggle of scouts (including Edward Norton and Harvey Keitel) and maybe even the narrator all are in pursuit in one form or another get things put into order before the hullabaloo starts (either the storm or the big Khaki Scouts fireworks show.) If you are going to have a big finale to your movie, you might as well explicitly label it the hullabaloo!

But the plot of the film, as simple as it is, is less important than the down-time in between. This lets Anderson move his camera across many minutely detailed tableaux, a meticulous diorama approach to reveal character and emotion by 2D-side-scrolling which started to be very explicit with The Royal Tenenbaums (the opening shots in particular), made a perfect kind of sense in stop-motion effort Fantastic Mr. Fox, went to hilarious extremes in some for hire commercial advertisements and here achieves a sublime virtuosity to the point where things swivel 3D-like into the frame and starts scrolling in another side-direction. It also allows for the Andersonian conceit of letting the children play at grown-up while the grown-ups engage in childish behaviour. Young Jared Gilman is convincing as Sam, the multi-talented, but parentless, boy who wants to set aside childish things and begin a life with his true love Suzy. Kara Hayward has the lolita-seriousness down and can seriously rock heavy-blue eyeshadow even if her performance and character feel like left-over traits from Margot Tenenbaum. Girls, outside of Angelica Huston performances have not been his strong suit as his wont is to slightly feminize (ok accessorize) the men. This is never more obvious than the ‘high-amount-of-flair’ in Edward Norton’s super-scout. It is wonderful to see Norton dive headlong into character as a man who gets his living as a math teacher, but sees his profession as Khaki-Scout first and foremost. That he unwittingly competes as a father figure for Sam with Bruce Willis’ sad-sack cop (his cop car is a converted hearse!) and has his own Odyssey-like journey from disgraced leader to some kind of hero is noble in its silliness. Even more of an accomplishment is the complete emasculation of one Harvey Keitel who shows up briefly as the anti-Mr. Wolf revealing all but a thin sheeps-clothing of manliness. All these Coen Brother’s regulars popping up hither and yon starts to get rather weird, so it is comforting to see Jason Schwartzman show up to fete the young lovers as a Rock-Star Scout Chaplain. Hullabaloo indeed.

Any film peppered so heavily with Benjamin Britton concert-pieces and Hank Williams songs should feel dis-jointed and at odds in tone. Yet, as always, the musical side of the film comes together as brilliantly as all the other design elements. Stay for the closing credits, not only because of the lovely scrolling typeset, but because Alexandre Desplat’s canonical score is explained in detail to show how a layered and beautiful piece of music is assembled from all the individual pieces. As apt a description of Anderson’s idiom as anything else, and it allows you to linger in the Moonrise Kingdom for a few more delightful minutes.

New Release Pick of the Week

Sherlock: Season 2
I’ve only just started watching Sherlock on Netflix Instant, but I’m already totally a fan – great modern approach to the material. Hopefully the DVD release of Season 2 means it’ll hit Instant soon as well.
2012 UK. Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Rupert Graves.

Other New Releases

American Warships (2012 USA, dir Thunder Levin, stars Mario Van Peebles)
Beyond (2011 USA, dir Josef Rusnak, stars Jon Voight)
Black Cobra (2012 USA, dir Scott Donovan, stars Damion Poitier)
Carol Channing: Larger Than Life (2012 USA, dir Dori Berinstein)
Mutant Girls Squad (2010 Japan, dir Noboru Iguchi, et al, stars Asami)
Newlyweds (2011 USA, dir Edward Burns, stars Edward Burns)
Perfect Sense (2011 UK, dir David Mackenzie, stars Ewan McGregor)
Planzet (2010 Japan, dir Jun Awazu, stars Kaori Ishihara)
The River: Season 1 (2012 USA, creator Oren Peli, stars Bruce Greenwood)
Rizzoli & Isles: Season 2 (2012 USA, stars Angie Harmon, Sasha Alexander)
Teen Wolf: Season 1 (2011 USA, stars Tyler Posey)
United (2011 UK, dir James Strong, stars Dean Andrews)

Catalog Pick of the Week

Certified Copy Criterion
Abbas Kiarostami’s cerebral inquiry into the nature and value of copies (and originals) played out through marriage which may or may not be real was one of my favorite films last year – and most other R3ers have agreed with me when they had a chance to see the film. It’s been on Instant Watch for a while, but I’d still love to own the full Criterion release.
2010 France. Director: Abbas Kiarostami. Starring: Juliette Binoche, William Shimmel.

Other Catalog Releases

WARNER ARCHIVE
The Age of Consent (1932 USA, dir Gregory LaCava, stars Dorothy Wilson)
Is My Face Red? (1932 USA, dir William A. Seiter, stars Ricardo Cortez)
Lucky Devils (1933 USA, dir Ralph Ince, stars William Boyd)
The Phantom of Crestwood (1932 USA, dir J. Walter Ruben, stars Ricardo Cortez)
Sealab 2020: The Complete Series (1972 USA, stars John Stephenson, Ross Martin)
The Sport Parade (1932 USA, dir Dudley Murphy, stars Joel McCrea)
State’s Attorney (1932 USA, dir George Archainbaud, stars John Barrymore)

A Bullet for the General (1966 Italy, dir Damiano Damiani, stars Gian maria Volonté)
Dean Martin Variety Show Uncut (1965 USA, stars Dean Martin)
Ilsa, The Wicked Warden (1977 USA, dir Jesus Franco, stars Dyanne Thorne)
Plot of Fear (1976 Italy, dir Paolo Cavara, stars Corinne Cléry)

Instant Watch Picks of the Week

Drive
Little wonder I’d choose this to feature this week; it ended up as Row Three’s consensus pick for favorite film of 2011, and I for one haven’t changed my mind on it at all. It’s an fantastically stylish movie, and having it on Instant Watch is awesomeness defined.
2011 USA. Director: Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks.

Other Instant Watch Releases

The American President (1995 USA, dir Rob Reiner, stars Michael Douglas)
Coach (1989-1996 USA, stars Craig T. Nelson, Jerry Van Dyke)
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (2010 France, dir Joann Sfar, stars Eric Elmosnino)
He Was a Quiet Man (2007 USA, dir Frank A. Cappello, stars Christian Slater)
The Karate Kid Part II (1986 USA, dir John G. Avildsen, stars Ralph Macchio)
Land of the Dead (2005 USA, dir George A. Romero, stars Simon Baker)
London Boulevard (2010 UK, dir William Monahan, stars Colin Farrell)
London River (2009 UK, dir Rachid Bouchareb, stars Brenda Blethyn)

Expiring Picks of the Week

Edward Scissorhands
With Dark Shadows out in theatres, what better time to revisit the original Burton/Depp collaboration (still one of my favorite Burton films of all time) before it expires.
1990 USA. Director: Tim Burton. Starring: Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder.

Other Instant Watch Expirations

In the City of Sylvia (2007 Spain, dir José Luis Guerín, stars Pilar López de Ayala) [5/24]
Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008 USA, dir Arne Glimcher) [5/24]
Singh is Kinng (2008 India, dir Anees Bazmee, stars Akshay Kumar) [5/25]
Hideous Kinky [5/26]
I Capture the Castle (2003 UK, dir Tim Fywell, stars Ramola Garai) [5/26]
Pretty Persuasion (2005 USA, dir Marcos Siega, stars Evan Rachel Wood) [5/26]
The Fury (1978 USA, dir Brian DePalma, stars Kirk Douglas) [5/30]
Heaven Can Wait (1943 USA, dir Ernst Lubitsch, stars Don Ameche) [5/30]
Iron Monkey (1993 Hong Kong, dir Woo-ping Yuen, stars Donnie Yen)
Hello, Dolly! (1969 USA, dir Gene Kelly, stars Barbra Streisand) [5/31]
Pinky (1949 USA, dir Elia Kazan, stars Jeanne Crain) [5/31]
An American Haunting (2006 USA, dir Courtney Solomon, stars Donald Sutherland) [6/1]
The Art of War (2000 USA, dir Christian Duguay, stars Wesley Snipes) [6/1]
Babe: Pig in the City (1998 USA, dir George Miller, stars James Cromwell) [6/1]
Baby Boom (1987 USA, dir Charles Shyer, stars Diane Keaton) [6/1]
Backdraft (1991 USA, dir Ron Howard, stars Kurt Russell) [6/1]
Bad News Bears (2005 USA, dir Richard Linklater, stars Billy Bob Thornton) [6/1]
Bowling for Columbine (2002 USA, dir Michael Moore) [6/1]
Deep Blue Sea (1999 USA, dir Renny Harlin, stars Samuel L. Jackon) [6/1]
Deeply (2000 USA, dir Sheri Elwood, stars Kirsten Dunst) [6/1]
Dolores Claiborne (1994 USA, dir Taylor Hackford, stars Kathy Bates) [6/1]
Frankie and Johnny (1991 USA, dir Garry Marshall, stars Al Pacino) [6/1]
The Great Train Robbery (1978 USA, dir Michael Crichton, stars Sean Connery) [6/1]
Halloween: Resurrection (2002 UA, dir Rick Rosenthal, stars Jamie Lee Curtis) [6/1]
Khartoum (1966 USA, dir Basil Dearden, stars Charlton Heston) [6/1]
Last Night (1998 Canada, dir Don McKellar, stars Sandra Oh) [6/1]
A Life Less Ordinary (1997 UK, dir Danny Boyle, star Ewan McGregor) [6/1]
Lorenzo’s Oil (1992 USA, dir George Miller, stars Nick Nolte) [6/1]
Loser (2000 USA, dir Amy Heckerling, stars Jason Biggs) [6/1]
The Missouri Breaks (1976 USA, dir Arthur Penn, stars Marlon Brando) [6/1]
Molly (1999 USA, dir John Duigan, stars Elisabeth Shue) [6/1]
Mr. Baseball (1992 USA, dir Fred Schepisi, stars Tom Selleck) [6/1]
Nine Lives (2005 USA, dir Rodrigo Garcia, stars Dakota Fanning) [6/1]
Nine to Five (1980 USA, dir Colin Higgins, stars Jane Fonda) [6/1]
Playing for Keeps (1986 USA, dir Bob Weinstein, stars Marisa Tomei) [6/1]
Revenge of the Nerds (1984 USA, dir Jeff Canew, stars Robert Carradine) [6/1]
Rocky II (1979 USA, dir Sylvester Stallone, stars Sylvester Stallone) [6/1]
Rocky III (1982 USA, dir Sylvester Stallone, stars Sylvester Stallone) [6/1]
Rocky IV (1985 USA, dir Sylvester Stallone, stars Sylvester Stallone) [6/1]
Rocky V (1990 USA, dir Sylvester Stallone, stars Sylvester Stallone) [6/1]
Starting Out in the Evening (2007 USA, dir Andrew Wagner, stars Frank Langella) [6/1]
The Ten (2006 USA, dir David Wain, stars Paul Rudd) [6/1]
The Messenger (2009 USA, dir Oren Moverman, stars Ben Foster) [6/2]

See all expiring titles.

As always, please join the conversation by leaving your own thoughts in the comment section below and again, thanks for listening!

 
 
Full show notes are under the seats…

  show

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Cinecast (Andrew and Halfyard show)
After the Credits (Marina and Co.)
Mamo! (Matt and Matt)
ALL the RowThree Podcasts on one feed
All posts and discussions from RowThree

  show

IN-HOUSE BUSINESS:
– Kurt on The Documentary Blog Podcast
– Happy Birthday to Adam Lopez!

SNEAK REVIEWS:
– Moonrise Kingdom

THE WATCH LIST:

Andrew
– The Salton Sea
– Good Night and Good Luck
– Primer

Kurt
– Shadow of a Doubt
– Jeux d’enfants (Love Me if You Dare)
“Fifth Business” (book)
“The City and The City” (book)

Matt
– Dark Shadows
– The Dictator

GRADING HOMEWORK: (LetterBoxd list)
Sean Kelly (LetterBoxd): A Prairie Home Companion
Miran Terzic: Possesion
Courtney Small (LetterBoxd) Fritz the Cat and Baraka
Robert Reineke: Time Bandits
Rick Vance: Wild Zero and “The Shadow Line”
Ian Loring: Kill List and Silence of the Lambs
Nat Almirall (LetterBoxd:) Taboo and Soul Sistas
Darryl Bowen: Phase IV, Joe’s Apartment, Frankenhooker, Doggy Poo
Jane Dixon: The Forbidden Zone (1982) (not to be confused with Space Hunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone in 3D)
Jay Cheel: Garbage Pail Kids
Lennart Andersson: Southland Tales
Dick Japowski: Leonard part 6
Hans Bjerva: Run Lola Run
Ryan McNeil: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Steven Beckley: Fantastic Planet
Jericho Slim: Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, Rocky IV
Mark V: The Hour-glass Sanatorium
Pete Mahoney: Vomit Gore Trilogy

full list on LetterBoxd
full GPA spreadsheet for this semester

DVDs/NETFLIX INSTANT NOW AVAILABLE:
Jandy’s DVD Triage

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT:
send us your best example of a film to inspire ideas for Andrew to write a wedding speech (in Church, not reception.)

OTHER STUFF MENTIONED:
Jay Cheel’s article on Genre Docs

NEXT WEEK:
Bernie
Headhunters
Men in Black

PRIVATE COMMENTS or QUESTIONS?
Leave your thoughts in the comment section below, or email us:
feedback@rowthree.com (general)
andrew.james@rowthree.com
kurt@rowthree.com

FOLLOW US:
Andrew: Twitter, G+, Letterboxd
Kurt: Twitter, G+, Letterboxd
Matt: Twitter, LetterBoxd
RowThree: Twitter, G+, Letterboxd

Jay Cheel of the Documentary Blog and some of his Film Junk cohorts (Sean and Frank) join our own Kurt Halfyard for a mondo wrap-up podcast of the recent Hot Docs film festival. As Jay states, the show is “designed specifically for those of you who like listening to four guys talk about documentaries for nearly three hours”, so fans of the Cinecast might enjoy it as a short warm-up to the next show…

They lead off the chat with a long discussion of my personal favourite from the fest – the fantastic Tchoupitoulas – and proceed to tackle an additional 26 films. Listen to it here.

With the 65th Cannes Film Festival enjoying one of its most (potentially) impressive line-ups in years I was lucky enough to attend the festival this year. Due to work and financial constraints I could only make the first few days of the festival, but I still managed to squeeze in 10 films (and the last half of Project A on the beach). So to give you my thoughts on what I watched, plus to rub it in for those who weren’t there, here are capsule reviews for everything I caught.

A couple of my friends and colleagues are still there and plan to record some podcasts during the festival, so keep an eye out at Blueprint: Review for those. I recorded a couple with them last week so check those out over there too.

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate

Director: Tsui Hark
Screenplay: Tsui Hark
Starring: Jet Li, Xun Zhou, Kun Chen
Country: Hong Kong
Running Time: 121 min

Tsui Hark’s latest martial arts extravaganza is entertaining and handsomely mounted but rather uninspired and clumsily plotted. There are a few too many characters too and it gets a little confusing at times. It’s not as enjoyably crazy as Hark’s previous offerings either which was disappointing but it is action packed and still fun to watch. The 3D is OTT which does it favours at times, adding depth to the lavish and extravagant sets, but distracts at others with a barrage of items being thrown at the camera.

Moonrise Kingdom

Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola
Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Edward Norton
Country: USA
Running Time: 94 min

Wes Anderson’s new film is charming and enjoyable but ultimately very slight. The central romance is a little too creepy to anchor the emotional core with the kids acting like adults all the time, but Anderson’s style takes centre stage and it’s clearly lovingly crafted, making for a very pleasant and easy watch. Maybe that’s faint praise but it’s hard to come up with a better way to describe the experience. I certainly enjoyed it at least.

Anton Corbjin Inside Out

Director: Klaartje Quirijns
Screenplay: Klaartje Quirijns, Thomas den Drijverv
Starring: Anton Corbijn, Bono, Martin Gore, James Hetfield
Country: Netherlands/Germany/UK/Italy/Sweden
Running Time: 90 min

Anton Corbjin Inside Out is a suitably well shot and intimate portrait of the photographer/filmmaker that I found very interesting. It dragged a bit though towards the end and had a number of ‘wanky’ moments that didn’t add much. Overall it’s a decent documentary though which was at its most interesting when watching him work and showing the work itself. I’m sure it will get released sometime soon possibly as a DVD extra which may be doing it a dishonour, although I doubt it has the appeal to hit cinemas.

Student

Director: Darezhan Omirbayev
Country: Kazakhstan
Running Time: 90 min

Taking part in the Un Certain Regard competition, Student is a lo-fi Kazakstani take on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. With a sparse, stripped down style it desperately wants to be Pickpocket but despite a couple of well staged moments it felt too flat and hollow for me. The blank-faced lifeless performances didn’t help.

Rust and Bone

Director: Jacques Audiard
Screenplay: Jacques Audiard & Thomas Bidegain
Based on a story by: Craig Davidson
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Armand Verdure
Country: France
Running Time: 120 min

Audillard’s much anticipated follow up to the popular A Prophet is very well made with strong performances (especially a fearless Marion Coutiard) and strong direction with a slick art-house style. The story has a few too many contrivances though and one or two sequences really jarred so it began to outstay its welcome after a strong first half. Plus it never quite delivers the emotional impact it seems to strive for. A solid but forgettable affair.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Director: Benh Zeitlin
Screenplay: Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin
Starring: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry and Levy Easterly
Country: USA
Running Time: 92 min

This debut feature about a young girl growing up in ‘the bathtub’, a swampland area in the Southern Delta, is generally excellent with a wonderfully joyous tone despite the potentially bleak subject matter. It occasionally gets slightly cheesy and many of the supporting adults are annoyingly characatured but overall it’s a fantastically original and beautiful work. The lead child performance from Quvenzhané Wallis is exceptional, feeling very natural while retaining enough character to carry the whole film on her back, which is probably why many of the other performances seem poor. Watching the world through a child’s eyes is brilliantly achieved through some nicely integrated fantasy elements, a strong voice over and great sound design and music.

Dead Mine

Director: Steven Sheil
Screenplay: Steven Sheil, Ziad Semaan
Starring: Joe Taslim, Sam Hazeldine and Miki Mizuno
Country: Indonesia
Running Time: 100 min

I made a random trip to this low budget Indonesian action-horror whilst there was nothing much else on. Although expectations weren’t high, this was still fairly disappointing. It’s too slow for an action film and wasn’t helped by painfully cliched dialogue and wooden performances. It did have some atmospheric sequences, looked nice for a cheapie and had decent gore effects, but ultimately it was a let down. The ending was especially disappointing and rather abrupt.

Lawless

Director: John Hillcoat
Screenplay: Nick Cave
Based on a novel by: Matt Bondurant
Starring: Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman
Country: USA
Running Time: 115 min

John Hillcoat’s hard-boiled out-of-town gangster thriller was one of my most anticipated films of the festival and proved to be highly enjoyable but far too derivative to be anything other than that. It looks great, moves at a solid pace and the violence is suitably brutal. The cast are strong too with Shia Le Bouf pulling off the leading role effectively and Tom Hardy providing a quietly intense presence throughout. Guy Pierce is painfully OTT though. Hillcoat should have used more of Gary Oldman instead who is woefully underused. Overall, although it was a lot of fun (if that’s the right word to describe such a violent film) it just lacked anything special to make it truly noteworthy.

Mystery

Director: Ye Lou
Starring: Lei Hao, Hao Qin and Qi Xi
Country: China/France
Running Time: 98 min

This Un Certain Regard entry starts off quite well with a dark, intense opening sequence and intriguing and well handled relationship-drama elements. As these develop they become less interesting though. The thriller elements feel clumsily inserted and occasionally rely on ridiculous contrivances and the relationship aspects get blandly melodramatic. A police officer and car crash driver subplot feel unnecessarily tacked on too. So it ended up being pretty poor.

Lawrence of Arabia

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt & Michael Wilson
Based on the writings of: T.E. Lawrence
Starring: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn
Country: UK
Running Time: 222 min

I treated myself to this as my last film of the festival. I haven’t seen it for a long time and only ever on VHS (it was widescreen at least). Without having much to compare it to I can still tell this brand new 4K remastered edition has undergone an incredible restoration job. It seems a little over saturated at times but this mirrors the style of the era and the print is so clean and the desert vistas look so beautiful that it’s ridiculous to criticise it. The film itself is still incredible too. Not only does it look gorgeous with David Lean pulling out all the stops to deliver a breathtaking spectacle, but it’s a dark and fascinating character study, crafting one of cinema’s greatest enigmas. It’s also interesting looking at middle Eastern politics of WWI in light of more recent situations. A true classic in every sense and it remains one of my all time favourite films. The close to four hour running time just flies by.

Directed By: Andy Sidaris
Starring: Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, John Aprea

Tag line: “Run for cover. This is no ordinary day in the sun…”
Trivia:  All principal actresses in this film were former Playboy Playmates

For more Cinematic oddities and reviews, head over to dvdinfatuation.com

Savage Beach is an action/adventure about drug smugglers, spies, and stolen shipments of gold. It also has former Playboy Playmates in skimpy outfits firing automatic weapons.

You tell me…which is the stronger draw?

Donna (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton), two drug enforcement agents based in Hawaii, have been chosen by their superior to transport vital medical supplies to a remote island hospital. The mission is a success, but on their return flight, the girls encounter a severe storm, and are forced to make an emergency landing on a seemingly deserted island. What they don’t know is this island is the resting place of a lost shipment of gold, which the Japanese army swiped from the Philippines during World War II. Many parties (including the United States Navy) are interested in recovering this gold, and descend upon the island to join in a frantic search for its whereabouts. Caught in the middle of a dangerous situation, Donna and Taryn do their best to keep out of sight, all the while dodging a Japanese soldier who’s been stranded on the island since the 1940′s, and believes the war is still going on.

Savage Beach is exploitation in its purest form. As the story opens, Donna and Taryn, with the assistance of fellow agents (and fellow babes) Patty (Patty Duffek) and Rocky (Lisa London), are conducting a drug raid on a heavily-guarded warehouse. There’s action aplenty in this opening sequence, which features automatic weapons fire, hand-to-hand combat, and even an exploding van. So what’s the first bit of slow-motion we’re treated to? It’s of a topless Patty jumping into a hot tub with her three cohorts (who are also topless) to celebrate their successful raid. Along with the skin shots, Savage Beach also offers lots of dialogue laced with sexual innuendo. In one hilarious exchange, Donna and her “boss”, the muscular Shane Abilene (Michael J. Shane), are reviewing some new weaponry the agency just sent over. “Are you comfortable with a big gun?” Shane asks Donna, to which she replies, “They have their advantages”. “This baby’s bigger than most any other around”, Shane continues, practically licking his lips as he says it. “I’m not as impressed with size as I am with performance” she shoots back, staring into his eyes. And that’s not even the half of it; the exchange goes on for another couple minutes, and gets steamier with each new syllable. By the time they finally packed the damn gun away, I was ready to light up a cigarette!

So, what’s my final assessment of director Andy Sidaris’ Savage Beach? I’ll sum it up for you in the following two points:

1. Despite being easy on the eyes, Playboy Playmates don’t make the most convincing Drug Enforcement Agents. On top of that, the action scenes are poorly executed, and the whole “stolen gold” sub-plot is so ludicrously complex that it’s impossible to follow.

2. As Donna and Taryn are navigating their small plane through that heavy storm, they pause for a moment (in mid-flight, no less) to peel off their wet T-shirts and towel down.

Now, I ask you, what’s not to love about this film?

I know that I am not the only one who has been eagerly waiting for the trailer to Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the great American classic novel The Great Gatsby. I’ve been publicly pleading for a new adaptation that would relieve me of the bitter taste left by Robert Redford’s bland 1974 version since 2007 (amusingly, at the time I recommended Leonardo DiCaprio, who is playing Jay Gatsby, for the part of Nick Carraway and someone like Robert Downey Jr. for the role of Gatsby).

I knew coming in that Baz would put his signature flair on the film – and I was okay with that. I’ve always imagined something stylish, something completely distinct from the novel unlike the ’74 film, yet still effectively touching on the same themes that made the 16 year old me fall in love with the novel a decade ago.

Now, for the trailer: Tobey Maguire doesn’t do much for me. The voice of Nick Carraway drove the novel, so the voiceover is no surprise, but there has always been something so bland about Tobey – although then again, maybe that is what they need for a character such as Carraway. I’m also not necessarily digging the Kanye/Jay-Z thing the trailer has going on – although I completely expected something along these lines considering this is a Baz Luhrmann film. The Jack White U2 cover, on the other hand, was an interesting touch, even if I had hoped for something a little more jazzy in there somewhere, anywhere, considering this is adapting the quintessential Jazz Age novel. Where the film will shine and what I think will carry the film will be the interaction between DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan (who plays Daisy Buchanan, a former love), as the tension we see in just the few moments of their screen time is enough to turn one’s stomach.

What are your thoughts on the trailer for Baz’s adaptation? Too much style? Too modern? Too Tobey? Or do you think the film is going to rock your world? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

The Avengers keep on avenging, obliterating expectations and creating a perfect storm of box office success. Meanwhile, Dark Shadows, What To Expect, and Battleship have all come and gone, filling May with bombs and clearing the way for bigger fights in June and July. Whither Spider-Man? Whither the Dark Knight? Plus, Dan Harmon’s TV clustercuss, all on tonight’s brand new Mamo!

To download this episode, use this URL: http://rowthree.com/audio/mamo/mamo254.mp3

Has it been five years since There Will Be Blood? Yes. Thus, with much excitement, the first footage of P.T. Anderson’s latest film, a loose adaptation of the founding of The Church of Scientology called The Master, was screened at the Cannes film festival yesterday, while the rest of us got this brief but very tantalizing teaser. I should say that it is a welcome return from one Joaquin Phoenix who seemed to take a bit of a break from conventional acting during/after the pseudo-doc, I’m Still Here. He is in very fine form indeed.

No sign of Phillip Seymour Hoffman who is (I believe) playing the L. Ron Hubbard style character. The The Master was shot on 65mm film and is scheduled to hit cinemas (IMAX? Please!) on either October 12 or some time in December of this year – I cannot seem to find a straight answer on this.

Monday, May 21

8:00pm – TCM – Norma Rae
The first of a set of Sally Field films that TCM is airing tonight is the film that brought Field her first Oscar, a drama about a labor dispute led by a young textile worker who’s also plenty busy being a single mom. TCM follows the film with her other Oscar-winning role in Places in the Heart.
1979 USA. Director: Martin Ritt. Starring: Sally Field, Beau Bridges, Ron Leibman.
Newly Featured!

2:30am (22nd) – IFC – The Others
Creepy atmospheric horror is one of my favorite things, and The Others does that extremely well, spinning its tale of a WWII mother and children left in a lonely mansion on a British island. Add in some unique elements like the fact that the children’s rare light allergy requires the house to be always blanketed in gloom and the strange hallucinations (or are they?) that the family starts experiencing, and it only gets better. Nicole Kidman is great here, doing her best Grace Kelly imitation (at least until she plays Kelly in an upcoming film).
2001 USA. Director: Alejandro Amenabar. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan.

Tuesday, May 22

8:00pm – IFC – Fight Club
This film is so good on so many different levels, it’s difficult to even know where to start. Masculinity, consumerism, terrorism, black comedy, mindbending narrative…yeah, those are not all parallel, making it a poorly-structured list. I don’t really care, you’ve all probably seen this movie before, but here’s a chance to see it again.
1999 USA. Director: David Fincher. Starring: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter.
Must See
(repeats at 11:00pm, and at 1:15am on the 27th)

8:00pm – Sundance – Blue Velvet
I’ll be honest, this is not one of my favorite David Lynch films. There are a lot of things I like about it. The unsettling take on suburbia, the gorgeously disturbing photography, the kids playing detective, the severed ear, you know, the normal Lynch stuff. But then it just gets to be too cruel for me. Still, it’s a Lynch classic, and you oughta see it. And I oughta see it again, see if my opinion has changed.
1986 USA. Director: David Lynch. Starring: Kyle McLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper.
(repeats at 2:15am on the 23rd)

10:15pm – TCM – Wings of Desire
In Wim Wenders’ heavenly fantasy, angels are the observers of humanity, watching everything goes on but not allowed to interact with us at all. When one of them gets a little too interested in one specific human’s life, he decides to give up angelhood to join her. This is simply one of the most beautiful and most moving films ever made, bringing in a subtle commentary on post-war Berlin, but mostly a celebration of the pleasures and pains of our transitory existence.
1987 Germany. Director: Wim Wenders. Starring: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander.
Must See
Newly Featured!

12:45am (23rd) – TCM – Rififi
Widely regarded as one of the greatest heist films ever, with meticulous planning and execution detailed in front of our eyes. A film’s gotta be pretty engaging to have a huge stretch of silence devoted to the execution of the heist, and this one definitely is.
1955 France. Director: Jules Dassin. Starring: Jean Servais, Carl Mohner, Robert Manuel.
Must See

3:00am (23rd) – TCM – Gilda
Gilda was the last person Johnny ever expected to meet again, much less as the wife of his boss, a sleazy casino operator in South America. Glenn Ford plays a quintessential defeated noir narrator in Johnny, while Rita Hayworth imbues Gilda with all her available mystique to make Gilda one of the more memorable films of the 1940s.
1946 USA. Director: Charles Vidor. Starring: Glenn Ford, Rita Hayworth, George Macready

Wednesday, May 23

6:00am – TCM – The Kennel Murder Case
William Powell is well-known for playing detective Nick Charles in the Thin Man series of movies, but he also played private eye Philo Vance in a less well-remembered series of films based on detective novels by S.S. Van Dine. This is probably the best of the lot, a witty mystery that’s not really too far off from the Thin Man vibe.
1932 USA. Director: Michael Curtiz. Starring: William Powell, Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette, Ralph Morgan.

10:15am – IFC – Cache
Very deliberate but intensely thought-provoking film from director Michael Haneke, delving into issues from privacy and surveillance to war guilt and revenge. It’s a difficult film, and one that stretches the limits of the suspense thriller, but if you’re willing to go along with it, it’s well worthwhile.
2005 France. Director: Michael Haneke. Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou.

8:00pm – IFC – Valhalla Rising
Nicholas Winding Refn’s nearly wordless take on the Viking action film, privileging visual storytelling and a somewhat surreal and philosophical feel.
2009 Denmark. Director: Nicholas Winding Refn. Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Alexander Morton.
(repeats at 2:45am on the 24th)

8:00pm – Sundance – Tokyo!
I haven’t seen this yet, but Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-ho and Leos Carax doing an omnibus film set in one of the liveliest and most varied cities in the world? Sign me up.
2008 France/Japan/South Korea/Germany. Directors: Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-ho, Leos Carax. Starring: Ayako Fujitani, Sohee Park, Julie Dreyfus.
(repeats at 9:50pm)

12:30am (24th) – IFC – Hard Candy
Ellen Page burst onto the scene as a teenage girl getting involved with an older guy she met on the internet – initially looks like a cautionary tale about internet chat relationships, but goes into even more twisted realms than that, with Ellen owning the screen every second.
2005 USA. Director: David Slade. Starring: Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, Sandra Oh.

Thursday, May 24

12:00N – TCM – Lady in the Lake
A not entirely successful experiment, with Robert Montgomery directing himself as Raymond Chandler detective Phillip Marlowe, with the gimmick that the whole film is from Marlowe’s physical point of view – we only see Montgomery when he looks in the mirror, or his hands when he reaches for things. That element has overshadowed the plot of the film itself, which is a typical hard-boiled detective affair.
1947 USA. Director: Robert Montgomery. Starring: Robert Montgomery, Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan, Tom Tully, Leon Ames, Jayne Meadows.

2:00pm – TCM – The Lady from Shanghai
Most of Welles’ films, no matter the genre, feel a little noirish in mood, but The Lady from Shanghai is the real thing, complete with fatalistic hero who gets dragged into a murder plot by a femme fatale (Rita Hayworth). And noir set-pieces don’t get much better than the chase sequence set in a bewildering hall of mirrors.
1948 USA. Director: Orson Welles. Starring: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth.

3:45pm – TCM – The Lady Eve
Barbara Stanwyck and her father Charles Coburn are cardplayers, cheating cruise ship denizens of their wealth. Millionaire (and snake afficianado) Henry Fonda is a good mark, especially since he’s a bit dense and spacey. Stanwyck’s plot is hugely elaborate, only a little muddled by her falling in love with Fonda as well, and she’s a delight from start to finish. As she usually is.
1941 USA. Director: Preston Sturges. Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, William Demarest, Eugene Pallette.
Must See

8:00pm – IFC – Training Day
A rookie cop heads out with a seasoned detective to learn the ropes, but the experienced cop isn’t exactly on the straight and narrow. Denzel Washington won an Oscar for his portrayal of the volatile detective.
2001 USA. Director: Antoine Fuqua. Starring: Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn.
(repeats at 10:30pm)

1:00am (25th) – IFC – The Thin Red Line
Breaking Terrence Malick’s twenty-year filmmaking silence since 1978′s Days of Heaven, this film applies his contemplative and poetic view of the world to a WWII story. It remains a favorite among Malick fans, and an interesting counterpoint to Spielberg’s action-oriented Saving Private Ryan, released the same year.
1998 USA. Director: Terrence Malick. Starring: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin.
(repeats at 6:00am and 4:30pm on the 26th)

Friday, May 25

Catch-up Day!

Saturday, May 26

5:30pm – TCM – Red River
Howard Hawks’ brilliant transposition of Mutiny on the Bounty into the Old West has John Wayne as a tyrannical cattle drive leader and Montgomery Clift (in one of his earliest roles) as his adopted son who soon defies him.
1948 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru.
Must See

8:00pm – TCM – Dinner at Eight
Dinner at Eight is one of the best examples of a 1930s MGM ensemble comedy. You got two Barrymores (Lionel and John), Jean Harlow (one of her best couple of roles), Wallace Beery (fresh off an Oscar win), Marie Dressler (largely forgotten now, but also just a recent Oscar winner at the time), and others converging for a dinner party. Sparkling dialogue is the real star here.
1933 USA. Director: George Cukor. Starring: Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Lionel Barrymore, Lee Tracy, Billie Burke.

10:00pm – TCM – Topper
Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are hard-living young couple who crash their fancy car after a night of drinking and end up as ghosts. They choose to spend their afterlife haunting Grant’s uptight boss Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) and teaching him to enjoy life again. Something of a screwball comedy without the battle of the sexes part; slight but a lot of fun.
1937 USA. Director: Norman Z. McLeod. Starring: Roland Young, Cary Grant, Constance Bennett.

12:00M – TCM – Father of the Bride
Long before Steve Martin kicked off his nearly twenty-year run of remaking classic comedies with his version of this film, Spencer Tracy was the Father of the Bride, dealing with the difficulty of letting his only daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, go to some other man. I don’t hate the Martin version, but this one is better. The family’s son is played by a young Russ Tamblyn (of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story).
1950 USA. Director: George Cukor. Starring: Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Bennett, Russ Tamblyn.

12:00M – IFC – Carnival of Souls
One of the most enduring cult classics of American cinema, about a young girl apparently killed with her friends in a watery auto accident, but who emerges from the river seemingly intact much later – but a bizarre carnival seems to hold the secrets of her existence. It’s a strange film, but a mesmerizing one.
1962 USA. Director: Herk Harvey. Starring: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison.
(repeats at 4:15am on the 27th)

Sunday, May 27

9:20am – Sundance – Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog’s fascination with the duality of nature’s beauty and destructiveness continues into documentary, as he brings the story of grizzly researcher Timothy Treadwell to the screen.
2005 USA. Director: Werner Herzog.

8:00pm – TCM – Sergeant York
Gary Cooper won his first Oscar for his portrayal of WWI hero Sgt. Alvin York, a pacifist who somehow decided that the fastest way to stop the killing was to join up and kill as many Germans as he could to end the war.
1941 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie, George Tobias, Margaret Wycherly, Ward Bond.

10:00pm – Sundance – There Will Be Blood
It’s no secret that I have very little love for There Will Be Blood, but I know I’m vastly in the minority on this one, and I’d be very remiss if I did not note that it was on. So this is me, letting you know that it’s on.
2007 USA. Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciaran Hinds.
Newly Featured!

11:00pm – IFC – The Prestige
Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins follow-up, a wonderfully twisty and evocative period thriller about a pair of stage magicians and their potentially deadly rivalry. Some great ideas elevate this far above what you might expect, and solid performances all around carry it through nicely. Definitely deserves mention among the finest thinking-man’s films of the past decade.
2006 USA. Director: Christopher Nolan. Starring: Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall.

But most importantly, I am dying to see what a Sam Mendes James Bond is all about. The guy is pretty much batting 1.000 for me and I’m anticipating this to possibly be the best Bond ever. Take a look at the promo and see what you think. Looks dark and vengeful… so what else is new with Daniel Craig’s incarnation of Bond?

Polaroids from the set of Blade Runner: | (via)

Dishonored from Bethesda Studios. Wait for it…

Star Wars bullshit for the week:

Other Fun Links:
22 Main Characters Casually Dismissed in the Sequel
Criterion Collection tumblr blog
.pdf comparison chart of all streaming devices
The Death of the Western Genre
Loneliest Whale on Earth
COLOR Pictures taken 100 years ago in Russia
Huge Explosion (from 2KM away) WHOA!)
Tony Stark’s car from Avengers

A minimal, but quite swanky poster for the upcoming Anchorman Sequel prioritizes the importance of the returning characters by the number of legs they get to show off in the image. Either that or the sight gag here is surprisingly subtle…

[I'm reprinting this article I posted on The Frame yesterday in support of the For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which continues until tomorrow. This year, hosts Marilyn Ferdinand, Farran Smith Nehme and Roderick Heath have dedicated the week to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early (non-directorial) work The White Shadow will be the beneficiary of any money earned during the event, to support the National Film Preservation Foundation's desire to stream the film online for free. Be sure to donate so you can see this very-nearly lost film yourself!]

We excitedly gathered on the sidewalk, anticipating being let into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ own screening room, the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills. VIPs slipped by, headed toward the bar or lounge in their finery, while the rest of us waited, patient but anxious to begin the evening’s entertainment. Any screening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre is a treat, a step into a more opulent past presented by the self-appointed guardians of Hollywood history, but this was no ordinary screening. This was the very first appearance of an early, long-thought-lost Hitchcock film pretty much since its original release in 1924. Well, technically Hitchcock was the Assistant Director on the film (and he tended to get in on every part of production he could in those early days, so likely he was doing much more), the second of two collaborations with director Graham Cutts and actress Betty Compson, apparently rushed into production to capitalize on the popularity of the first, Woman to Woman. According to producer Michael Balcon, “it was as big a flop as Woman to Woman had been a success.” But Woman to Woman remains a lost film, and in any case, The White Shadow could’ve been a terrible movie and we still would’ve been ecstatic to see it.

Our excitement was first of all out of curiosity to see if we could see any glimpses of Hitchcock in the film’s style, but also simply because here’s a film that has been thought lost for decades, turned up (partially at least) in an archive in New Zealand, along with a bunch of other long-lost films. If we can still locate treasure troves like this in 2011, what else might still be out there, waiting for intrepid archivists to find it, figure out what it is, and restore it so the world can rediscover it?

Archivists are kind of like detectives. Films may sit in archives for years, preserved so they don’t deteriorate, but often lacking reels or credits that would help identify what the film even is. That’s the case with several films in the New Zealand Archive, which has been the source of a lot of publicity in the silent film archiving world over the past couple of years as they, along with researchers from American archives, realized they had fragments of John Ford films, Clara Bow films, and other American films that they’d been holding on to for years but hadn’t had the resources to go through and identify. The same is probably true of many archives around the world, not to mention what private collectors or grandpa’s attic may still hold. But I think it’s important to realize that finding these films is often not simply a matter or serendipity, like finding a bunch of film reels in a relative’s home that nobody knew were there, or digging up a bunch from an underground bunker or whatever romantic flights of fancy one can come up with. A lot of times they’re actually already in archives, having been donated as part of a large collection at one time or another, and the issue is that film preservation and restoration is woefully underfunded to the point that all archivists can do is keep the films safe until they have the resources to do the sometimes daunting work that goes into just finding out what the films are, much less the often laborious process of restoring them to a watchable state.

The finding of The White Shadow is a combination of both the romantic and the mundane, having been part of a donation to the New Zealand Archive in 1989 after being found in a garden shed. It remained on the shelf mis-identified until 2011, when an archivist with the Academy who was working at the New Zealand Archive figured out that this film, labeled “Two Sisters” and “Unidentified American Film,” was actually the first few reels of The White Shadow, a British film that’s now the earliest known surviving film worked on by Alfred Hitchcock. The film world went abuzz, with many media outlets often forgetting to mention that he was AD on the film instead of full director, but really, for me, the exciting thing was the rediscovery of even part of this film, whether Hitchcock had been director or coffee-boy.

You see, fragments fascinate me and sadden me in fairly equal proportions. With some 80% of all silent films lost, the fragments that remain are heartbreaking reminders of what was and what will never be again. They have a special kind of beauty, almost ghostly and ethereal, the remnants joyous and yet constant signs of what has been lost. Some fragments are mere minutes or seconds long, as with the glorious two-color Technicolor opening of Clara Bow’s Red Hair, the first few minutes of which were discovered and restored only this year and shown at the 2012 TCM Film Festival. Who knows if the rest of the film was any good or not? Maybe seeing the rest of it would yield disappointment. Maybe someday the rest of it will be discovered and we can find out for ourselves. Until then, the fragmentary opening stands apart in time.

The White Shadow currently has the first three of six reels intact, so it’s a much longer fragment, but a fragment it remains. It tells the story of two sisters (both played by Betty Compson), one “good” and one “bad.” The “white shadow” of the title refers to the sweet and demure soul of the good sister. They both have their eye on the same man, who is initially attracted to the wild sister, but when she runs away from home and their overbearing father, the sweet sister marries him instead – but here’s the kicker: he never knew there were two of them, so he assumes he’s marrying the one he initially fell for. Mistaken identity follows mistaken identity, the now-repentant father embarks on a life-long quest to find the wild sister, and the mismatched couple struggle with their marriage. It all comes to a climax when they fatefully end up in the same nightclub. The wild sister enters the club dramatically from the top of a long, imposing stairway and…the film cuts out.

The entire sold-out audience at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre erupted into a sigh and a groan – a resigned sigh that we may never get to see the rest (though Eva Marie Saint did read us the very brief and somewhat bizarre plot description filed with the film’s copyright materials), and a groan of frustration. Frustration that neglect has let this, and so many other films disappear. In a way, the film couldn’t have ended better in terms of raising awareness for the great need to preserve the films we have left and work to find and identify more. Though some parts of the film fall a bit too far into melodrama, the final image is one of tension and excitement, a real edge of your seat cliffhanger – as if the gods of Cinema had planned it that way so the film, as it remains today, would have the maximum impact a fragment can have, a tangible symbol of the phantom reels. The cliffhanger has no resolution, but it carries with it the hope that if this fragment could be found and recovered, perhaps more can be also.

Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind heading into the screening was, would we be able to tell the influence of Hitchcock on this very early film? Would we be able to see the seeds of the great master of suspense? To be honest, I’m not sure. There is suspense in the plot, thanks to the Compson’s double role and the way mistaken identity is played for suspense and tragedy rather than comedy (most of the time), but the tension is relatively innocuous and the film spends more time, at least in this first half, on the father’s anguished search for his daughter. You can see the idea of shadow selves and people torn between good and evil as an idea basic to much of Hitchcock’s later work, but at the same time, a lot of that feels like reading into the film because of what we know about Hitchcock.

The purpose of this blogathon is to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation to record a brand-new score and put the existing reels of The White Shadow on their website, streaming for free. I can’t promise you that watching The White Shadow will be a totally satisfying experience – how can it be, when the conclusion of it is still lost? But I can promise you that it will be worthwhile, if only to see part of a landmark director’s origin, if only to be reminded of the necessity of caring for the films we have, and if only to remain hopeful that more films (even perhaps the rest of this one!) will continue to be found and preserved for us to see. And maybe you’ll have a better idea of how it relates to Hitchcock’s later work than I do. So join me and my fellow bloggers – donate if you can, spread the word, and when the film is posted online by the NFPF (as I have no doubt it will be), watch it!

One of the early announcements out of Cannes was that of a new picture on its way from director John Woo. Known for over the top action scenes, fine cheese and crates of doves, Woo will be looking to remake one of the classic films from Japanese movie studio Nikkatsu as part of its centenary celebration. Entitled Day Of The Beast, the film will be an English language take on Seijun Suzuki’s superb 1963 film Youth Of The Beast. Of its many great scenes, one of my favourites is when Jo Shishido’s main character survives being blown up in a house while he’s hanging upside down, manages to swing himself to a gun, fight off two remaining yakuza and then shoot himself free before finishing them both off. How can Woo top that?

Of course, I’m kidding when I tell Woo to tread carefully. I’m not one to believe that the original film can be wrecked by any attempt to remake it. In fact, any attention a remake can bring to an earlier film is definitely welcomed – especially when it’s something by one of my favourite directors. Though he was a studio director – in other words, he had to film whatever script they gave him with whatever cast they gave him – Seijun Suzuki figured out early on how to keep things interesting even when the scripts were standard B-movie fare. Akin somewhat to Hitchcock in viewing the role of the director to be more technical in nature (where does the camera sit, when does it move, how do I frame things, etc.), Suzuki was able to play with storytelling conventions a great deal by adding subtext and context via his images and visual style while avoiding exposition like the plague. The classic story is that Nikkatsu fired him upon seeing his 1967 film Branded To Kill after having warned him to play by the rules (his previous film Tokyo Drifter wasn’t exactly a straight line narrative either). His methods of telling his story made generic plots into interesting ones and I’ve never seen a film of his that didn’t make me broadly smile at something totally unexpected, make me think “Whoa, that was cool…” and yet still convey relevant information about the story or character.

So in anticipation of John Woo’s re-imagining of one of the classic yakuza films, here’s just a few examples of Suzuki’s work:

Youth Of The Beast (1963)

Gate Of Flesh (1964)

Tattooed Life (1965)

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

Branded To Kill (1967)

Kagero-za (1981)

Yumeji (1991)

Pistol Opera (2001)

Princess Raccoon (2005)

Bait-y school drama, Won’t Back Down has several actors I enjoy watching on the big screen, Viola Davis, Holly Hunter and Maggie Gyllenhaal. But I’ll be promptly skipping this one. Focusing less on fixing the schools and more on starting your own damn school (note this topic was delved into quite a bit in Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting For Superman), it amps up every cliche in this sort of ‘genre’ that makes me kick myself for skipping Tony Kaye’s Detachment, which seemed to earn its earnestness rather than flailing it about like a dead cat in an elevator.

“We have to find a teacher that has the same ideas you do.” – Isn’t this the problem with America in a nutshell, from Fox News to MSNBC? Likewise, school should be neither a ‘shopping trip’ nor an entrepreneurial endeavor. But I digress, it’s not by far the only howler that Maggie has receive or deliver. The last line in this trailer, dares you to vomit on your computer. My Gosh, with dialogue like that who needs plot or story.

I know, I know, you don’t want to spoil any of the mood or surprises of Ridley Scott’s new Alien prequel and you are not watch these. Yea, right.

You have got to hand it to the web-viral marketing department for Prometheus who have been world-building with this series of videos in a pretty amazing way. First Weyland’s TED Talk, then a commercial for the “David” line of sythentic humans, now we have the girl with the dragon tattoo herself, Noomi Rapace, essaying her Dr. Elizabeth Shaw character’s philosophy for adventure to the Weyland corporation (Ellie Arroway style) as their computer analyzes every square nano-meter of her face for identity, archival, and one assumes, empathy testing.

Yep, it’s Contact meets Blade Runner in an Alien movie. Yum.

Directed By: Tod Browning
Starring: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova

Tag line: “The Strangest… The Most Startling Human Story Ever Screened… Are You Afraid To Believe What Your Eyes See?”
Trivia: Myrna Loy, originally slated for the Olga Baclanova role, turned down the part because she felt the script was offensive

For more Cinematic oddities and reviews, head over to dvdinfatuation.com

Director Tod Browning, who had run away at age 16 to join the circus, came to love the “Big Top”, and all the excitement it had to offer. With his 1932 film, Freaks, Browning wanted to show the world a slice of circus life few on the outside had ever seen, namely the camaraderie and close-knit relationships that formed among the sideshow attractions, sometimes referred to as the circus freaks. But the world in 1932 wasn’t quite ready for Browning’s film, and as a result, Freaks was reviled by both audiences and critics alike.

Hans (Harry Earles), a circus performer who stands less than three feet tall, has fallen in love with trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), despite the fact she’s twice his size. Cleopatra initially laughs off Hans’ advances, but changes her tune when she learns he’s about to inherit a large fortune. It doesn’t take long for Cleopatra to seduce Hans, and soon the two are married. With the help of her secret lover, Hercules the Strong Man (Henry Victor), Cleopatra plans to knock off her new husband and collect his inheritance. But when she humiliates Hans in public, Cleopatra incites the anger of the other circus ‘freaks’, who are only too happy to intercede on Hans’ behalf.

It’s easy to see why Freaks might have been a bit much for it’s 1932 audience. Along with the appearance of such sideshow performers as the bearded lady (Olga Roderick), the half-man/half-woman (Josephine Joseph) and the human skeleton (Peter Robinson), we also meet the Half-Boy (Johnny Eck) who was born without legs, and the ‘living torso’ (Prince Randian), born with no limbs whatsoever. There are other “oddities” as well, like pinheads, Siamese twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton) and a girl with no arms (Martha Morris) who has to eat every meal with her feet. Yet, while these characters are certainly unusual, I don’t believe it was Browning’s intention to simply exploit their various deformities. On the contrary, I get the distinct impression when I watch this film that a mutual respect had developed between the director and his sideshow subjects, and am convinced his ultimate goal was to paint them all in a sympathetic light. That’s not to say there’s no exploitation whatsoever, just that Browning counterbalances it by making the ‘freaks’ genuine characters. In short, he wanted us to see them as the true heroes of his story, and the so-called ‘normal’ characters, who lie, cheat and steal their way through the film, as the tale’s true monsters.

Upon its release in 1932, critics attacked Freaks unmercifully. The Atlanta Journal wrote that it “Transcends the fascinatingly horrible, leaving the spectator appalled”, and its “shocking nature” resulted in the film being banned in many states. Ultimately, audiences could not accept Browning’s vision, and I truly believe ‘acceptance’ is what the director was after. He set out to show us the inner decency, even the humanity of this special group of performers, men and women who were dealt a blow by life, yet were coping with it as best they could.

Browning was able to see past their deformities. Unfortunately, at the time, he was the only one who could.

Last week I was complaining because there were hardly any releases worth glancing at; this week I opted to put in a second row of highlighted covers because there are a LOT of releases, including a bunch of last year’s festival circuit films that I didn’t want to get lost in the shuffle. Still a slow week on the Instant Watch front, for both new additions and expirations, but there are a few gems in there you won’t want to miss.

New Release Pick of the Week

Chronicle
A nice surprise in the midst of February doldrums to find this small but satisfying take on what would happen if a group of high-schoolers got the power of telekinesis. Both the “ordinary people get superpowers” and found footage genres are getting stale, but Chronicle uses both to good advantage, chiefly by being spot on in how teenagers would react to their new-found powers.
2012 USA. Director: Josh Trank. Starring: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan.

Other New Releases

Afghan Luke (2011 USA, dir Mike Clattenburg, stars Nick Stahl)
Agent Vinod (2012 India, dir Sriram Raghavan, stars Kareena Kapoor)
Chained: Code 207 (2012 USA, dir Tino Struckmann, stars John Greer)
The Devil Inside (2012 USA, dir William Brent Bell, stars Fernanda Andrade)
Dragonslayer (2011 USA, dir Tristan Patterson, stars Josh ‘Skreech’ Sandoval)
eCupid (2011 USA, dir J.C. Calciano, stars Andy Anderson)
Flashpoint: Season 4 (2011 USA, stars Amy Jo Johnson, Hugh Dillon)
Golf in the Kingdom (2010 USA, dir Susan Streitfeld, stars David O’Hara)
Hell on Wheels: Season 1 (2011 USA, stars Anson Mount, Colm Meaney)
Mortuary (2005 USA, dir Tobe Hooper, stars Dan Byrd)
My Perestroika (1010 USA/UK/Russia, dir Robin Hessman)
My Piece of the Pie (2011 France, dir Cédric Klapisch, stars Karin Viard)
The Tenants (2009 Brazil, dir Sergio Bianchi, stars Fernando Alves Pinto)
The Universe: Season 6 (2007 USA)
Victorious: Season 2 (2011 USA, stars Victoria Justice)
We Were Here (2011 USA, dir David Weissman, Bill Weber)
Windfall (2011 USA, dir Laura Israel)
The Woman Knight of Mirror Lake (2011 Hong Kong, dir Herman Yau, stars Rose Chan)

Catalog Pick of the Week

Being John Malkovich Criterion
There are no films that define “mindfuck” quite like Being John Malkovich, and yes, I pretty much mean that literally. When John Cusack discovers a door that leads inside the brain of John Malkovich, it’s only the beginning of one of the most bizarre and brilliant films I’ve ever seen. I’m glad to see Criterion honoring newer, deserving films like this.
1999 USA. Director: Spike Jonze. Starring: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich, Catherine Keener.

Other Catalog Releases

Before and After Blu-ray (1996 USA, dir Barbet Schroeder, stars Meryl Streep)
Born Yesterday Blu-ray (1993 USA, dir Luis Mandoki, stars Melanie Griffith)
Bringing Down the House Blu-ray (2003 USA, dir Adam Shankman, stars Steve Martin)
Caravan (1946 USA, dir Arthur Crabtree, stars Stewart Granger)
D.O.A. Blu-ray (1988 USA, dir Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton, stars Dennis Quaid)
Duets Blu-ray (2000 USA, dir Bruce Paltrow, stars Gwyneth Paltrow)
Eagle’s Wing (1979 USA, dir Anthony Harvey, stars Martin Sheen)
Fanny by Gaslight, aka Man of Evil (1945 UK, dir Anthony Asquith, stars James Mason)
Forbidden Zone Blu-ray (1982 USA, dir Richard Elfman, stars Hervé Villechaize)
Gone Fishin’ Blu-ray (1997 USA, dir Christopher Cain, stars Joe Pesci)
Hazel: Season 3 (1963 USA, stars Shirley Booth)
Holy Man Blu-ray (1998 USA, dir Stephen Herek, stars Eddie Murphy)
Love Story, aka A Lady Surrenders (1944 UK, dir Leslie Arliss, stars Margaret Lockwood)
Mr. Wrong Blu-ray (1996 USA, dir Nick Castle, stars Ellen DeGeneres)
The Odessa File Blu-ray (1974 UK, dir Ronald Neame, stars Jon Voight)
The Order Blu-ray (2001 USA, dir Sheldon Lettich, stars Jean-Claude Van Damme)
Riverboat: Complete Series (1959-61 USA, stars Darren McGavin, Dick Wessel)
Spaghetti Western Double Feature: Grand Duel / Keoma (1972/1976 Italy, dir Giancarlo Santi/Enzo G. Castellari, stars Lee Van Cleef/Franco Nero)
Terminal Velocity Blu-ray (1994 USA, dir Deran Sarafian, stars Charlie Sheen)
Walking Tall Trilogy (1973-1977 USA, stars Joe Don Baker / Bo Svenson)
White Squall Blu-ray (1996 USA, dir Ridley Scott, stars Jeff Bridges)

Instant Watch Pick of the Week

Sleep Dealer
In the near-future, borders are blocked and immigration halted, but richer countries using poorer ones for labor hasn’t changed; thanks to the wonders of virtual reality laborours can hook into a machine and control robots to do the menial tasks that the wealthier nations don’t want to do. A great setup that the film may not quite exploit (no pun intended) to its full extent, but is still a worthwhile low-budget, idea-ridden sci-fi film.
2008 Mexico/USA. Director: Alex Rivera. Starring: Luis Fernando Peña, Leonor Varela, Jacob Vargas.

Other Instant Watch Releases

Expiring Pick of the Week

Metropolis Restored [5/16]
This is the Complete Metropolis edition with the additional 25 minutes of footage, which is the best way to see it. I hope I don’t have to really sell this film too hard – it’s a simply breathtaking experience, and if you can’t get a chance to see it on a big screen, definitely don’t miss this chance to see it before it expires.
1927 Germany. Director: Fritz Lang. Starring: Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Frohlich.

Other Instant Watch Expirations

Barking Water (2009 USA, dir Sterlin Harjo, stars Casey Camp-Horinek) [5/16]
The Producers (2005 USA, dir Susan Stroman, stars Nathan Lane) [5/16]
Battleground (1949 USA, dir William A. Wellman, stars Van Johnson) [5/19]
In the City of Sylvia (2007 Spain, dir José Luis Guerín, stars Pilar López de Ayala) [5/24]
Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008 USA, dir Arne Glimcher) [5/24]
Singh is Kinng (2008 India, dir Anees Bazmee, stars Akshay Kumar) [5/25]
I Capture the Castle (2003 UK, dir Tim Fywell, stars Ramola Garai) [5/26]
Pretty Persuasion (2005 USA, dir Marcos Siega, stars Evan Rachel Wood) [5/26]

See all expiring titles.

Formerly the “Untitled Terrence Malick Project” starring Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Rachel Weisz, Javier Bardem, Olga Kurylenko, Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen and Amanda Peet, the film got both its title, To The Wonder, and its MPAA rating, “R” today. Strange title, it feels like directions to Malick’s awesome yet often obtuse filmmaking style (“This way to the wonder folks! Wonder? Wonder!”) It’s certainly not at Cannes, and who knows if it will come out in 2012, 2013 or whenever. Just passing this along, because, well … Terrence Malick.

Oh, in cause you were curious, the R was doled out for nudity.

“To The Wonder is a romantic drama centered on a man who reconnects with a woman from his hometown after his marriage to a European woman falls apart.”

In 2006 Joss Whedon (certainly the mainstream man of the hour in light of Avengers‘ rip-roaring success) expressed his exasperation with the question “Why do you write all these strong female characters?” His pithy, Whedonesque answer of course was “Because you’re still asking me that question.”

Five years later in 2011, his words and frustration still rang true. The list of top ten box office hits includes only one film with a female lead – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, and Bella’s status as a “strong female character” is questionable (more on Twilight in a minute…) and the audience for the film adaptations of Stephanie Meyer’s novels is female-dominant. Last year’s box office champ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows does have a strong female character in Hermione Granger, but the lead of that film is obviously the Potter himself, everyone else more or less orbits his journey. Meanwhile, Transformers 3, The Hangover Part II, Fast Five, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and on down the list are male-centric to say the least.

But 2012 may be the year of the empowered girl.

The ongoing box office (and to a degree, critical) success of The Hunger Games seems to support that idea. But it is not just Katniss leading the charge: smart and strong women are leading many films this year. Films that seem utterly poised to be blockbuster hits and critical darlings feature women in the lead.

In the past 30 years of western pop culture (we’ll get to Studio Ghibli in a moment too…) we have Wonder Woman, Lt. Ellen Ripley, Buffy Summers and Foxy Brown.

Perhaps in 2012 we will have new names to add to that list. Mallory Kane. Katniss Everdeen. Lisbeth Salander (admittedly Fincher’s polished update of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo was at 2011′s in extremis, but we’re counting her in the vanguard). Snow White. Princess Merida. The fact is, this shouldn’t be notable. But it is, because we are still asking writers, the majority of which are men, why they write strong women characters. But there are now many more writers to ask (admittedly still predominantly male!). Allow the Row Three staff to offer a survey of this years fem-powered offerings, starting with the resurrection of the Alien franchise.

There’s ample reason to believe that Ripley was an accident – at least in terms of the pop-cultural feminism we have subsequently subscribed to her. Both she and Lambert were written gender-neutral, with only a script note attached to the Alien screenplay suggesting that one or two of the crew members of the Nostromo might, if suitable, be cast female instead of male. This decision may therefore have been completely arbitrary. One suspects that Jesus-jawed crew leader Dallas, or science fiction’s signature dyspepsia victim Kane, would probably have been male no matter what. Parker, Brett, Ash, Lambert and Ripley were all up in the air.

Ridley Scott was working fervently to make a pitch-perfect monster movie. Any horror worth its salt needs a good Final Girl, and one can look at the gender choice for Ripley and think quite reasonably that yes, six-foot-two supermodel Sigourney Weaver looks much more appealing in her end-of-movie strip-down to tank top and panties (and subsequent, unexpected final smack-down with the Big Green Meanie) than, say, Christopher Walken.

But I don’t buy it. This, after all, is the Ridley Scott who brought us, in descending order, the fortysomething Marian of Robin Hood, the autonomous and prideful Sibylla of Kingdom of Heaven, the con-girl of Matchstick Men, the – ahem – whatever-the-hell-she-was of G.I. Jane, and the two feminine killing machines – Pris and Zhora – of Blade Runner. This Ridley Scott is not someone who would have created our female Ripley lightly – and I say that without even invoking the decade-defining pair of feminist icons that were Thelma & Louise.

I have no idea what’s in Prometheus, although we can safely assume that Ripley isn’t. I have judiciously avoided Prometheus spoilers like the plague. Charlize Theron seems like a feint, but I see Noomi Rapace in stills from the film, and my mind immediately begins conjuring powerful possibilities. One can ascribe a plentiful variety of meanings onto the Alien franchise, but one thing can never be denied: this is a cycle of movies whose women – females, of whatever species – have been not just important, nor even merely central, but defining.

So whether Rapace goes down like Kane in the first act or ends up as this neo-franchise’s newly minted Final Girl, it’s her that I’m going to the theatres to see. I’ll tell you this: the Ridley Scott described above didn’t cast the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in his new film by accident.
-BROWN

I came at The Hunger Games not as a rabid fan of the books (in fact, I haven’t even read them), but as someone intrigued by the hype coming not only from the studio marketing machine, but from people I know and trust. It seemed likely that The Hunger Games would take the movie world by storm as it had the world of young adult fiction, and so it seems to have done, becoming 2012′s first certified blockbuster, and tracking perhaps surprisingly well across age and gender borders. The movie isn’t without its problems, but it has one element that’s essentially unassailable: the character Katniss Everdeen.

There’s no one reading this who doesn’t know the story by now. Katniss volunteers to fight for her district in the titular games to keep her younger sister out of them and ends up giving the gamemasters a bunch of headaches when she pushes the rules of the games to their limit. But Katniss is not a trained fighter like the contestants from District 1 or District 2, nor does she have an action hero exterior or drive. She depends on the skills she’s picked up struggling for survival in her backwoods district – archery, tracking, hiding – and her innate intelligence and intuition.

However, though she’s clearly set up as someone who can handle herself, she isn’t really a hero in the beginning any more than she appears to be a strong contestant. Success in the games is not wholly dependent on either combat or woodland survival skills, but on likability, a quality that Katniss does not initially appear to possess. Instead, she can be blunt, abrasive, tactless, and single-minded to the point of alienating others, including the sponsors who can make or break a contestant in the games. At the same time, she is initially so fiercely protective of her home and family that she seems willing to be utterly ruthless in her pursuit of victory. But that’s not who she truly is, and she comes to redefine what makes a good Hunger Games contestant, by acting with humanity – and thus she becomes a heroine defined by her very humanity, both in the sense of being humane and caring to those who need it and in terms of her own fallibility. She doesn’t always make the right decisions, nor for the right reasons, but that’s part of being human, and heroes with no journey of their own are of little interest.

But perhaps the most notable thing about Katniss as a female hero is that in a way, gender does not matter to these games. Each district gives a girl and a boy, but age, skill, training, and persona matter much more than gender, and no one assumes Katniss or any of the other girls in the games is innately disadvantaged because of their gender. On the other hand, gender distinctions aren’t completely ignored in this society, nor is Katniss forced to take on masculine traits to win the games. Her strength is primarily centered in her humanity, her sense of loyalty to her district and her fellow players (those who deserve it, anyway), and her willingness to make tough yet smart decisions when necessary – all traits that cross genders. In fact, the most important factor of Katniss’s being female may be how unimportant it is – and that’s what gender equity is all about. Perhaps that’s why The Hunger Games does not have as overwhelmingly female an audience as other female-led young adult series. Her appeal is universal, because she is a hero that we can all admire.
-HARDESTY

Haywire has a plot that is so traditionally male driven, the Special-Ops soldier sold out by his bosses petty politicking, that one could initially look at the gender swap of its lead, in the form Mixed Martial Arts champ Gina Carano, as a simple gimmick to refresh an oft-used formula. But the moment you see Ms. Carano simply move, the thought quickly vanishes. Instead of 95-pound ladies with super-human strength, you have a woman who looks the part physically, and is instantly believable in her role as a 21st-century soldier of fortune. Soderbergh famously took all the the artificial foley work out of the fight sequences in Haywire, and why not, you accept that Mallory Kane is beating the tar out of Hollywood’s male elite (MacGregor, Fassbender, Banderas, Tatum) equally as you buy her a sexual being and one who is more confident that she has made her daddy proud. One might argue that the antecedent is Elmore Leonard’s tough cop Karen Cisco (brought forth by the prolific director in Out of Sight) but there she is clearly second fiddle even as she is perhaps more interesting than Jack Foley, even as her sex-fantasies rub up against her professionalism. Kane’s femininity is most certainly present, but it is a non-issue. She bristles to wear the black cocktail dress and be arm-candy when sent on a job with an Irish 007-esque agent and things end badly on that front. No time outs, here. Soderbergh plays the iconic tussle at the heart of Haywire as a cheeky stand-in for rough sex, where the lady-mantis eats the male at the end of copulation, but here the goal is clearly self-preservation, not mating or passing down DNA.

If there is a case to be made for a fresh new action franchise in the vein of the now dusty Stallone/Schwarzenegger films of the eighties, or their more meterosexual counterparts of late (vide Jason Bourne or Thomas “Neo” Anderson), then Carano is your lady. I’m completely surprised that she is not going pop up in The Expendables 2 in some way, maybe she will. Perhaps they can dust off one of those many Wonder Woman scripts and stuff her into the latest in Amazon-wear. Or better yet she should blaze her own trail; indeed she seems well on her way.
-HALFYARD

In A Lonely Place To Die it does not take long to sense that Alison is in control and means business: a minimal smile for a photo while rock climbing, a calming influence in someone else’s moment of panic, a few short and to the point comments to a fellow climber (“if you want to climb with me you need to up your game”) and a quick rebuke of an admirer. Not to mention the fact that she invents the “ginskey” – a mixture of gin and whiskey. She’s tough and confident – just her body posture alone tells enough of the story. She’s in the mountains to climb and challenge herself so let her be. When her group stumbles across a child in danger, she’s quick to act and assume responsibilities. As the bad guys give chase across cliff, hillside and village, she dodges bullets, withstands bone crunching falls, navigates rapids, powers through the forest and protects the young girl now under her charge. Not without breaking a sweat though – this kind of effort doesn’t come easy. She’s not a superwoman, but she will push herself to the limits, give every ounce of herself and dammit if she won’t make you do the same. Melissa George plays Alison and she needs more roles in action films – she works harder than Daniel Craig does as Bond with twice the commitment.
-TURNBULL

That 2012 brings not one, but two adaptations of the most delicate of princesses, Snow White, but re-invented as a figure of girl-power. If you go by the iconic 1937 Disney version Snow White exists to be abused, confused and to fall into a deep sleep before being woken by true love’s kiss with marriage as the end game. Even if you look at the emphasis on costume design and opulent pageantry in Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror, you will see that all of this is directed as the vice of the vainglorious Queen. Snow (Lily Collins) herself goes from being imprisoned in elaborate bows and ribbons to an investigator of what is wrong with the kingdom. The huntsman sent to do away with her has been transformed into a courtier (Nathan Lane) who wears the trappings of a sycophantic fop, indeed he has fallen from grace in the former regime (a paralysis or sleep of its own) and now plays nursemaid, toady and beautician consultant to the Queen. The rest of the sleep and paralysis is bestowed upon the incoming prince (Armie Hammer) who is often tied up, suspended and eventually is the recipient of the ‘sleep’ spell (in the form of puppy love, that is to say goofy obedience and sulky pouts) before being rescued by Snow. Many people have seen fit to write off the side-plot of the prince and his submission by Julia Roberts the cougar-Queen as a bit of slapstick fun for the kids, bit it is precisely the inversion of who is in danger and who is the rescuer that re-defines this post-feminist faerie-tale.

Snow earns the respect of the dwarfs not by housework and demure prettiness (albeit she dabbles in both) but by exercising leadership and a willingness to understand and empathize. In short, it is dignity, not beauty, that slays the beast of the kingdom and breaks all the evil spells upon the land. Granted, Snow does get married off and recedes her leadership role back to her elders, but not before restoring order, and perhaps insuring a proper succession plan.

Less is known about the darker and potentially more violent Snow White and The Huntsman that takes a more adult tone in terms of the story, looking to be more like a spiritual sequel to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. In the latter, Alice dons armour and leads a CGI army into battle before taking on the dragon, Jabberwock and looks to be directly echoed here with Kristen Stewart eshcewing twinkling vampires and swooning indecision (see below) and looking much like Joan of Arc decked out in plate mail and mounted on horseback. Ready for action, she is. Although little is known beyond the trailers at this point, will The Huntsman be the prince, or mentor & trainer in the art of war, or both? The poison apple and glass coffin seem to be in store for Snow White, but will she also be leading a CGI army into battle at some point? I think so.
-HALFYARD

Let me tell you about my Wonder Woman. The Lynda Carter TV show was my absolutely favourite thing in the world when I was five or six; I remember explaining quite sternly to my mother at one point why there was nothing weird about a boy preferring to be someone of the opposite sex while playing dress-up superhero with his friends. I was a mouthy kid anyway, and twirling around to become an Amazon Princess is fun, no matter what you have between your legs – and so to support my Wonder Woman fascination, my parents bought me everything Wonder Woman for a glorious couple of years. I remember very specifically a Wonder Woman book-on-tape which told the origin story of Wonder Woman in part text, part illustration. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first comic, and I identified with the heroine so completely – while still appreciating the first queasy stirrings of nascent fanboy lust at the sight of her in that Paradise Island short toga – that I can say quite definitively that there were many long years of my life before it ever even occurred to me that a story about a female superhero was in any way unusual.

It is unusual, though; even in the history of the Wonder Woman mythology, I came into the game at an unusually forward-thinking point, when Wonder Woman got to be powerful, friendly, optimistic, and beautiful. Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, a fantastic one-hour documentary that I saw at ActionFest in April, gives the complete canvas sweep of the evolution of the character, from female role model, to mean-spirited sexist caricature, to feminist icon, and back again. As an essay, Wonder Women is fairly median in its survey of the evolution of the character, which it expands to include female heroines in pop culture in general – but the film makes some strong connections in its essay, and is just so gosh-darn heartfelt besides (a little girl proclaiming that for super powers, she’d want “Eye lasers that could make trash go into little shreds. Recycle Girl.”) that it was hard not to arrive at the end of Wonder Women with a big stupid grin on my face.

I had not connected the fact that both Buffy and Xena died (onscreen) within moments of each other in 2001, nor what those events might have meant for a generation of girls growing up with self-annihilation as a disturbingly omnipresent motif in their culture of stories. I had not connected the recent hyper-sexualization of female superheroes with young girls learning that the only route to empowerment is through sexual actualization. I had not heard of the Reel Grrls organization, which puts cameras in the hands of teenaged girls in an effort to fight the fact that only 3% of the decision-making positions in media are held by women. Like I said, Wonder Women makes good connections, and tells the tale once again for why female superheroes shouldn’t be so unusual.
- BROWN

The Secret World of Arrietty, adapted from The Borrowers by Studio Ghibli, continues a long-standing tradition by this particular Japanese animation-house for stories centered around competent and heroic girls (of all ages.) In North America the film hardly lit the box office on fire – it certainly wasn’t marketed very hard by Disney – but that may be due to an interesting complexity of what exactly is going on with the storytelling. Here we have a young lady of a race of tiny people who live under the stairs who forms a Capulet-like relationship with a human boy’s Montague. The film does not play the tragedy to the melodramatic heights of Shakespeare, but instead goes for a more ‘endless summer’ feel one gets at a certain age on the cusp of adulthood.

Arrietty certainly makes mistakes in her coming-of-age explorations both in geography and love. She ends an era for her family as she forges her unusual relationship with human owners of the house. But she is never used as bait to be rescued (that role falls upon her mother) and she finds her own way on her own terms whilst still trying to honour her parents. That her father accepts her as a ‘hunter-gatherer’ (that is what the Borrower’s do) without question is a post-gender giveaway right there. That she uses a sewing pin as her weapon of choice, sword-size for her, is a nice visual nod. Arrietty may not be the epic girl-driven adventure of Nausicaä or Princess Mononoke, but there is a maturity and quiet confidence in the film; one that belies the need to show-off that I believe was completely overlooked upon its release.
-HALFYARD

Perhaps Disney never pushed The Secret World of Arrietty very hard because they have their own inhouse film coming up very soon. It is notable in the lengthy and very successful life of Pixar (America’s Ghibli if you will, and John Lasseter would be the first to agree) that Brave is the first feature to be anchored around a girl. Staggering to think this, but after 20 years, the studio has come along way from Lil’ Bo Peep and Ms. Potato Head, the barely regarded females in Toy Story. The former, it should be noted pretty much vanished from the franchise by its third entry – albeit Jesse the Cowgirl is a far better replacement coming in at part 2.

Brave has anchored a lot of its marketing muscle around the relationship between Princess Merida and her mother the Queen which has a quiver of friction on the grounds that she wants to be a warrior and her mother wants her to go the traditional route. Dad seems ambivalent, leaving him more or less out of the equation. Now I believe that Brave goes the more traditional route of a curious girl causing a lot of the problems (one has to look no further than Disney’s The Little Mermaid for curses and witches and Kingdoms in jeopardy) only to find a way to bail herself out, but Brave hopefully stands to push the character – the moral fabric – of its lead beyond the song and dance and romantic longings of wistful mermaids. Ariel never had to take on a man-eating bear to prove her mettle.
-HALFYARD

Whether you love, hate or simply like Adam Wingard’s You’re Next (I’m in that last camp), there will be little question that you’ll remember the character of Erin (a tier-jumping performance by Sharni Vinson). She plays an innocent girlfriend who gets caught in one of the worst “meet the family” dinners ever. Not only do things spiral into vicious squabbling between siblings, but when the killings start it really ruins the mood. Particularly the crossbow arrows hurtling through the windows from the unseen attackers outside. The problem with remaining unseen, though, is that you can’t always see your target clearly and what these assailants don’t realize is that Erin has some kickass hidden talents. Not just her fighting and weaponry skills (which are, to say the least, impressive), but also her intelligence and cunning. As the family dwindles, she survives by using whatever resource is at her disposal. She turns the “game” around and doesn’t simply stay as prey – she becomes a hunter herself by setting traps and outwitting everybody each step of the way. She deserves every “Whoop!” and spontaneous bit of applause her character gets as she leaves her own trail of carnage in the house and never gives an inch. Not all the humour or horror elements work throughout the film, but Erin’s new version of the Final Girl does – one who doesn’t just make it out via her gumption, but actively engages in the challenge of surviving what’s thrown her way. She throws it right back – and harder.
-TURNBULL

Twilight seemed innocuous when it was first released but as it entrenched itself into pop culture, discussions around Bella and her inadequacy as a role model for young women have been many and often, in my humble opinion, short sighted.

There’s this feeling, and looking at the list of other women who have made our list, that the women we should be looking up to need to be outwardly strong, fiercely independent and willing to stand up for what they believe in, against all odds. Does that mean that women who chose to be wives and mothers and who favour traditional ideals aren’t fitting role models or, in their own way, strong and worthy of attention?

On the surface, Bella doesn’t appear to fit into what has become the ideal “empowered woman.” She comes across as a helpless romantic, a young woman so blinded by love and her want of a man that she leaves behind her life. At its core, feminism fights for a woman’s rights to be the same as those of men and allowing women to make the choice. That choice could land you in a fight to the death in an arena or in the case of Bella, the choice to enter into a relationship and stick with it even when the odds are stacked against her. It doesn’t make her a coward it just exemplifies that “traditional” values of family and love are just as important to fight for as anything else. Her fight is personal but it doesn’t make it any less important or any less worthy.

Bella’s growth has been slower than we may be used to but she hasn’t exactly been standing around for three movies waiting for Edward to come to her. To protect and save her. She has gone after what she wants at every turn. She wanted Edward and even when he fought her, she came out victorious. She fought, and continues to fight, for what she wants and cares for, fights that often land her in the line of death. We tend to focus on her moments of weakness but that’s like kicking a dog when he’s down. We all have those moments, it is part of what makes us human. Bella is stronger because she fights those troubling moments and emerges stronger. Her death dive in New Moon was stupid and done for the wrong reasons but she owned her mistake and went on to save Edward’s life. Not bad for a girl who many argue is weak.

I think some of the hate on Bella stems from the fact that her story is so clearly romantic and entrenched in a romantic trope where we often find women who let themselves be pushed around by men and over three films, try as the studio, writer and directors might to infuse the tale with action sequences, this is still, at it’s core, a story of romance and of a woman who fights for love. Perhaps when Breaking Dawn: Part 2 opens in November thoughts on Bella will change. The conclusion to the tale puts Bella at the centre of a brewing war where she becomes responsible and the only person capable of protecting her family and friends. Maybe a physical fight will finally dispel the idea that Bella is an inadequate role model because from where I sit, she’s just as capable and deserving of the “role model” moniker as any of the other women in this discussion.
-ANTUNES

“May I kill him?” Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) asks an incapacitated Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), just before chasing serial rapist and murderer Martin Vanger out of his torture-basement with a handgun. Some members of the audience were incensed – why was feminist icon hacker hero Lisbeth Salander asking a man’s permission to exercise her proxy? But this reaction misses the point of the two arrow-straight throughlines that screenwriter Steve Zaillian and director David Fincher have guided through their adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

A minor character in Dragon Tattoo describes two elder white men in the film as “the old Sweden and the new,” but for me this line refers more to Blomkvist and Salander. Yes, Blomkvist – 40ish, urbanized, and a marvelous wuss – is now the “old Sweden,” while Salander – 20-something cyberpunk bisexual superhero – is the next generation, roaring to get out of its garret. This is what makes the Blomkvist/Salander pairing in Dragon Tattoo so compelling: these are two people who should not even be in the same room with one another, socially speaking, and yet in combination they find a genuinely adult kinship that makes each of them more than the sum of their parts.

Perplexing some and galling others, Lisbeth is not only the victim of sexual violence, but is also, independently, a fully sexual person, with needs and drives which she is more than capable of meeting. In American cinema, it’s easy to cast women as one of these or the other, but giving Lisbeth the ability to survive sadistic guardian Bjurman’s actions, and take equally sadistic revenge on Bjurman, and yet also insistently take Blomkvist as a pleasurable lover, makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Not me. There’s an obvious gag, late in the film, when Lisbeth insists that Blomkvist shut up about the case they’re investigating while she’s busy arriving at orgasm, but it underscores the onscreen couple’s most important genre coup de grace. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth is James Bond, and Blomkvist – played by James Bond – is the bimbo.

But when Lisbeth asks Mikael “may I kill him?”, I don’t see a girl asking permission of a man; I see a character asking someone whose opinion of her has come to matter, whether doing what she considers to be the natural course of action will make him dislike her. It’s Lisbeth – who, until this point, was socially withdrawn enough not to think about such things – asking her only friend, “Is this right?” She does this because whether or not Mikael dislikes Lisbeth has come to matter to Lisbeth, and by asking, Lisbeth exposes vulnerability for the first time. This single line marks the moment when Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, the old Sweden and the new, meet in the middle and understand that they are on exactly the same page: someone’s gotta go kill the fuck outta that Martin Vanger.
-BROWN

So what was it about Black Widow? As I stated in my review, I don’t feel like Joss Whedon and Scarlett Johannson – writer/director and star of The Avengers, respectively – really “solved” the character; her “red ledger” speech sounds like warmed-over Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and her relationship with Clint “Hawkeye” Barton never coheres into a strong enough story point. Widow’s role in The Avengers, on paper, doesn’t seem to hold up to the more instantly crowd-pleasing superheroics of Iron Man, Thor, or The Hulk. So why, then, does the Black Widow occupy such a large part of my fond recollections of all that was good and great about The Avengers?

In a word, agency. Black Widow is of course herself literally an agent, but she also demonstrates – throughout The Avengers, without a single moment of exception – remarkable freedom from the sort of agency-hampering clichés that routinely surround the female leads of just about every single action movie ever. Black Widow is not a love interest. She is not an instigator of messes that other people then have to get her out of. She is not abused or raped for the thinly-veiled purposes of inciting her (male) counterparts’ ascendance into true heroism. Her skills and abilities as part of the Avengers team are never questioned, verbally or otherwise, by anyone. And she is not a member of the titular collective of superheroes for any reasons beyond her own chosen ones. In other words, for Black Widow, in her Avengers version, is there because she should be, and her femaleness simply never comes into it. Black Widow is a feminist statement by virtue of not being one: she is the first citizen of Joss Whedon’s long-imagined world where articles like this one don’t need to be written.

Black Widow is, of course, the subject of one of The Avengers’ most talked-about incursions, a two-word slap of profanity so unabashedly satanic that one presumes the only reason the MPAA allowed the phrase “mewling quim” to land in a PG-13 movie is that the voting body, historical dullards that they are, simply have not heard of the word. (My old high school English teacher, who was in every sense of the word a great mentor and friend, once held forth to his entire assembled class on the disproportionately excellent vulgarity of the word quim, which has passed so far into obscurity that one can nearly employ it in regular conversation again with impunity.) That the expletive should come at the very apogee of one of The Avengers’ best sequences – in which Loki squares off against the Black Widow in his prison cell – is delightful; that Widow should then immediately reveal that she has, in fact, outsmarted Loki – the God of Lies! – cements the character’s preeminence in Whedon’s otherwise even-handed ensemble. I have no proof of it, of course – and I do not discount his genre-defining work with Bruce Banner, or Tony Stark – but I suspect that Joss Whedon took The Avengers assignment, at least in part, so he could see that smile on Black Widow’s face, as she strode away from Loki and out of that room.
-BROWN

Black Widow is the not only highly empowered role for Ms. Johannson in 2012, with Johnathan Glazer’s Under The Skin on the way before the end of the year. Based on the first novel from Scotsman Michael Faber, it sees a unique female predator named Isserly using sex (and large mammaries) to gather male victims who fit a certain robust body type as … well, I’m not going to spoil it for those who’ve not read the novel (which I might add is quite excellent, if initially very opaque.) Suffice it to say that Isserly is both a victim and an empowered figure whose journey into empathy grounds the grisly subject matter at hand. In a mash-up of horror, science fiction and morality play, Under The Skin is a unique beast of a story that turns the entire notion of the ‘femme fatale’ and the ‘sex-alien’ (think Species‘ “Sil” or Splice‘s “Dren”) on its ear. It remains to be seen just how faithful Glazer is going to be to the novel and even perhaps the character. It is notable that females are practically trophies in Sexy Beast and poor Anna in Birth is emotionally manipulated and pretty much has her psyche crushed when she comes vis-a-vis with the ghostly embodiment of her man resurrected as a 9 year old boy. Nevertheless, I am willing to throw it as a potential cherry on the top of the large pile of films that makes our collective case for 2012.
-HALFYARD

(with contributions from Marina Antunes, Matt Brown, Kurt Halfyard, Jandy Hardesty, and Bob Turnbull.)

One final thing. Because there was no obvious place for it elsewhere. In the spirit of this piece, below is the patron saint of this new era of Women on Film from 1996, the hero of the instant classic American-noir Fargo, Marge Gunderson.

Postscript: Yes, Joss, we will all stop asking that damned question now.