Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

I only heard of [REC], the new Spanish horror film, by word-of-mouth and watched it for the first time before it was available on DVD, online, in eight different segments. I got together with about eight different people and we all crowded around my laptop to watch it in the dark. Despite the small, pixilated screen and the large group, the film still made a significant impression on everyone in the room.

Not too long after my first viewing of it, the American remake QUARINTINE came to Film Is Truth. To be fair, I watched that also and was (as I expected to be) greatly disappointed. Though the story tagged many of the same points, it just couldn’t be taken seriously and the acting was enough to distort the characters into people who I couldn’t really sympathize with, no matter what “horrific” events they were put through. Even the makeup jobs didn’t hold next to the original.
So I waited, in high anticipation, for [REC] to finally be released on DVD, to get the chance to see it again and spread the word. Although I was worried that it would somehow not be as realistic or as frightening when seen on a TV screen rather than a laptop, I had no need to be. This film is one of the pinnacles of new, foreign horror. Like LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, it takes an old favorite and refurbishes it into something refreshingly original. And it just so happens to be one of the handful of horror films ever to scare me.
Angela Vidal is our main character, a reporter for a late night TV show, who is filming at a fire department to get a first hand view of what the volunteers do. While most of the night is routine and quiet (setting an appropriate pacing for the film, one that continually builds to the end) they are soon called out to an apartment building where a woman was reported to be screaming in her home. When they arrive, it is first very unclear what the situation is, but the panic of the other tenants sets you on edge before you even know what you’re afraid of. Seen through the eye of the camera, and while other films have used this same technique (BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, CLOVERFIELD), [REC] makes it believable and not at all dizzying. The camera becomes a character, as its presence is questioned by the police officers also responding to the call, and they are forced to turn it off by authorities, even as the equipment falters during high-paced moments.
After finding the woman who was screaming, an officer is wounded and the situation becomes much more urgent. Before anyone can get the injured medical attention, however, they reach the bottom floor to find that the building has been sealed and they are all locked inside. Again, while some films have used claustrophobic settings before, [REC] uses it without staring at the same scenery the entire time. The quarantine still gives the story and the characters room to move, and makes climbing the floors of the buildings and either trying to reach the remaining people upstairs or keep them there a magnificent plot device. Asked to wait downstairs, the tenants panic and the terror rises as the state of the injured turns horrific.
Now, I’m struggling not to reveal too much more, because this film is better seen with few ideas about what happens. I am certain the surprises will get to you, but while watching also make note of the incredible make up jobs, and the impressive acting because without the work of these actors the film would fall apart. Part of the actor’s presence is due to the directors, however. In watching The Making of [REC], I learned that the directors only told the actors pieces of what would be happening, so they’re fear was more tangible and their confusion was legitimate. The finale is amazing and by the time you get there, I promise you won’t be able to look away.
This is a must for any horror or thriller fan, and for those who are craving an original plot out of the flurry of summer movies. Come by and pick up [REC], if only so I can talk further about this fantastic movie without giving anything away!

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star in In Bruges, the feature film debut from Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who won an Academy Award in 2005 for his short film Six Shooter.
If you missed it’s run at The Pickford, this is your chance to check out one of the funniest and darkest buddy comedies to come along in recent memory.

Colin Farrell plays Ray, a rookie hitman whose botched first job finds he and his older, more experienced partner, Ken, (Brendan Gleeson) cooling their heels in Belgium’s most picturesque tourist destination, the city of Bruges. While Ken enjoys himself taking in the sights of the town and kicking back, Ray feels trapped by the city and is haunted by the mistake that got he and Ken sent into exile. But when it turns out the job might not be over after all, Ken and Ray end up having a much more exciting time in the laid back town than they expected to.

Though he comes from a stage directing background, McDonagh is a natural behind the camera, and his directorial sense translates beautifully to the more expansive, full city setting of the film. Through long panning shots and an obvious love of the city’s medieval architecture, McDonagh makes viewers feel like gawking tourists in a strange place. And as we watch another film being shot in the town’s ancient square as a plot piece, the sensation of being bystanders to this sordid, violent and immensely entertaining debacle is unmistakable. While his eye for direction has adapted to the fit the screen, McDonagh’s sharp screenwriting carries over directly from his award winning stage pieces such as The Pillowman, which played at Bellingham’s own Idiom Theater earlier this year.

Owing much to acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which also features a pair of hitmen bickering in exile following a job gone sour, In Bruges is replete with sudden violence, dark humor, deadly misunderstandings and slapstick comedy, along with a heaping helping of midget humor thrown in for good measure. By turns unflinchingly stark and comically surreal, it also features a phenomenal chase scene through the city’s canals, the most civil and considerate shootout ever put to film and a great third act performance by Ralph Fiennes as the two killers distinctly unhappy employer.

Click here to listen to an interview with McDonagh, and be sure to watch the official trailer here. Or just come on down this week and pick up a copy for yourself!

If you’re like me, and you enjoy animation for grown ups, you owe it to yourself to check out the breathtaking, surreal and groundbreaking work of Bay Area underground animation giant Larry Jordan, the greatest cartoonist you’ve probably never heard of.

I didn’t know a thing about Jordan’s work until seeing a smattering of reels a few years back, including Sophie’s Place, which you can check out a fairly low quality print of on YouTube here. ( A caution here - though animated, Jordan’s works are not for kids. Consider yourself duly warned.) I was hooked. Jordan’s stop motion collage animation, culled in large part frm paintings, etchings and engravings, was mesmerizing, a kaleidoscopic array of colors, shapes and themes that collide, fade, vanish and transform, only to return later as something entirely new. It was bizarre, yes, and calling it inscrutable is probably being a bit generous, but Jordan’s work transcends a need to entirely understand it. Comparable to Cocteau in his imagery and symbolism and Rauschenberg in his sense of color design, the films of Lawrence Jordan defy simple explanation. They are by turns challenging and carefree, mystical and lurid and always supremely rewarding.

After my brush with Jordan’s work, I found myself trying to hunt down copies of his other films with at best marginal success, occasionally lucking into a third generation copy or sub-par internet clip. Luckily, the fine folks at San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema have released a new boxed set representing the entirety of Jordan’s 40 year filmmaking career. Whether they know it yet or not, animation fans everywhere are in their debt.

Culled from archives across the nation, many of these works are seeing the public eye for the first time in years, bringing new and deserved attention to animated classics like the Orson Welles narrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner or the magical documentary The Sacred Art of Tibet. Also included is Jordan’s live action work, including the only existing footage of reclusive surrealist assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell, for whom Jordan worked as an assistant for a brief period. If you’re interested in surrealist art, avant garde cinema, the history of animation, or just having your mind blown, I cannot reccomend this collection highly enough. And of course, you can find The Films of Larry Jordan in our New Arrivals section this week here at Film is Truth.

Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom is finally getting re-released from Criterion, after being out of print for years. I was about to watch it on VHS, too. Not anymore. I expect this to be one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen. Seeing some interviews and behind the scenes with the directors and production will be quite interesting too. The new cover is terrifying…

Due in August.

The following titles are my “Best of 2007″ choices. The list includes recent films released on DVD this year, old films making their DVD debuts this year, old films I finally saw just this year, etc. I’ve included one title not yet out (Two Lane Blacktop hits the shelves in a week) and I may amend this depending on what I watch the remaining four weeks of the year (for example, The Simpsons Movie) but otherwise, this is pretty much all I’ve got — though I’m sure I’ve forgotten something:

• American Gigolo
• Black Christmas (1974, Clarke)
• Blue Collar
• Daisies
• Face of Another
• Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 1 & 2
• Fires on the Plain
• Flash Gordon
• The Girl Who Knew Too Much
• The Holy Mountain (1973, Jodorowsky)
• Idiocracy
• Imitation of Life (1959)
• Inland Empire
• Ivan’s Childhood
• Killer of Sheep (pictured above)
• Late Spring
• The Little Fugitive (VHS only)
• Maya Deren: Experimental Films
• Mouchette
• Muriel
• Old Joy
• Overlord
• Pitfall
• Princess Raccoon
• Puppetmaster
• R Kelly: Trapped in the Closet
• Raising Victor Vargas
• Salesman
• Sansho the Bailiff
• The Science of Sleep
• The Seventh Victim
• Spider Baby
• Straight Time
• Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip: Music for Experimental Film
• Two Lane Blacktop
• Woman in the Dunes
• Zodiac

My “Best of 2006″ can be read here.

Blog’s been a bit slow lately… neglected, the poor thing, so many readers left with bated breath for something, anything… so here’s a review I pulled from one of the store’s email newsletters from earlier this year. Get all excited and lose your mind and stuff:

I don’t believe Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep captures the essence of dreaming as well as the best surrealist films, but it does convey a convincing sense of disorder and weird synchronicities in the guise of a charming (albeit ultimately painful) romantic comedy.

Gondry’s previous films (Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - both scripted by Charlie Kaufman) teetered on the brink of delirium and madness, but here he more or less throws his main character (Gael Garcia Bernal - what a dreamboat, *sigh*) headfirst into a Freudian soup of fractured families, questionable motivations, workplace frustrations and unfulfilled longings. Bernal’s protagonist escapes from this misery into his dreams, which begin to overflow the boundaries of slumber and imagination, coloring his daily life with plastic, childlike designs and creations: water made of cellophane, mechanical horses, one-second-time-machines, etc. Gondry’s trademark visual inventiveness has never been more vivid and intuitive (nor more deeply felt and profound) than it is here.

To be perfectly honest I was not an admirer of Gondry’s previous work (including his many music videos) nor of Bernal’s acting (which seemed to consist entirely of puffing up his lips and squinting - wow, sexy!) so I was pleasantly surprised how affecting I found this film, and how taken I was with Bernal’s performance. The film manages to be both melancholy and funny, and frightening and beautiful at the same time.

Halloween is a week away, and while I generally don’t pay much attention to holidays I thought it might be appropriate to bore you all reprint here a few articles and reviews that originally appeared in our store’s email newsletter (subscribe) which have some relation to scary movies, etc. So here’s the first, with several more to come in the following days.

“Monsters and Madmen” and Other Not-So-Guilty Guilty Pleasures

If you’re familiar with the Criterion Collection’s DVD releases – most of which are “unquestioned” classic art house and foreign films - it may at first seem unlikely that they would release something like the Monsters and Madmen box set. But, a closer look at their history reveals that they have always had a fondness and respect for genre and “B” films.

When they were releasing laserdiscs in the early ‘90s, their first title was, predictably, Citizen Kane, followed immediately by… King Kong! Eventually the collection included other esteemed science-fiction, horror, crime and exploitation movies such as Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Switchblade Sisters, The Blob and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. And among their earlier DVD releases was Fiend without A Face – a film produced by the same team responsible for the movies in the M & M set.

Included in the set are four of producers Richard and Alex Gordon’s films: The Haunted Strangler & Corridors of Blood (both starring Boris Karloff!) and Atomic Submarine & First Man into Space. These may not be undiscovered classics of the genre, but they are, like Fiend without a Face, slightly more peculiar than the usual fare and contain some pretty strange, even shocking moments. The films all seem stilted and inept at first, but each one has a point where everything sort of turns an unexpected corner and the filmmakers pull something bizarre out of their hats, something only films like these (made cheaply and under the radar) could get away with. These aren’t works of formal beauty (even by genre standards) or thoughtful introspection, but they are perfect examples the nation’s subconscious fears and desires at the height of the Cold War, and good movies to watch while wearing a silly costume and enjoying a cold drink at a Halloween party.

“Halloween-appropriate” films available on Criterion DVDs:

• The Atomic Submarine
• Beauty and the Beast
• The Blob
• Carnival of Souls
• Corridors of Blood
• Day of Wrath
• Dead Ringers
• Diabolique
• Equinox
• Eyes Without a Face
• The Face of Another
• Fiend Without a Face
• First Man into Space
• The Haunted Strangler
• Haxan
• The Honeymoon Killers
• Jubilee
• Knife in the Water
• Kwaidan
• M
• Man Bites Dog
• The Most Dangerous Game
• Naked Lunch
• Onibaba
• Peeping Tom
• Rebecca
• Robinson Crusoe on Mars
• Sisters
• The Tales of Hoffmann
• Ugetsu
• Videodrome

This week sees the second DVD release of works by Kenneth Anger, one of the greatest and most revered avant-garde / experimental / gay / whatever filmmakers of the last fifty years. Anger has not been a particularly prolific director, making about two dozen shorts (five of which are now available on The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume 1, an additional five on Volume 2) but what he lacks in prolificacy he more than makes up for with quality and influence.

Each of the ten films on these discs is a stunning gem, and each is as distinct from one another as all of them are from ordinary Hollywood product. Anger’s influences are wide-ranging, and this is one reason his body of work is so compelling. Unlike many experimental film artists (e.g. Stan Brakhage or Maya Deren, both of whom are otherwise wonderful) Anger draws upon pop culture as much as mythology or personal esoterica. You’ll see Mickey Mouse, comic books and Kustom Kar Kulture rubbing shoulders with the homosexual S&M Los Angeles underground, or the occult, set variously to scores of pop songs or classical music. So his work is simultaneously challenging and accessible in its choice of imagery and iconography. His use of the form follows suit: You can see the tradition of silent film language, Russian montage (Vertov, Eisenstein, etc.), the dream symbolism of Jean Cocteau, the vibrancy and lyricism of Hollywood and theatrical musicals, and much more. Anger’s films are among the few avant-garde films that are truly beautiful in both a classical and abstract sense of the word. His vivid coloring and use of different film stocks and found footage has held sway over dozens of subsequent directors, including David Lynch, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant , Wong Kar Wai and Gregg Araki. Lynch and Martin Scorsese were especially influenced by Anger’s novel use of pop music.

If you have any doubts about this stuff, two stunning trailers for these discs can be seen here and here. I’ve been watching these films on beat-up old VHS (and, yes, online) for years, but the restoration work on the new DVDs is incredible and they’re really worth seeing in their best form. Also, Anger provides some pretty bizarre commentaries, and several of the films have multiple soundtracks… so pick these up.

Yes! One of my very favorite films from the 1970s - and my favorite “road” film ever - is being (re)released on DVD in December by Criterion. The previous disc has been out-of-print for several years and the new version will no doubt be definitive. This is one of the great films about America at the end of the 20th century… or maybe it’s just a film about two guys racing cars… take your pick. I dig it - it’s like Antonioni on wheels. Also it has two of my favorite people in it: Warren Oates and Dennis Wilson; the former talks incessantly, the latter nary utters a word. If you must see this now, we have it on tape, check it out. If you need convincing or are merely curious, here is a fairly incisive look at the film and what it means.

Darren Aronosky has recorded a director’s commentary for his recently released film The Fountain, and it’s available online here if you’d like to hear his thoughts on the film and its troubled production history. Supposedly the studio wasn’t interested - who knows why? - in slapping it on the DVD, and his ardent fans went nuts… so here it is, yo.