film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: BRWC

  • Blood Car – Review

    Blood Car – Review

    Let’s start by talking about the basic premise of Blood Car. In the not too distance future Petrol (or Gas) has reached astronomical prices which has driven the western world off the road.

    Archie (Mike Brune) a primary school teacher in middle America is working on a new form of fuel when he makes a shocking discovery = human blood can act as a replacement for petroleum.

    The inventor of the Blood Car of the title soon finds his new mode of transport drawing a great deal of attention from locals Denise (Katie Rowlett) and Lorraine (Anna Chlumsky) as well as the shady ‘government’.

    What follows is a bizarre black comedy which at its best pokes fun at the limited resources at the film makers disposal and at its worst is simply cringe worthy.

    A weird love triangle motivates Archie as he continues a killing rampage in order to keep his precious car running. Rowlett and Chlumsky play their parts well although both local tart (for want of a better word) Denise and nice geeky girl Lorraine are thinly drawn stereotypes at best.

    Brune delivers an awkward and at times OTT performance that doesn’t always hit the mark but the actor comes into his own in the final few scenes as Archie’s world inevitably crashes around him.

    At times the film plays like Napoleon Dynamites twisted cousin and at others it is a dark, gory horror. The ending of the film is also oddly dark and doesn’t quite fit with the light hearted tone.

    A muddled mixed bag Blood Car never quite lives up to its horror B-movie premise. If viewers are in the right frame of mind however, this could provide a great deal of fun.

  • Some Reflections On Tarun Thind’s ‘English’

    Some Reflections On Tarun Thind’s ‘English’

    In every instance of human interaction, of communication, there exists the possibility of violence, the potential for it.  Little, if anything, is needed by way precipitating event, because the undercurrent of every unconsciously experienced moment of one’s life is constantly at tension against the undercurrent of every unconsciously experienced moment of everyone else’s life—there is an unavoidable weight and stress of invisible circumstance inside of which everyone is immersed.

    So often, the few moments where conscious regard could be given to a circumstance one is participant in go by the wayside.

    Tarun Thind’s short film English is an exploration of these flits of conscious regard—of moments that could result in either mere thoughtless reactions or in empathetic communications, these two options separated from each other by a hair’s breadth. It is a film built of the constant rearrangement, the inversion after inversion of circumstance and perception in which all of the potential for violence bubbles and bubbles while at the same time eyes dart looking for some reason to not let the final eruption out.

    The eyes, specifically, belong to a young man named English, played with brilliant understatement by Leon Wander. They are eyes both feral and timid, and they are eyes that seem finely tuned to pick up on the subtlest vibrations in what they observe—this quality at once their power and their potential threat.

    English is a film of what could be considered little incident, at first glance, but this is part of the deceptiveness it requires—that is, to announces itself too soon, to be ready to brandish its technique would be the very thing it, as art, seeks to caution against, in life.

    It is the precise control over atmosphere and suggestion that gives English its uneasy verve. The characters seem to be in an endless flux, the camera eye, by mere attitude, focus, movement, keeping the roulette of Potential Victim/Potential Victimizer always at spin. And underneath of this all, a sense of giddy, even irreverent philosophy seems to be at play.   I was reminded of Dogville and Funny Games while just as much I was reminded of Down By Law or an episode of Louie.

    For example, we open on a youth observing a woman packing belonging into her car, the youth’s eyes tightening, his hand gripping an object unknown inside his sweatshirt pocket. The camera makes us voyeur, makes us antsy for the confrontation, for the collision of the unassuming (the woman) and the calculating (the youth), the very aspect and duration of shot, of position of camera eye emanating a sense of impending criminality that audience is rather conditioned to expect. Indeed, I would personally go so far as to say the shot is designed to linger and break in such a way as to have the audience understand that confrontation is what is largely desired by them.

    And as the film progresses, the repeated release of tension from each “close call” seems meant to reinforce and bloat the desire for the next, more potentially violent outburst.

    In the world, it might be said, people don’t observe each other, ever, just for the sake of observing each other—we observe for the sake of attack or defense. English seems to embrace this, and does so in presenting moments-out-of-the-banal so deliberate and individual it almost seems they have no need to exist—the playing field the films sets up for its confrontations is one comprised of moments and circumstances most people would forget about by the end of the day if they had lived through them without incident. The film suggests an absurd, but entirely undeniable, sense of isolation and alienation within a world overcrowded and, in this world, suggests that violence, perhaps entirely, is what comprises everything normally unregarded, suggests that any person might, at any moment, be set upon and that every person, in their core, knows this as Imperative Number One.

    Of course, no incident results from the youth’s vigil over the woman, or none of conscious consideration—a harmonica drops to the pavement, the youth taking it up and going on with his day.

    And the films proceeds in just this fashion—incidents that are poised for obvious confrontation pivot on a dime, objects are given suggested weight only to have these suggestions rotate until they fully invert.

    The object gripped in the youth’s pocket, for example?

    We are given three lead-ups to suggest it is perhaps a gun, maybe a shiv, but certainly a tool of some violence, so that by the time it is pulled out (a pencil, in fact) we are ready to immediately side with the man who asks “You think you’re going to hurt me with that?” as he snaps it in half.

    The pencil, a tool of communication, is of course quite intentional.

    What impacted me the most with this film, though, was the fact that it did not ever try to sum up in a neat (or even wry) way a simple philosophy. Or, better said, it let a philosophy be self-evident, it let no single character have dominion over enlightenment, posited no party as completely misunderstood any more than every party was completely misunderstood. There is an aggression present in the titular character English, as well as in his friend—we see this; there is a goading, volatile aspect to the homeless man, as much as there is a brokenness, a defeat—we see this; there is a rightful fear in the shop owner, a reason he reacts the way he does.

    And when most impactfully, this shop owner is confronted with what he thinks is actualization of his fear (a rotten bagged banana he believes to be a pistol is pointed in his face) his understanding is as profound, as proper, and as much his own as it is something revealed to him, brandished at him, made to instruct him.

    The philosophy of the film is: Observe. The philosophy is: Think. The philosophy of the film is: React in proper measure to only what is actually there.

    And this philosophy, as much as it is a potential balm for the stress and the tension of the world and a compass for navigating its waters, is also the cause of the unease, the wind that blows the waters calm to choppy as if by random caprice.

    ***

    Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

  • The Throes Of A Kickstarter, Starring Russ Russo

    The Throes Of A Kickstarter, Starring Russ Russo

    “wants eleven dollar-bills

    you only got ten”

    The throes of a Kickstarter, starring Russ Russo

    by Pablo D’Stair

    I finally met Russ Russo, in the flesh, after months and months of trading just the briefest exchanges via e-mail and twitter, finally met him about two weeks in to his Kickstarter for a film he had written called Heat Wave. I was out in LA on account of I had written an article concerning he and his co-star Natasha Alam for The Arts Magazine, was out there to meet up with folks about another article about another film, too.

    ***

    I didn’t know exactly what to expect of Russ, his e-mails usually succinct (I’d go so far as to say peculiarly so) and from which I had gleaned his honest love for the poetry of Blake, his seething hatred for much of modern culture—indeed he had been a long time coming around to seeing Kickstarter as anything but a form of egocentric-hipster-hoboism—and his very nearly naïve idealism about actual art being recognized somehow as not only that, by as that and by the masses, no less.

    He showed up at Bourgeois Pig, a coffee shop he had chosen for our get together and one that, due to a misunderstanding of LA roads, had cost me seventy dollars to get the seven miles to from my hotel by cab.  He ordered a tea, briefly lecturing me on its benefits as opposed to the coffee I ordered, and we sat out in front, shielded only barely from the bleat of the middle day sun and its reflection off the warped pavement’s burped cracks and coughed potholes.

    Mixed in with the somewhat random talk of this and that—my bringing up a short film I’d seen him in recently, he mentioning some good fortune a film writer friend of his had recently had, our debating our slightly-at-odds-to-each-other’s reactions and opinions to the Casey Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix film I’m Still Here—he would soberly bring up some of the reservations he had about the Kickstarter process and how it was somewhat dragging on his spirits, the uphill grunt it was turning out to be to get interest, let alone donations.  It was two weeks in and—due in part to some curveball setbacks and in part to it’s-just-the-way-things-go—the project was not even twenty-percent funded.  Already, everyone working on the piece had whittled themselves and their resources to the bone, at least as far as they were reasonably capable, and Russo brought up intricacies of the nit and grit of getting a film off, all more or less foreign to me.

    His mood was by no means sour, though, and we soon began an aimless walk around the area, me talking my usual mile a minute, he talking as much, but at more even a draw.

    One of the most surreal aspects of his current situation was that his involvement in a small parody film called Batman Maybe (a mash up of the hit song ‘Call Me, Maybe’ and the film The Dark Knight Rises) had turned him into something of an underground pop culture thingamajig—he was confronted with random postings of his likeness every day, his name appearing in small articles everywhere—an amount of attention, he laughed, that dwarfed all the attention toward him from all the stage and film projects he had participated in over the past decade put together, and an attention based entirely around the fact that he looked a lot like Christian Bale and did a funny head jiggle dance.

    I could see where that might be odd—seeing his name around variously in hundreds of places a day, while at the same time feeling like a failed panhandler Nowhere Man trying to eek out one dollar donations at a time for his passion project.

    Russo explained that—and he felt it must be the same for a lot of working actors and writers and directors he knew—the surreality had kind of lost its edge, though, now was something he felt familiar with and even—he seemed he might be admitting but not wanting to put so fine a point on it—that he had resigned himself to, found a sort of comfort in.

    He explained how only some few weeks previous he had been granted a general meeting with the casting agent for a popular primetime drama program on one of the major television networks. Showing up, he had been enthusiastically greeted, but only referred to as ‘Rockstar’ by everyone, patted on the arm, ushered into an office. The casting agent had proceeded to—with no ceremony—hold up various headshots of actors and to deliver scoffs and mockery, asking Russo—always saying ‘Right, Rockstar?’—for encouragement or input. Finally, Russo had been asked ‘When are you getting off tour?’ and it was only at that moment discovered that, due to a scheduling snafu, the agent thought he was meeting with the member of some popular music group and that Russo, the indie actor, would be his next appointment. This ended badly.

    Russo seemed to think it was all pretty much a laugh, though, going so far as to correct me that I need not boycott the program, as the casting agent had nothing to do with the actual show, probably never even watched it.

    This segued in to a discussion of indie film, in general, and to the idea of how it could be considered a triumph for a small film (he referenced on he had been in called Blue Collar Boys) to, after existing for three years as a finished product in a limbo, get a week long engagement on three screens in three cities, while at the same time a studio system film would be considered a miserable flop and ridiculed by folks far and wide for only holding the number five slot at the box office for two weeks before sliding down into the oblivion of ‘home video’ and grossing a mere worldwide hundred million.

    As to Russo’s own film, he explained how one of the interesting dilemmas he was facing was that in casting Kiowa Gordon and Bronson Pelletier as the two leads, he knew there was no choice but to somewhat court these actor’s devotees, all the while knowing they were devotees for no reason other than that the two young men had played sexy shirtless werewolves in the popular Twilight film franchise.  Russo—and for a moment I thought it might be a put on, except for the very somber way he kept taking breaths, like he was the one giving himself the hard time and no one else, we had even stopped walking, stood at the edge of a random lawn, the homeowner having a middle day beer and once or twice nodding at us—related that it made him feel uncomfortable to fundraise from an audience he knew was not the audience ideally suited to the material, that it felt a curious position to be in to even mention Twilight when his film was a Jarmusch-ian, slow burn existentialist riff more in the spirit of Waiting for Godot or Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality than anything either ‘pop,’ ‘in-the-now,’ or that would make young girls giggle.

    To lighten the mood, we generally bad mouthed all celebrities who took part in Siri commercials, up to and including Martin Scorsese—though in case anyone was listening (like the man drinking on his stoop) making sure to also point out all the masterful things these artists had done, it all the stranger they were endorsing an only marginally able-minded talking telephone.

    I admitted that I was fascinated by the particular mathematics of Kickstarter—the other film I was in LA to meet people about had utilized the platform as well, though the folks producing it were much higher on the food chain and had made the money they needed, lickity-split, and then some—how I had offhandedly researched that the combined starring cast of Heat Wave had something in the neighborhood of three quarters of a million followers on various social media, not to mention their personal friends and connections, meaning that to generate the twenty thousand dollars they were after it was either a matter of point-two-five-percent of the people each contributing one dollar or of every person contributing two-point-five-cents or something silly sounding like that, but here were Russo et al., stuck well behind the eight with the clock hands spiraling into a close knot.

    The thing with Kickstarter, in Russo’s experience, was that the money was hard to come by, but the participation poured in. His film had found its Director of Photography through contact related to the fundraising, cameras had been offered, dollys, cranes—during our conversation, even, I arranged it by telephone with my older brother to have not only his band provide some music, but my brother in turn had, within an hour, fifteen musicians willing to work on the project and two engineers willing to give time and studio space, all gratis, just for the sake of doing the thing.

    All of this, Russo said, it seems should make things easier, but the budget had already been set to account for not having many of these things, or at least not to the degree the opportunities had come up, that these donations were gravy, but did nothing for the core nutrition needed.  Russo had it that undertaking a feature length film project for no dough usually depended on random kindness—that or luck, or both—or else the film would be made but would have piece of shit music by a band who offered and the filmmakers had no choice but to include, every shot would be filmed as one take (and not for Paul Thomas Anderson effect) and other such amateurish horrorshow: the trick was to not overly compromise and say ‘Let’s do it for nothing and whatever it turns out to be is what it turns out to be’ while at the same time not to get overly caught up in a ‘money is always the answer’ mentality.

    “You can’t throw money and get talent…you throw money, you get people that are only after that money, picking it up…the thing is for the film to entice, the work to entice.” This, Russo said, was always his way of approaching projects, and that this philosophy had put him touch with enough likeminded folks to have brought Heat Wave to the page, now it was a matter of lifting it off.

     ***

    I had to break it to Russo inside of another week—his fundraising still only at about twenty-two percent of total needed—that The Arts Magazine had pulled some dipshit tactic, canceling on a photo shoot to accompany my article, so I had pulled the article from the publication, full stop (I was able to, through more random kindness, find a home for the article at the indie literature site Outsider Writers). Russo related some other woes that had come up concerning a misunderstanding about Norman Reedus being attached to the project and how the blowback from that had been putting a crimp in things.

    Meanwhile, his name continued to be posted everywhere, his image in foreign newspapers as ‘the Christian Bale look-a-like’ or sometimes even as ‘Christian Bale’ by organizations that did less fact checking, the Batman Maybe video a full on viral hit.  Even incorporating that little nugget of ‘fame’ into the fundraising seemed to have a kind of negative effect, he mentioned in e-mail at one point. It seemed people who would be thrilled to see him ‘look like someone else’ would think it awful of him to try to ‘cash in on that.’ This was something I honestly wondered what to make of: being made into a pop-culture in-reference and then chastised for pointing out that you have not only a past body of work, but future plans that don’t exclusively involve being remembered and joked around about by D-list celebs in another decade when VH-1 does a new I Love The…show.

     ***

    As of writing this, there are two days left in the campaign and some last minute boosts have come into play. A single donor going by the twitter moniker @Faileas said that they would donate $100 for every retweet of a message, up to $5000—this being met inside an hour, the donor doubling down (having given a 48 hour window) that each retweet in excess of the 50 needed to make the 5k would generate an addition $10 pledge.

    In essence, all that is left now is to hope that people are willing to spend enough of someone else’s money to make an artist work see light.

    Considering the conversations I’ve had with Russo, I wonder if the surreality is numb on him, still, or if his own coupling with the absurd is renewed with vigor, will perhaps make its way into his film of two young men descending into an ever rising heat to arrive, hook or crook, at whatever nowhere they might.

    ***

    TO SEE THE CURRENT STANDING OF THE PROJECT MENTIONED, VISIT: HEAT WAVE 

     ***

     Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

  • The Horror Of Understanding In ‘Pontypool’ And ‘The Interview’

    The Horror Of Understanding In ‘Pontypool’ And ‘The Interview’

    “Springes to catch woodcocks”

    The Horror of Understanding in Pontypool and The Interview

    by Pablo D’Stair

    Pontypool

    Though it is hard for me to imagine anyone having not seen the masterful Canadian horror film Pontypool, I have to face facts that it has gone unwatched by many. So to quickly summarize: set in a church basement radio station during the course of a single night, the film chronicles the outbreak of a virulent disease (transmitted by the cognitive act of processing language) as it spreads uncontrollably across the expanses of Canada and perhaps beyond.  Grant Mazzy (in a barnstorming performance by the always marvelous Stephen McHattie) is the recently relocated shock jock who serves as primary victim of and unwitting mouthpiece for the unexplained condition that is decimating the others locked in with him and the world outside. I hasten to emphasize that it is not merely inside “language” that the virus gestates (as I feel is often the misconstrued idea taken from audience to the film) but in the act of “understanding.” And therein the horror lies: the particular vulnerability is that the very act of attempting to understand what is happening leads to it happening, more swiftly, and the impossibility of ignoring an attempt at understanding is the predicament of the characters and, indeed, of the world at large, on display.

    To turn this most basic survival instinct into the monster needing to be survived is a thing of wide implication. After all, in not only situations where life is immediately at risk, but in situations of more expansive sociological significance, the suggestion that “thinking” and “understanding” are villain strikes a very unique cord. Not only does it seem an act born of the devil to twist the purity of empathy (in all senses of the word) on its head, but to so deftly distort the very “nature of humanity,” which Thinking could be considered, into the impossible-to-subvert destruction of said humanity is…well, a drag to say the least. I am reminded of the predicament of the chimpanzee in Vernor Vinge’s Run, Bookworm (a story perhaps even less known than Pontypool) wherein in order to survive in the sense of “living” the poor thing must discard the very essence of what it values as life: intelligence.

    Horror cinema, at its best, always aims to implicate the “victim” figures, and in turn, the audience as much as possible, quickly dismissing the moot rhetoric of arguments about guilt or innocence and turning the hot light focus on the nature of Man-Writ-Large. Pontypool, through making villain not of some perversion of human thought (as is the typical thing to do, often to great effect, i.e. the Bad Guys always representing the extreme end of a spectrum and the Good Guys having to admit some germ of the same extreme in themselves in order to escape/survive/go on) but of the purity and rational-ness usually reserved as “antidote to the insane” (the film makes the effect of sanity far more catastrophic than that of its inverse) is a unique little poison pill.

    ***

    The most wonderful thing about The Interview is that it begins as a Kafkaesque horror of a perhaps-innocent man being strong armed by the police into an interrogation cell and accused of something he didn’t do and ends as an even worse Kafkaesque horror of a definitely guilty man being strong armed by the police into an interrogation cell and being accused of things he definitely, unrepentantly did do.  This is the same man, by the way (I beg pardon for my fatuous indulgence in that opening sentence) and one of my all-time favorite screen performances by a male actor (Hugo Weaving).  In a nutshell, the film is one of claustrophobic observation-inside-of-observation: the police observing the killer, other police observing the police observing the killer, the killer knowing the double observation is taking place, the two sets of police, per procedure, not allowed to give whiff of each other’s purposes, the one to the other.

    An example of the power of closed room set piece cinema (indeed the few scenes that do—as images accompanying the relating of past incidents—take place outside of the confines of the station/interrogation cell are more or less superfluous) the film is even more remarkable for setting the devastatingly absolute traps (for audience and characters) inside of semantics and subtextual remarks rather than in any of the usual big reveals, outing of bald facts, or irrefutable discoveries–think something along the lines of watching The Usual Suspects after knowing full well who Kaiser Soze is (only more so) or of watching The Game after knowing it’s all a game, both pieces of knowledge just making things worse and more alarming.  In the case of this vicious little film, the subtext and seemingly innocuous phrases all but make impotent the should-be-damning nature of a flat out confession—asking for a sandwich at a specific moment and not receiving it until another moment is revealed to be enough to overpower a full on, graphic description of a brutal and random homicide…or of twenty plus such homicides.

    The film focuses on the nuance of our nature to understand—how it is achieved and what the act of its achievement indicates of those in pursuit. “Induction and deduction—they still teach that?” the veteran interrogator asks of his less seasoned partner at one moment, putting the pin on the exact horror-show that is allowed to play out. Not simply a case of a little mistake (such as the misreading of Miranda rights) allowing a criminal to skate (as many other films and television programs often use to effects both mediocre and sublime) but instead a case of a procedure followed to the “T” subverted by the insertion of what would obviously be considered insignificant and random statements (these insertions calculatedly done by someone who understands the nature of the perfectly polished process and counts on its sheen for the easy slipping out) the film turns the desire for exactness and propriety into a goblin.

    What the film so deftly and horrifically points out is that the more specific and absolute the understanding is required (and desired) to be, the more its seemingly concrete nature turns subjective. A kind of absurdity-in-sobriety, it is a depiction of two sets of clear headedness, set to opposite balances of the scale, shown to each contain the elements necessary to make the device keep perfectly level, while at the same time make the table collapse beneath the measured weights.

    ***


    Pablo D’Stair     is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

  • The Fields – Review

    The Fields – Review

    After seeing his Father pull a shotgun on his Mother young Steven is sent to stay at his Grandparents farm. Mysterious happenings befall the family after Steven ventures into the surrounding fields.

    Tom Waits tells an on stage anecdote about people who sit in movie theatres and lean in to say “you know this based on true story right?”. His point being “as though that improves the film”. The Fields proudly claims to be based on a true story. Horror films based on true stories often prove to be the most terrifying of all; The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wolf Creek, Beyond the Sea.

    Things don’t start too promisingly. Firstly the title. The Fields in one way sounds vague, mysterious and perhaps riddled with evilness. On the other hand it just sounds like a nice spot for a picnic. Tara Reid’s name above the title also doesn’t inspire confidence. Since her peak in the late-90s her acting abilities (and seemingly her ability to speak without some kind of woozy drawl) have gone downhill despite that slight spike of brilliance in Alone in the Dark. Pleasantly surprising then to find her somewhat believable as a put-upon wife and mother. Plus her role is essentially little more than an extended cameo.

    The real stars of the film are Joshua Ormond as the inquisitive little boy Steven and Cloris Leachman as his foul-mouthed Grandmother. Still going strong Leachman is still a deft hand at play slightly grotesque without going too overboard. She shows her Grandmother to be both an impatient nag and a caring matriarch who is not beyond passing gas to raise a smile. It’s the scenes between her and Steven where the film really comes into it’s own. In fact the “horror” aspects of the film could have been left out in favour of character drama and it may have worked better.

    The creepy events begin after Steven ventures out into THE FIELDS despite his Grandmother forbidding him. He comes strange things before running foul of drugged hippies. Admittedly it is nice to see crazed hippies making a come back as movie monsters, it gives the film a strange sense of nostalgia. Tension begins to build as the family are gently terrorized by the un-seen hippies over the course of many nights leading to an eventual semi-car chase through the fields. Although never properly seen or any reasons as to why, we are definitely dealing with hippies.

    Directors Mattera & Mazzoni should be applauded for attempting to slow the pace down a little. Their approach is to give only a little away each time something spooky happens. It’s a refreshing change of pace to many of the music video inspired horror films of late. Unfortunately the scares are so sparse and so infrequent that it renders the film ultimately quite dull. The plotting of the film could also have used some work. The film opens with Steve’s Father (Faust Checho) threatening his Mother with a shotgun. It’s only in the last 20 minutes that the characters re-appear to tie up the plot strand.

    The film looks good, but with little in the way of scares it’s main reason for watching is Cloris Leachman’s spirited performance. Hopefully with some better material for their next picture directors Tom Mattera and David Mazzoni can pull off something interesting.