“What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?” The affecting spirit of Cloud Atlas was palpable last night as Fantastic Fest unveiled its second Secret Screening — the ambitious sci-fi adaptation — with Lana and Andy Wachowski (“Formerly the Wachowski brothers, now Wachowski Starship,” quipped Andy) making a rare public appearance.
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The filmmaker-critic relationship has always been complex — as demonstrated last weekend with hearty debate and even more heartfelt punches in the epic Joe Swanberg-Devin Faraci throwdown, henceforth known as the Mumble in the Jungle — but Sunday night, Looper director Rian Johnson and journalist Aaron Hillis united in sweet synergy to drop a rousing rendition of Weird Al's Kinks-meets-Star Wars classic "Yoda." I wish I had a futuristic time machine to take us all back to relive the moment with our younger selves, but this YouTube video capturing the entire number should suffice.
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The new Universal Soldier picture, the latest in the series about genetically-modified supermen raging against their government creators, is a curious exercise in cognitive dissonance; here you have an action flick high on gory, bone-crunching slicing and dicing and kicking and punching — everything star and Ben Affleck doppelganger Scott Adkins (Undisputed II and III) can possibly do to evoke oohs and aahs in 3-D in the serious-faced, beefy fashion of his '80s and '90s predecessors — and yet director John Hyams didn't sound completely delusional this week at Fantastic Fest when he said his UniSol fourquel was influenced by David Cronenberg, Michael Haneke, and (yes, I see it, kinda!) even art house provocateur Gaspar Noe.
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There's no film festival quite like Fantastic Fest, as the annual Austin event proved Monday night when festival awards were handed out in a rollicking ceremony in which winning filmmakers accepted their prize by receiving a stein/trophy filled with beer. In an awards show filled with chugging winners and festival guest/presenter Doug Benson toking on his beer alternative of choice, Kristina Buožytė's sci-fi drama Vanishing Waves nearly swept the feature competition while Adrián García Bogliano's Here Comes The Devil won its entire category and the kid-battle pic I Declare War took home the Audience Award. Full winners inside!
Hitman Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confronted with his future self — in the form of a time-traveling Bruce Willis — in Rian Johnson's Looper, the writer-director's third feature and one of the freshest original science fiction tales in years. Before debuting the September 28 release at Fantastic Fest over the weekend, Johnson spoke with Movieline about the pre-Brick short script that gestated into Looper, the film's dark streak and the 1970 soul ballad that serves as "the heart of the movie."
It's hard to say who really won, or if nobody won, or if everyone won last night when filmmaker Joe Swanberg (LOL, Hannah Takes The Stairs) and Badass Digest critic Devin Faraci took their creative differences to the boxing ring at the Fantastic Debates, an annual Fantastic Fest highlight that combines traditional debate with actual fisticuffs. Technically, their topic of debate was "Mumblecore is catshit and is giving a bad name to independent films," though given Swanberg's position as the micro-indie movement's poster child, the fight got personal as soon as it began.
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It's not after every interview that you stand up to leave and then your subject drops a bomb that changes how you see them, but at Fantastic Fest anything goes. So I was amused when, after talking opening night selection Dredd 3D (in theaters nationwide on Friday), lower jaw acting, and Indiana Jones baby names with actor Karl Urban, he mentioned he'd read my stuff. "Even the one where you said I have no charisma," he laughed. Mea culpa, Karl.
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Sweeping into Austin to present Fantastic Fest’s opening night film Frankenweenie in his signature tinted glasses, director Tim Burton extolled the virtues of one of his most favored art forms: Stop-motion animation. “It’s such a beautiful, rarified medium,” said Burton, who returns to many of his roots — stop motion, black and white film, monster movies, macabre kids tales, and his own 1984 short film of the same name, about a boy who brings his beloved dog back from the grave — in the feature-length October release.
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The World Premiere of The Collection will take place at the upcoming genre-lead Fantastic Fest, taking place in Austin, TX September 20 - 27. Starring Josh Stewart (The Dark Knight Rises), Emma Fitzpatrick (The Social Network) and Christopher McDonald (Requiem for a Dream, which LD Entertainment will open in theaters in late November. Fantastic Fest announced 26 new titles for its upcoming event.
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The genre/action/foreign film spectacular that is Fantastic Fest is my favorite festival of the year, and not just because you might catch a Hobbit-on-Hobbit boxing match or impromptu celebrity karaoke or see the lady next to you faint from shock inside the theater in the span of a few glorious days at the annual Austin, TX event. Take a look at the latest wave of programming for next month's Fantastic Fest (September 20-27), including screenings of Rian Johnson's Looper, the horror omnibus The ABCs of Death, Jean-Claude Van Damme (in 3-D!) in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, and more gloriously insane-sounding films from around the globe. Tree boobs, anyone?
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A Very Movieline Thanksgiving continues! Like Louis Virtel and Julie Miller, I'm quite grateful for the cinematic discoveries that came my way in 2011. Raise your glass along with me as I give thanks to five of the movie-related things that kept me going this year, including the sweet sounds of the Baby Goose, the best film fest-karaoke super fun time of the year, and -- yes -- Tyler Perry.
Laurence R. Harvey (not to be confused with Laurence Harvey, the late Oscar-nominated Lithuanian-British actor) made an unusual debut on the world's stage when a close-up of his face, sweaty and bug-eyed, was released as the first image from Tom Six's depraved sequel The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). Meeting the British stage veteran -- and, yes, one-time children's television performer -- on the red carpet at Fantastic Fest, Movieline was pleasantly relieved to find that Harvey is far from his disturbing alter ego, the put-upon Human Centipede-worshipping drudge Martin, who commits unspeakable acts upon fresh victims in the new film. But does his mother know what he's been up to?
I'm not a huge supporter of remaking great foreign films; the trend runs from enticing (Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) to unnecessary (Let Me In). But because it's inevitable that Hollywood will keep borrowing ideas from the outside world -- and since the aptly named Fantastic Fest played host to so many of them over the past week -- here are five international offerings I could see studios attempting to re-envision. Let's just hope they don't muck it up.
There was an inkling around town that Fantastic Fest's secret screening Wednesday would turn out to be Paranormal Activity 3, what with the viral VHS tapes surfacing in Austin this week and the seemingly perfect timing for the horror sequel, which hits theaters nationwide on Oct. 21. By the time the surprise world premiere was confirmed to a packed audience at midnight on Wednesday, it was a surprise many folks saw coming. So how did Paranormal Activity 3 measure up to its predecessors -- and what does it mean that it doesn't match up at all with its recent trailer?
Genre fans already know Kevin Sorbo for his long-running stints on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Andromeda, two shows for which he's earned international stardom on the small screen, and in recent years the erstwhile Hercules/Dylan Hunt has branched out by adding Christian flicks to his resume. But are audiences -- not to mention fans of his faith-based work -- ready to see Sorbo as the ultra-violent, masochistic lady-hunting sociopath he plays in P.J. Pettiette's horror satire Julia X 3D?
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