Come on, Canada. Get your shit together. Who the cock would get offended by Triumph? What’s he gonna do, come up here and complement everyone? The whole point of the gag is that he’s like, a dog puppet, who insults people. It’s a “scandal” only slightly stupider than that about Don Cherry calling Europeans and Quebeckers “wimps” or whatever it was he said. Frankly, I’m offended by anybody who takes Don Cherry seriously. He’s the only person in the world who’s racist against “Europeans”! It’s sorta cute! It’s not like he went off about the Seven Jew Bankers who control hockey or something.
If you a complete master kung fu swordfighter, you must never look at your opponents. Or face them, unless you are spinning sideways like an airborne top, with swords flying everywhere. But be careful, you shouldn’t barely ever use your sword. In fact, if you are a real, like hardcore real swordfighter, you should avoid fighting in general. If necessary, fight your opponents in your mind. Because the pinnacle of swordfighting is not using a sword at all, don’t you see? Absolute next-level type sheer sword geniuses like myself have never even picked up a sword. And if you challenge me to a sword fight I will face away and down like a heartbroken android and inform you with only the slightest hint of superiority that I have already won.
See? Watch Hero, you might learn something. It’s Zhang Yimou’s attempt at tiger crouching Rashomon, with kung fu champs Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and the beautiful Zhang Ziyi. It’s very good. Beautiful with frequent wire-fight ass-kickings, just like life.
He’s in Toronto right now shooting weird Toronto-based episodes of his show, a ploy cooked up during the SARS crisis that I guess only came to fruition now. (A fruiting ploy? Mixmaster Metaphor!) Nonetheless he’s getting so much attention from press and mobs of fans alike that his amazed publicist said it appeared he was bigger than J-Lo.
I love this town.
The man-on-the-street interviews reveal a populace that is perfectly aware he wrote for SNL and the Simpsons, and they love him for it. Contrast that with J.Lo, whose artistic peak was stealing the Beatnuts’ “Watch Out Now”. Fucking A T-dot! That, coupled with the news that only 15% of Canadians would vote for Bush, makes me happy despite the asshole-in-sheep’s-clothing behaviour of the province’s new government right now.
I love this guy’s photos. If only he had a more Googlable name, like say Purposes L. Xylophonist, I might be able to dredge up more sites than this this this this this this.
I posted their latest mission over on the linx thing there, but y’all should really have a look at some of Improv Everywhere’s other missions. Hours of entertainment! The “Megastore” and “Moebius” ones are especially good. So who wants to start a Torontopia chapter?
On y‘s reccomendation I gave this film a good watching. It’s very, very, very, very, very, very good, and if I believed in “truth” I would call it a very true film. I especially love how quickly and obliquely the film establishes its premise – it does in 5 minutes what most films do in 30. Then, one is carried by acting so naturalistic it manages to make a densely poetic script sound realistic. It features one of the best ‘heartbroken drunk’ scenes ever, in which the lead actor asks “Did you ever see that? An animal make a mistake?” as a tear courses down his face. Almost everyone should watch this film.
This was shot for under half a mil and premiered at the Toronto Film Fest’s Midnight Madness program. Apparently the bidding war began before the film was halfway done. It was given a 2,000 screen release, and grabbed a gross domestic haul of $21-million.
There is no question that this film is bad. The question: is it bad intentionally or un-?
Is it a passable horror spoof or a really shitty, amateurish waste of time? To me, this revolves around the old man and the gun scene that happens maybe 15 minutes in. As it stands in the final cut, it’s one of those creepy, these-guys-could-get-scary-later inbred hick sort of scenes – until the end of the film, when the punchline is revealed, and you see it’s a joke. So the fraction of the scene in the first act gives no cue that the rest of the film should be taken as a comedy, quite the opposite. However, it’s easy to imagine an alternate cut in which the scene played out in full, cuing us to see the film as a spoof.
The only thing that matters is what’s on screen, however, so we must treat this thing as an unintentionally bad film, a film with so many basic comprehension problems it was basically unintelligible. Why is she canoeing away alone? Why is he shooting his own truck? Why do those hicks want to kill them? What’s the point of the surfer dude? Why are they cradling the infected friend whom they were shunning moments ago? Humans just don’t act like that, ever. But I must say I laughed ‘till I cried at the most specialest line ever, delivered straight: “He asked us for help. We set him on fire.”
Whoa. This is definitely worth checking out, if only to marvel at how a film like it got made – oh for the days of mainstream art porn, when Sir John Gielgud and a cumshot could be in the same film! (not his, thank god). McDowell-as-Caligula’s fancy thumbs up dance is a wonder to behold. As scandalous as it all seems, it’s mostly true, if we can trust the ancients’ testimony. Gore Vidal did a good job with the script, although watching a crazy guy fuck and/or stab people inevitably becomes tiresome past the two hour mark.
Apparently Brian Eno said this: “there isn’t a problem in the world that can’t be fixed by backing vocals or oyster sauce.”
Two picks up shortly after One ended. Ginger, dead, is now only a sort of guardian devil for her sister Bridgitte, who is busy injecting herself with wolfsbane – which turns out not to cure lycanthropy but only to postpone the transformation – while trying to avoid a fully-formed werewolf which follows her from town to town, looking to mate. When she is thrown into a group home to treat her ‘addiction’, she can postpone no longer. She befriends the resourceful 13-year-old Ghost, but before long the beast that has been stalking her has tracked her down. [/half-assed plot summary paragraph]
GS2 is a touch of a disappointment. It takes the franchise in a different and not entirely welcome direction, foregoing teen wisecracking and socializing and werewolves-as-metaphor in favour of junkie brooding with the odd wolf attack thrown in. Also, the monster has been divorced from the protagonist. In GS, it was Ginger herself who is the source of dread; in GS2 Bridgitte is mostly fine, and it’s the other, nasty fully transformed wolf who is intended to make us afraid. That’s not quite as compelling; and indeed in most uses the werewolf myth is about personal transformation and loss of control, about giving one’s self over to the unconscious beast; so to remove this is to go against the grain and turn the story into the traditional “I hope/kinda don’t hope that the girls stay away from the unspeakable monster” horror narrative. What’s more, ball-dropping occurs in respect to the metaphorical quality of the franchise. If there’s a metaphor in GS2 it’s addiction, but it’s not fleshed out in any meaningful way, which is a disappointment after GS so aptly matched wolves to menstruation.
On the flip side, the narrative moves along competently and the characters are better than most genre stereotypes. And, in the depressing sub-genre of horror franchise sequels, this is easily in the upper echelon. If the Canadian film industry – fuckit, the US too – could crank out flicks like this with regularity I’d rent at least one a week, and I’d see quite a few in the cinema to boot. Here’s looking forward to the simultaneously-filmed period-piece threequel, Ginger Snaps Back, due out in April.
sucks, but it does feature the shittiest wizard in the history of cinema. This fellow, who looks like a street maniac dolled up with a dainty cap and special shiny pointing glove, has his “magic” castle violated easily by Arnie and friends, and then is stabbed five minutes later. He gets two lines, total. And they talked him up for ages as the most fearsome wizard because of his magic program-related activities. That was a refreshing turn for the bizarre in a film that otherwise features too many scenes of walking or horseriding from one dreary locale to another, in what must be considered the wrong way to go about making your film appear ‘epic’.
Now that’s a damn fine picture. I’m a little embarassed to admit that this is the first Ozon film I’ve seen, but I hereby pledge to binge-view his other films, stat. It’s amazing what he manages to express visually, with a minimum of dialogue. At first, I wondered where the thrills were in this so-called thriller, but because of the nonstop nature of Ludivine Sagnier’s nakedness I was willing to look the other way. Then, it really picked up and it ends fabulously (although that seems to be a point of debate). I’m glad to see Hitchcock is alive and well and living in French cinema.
I have a soft spot for both the CIA and Irish guys with copious eyebrow hair, so logic dictated I give this film a try. I like plot twists, too, and the jacket said breathlessly “oh so many plot twists” something something yada yada. So I predicted plot twist #1 about halfway through the film and given the complete and utter lack of action, my brain had plenty of time to come up with some theories for what plot twists #2, 3, 4 might be… and then it ends? One plot twist? Somebody rent these clowns Ronin. A fucking Carrot Top movie has more plot twists than this asshole film. Oddly enough, despite the severe action deficit from which it suffers, it would be a decent, tense film if it had just one more freaking plot twist.
If you start thinking Lucas is a Cambellian visionary who made breakthrough anti-imperialist narratives into blockbuster entertainment by setting the Vietnam war in space, or if you start thinking covetously about his fabulous net worth, then go watch Howard the Duck. Phantom Menace has nothing on this bastard – everone has their Achilles heel, and Lucas’ has feathers. As the link says, “this movie is an insult to ducks.”
aka Zombi 2, aka Island of the Flesh Eaters. Great opening three shots, but then a lapse into a first act of languid, awkward 70s pacing. However the last hour or so is an unrelenting gorefest that puts most horror movies to shame. It’s all about the zombies – here’s hoping that’s the motto of some company I go on to found at a later date – and these ‘zombis’ are fabulous, especially the really old ones who have insects crawling around in their eye sockets. Mmmm! Plenty of explosively violent deaths, of course, and nary an attempted scientific explanation.
E-40 interviewed by Vice. Me, I’m not so sure. He also says he invented “you feel me?” in 1991, and that’s in Mad Max (1979). Maybe he was the first to recontextualize it in a hiphop context, but who cares about that? Me, I invented the acorn and the ability to cough. (via G-dog)
What is it with Gawker blogs (1, 2, 3) and the royal ‘we’? There’s only one of you, for fuck’s sake, and everyone knows it. The pretense of mainstream magazinehood – poof! It’s gone! Give it up! There’s only one of you!
I thought from the title that this film might be kinda funny, so-bad-it’s-good. Wrong again, Sankey.
Question: would this flick be as good without the novelty structure? I don’t really know: I loved the film, which completely rang true to me, but I’d need to see it twice to tell if the structure is in fact motivated.
This is basically an MOW with a fucking mindblowing performance by Theron. I had no idea she could act. As much as I hate the whole idea of Ugly-For-Oscar films like this, she really did a damn fine job. Nothing other than her performance is of interest, really – wait for video. Ebert needs to keep his pants on.
Gus Van Sant is up to some weird shit yo. Somehow, by practically vanishing as an auteur in any measurable sense, he delivered a bafflingly original film with Elephant. He was lost there for a while. Was he a Matt Damon team player (Good Will, Gerry), or maybe a poor-kid-with-brains feelgood storyteller (Good Will, You the Man Now Dog)? And then he vanishes behind a cloud of Hitchcock (Psycho rebake) never to appear again. I hear Gerry was good. Psycho is still a mystery to me, as is – to some extent – Elephant. (I’m hoping someone makes a school shooting film set in Middle Earth, “Oliphaunt”.) There doesn’t seem much point in analyzing it, it’s just there – it’s all surface, no depth. In a good way.
I liked it. Acting stylee. Classical direction from Clintster.
I will try and peel my Apple-zombie ass away from GarageBand for a moment to share some of the results, a song that samples my favourite online film in an attempt to express my fierce hatred for pornography.
y tells me this is considered by some to be the best Canadian genre film ever made, and that may be right. More importantly, it’s the first metaphorical reading of the werewolf legend that I know of. By that I mean it makes an attempt to understand what real-life issues the fantasy might be articulating, much as Coppola made Dracula about sex and STDs, or Habit reinterpreted vampirism as a metaphor for addiction. In Ginger Snaps’ case, lycanthropy is about puberty and menstruation (full moon, blood, hair where there was no hair before… natch). It’s very well-written. It’s very well made all-round, in fact; only the creature effects fell short. I look forward to the sequel – although director Fawcett and writer Karen Walton are no longer involved, it sounds pretty damn good.
Methinks Rodriguez is wearing too many hats these days: writer, director, editor, shooter, and scorer. I found the editing and possibly direction to be wack here: not only were many of the action scenes unintelligible, a lot of the plot was as well. It was definitely inspired by Tsui Hawk flicks, but he didn’t quite get it right. Talk about discontinuity. We get a shot of the street showing citizens rising up and repelling the military coup attempt; then a few shots of the action inside; next shot of the street and there’s no one out there! On the plus side, Depp is always fun to watch, and there’s some good humour here and there. All in all this is one of those films that sure isn’t boring, but it doesn’t mean anything or inspire in any way. Nor is it especially well made.
