This year I’ll be attending Fantastic Fest in Austin as a reviewer/reporter/spy for Dangerous Minds. The festival which runs from September 23 thru the 30th is the largest genre film festival in the US. I plan to keep DM readers up-to-date on the latest in sci-fi, fantasy and horror films, including interviews with filmmakers and cast members.

Gallants is one of the films getting alot of pre-fest buzz. It looks like crazy fun.

Loser office boy, Cheung (Wong Yue-nam), is banished to one of Hong Kong’s rural backwaters to help greedy property developers kick a bunch of old timers out of a run down tea house. But this teahouse used to be a martial arts studio and its owners, Dragon (Chen Kuan-tai) and Tiger (Bruce Leung), are trying to keep the lights on until Master Law (Teddy Robin), wakes up from his 30-year coma and tells them what to do again.

Chen Kuan-tai was Shaw Brother’s most iconic leading man in the 70’s and Bruce Leung started his career as a Bruce Lee imitator before becoming a celebrated martial artist (he played “The Beast” in Stephen Chow’s KUNG FU HUSTLE). Teddy Robin is only four feet tall, but he’s a producer, an actor and the man who invented Chinese rock n’roll, even writing and performing the music for this film. Real-life gangster-turned-actor, Chan Wai-man plays the evil Master Poon; Lo Meng (aka Turbo Law) was one of the Five Deadly Venoms; and Susan Shaw, playing Dr. Fun, was a softcore sexpot back in the day. And with decades of experience behind them, these old pros own the screen.

 
Alien vs. Predator skateboard deck from Skate Mental.

 
A conversation with director John Scheinfeld about his superb documentary, Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?).

If you’re under 45-years of age, you might have little idea of who the great singer/songwriter/hellraiser Harry Nilsson was, but surely almost everyone has heard his biggest hits “Everybody’s Talkin’” (from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack), “Without You” (a Badfinger cover given its devastating emotional impact by Harry’s plaintiff three octave vocal range, later recorded by Mariah Carey) and “Coconut” which was used in dozens of movies (normally during a drinking scene) and in more than one 7UP advertising campaign.

Harry Nilsson was also responsible for co-creating the much-loved children’s TV movie, The Point, a Ringo Starr-narrated fable about a boy named Oblio, born with a round head in a land of pointy-headed people. (”Me and My Arrow” and “Are You Sleeping” are two of the best remembered songs from the project. Scratch someone in their 40s and trust me, they’ll be able to sing both from childhood memories of The Point)

Another important thing to know about Harry Nilsson is that he was the favorite American musician of both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, no small achievement, that! After Apple Corps press officer Derek Taylor heard Nilsson’s autobiographical “1941” (from his 1967 RCA debut Pandemonium Shadow Show) siting in the car waiting for his wife, he bought a box of the album and gave it away as presents, including to all four Beatles. The story goes that Lennon listened to the album for 36 straight hours before calling Nilsson in Los Angeles and telling him how much he loved his record. McCartney did the same soon after. Nilsson became a part of the Beatles inner circle, becoming close friends with both John (who would produce his 1974 Pussy Cats album) and Ringo (who was the best man at Nilsson’s second wedding).

The documentary features stellar interviewees such as Brian Wilson, Jimmy Webb, Van Dyke Parks, Yoko Ono, Paul Williams, Mickey Dolenz, Ringo Starr, The Smothers Brothers, and Pythons Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle,
 

 
Hard to believe that Uwe Boll could descend any lower into the cinematic septic tank, but the motherfucker continues to amaze. Auschwitz porn. Ilsa, she wolf of the SS, already plumbed these depths 40 years ago.

Via ain’t it cool news

 
Les Kiriki: Acrobates Japonais, directed by Segundo de Chomon in 1907, is a lovingly hand-tinted artifact from the early days of French cinema. Similar in technique to George Melies, Aragonese film maker Chomon was a pioneer of cinematic special effects. In Les Kiriki, Chomon creates the illusion of complex, gravity defying acrobatics by having dancers lay on a black floor and filming them from above. The feat, while not as miraculous as if they were actually standing upright performing the balancing act, is still imaginatively choreographed, requiring considerable skill. The use of absurd Japanese wigs, pulsing colors and the primitive set result in a witty and surreal little film. For the soundtrack I added The Ventures’ “Let There Be Drums.”

The second video is Chomon’s Le Spectre Rouge which was also made in 1907 but released in 1908. Music by Shpongle.

 
The Red Spectre after the jump…

 
“Church can suck it.”

Act da Fool, a new short film by Harmony Korine for fashion line Proenza Schouler. Superb! Note use of Super 8 film stock.
 

 
Via NY Mag

 
Stefan Nadelman’s Terminal Bar is a document of the infamous New York City dive located across the street from the Port Authority bus terminal near Times Square. Stefan’s father, Sheldon, was a bartender at the Terminal from 1972 to 1982 and took thousands of photographs of the drunks, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes that hung out at what was considered to be the roughest bar in NYC.

Sheldon also photographed the bartenders, bouncers and porters that worked the joint. I can’t imagine a tougher gig. I used to poke my head into the Terminal back in the late 70s. Its notoriety drew artists and punks and the curious. But, it wasn’t welcoming to slumming hipsters or bush league Bukowskis. It was an enclosed society with it’s own brutal code, not easily cracked by the voyeuristic aesthete.

Stefan recalls what it was like to live among the images of the Terminal:

Our house [was] basically my father’s gallery, I grew up looking at these faces of the Terminal Bar. My father would also paint on the matte around the photos to further make his point. He used a lot of wordplay…like GRAPE/RAPE/APE (the effects of wine). Each picture had its lesson or story and I think they subconsciously warned me of the ramifications of heavy drinking. Looking back, I can see how odd it may have seemed to have your house’s walls filled with 16x20’s of drunken strangers.

Terminal Bar is a stunning achievement, an evocation of a period in New York City’s history when the streets were wild with life and filled with the stench of garbage, booze, sex and death. The city is cleaner now, domesticated, safe, but lacking that certain soulfulness that is at the heart of Sheldon Nadelman’s dark and deeply human photographs.
 
Here’s the trailer and a clip from Terminal Bar. The entire 23 minute film is available on DVD here. Stefan is working on new video vignettes using his father’s photographs and I’m looking forward to future installments.
 

 
More of The Terminal after the jump…

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Chewbacca hairdid
The ultimate silent ‘Star Wars’
Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip: I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper
Japanese ‘Star Wars’ Sea Chicken Commercial (1978)
70s French Disco Dance-Off Between Darth Vader And C-3PO
A-Team Intro vs. Star Wars
Darth Vader moonlights as symphony conductor
Star Wars vs. The Mighty Boosh
Star Wars: The Environmentalists Version
Robotic French Space Disco inspired by Star Wars (1977)
21-87: How Arthur Lipsett Influenced George Lucas’s Career
C-3PO Catches R2D2 Smoking

The director in a scene from Nice Bombs…
 
Chicago-based Iraqi director Usama Alshaibi seems to be one of the most prolific Arab filmmakers in the American independent film scene—and he’s almost certainly the most experimental. Working often in close collaboration with his wife Kristie, Alshaibi has jump-started the canon of what we might term transgressive Arab-American film.

In his over 50 short films, Alshaibi has updated the techniques of transgressors like William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger to transmit his obsessions with culture-clash, technology, religion, violence, sexuality and identity. He’s finished four features, two of which deal with porn and STDs, one with cross-cultural relationships and another with the personal reality of post-Saddam Iraq. He has three in production or post-production now, two of which—American Arab and Baghdad, Iowa—portray growing up Arab in the heartland in the in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and today, and the third, Profane, about a Muslim dominatrix in spiritual crisis.

As the news media shamelessly reduces the complex relationship between America and its Arab and Muslim communities into a dopey controversy over where to build a friggin’ cultural center or mosque, we need the perspective and imagination of Alshaibi’s work now more than ever.

Like most hard-working indie filmmakers, Alshaibi can always use financial help making his vision manifest. Click to donate to help him finish Profane or American Arab.
 

 
After the jump, check out a clip from American Arab…
 

 
2009 Indian mega-hit Magadheera is the most expensive film produced in the Telagu language of Southern India. Telagu (Tollywood) films don’t have Bollywood budgets, but Magadheera , a tale of reincarnation spanning 400 years, delivers maximum bang for the buck and, in this scene, some big laughs.

Directed by S.S. Rajamouli (watch out Michael Bay) and starring Ram Charan Teja.

The DVD is available here.