Roman Polanski’s new film, Carnage, looks like a juicy combination of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf, Knife In Water and Repulsion.

Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and John C. Reilly appear to be bringing some very edgy performances to the project.  Roman is a great director of actors and he has a knack for bringing out their dark side. Love the Winslet freak out in the clip.

Carnage, based on a play by Yasmina Reza, opens the 2011 New York Film Festival which runs from September 30 until October 16. It opens in select theaters in December in order to qualify for Oscar nominations. I predict it will receive noms in the acting categories, screenplay and director. I’ll put money on it.

This is at the top of my “must see” list.
 

 
Italian mondo movie maker Gualtiero Jacopetti has died at the age of 91.

Mondo Cane was the movie that started the “mondo” craze back in the Sixties. It was a hugely successful documentary, though some scenes were staged, intended to shock and it did. Although an exploitation film, it was a well-crafted movie that most of its imitators didn’t come close to equaling. While appealing to some of humanities baser instincts, it was also quite critical of the way people treat each other and our planet. It was a shocker with a conscience.

Jacopetti directed several other films, including two that depicted African culture in ways that garnered him some very harsh criticism. Africa Addio (aka Africa Blood And Guts) and Goodbye Uncle Tom depict Africans as either savagely cruel and uncivilized or as victims of white domination and genocide. Billed as exposés about the end of white colonialism and the subsequent civil unrest in Africa, some critics, particularly Roger Ebert who called them “vile crud,” condemned the movies for being racist. But, both films have their champions who see them as denunciations of slavery and white Imperialism. Both sides make compelling arguments for and against the films.  DM is offering you the opportunity to make up your own mind by offering the uncut version of Good bye Uncle Tom for your viewing. I think it’s a rather amazing and extreme piece of film making that draws inspiration from Artaud’s theater of cruelty and Bunuelian surrealism with some of Jodorowsky’s dark vaudeville.

Today’s New York Times’ obituary for Jacopetti describes his best known film with succinct accuracy:

Mr. Jacopetti liked to say he had invented the “antidocumentary” or the “shockumentary” with “Mondo Cane,” which was unveiled, and well received, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. He showed Italian villagers slicing themselves with glass in observance of Good Friday; the French painter Yves Klein using naked women as paintbrushes; and New Yorkers dining on insects in a fancy restaurant.

The narration was droll and the images were ironic: A bereaved mother in New Guinea nurses a suckling pig, immediately followed by the wholesale slaughter of pigs for an orgy of feasting in the same region. Mr. Jacopetti called such transitions “shock cuts.” Another scene shows people mourning in a pet cemetery in Pasadena, Calif. Cut to shots of customers savoring roast dog at a Taiwanese restaurant.

I remember seeing Mondo Cane as a kid and its images were indelible, they linger still. The film’s theme song, “More” became an international hit and is as memorable as the film itself.

In this clip, we see baby chicks being dyed for Easter gifts, geese being force fed to create foie gras and cows being massaged and fed beer as part of the process of being transformed into Kobe beef.
 

 
A short film made during the UK premier of the restored version of Goodbye Uncle Tom.
 

 
Goodbye Uncle Tom after the jump…

 
There have been few films as truthful about the state of MerryEngland as Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Here is a world bought by bankers, sold by politicians, all with public money. A world where everything has its price, and liberty is defined by our Right to Shop. A world best described in the film by the wonderful creation, Borgia Ginz:

“You wanna know my story babe. It’s easy. This is the generation that grew up and forgot to lead their lives. They were so busy watching my endless movie. It’s power babe, power. I don’t create it, I own it. I sucked and sucked and I sucked. The media became their only reality and I owned their world of flickering shadows. BBC. TUC. ITV. ABC. ATV. MGM. KGB. C of E. You name it, I bought them all and rearranged the alphabet. Without me, they don’t exist.”

After its release in 1978, Jubilee was denounced by some of the people who should have supported it, but were horrified by its nihilism. Jarman explained his motivation to the Guardian‘s Nicholas de Jongh:

“We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution - they no longer ring true.”

As true today, as it was then.

Here is Jordan as Amyl Nitrite, giving it laldy with her rendition of “Rule Britannia”.
 

 
I read John Boorman and Bill Stair’s novelization of Zardoz when I was about 12. It was—to be frank—a defining moment in my childhood. The story chimed with many of my half-baked thoughts about those usual tropes—the control of religion, the division of class, society’s inequalities and its endemic violence. In a way you could say it was the start of my adult education. The book held extra significance as I had walked home from school for a week to save the money on bus fares to buy it. After reading it—nothing was ever the same. How could it be? When within its opening pages a flying godhead Zardoz has descended form the heavens and announced to its murderous followers:

“You have been raised up from Brutality, to kill the Brutals who multiply, and are legion. To this end, Zardoz your God gave you the gift of the Gun. The Gun is good!

“The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken.”

 

 
When Sean Connery was sent the script, he was “absolutely caught by its originality”, as he told Gordon Gow from Films and Filming in 1974:

“It was one of the best ideas I’d come across for ages…So by the following weekend I was over in Ireland to prepare for filming.

“What gripped me especially was the direction the people in [the script] were taking in the future existence, as opposed to space ships and rockets and all that…[..]...What does interest me is the possible development of society in centuries to come. The way different levels and types evolve in the script is intriguing and refreshing, and could well be true. The fact that people are not going to die, for example.

“Many things are changed by the knowledge you’re not going to die. There’s no need to procreate, therefore it takes away the sexual drives. Today we live in the age of analysis: we can give answers as to why people do things, whether it’s ambition or fighting for power or because they hated their father or their mother - their hangups become a kind of blueprint to their behavior. But if you take that away you get an entirely different concept of human beings.’

Connery hadn’t been Boorman’s first choice, that had been Burt Reynolds, with whom Boorman had scored the major hit Deliverance. Somehow I can’t imagine Reynolds carrying off the thigh high boots or red loin cloth, or exuding the necessary untrammeled masculinity. With the success of Deliverancve, Boorman was given a carte blanche to make what he wanted. He started working on a science fiction script, Zardoz, in 1972, and brought in Bill Stair to “...help rationalize the visions that threatened to engulf me.”

Zardoz is certainly rich with ideas, some better developed than others, but all have their own merits. That’s one thing about the best of seventies’ films, they had intelligence behind them, ideas at play, rather than today’s reliance on CGI and anodyne stories.

Set in the 23rd century, where Exterminators trade grain with their god - Zardoz - for guns to exploit and kill. Enter Zed (Connery) who questions why a god would require grain, and sneaks on board the flying godhead to uncover the secret of Zardoz and life beyond the Outlands in the Vortex.

The Outlands: once it was called the good Earth. Now it is the desolate, exhausted, polluted wasteland all the world has become, except for the lush Vortex.

The Eternals: members of the Vortex. Highly privileged scientists and intellectuals, eternally young, who have learned all the Secrets of Life - except one.

The Exterminators: a privileged and physically superior group permitted to breed under strict control to fight the Brutals and support the Vortex.

The Brutals: the last survivors of the dying world outside the Vortex, who live at subsistence level.

The Apathetics: victims of the pursuit of perfection, they are Eternals who have found the strain of immortality too great and live only for the one thing their society denies them.

The Renegades: malicious, embittered offenders in the Vortex who would defy and destroy the establishment - if they could only find it.

Connery explained the film to Gow:

“Then society, a sit always does, starts to fragment into different strata. There are the Apathetics and the Renegades. They are all Eternals, these people, who are going to live forever. The base of all the great learning that the world has accumulated by that stage becomes a Tabernacle, which gives people information as to how to act, like a major computer, a great feed-tank put together by the best minds of the world. But the human condition is such that it still retains anger and other emotions.

“There are areas like oases: each is known as a Vortex. They exist throughout the world on a system of highly democratic rule with guidelines supplied from the Tabernacle. But the Renegades abhor the system and fight it…[..]...On the other hand, the Apathetics are reluctant to do anything at all..the Renegades they’d really like to die, to get out.

“Beyond the Vortex areas, there are the Outlands: very barren. The inhabitants there are called the Brutals, they’re rather like our present society, not very civilized. The god Zardoz gives the Brutals something to worship, the gun. the penis is evil, the gun is good. The Brutals are necessary to each Vortex, because they’ve been taught to provide wheat and other food substances…[..]...This is where the character I play comes in. I hide in the head…[..]...and set about destroying the society.”

For your delectation, here is the original photo preview for Zardoz, which appeared in Films and Filming in March 1974.
 

 
More pics from ‘zardoz’, after the jump…
 

 
“Turns out there was this Senator at the Capital, causing a ruckus.”

Meet “Jimmy Valiant,” the Christian James Bond. Jimmy Valiant: Scions of Danger is a new Christian action flick funded via Kickstarter and produced in San Antonio, Texas. This totally looks like shit:

WHY JIMMY VALIANT?

For too long, Christian films have been stereotyped because of clichéd stories, bad acting, and shoddy production values. The idea for Jimmy Valiant: Scions of Danger grew out of a desire to challenge these stereotypes, and to raise the bar for independent Christian filmmaking by creating an action-packed, thrilling, and visually compelling film that honors God in both the process as well as the final product.

Second, we wanted to utilize the project as a training and discipleship opportunity for young men and women interested in filmmaking — without compromising the quality or the integrity of the project in the process.

Finally, we desired to tackle a genre that has been largely overlooked by Christian filmmakers: the action/thriller film.

WHY AN ACTION/THRILLER FILM?

For over half a century, the action/thriller genre has discipled generations of young men, who have found their role models in such notable action series as James Bond, Rambo, Terminator, Mission Impossible, and the Jason Bourne films. Like many young boys, the action/thriller genre was a favorite of ours growing up (and still is, to tell the truth). Regretfully, however, this important genre has been largely overlooked by independent Christian filmmakers.

We believe that independent Christian filmmaking can take advantage of some of the unique archetypes and themes associated with the thriller genre to communicate powerful biblical truths. Truths like responsibility, loyalty, courage, obedience, proper jurisdictional roles, family unity, justice, and forgiveness — without all of the negative elements often associated with the typical Hollywood thriller film.

Here’s the trailer for Jimmy Valiant: Scions of Danger. THIS is acting. Love the regional accents!
 

 
Via Showing Christ’s Love

 
You like werewolf movies? You like TV On The Radio? Yeah, so do I.

Here’s a tantalizing mash-up of highlights from werewolf flicks and TOTR’s terrific “Wolf Like Me.” An obvious coupling done well by Editcadet. And it’s actually kind of spooky.
 

 
Here’s Mr. Cadet’s latest, ‘Keep On Walking’: a montage of scenes of people walking away from the camera turned into one seamless tracking shot.
 

 
(via How to be a Retronaut)

Limited edition of 100, signed and numbered 13” x 19” print on fine art, acid-free paper
 
Limited editon print by Jason Edmiston.

This painting is inspired by the scene at the beginning of the first Apes movie. Gorilla soldiers are standing posing for a photo after the great human hunt. This is the view from the photographer’s perspective.

(via Laughing Squid)

 
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 utilizes dozens of hours of 16mm footage shot by Swedish documentarians during the height of the Black Power movement to tell the era’s story of radical revolutionary promise and what happened when that promise went unfulfilled. The film sat in the basement of a Swedish TV station for decades.

Contemporary director Göran Olsson (who also helmed 2009’s Am I Black Enough for You? doc about the Philly music scene) used this footage, including interviews with Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Kathleen Cleaver, along with modern commentary from Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli and Melvin Van Peebles, to create this new film, now being released by Sundance. After a limited NYC/Los Angeles theatrical run, it’s supposed to air on PBS.

I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff anyways, but damn this looks amazing:
 

 
(via Nerdcore )

 
Dangerous Minds pal Matt Dunnerstick’s directing debut, The Custom Mary—which Tara and I have cameo roles in—premieres this week in New York City:

When a spec of Christ’s blood falls into the hands of a pair of preachers, they hatch a scheme to clone Jesus. All they need is a willing host.

Mary is a modest young Latina churchgoer. It doesn’t take much convincing for her to carry the Lord’s child. As the pregnancy progresses, she finds comfort and support in Joe, an African-American low-rider mechanic and aficionado. Nine months later, the outcome is not quite as expected—and Mary finds herself desperate and scared.

God reveals Himself in unexpected places. But there’s no mistaking justice when it’s low-rider style!

The Custom Mary will be premiering at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival on Wednesday August 17th at 5PM and Saturday August 20th at 4PM. The screenings will be at the AMC Empire 25. 

Click here to purchase tickets.

The Custom Mary