Blogcritics Author: Pat Evans

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Movie Review: Lunacy

Pat Evans — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 03:53:45 EST

There is something a little sad about finding that a favorite director has produced a work that is so off-putting that one would have to think twice before choosing to watch it again. Such is the unfortunate problem I have with this 2005 movie (not yet on DVD) from veteran Czech writer/director/animator/puppeteer Jan Svankmajer.I have been a big, big fan since I first saw his 1988 riff on the Alice in Wonderland story, Alice, with its mix of live action, animated toys, and tumbling everyday objects. So I sought out his short animations, which are amazing, and was similarly taken with his full-length feature films: Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), and most recently Little Otik (2000). Despite the occasional blackness of these tales, one also found a certain playfulness, which is totally missing from his newest film. Perhaps as one grows older one also grows more cynical and pessimistic, and this great talent is now 72. The movie begins with a voiceover introduction from Svankmajer himself, explaining that we are about to watch a horror film "with all the degeneracy of the genre," inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade. References to both, but particularly the latter, are discernible throughout the movie. However, in no way is this a horror film in the traditional sense. Rather it is a philosophic exposition on how the madness in our world can only be dealt with by brutal force.The first of the two main characters is a rather simple young man, played by Pavel Liska, whose mother has just died in the insane asylum at Charenton and who has nightmares about being locked away himself. The other main character is a more worldly man, referred to only as the Marquis, played by Jan Triska. While we appear to be in the modern world, the Marquis seems to exist in another era as well. He wears old-fashioned clothes, has a courtly manner (on the surface), and gets about in a horse-drawn carriage in the same time and space as buses and motorcars.After a night spent at the Marquis's castle, with its sacrilegious rites and a strange retelling of Poe's premature burial, the Marquis convinces Liska to voluntarily enter an asylum to help cure his fears. There he encounters a young woman whom he had observed at the previous night's orgy, purportedly the daughter of the head doctor.However, it soon becomes clear that she is working under duress and that the lunatics have taken control, with the Marquis's assistance. The real doctors are tarred and feathered shadows locked away in the basement and the young man helps set them free. Yet they appear as demented as the staff they have replaced and they advocate punishment as the panacea for all ills. By the end of the film one can no longer tell just who are the madmen and which, if any, of the characters are sane.The action is punctuated throughout by the most disturbing animations of fast-moving, encroaching meat, animal tongues, and eyeballs that I have ever seen; it was seriously sickening enough to turn the most avid carnivore into a vegetarian. I can't begin to suggest what Svankmajer was saying here, unless he is implying that we are all nothing more than meat to be ground up and spit out by the modern world. Whatever, it was dead upsetting and depressing.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

Movie Review: Taxidermia

Pat Evans — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 22:27:50 EDT

A few years ago I discovered the 2002 movie Hukkle, which was the first feature-length film from Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi. I was enchanted by this virtually dialog-free film which relied mainly on ambient sound and largely on the recurrent noise of hiccups. Set in an idyllic farming community, the viewer gradually becomes aware of nasty doings behind the simple facade, with one or more murderers at large. It is a film that encourages repeat viewings, if only to get a better grip on the underlying sense of unease.When I learned that Palfi's sophomore feature Taxidermia was showing at the London Film Festival, I immediately booked tickets. However I was in no way prepared for the body horror on display. The opening sequence sets the pace for what follows. Someone is toying with a candle flame, exploring the heat next to different parts of his body -- his chest, his arm, his mouth. When the camera pulls back, we see him lying flat on his back with the flame shooting upwards from his erect penis. That's not something you see every day, nor was the rest of the film.The film focuses on three generations of men in three periods of recent Hungarian history. It opens on a lowly army orderly stationed at a bleak outpost to look after his commanding officer, his wife, and daughters. Vendel is an ugly and forlorn soul with a harelip, played by Csaba Czene. When he is not fetching and carrying for his martinet master, he spies on the girls in their bath and indulges in more and more outrageous mastrubatory fantasies -- some funny, some poetic. When he finally lays his superior's wife, he gets his head blown off for his effrontery. However when a babe is born with a pig's tail, the child is accepted as one of the family, once the offending appendage is hacked off.Fast forward to the height of the communist era to the grown child, Kalman. He is now a hefty chap played by Gergely Trocsanyi and a competitive speed-eater, coached by his "father". We are not talking here of little Japanese ladies who can consume 30 hotdogs in 15 minutes, but of huge, fleshy men who attack troughs of slop and who wish that their sport could receive Olympic recognition. The hard part to watch is what happens between "courses" in these eating competitions, when the contestants withdraw to copiously regurgitate what they have just stuffed into their guts, before starting all over again.Kalman is in love with an equally obese female champion eater. Eventually they marry, but at the wedding feast she is roundly rogered by one of her husband's cohorts. Nonetheless the newlyweds go off on their jolly honeymoon. When Kalman discovers that she is pregnant, he is overjoyed even if the viewer realises that the child, like the previous generation's, will not be his own. Still the pair frolic merrily and even resume their competitive eating until the child is born. They just can not understand, however, why he is so small and sickly.That child grows up in modern Hungary to become a taxidermist. A slim nonentity played by Marc Bischoff, Lajoska lives to stuff animals, rather than stuffing his genitals or his stomach. His mother has departed the scene, but his father, whom he looks after, is now an obscene mountain of flesh, stranded in his oversized chair, training gigantic scary housecats to eat competitively. When the father and son argue, Lajoska storms out, leaving his nasty dad at the mercy of the cats with pretty graphic results.Believing that he must make his own footnote in history, the son decides to produce the ultimate work of the taxidermist's art by literally stuffing himself while alive by the same methods that he uses on dead animals. I will omit the gory details on show before he achieves his desired end, so do try to repress your own imaginations here.The movie closes at an art exhibition in a Hungary to come, where the crowd can admire the metamorphosed father and son on display. Creepy!The film is still playing the festival circuit and is not yet available on DVD. When it does come out in that format, I can forsee major censorship problems and restricted ratings. However, assuming it survives with its highly original vision intact, I am sure it will find its own audience. Mind you, they will need a strong taste for the bizarre and cast-iron stomachs.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

DVD Review: The Fantastic Planet

Pat Evans — Wed, 4 Oct 2006 16:01:19 EDT

I had not watched this 1973 animated film for a while, so its all-regions release on DVD by a British label was very welcome. A Czech-French co-production by director René Laloux, it is something of a landmark film in its Sci-Fi sensibilities and its appeal to an adult audience. While Japanese anime has now claimed this market, it is important to recall who was here first.The original title of the film is La Planète Sauvage and the movie tells the tale of a world inhabited by large cerebral blue folk (Draags) who keep some tiny human-like creatures (Oms) as pets, but consider wild Oms as vermin to be periodically culled. We follow the story of one such Om, Terr, who is taken as a pet after his mother is killed and raised as a toy by a young Draag. He manages to learn in the same manner as his Draag captor: via a device which feeds knowledge directly into the brain -- though the learning in question is largely gibberish to the audience. When, as a teenager, his captor tires of him and turns to meditation, the Draags' main pastime, Terr escapes, taking a learning device with him.He moves into the wilderness of the surrounding park where he finds several Om colonies who are uneducated and vulnerable. Despite their initial suspicions, his ability to read saves many of them during the next cull. He supervises their education and eventually their rebellion. At first, they attempt to establish their own land on the nearby satellite, known as the Savage Planet. They quickly find that this is where the Draags travel with their meditating bubbles. They land these bubbles on the top of giant headless statues, which then mate in order to renew the Draags' will to live. There can be no safe Om settlement here, so they return to their homes and eventually forge a 'live and let live' world with their former oppressors.The animation is unusual by Hollywood or Japanese standards and has the psychedelic feel of its period -- much in the vein of Yellow Submarine or Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python. Largely, the animation is achieved by moving paper cut-outs across a background. Despite this simple-sounding technique, the movie is full of fantastic images and creatures which befit a fantastic world.Also included on the British Release DVD (available at Amazon.co.uk, not Amazon.com) are two animated shorts from Laloux, which is wonderful because his body of work is small and not always easy to find. The first of these shorts, Les Escargots, is a very scary story about a farmer watering his crops with tears and creating giant snails who proceed to destroy his world. The second, Comment Wang-Fo fut Sauvé, is the retelling of an old Chinese tale: a master artist is hated by a Han ruler because the world can never be as beautiful as the artist's paintings. The artist ends up escaping his fate through his art.Laloux deserves to be far better known, and it is unfortunate that he did not leave more of his creations with us before he passed away in 2004. I've not seen one of his later films, Gandahar, but it is now on my list of films to chase down.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

Movie Review: September 11 (2002)

Pat Evans — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 10:39:17 EDT

A quick search shows the 2002 film September 11 has never been reviewed on this site, which certainly surprised me. I've known about it since its release. Because it was partially British-financed, I half expected it to turn up last week amongst the various 9/11 programs, but it didn't. I set it to watch off German television. With the help of a Sight and Sound summary, I managed to follow it. Since it was filmed in a number of languages, it was shown with subtitles rather than the usual annoying German dubbing.It left me feeling so very, very angry, not so much regarding the event itself, but what some very well known filmmakers had made of it. I could well understand its never showing on television in the States, but I could be wrong.French producer Alan Brigand came up with the wheeze that he would approach eleven leading directors from around the world and ask each of them to film a segment lasting exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame -- depicting their take on the disaster. In order of their presentation, I will attempt to briefly summarise the results.From Iran, young Samira Makhmalbaf portrayed a teacher attempting to describe the day's events to a group of young Afghan refugee children who had no concept of towers or airplanes or any understandable motive to take part in a minute's silence.French director Claude Lelouch used the occasion as a mawkish reconciliation between a deaf woman in New York who is oblivious to the events being shown on her unwatched television and her dust-covered returning lover.Egyptian director Youssef Chahine used an actor to play himself and viewed the occasion as an opportunity to recall the ghosts of an American soldier killed in Beirut some years before and a young Arab suicide bomber, as well as to catalog a dossier of American-inspired deaths and invasions over the years.From Bosnia, director Danis Tanovic had the rather muted story of how a monthly march by the women of the community commemorating a 1995 massacre was not postponed by the news from New York.The jolliest mediation came from Burkino Faso and director Idrissa Ouedraogo. A young schoolboy with an ailing mother thinks he has spotted Osama bin Laden. With his pal, he plans how to spend the 25-million dollar reward.From Britain, our own dear Ken Loach gave us an exiled Chilean poet, Vladimir Vega, meditating on the day and the same day in 1973 when President Allende was murdered by a CIA-financed military coup, starting a reign of terror in that country.The most pretentious entry was from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, which was nearly eleven minutes of black screen with various ambient sound occasionally showing brief shots of bodies falling from the towers and ending on a white screen with an Arabic inscription translated as 'Does God's light guide us or blind us?'From Israel, Director Amos Gitai focused on a street reporter trying to cover a bloody car bombing who gradually loses her feed to the station as New York takes over the news.Indian director Mira Nair told the purportedly true story of a Pakistani family living in New York whose son disappeared on 9/11, and whom everyone assumed was some kind of conspirator, until his remains were found at the site six months later. All of a sudden the people who readily condemned the family now treated them as having raised a hero.The most maudlin story, and something of an embarrassment, came from the only American entry and director Sean Penn. He showed Ernest Borgnine as a lonely old man, talking only to his dead wife, plodding on from day to day, living in the shadow of the towers. When they fell, his apartment was suddenly suffused with light and his dead plants miraculously sprung into vibrant life. No doubt some sort of allegory about hope and new beginnings -- but it just didn't work.The final and weirdest section came from 76-year old Japanese director Shohei Imamura and was set at the end of World War II with ostensibly little relevance to 9/11. A Japanese soldier returns home believing he is a snake and is caged; when he escapes, he slithers down to the river and drowns. Yeah, war is hell!With friends like these, you don't need enemies.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

Movie Review: Un Soir, Un Train

Pat Evans — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:22:38 EDT

The National Film Theatre in London is currently running a season of so-called lost films shown at the London Film Festival over the last fifty years, favorably received at the time, and then disappearing into obscurity. Since most of the films featured are not available on either video or DVD, this seemed a good opportunity to broaden my horizons.The first of the two films I selected, Trans-Europ Express, proved a huge disappointment. Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet of Last Year in Marienbad fame, it was, in a word, pretentious and worse yet, not very good. The director himself played a director journeying on a train with two colleagues and testing ideas for a would-be scenario of a smuggler on the Paris-Antwerp run; these, in turn, were acted by Jean-Louis Trintignant who seemed nearly as lost as the audience. I suppose this was some sort of conceit of the director's power over his actors, but I have seen the same concept more successfully deployed elsewhere.I was therefore not looking forward to the other train film I had chosen, although it had sounded promising. Dating from 1968, it was directed by Belgian Andre Delvaux and proved to be rather a mixed bag. It started slowly and somewhat boringly as we are introduced to Mathias, a linguistics professor (played by Yves Montand) in the heart of Flemish-speaking Belgium. He is in a loving relationship with handsome Frenchwoman Anne (Anouk Aimee), but she feels something of an outsider in his parochial world, especially as he avoids formalizing their relationship. After a meal, which he has carefully prepared for her, where he savors each oyster and each sip of wine, he needs to leave for an evening lecture at another university. On the way to the station they quarrel and she storms off; he is therefore pleasantly surprised when she joins him on his journey, even though he had discouraged this. So far, relatively straightforward, if a little puzzling -- especially as we are provided with flashbacks of a previous trip to England, which has little relevance to the plot, except to again present her as a stranger in his world, since she speaks no English.As the train travels through the countryside, we are presented with scenic tableau straight out of the Flemish old masters such as Brueghel and there is no denying the director has a painterly eye. However, in a complete and unexpected turn, the viewer next finds himself in the surreal world of the director's namesake, Belgian artist Paul Delvaux -- no relation as far as I know.Waking from a quick nap, Mathias sees all of the other passengers are asleep and there is no sign of Anne. The train has stopped in the middle of a muddy field and he is joined by two other passengers, an older professor whom he recognizes and a young man who was once one of his students. They disembark to try to discover the problem and watch aghast as the train pulls away without them.Stranded in the middle of nowhere, Mathias tells his companions of how he first met Anne and how he hopes she will not worry about him. Eventually they reach a town which seems deserted, one that well could have been painted by Paul Delvaux, until they eventually find a cinema full of people watching an unintelligible film of a skydiver in free fall. When that finishes abruptly, they follow the crowd to an unworldly inn full of people who seem to be speaking an unknown language and with whom they are unable to communicate. However, they are plied with exotic food and drink in much the same way as the meal Mathias had provided for Anne earlier. The young man is enticed into a wild dance with the inn's hostess and is soon joined by the other frenzied diners, much to Mathias' dismay; the older man has apparently disappeared.When the dancers stream from the inn, Mathias finds himself back at the train, which has been in a terrible crash, and he can no longer find an escape from reality in the supernatural half-world he has experienced. His colleagues are gone and he now knows that he has lost Anne as well.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

Movie Review: Pan's Labyrinth

Pat Evans — Fri, 1 Sep 2006 18:41:51 EDT

London's FrightFest is now in its seventh year and has earned a reputation for being amongst the best festivals for fantasy and horror. It's always held over the late August 4-day Bank Holiday weekend and even the most diehard fan can easily reach satiation point. Out of the possible twenty-four features, I only saw seventeen (plus various shorts and trailers) since I do like to eat, sleep, and unwind occasionally!Pan's Labyrinth was the opening attraction, but actually the fifth movie to be shown, and it was undoubtedly the fest's highlight. In fact, when it opens in the UK in November and the US in December, it deserves to be one of the year's highlights, and I can't urge you too strongly to make sure it is on your own must-see list, even if you try to avoid subtitled films. Directed by the Mexican Guillermo del Toro, it forms a companion piece with his earlier movie The Devil's Backbone focusing on the disastrous effects of the Spanish Civil War on youngsters. Young Ofelia, beautifully played by 12-year-old Ivana Baquero, travels with her heavily pregnant and sickly mother to join the latter's new husband, a captain at an outpost surrounded by rebels. The captain is played by Sergi Lopez. He is probably better known in French films of late, and he is one of the most complete bastards and martinets imaginable -- a devil of a man.To escape the horrors of her new life, Ofelia enters an Alice-like maze where she meets a faun who convinces her she is really a princess and tells her she must complete a series of tasks to fulfill her destiny. Rather than depend on CGI, del Toro uses the actor Doug Jones to play both the faun and the scary pale man whom she encounters later on. When you come to see the posters for this movie, you will recognize him as the one with his eyeballs in his palms! All of the fantasy effects are simply but strikingly done without spending the requisite millions of so many other recent films.Back in the real world, Ofelia's only ally is the feisty housekeeper played by Maribel Verdu, familiar to many buffs as the lust-object from Y Tu Mama Tambien. Hers is an extremely strong role and she proves to be as single-minded as both the captain and, ultimately, Ofelia.Del Toro was at the festival to introduce his film and to answer questions afterwards. He said he considers this film to be perfect, and I for one would not disagree with him. In between making Spanish language movies, he has also accepted the Hollywood shilling, but even with these there is much to admire. What he has created in this movie is an absorbing hybrid of the war, horror, and fantasy genres combined into a jet-black fable. Miss it at your peril.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

Movie Review: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Pat Evans — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:18:46 EDT

Every film buff should make some time in his or her life for watching trash cinema as a corrective to getting too immersed in pretension and worthiness. Apart from light relief, such films help a critic appreciate real quality on those all too infrequent occasions when it appears. So I am always prepared to leave my brains by the door, as long as I can pick them up again on the way out.It's been a while since I last viewed this cult gem directed by Stephen Chiodo (his sole directing credit) and produced by his two brothers. All three are still in the industry but somewhat down the food chain, mainly involved with special effects. It's the brightly told tale of giant clowns with scary teeth arriving in a small town to harvest its inhabitants by wrapping them in cotton candy/candy floss, so they can suck their blood through funny straws when they feel a little peckish. Clowns, like dolls, are pretty frightening presences, I think, to the easily unnerved and the characters in this movie who are tempted to react positively to them soon learn to their detriment otherwise.The clowns dispatch their victims by a variety of comedic means including popcorn-loaded guns (where the leftover popcorn grows into miniature clowns), shadow animals that spring to life to devour, and a surfeit of custard pies to bury the unwary. Despite the theme, it is not really a horror movie but more an amusing and affectionate throwback to the alien-threat films of the '50s. The film boasts a largely no-name cast apart from veteran actor John Vernon as the pig-headed local sheriff and old-timer Royal Dano as the first victim, but seeing that it was probably made on a shoestring budget, there would have been no point finding some better-known teens to defeat the baddies.What I like most about this film is its use of bright primary colors with none of the "let's film it in the gloom to make it really scary" ethos of so many other movies. Thinking about this I realized this is also why I have a soft spot for much of the Troma trash output -- you can actually see what is going on! Of course much of Troma boss Lloyd Kaufman's output is complete and utter rubbish, but in the right frame of mind, one can have a really good time with the first Toxic Avenger movies, Monster in the Closet, and even Rabid Grannies. (For the uninitiated, I'll write more on Troma on another occasion.)I also rewatched Freaked recently, a directing effort by Alex Winter of Bill and Ted fame, which definitely belongs in the trash category. He takes the lead as a bumptious personality who is turned into a hideous freak by freakmaster Randy Quaid to join his collection of oddities. Winter manages to get a cameo from his pal Keanu Reeves as a dogboy, which is probably not a highpoint in that actor's filmography. Truth be told, the film was terrible, but it did serve as a palliative to going back to my usual fare of classics and subtitled foreign features.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic

Movie Review: The Italian Straw Hat

Pat Evans — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:14:05 EDT

Rene Clair was one of the greatest French writer/directors with a host of classic films to his credit. He also had a lengthy sojourn in the United States, during which time he produced such immortal movies as "The Ghost Goes West", "I Married a Witch", and "And Then There Were None." I'm a new blogger to this site, but a compulsive film buff, watching 1000+ movies a year (believe it or not as Ripley might have said). I also have a growing list of films I want to view but have not yet managed to track. The above 1927 film, a stalwart of film societies, was among them and I finally saw it a few days ago (not on DVD, since like many worthy films, no one has yet invested in this title; it is however still available on video). Unfortunately when one anticipates an event so avidly, one often risks disappointment, and that is in fact the case here. As an ensemble comedy, this film definitely had its moments and its mainly gentle humor was vested in giving a number of the characters little bits of business like having too-tight shoes or a non-functioning ear trumpet, but for a silent film there were insufficient visual gags. Also, the main conceit went on far too long and was therefore stretched far too thin. The gist of the tale is a groom on the way to his wedding (the story is set in 1895) allows his horse to partially devour the eponymous bonnet. This compromises an adulterous married woman, and her paramour threatens to destroy the groom's apartment if the identical hat is not provided. He therefore spends the day trying to balance his marital duties with trying to find the elusive chapeau, without letting his wife or her extended family in on the problem. I can't quite say that hilarity ensues.

Pat Evans is a certified and probably certifiable film fanatic