FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Eating rats with Morgan Spurlock at Fantastic Fest 2016
09.26.2016
02:27 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
At this year’s Fantastic Fest in Austin the movie with the highest gross-out factor wasn’t a horror flick. It was the documentary Rats directed by Morgan Spurlock. As a New Yorker who braved the garbage strikes of the 70s, I know a thing a or two about rats. Rats as big as cats. I don’t like them. Spurlock’s film made me hate them. The disgusting little creatures are taking over the world and Spurlock has shot the film in ways that make the invasion as spooky as an episode of The Walking Dead. Using bursts of sound, night-vision photography, jump cuts, creepy point of view shots, skewed camera angles and Pierre Takal’s subtle but unnerving score, Rats shows us that reality can be far more horrifying than fiction.

I ran a few bars in downtown Manhattan in the 80s/90s. One was right near The Bowery. A giant 9000 sq.foot space. We had a serious rat problem. I came up with a somewhat effective solution. I offered my night clean-up crew $10 bucks for every rat tail they’d bring me. In the mornings when I got to work there would be a plastic bag containing dozens of rat tails in a box near the door to my office. One guy was picking them off with a .22 caliber rifle. No shit.

Some of the best moments in Rats feature battle-hardened exterminator Ed Sheehan who’s been in a Sisyphean war against the rat population in New York City for more than fifty years. He’s a cigar-chomping character right out of central casting. Here’s our next Netflix hero.
 


 
In addition to screening the film, Alamo Drafthouse had a special treat for the people attending Rats. Drafthouse chef Brad Sorenson prepared some delicious (so I’m told) rat curry. Here’s a shot of some stouthearted men (including Drafthouse CEO Tim League) chowing down on vermin vindaloo. Supersizing was not an option. Rats can carry up to 5 million viruses on just one of its tiny little gross rodent hands. So no rat sushi.
 

Photo: Scott Weinberg.
 
As repellent as the idea of eating rats is to westerners, the fact is that rat is a commonplace dish in many parts of Asia. One can see this as nature’s way of dealing with a rodent problem. As a vegetarian, the thought of eating a rat isn’t that much more repulsive to me than eating a chicken or veal calf. And all rats are free range and locavore. Rat is going to be the next foodie trend. Just wait.
 

Rat Thai-style goes nicely with red chili sauce.
 
Rats will be screening on the Discovery Channel on October 22.  Tune in. Just don’t watch while eating a TV dinner. Or anything else.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.26.2016
02:27 pm
|
Fantastic Fest reviews: ‘Holy Motors’ and ‘Cloud Atlas’
09.29.2012
01:51 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
I spent the past week watching movies at Fantastic Fest. In the next few days I’ll be reviewing Red Dawn, Sightseers, Doomsday Book, American Mary, Wake In Fright and more. I’ll also be sharing filmed interviews with some directors I met. But first, I thought I’d cover the high and low point of the festival.

In the case of my favorite film of the festival, Holy Motors, I was one of a very vocal majority of people who loved it. Regarding the film I liked least, Cloud Atlas, I was among the lone voices who hated it. Most of the audience attending the Cloud Atlas screening lapped it up like starving dogs eating vomit. The movie was greeted with roars approval from a crowd whose main source of exercise seemed to come from isometric mouth breathing and high impact masturbation. I ran from the theater in fear of being infected by whatever had gotten into them.

Holy Motors screened several times during the fest and as a result a lot of people got to see it. A good thing for getting the word out on a film that is almost impossible to describe without waxing poetic. The most satisfying conversations I got into were the ones in which people were trying to crack the Holy Motor code. While the film has a wonderful aura of mystery about it, the essence of the film is clear - it is a movie about the pleasures of seeing movies and making them. And part of the pleasure of the movies is having them fuck with your head. Holy Motors is a mindbender of a very rare sort. I include it among my favorites: Performance, El Topo and Enter The Void.

Holy Motors

Synopsis:

From dawn to dusk, a few hours in the life of Monsieur Oscar, a shadowy character who journeys from one life to the next. He is, in turn, captain of industry, assassin, beggar, monster, family man…He seems to be playing roles, plunging headlong into each part – but where are the cameras? Monsieur Oscar is alone, accompanied only by Céline, the slender blonde woman behind the wheel of the vast engine that transports him through and around Paris. He’s like a conscientious assassin moving from hit to hit. In pursuit of the beautiful gesture, the mysterious driving force, the women and the ghosts of past lives. But where is his true home, his family, his rest?

When Holy Motors’ Mr. Oscar (the magical Denis Lavant) is asked why he does what he does, he replies that it’s for “the beauty of the act.” Director Leos Carax might reply similarly in describing why Holy Motors does what it does.

In his exhilarating new film, Carax seems to have tapped into cinema’s Akashic Record and brought it to Earth in distilled form. From the opening scene where Carax unlocks the door that opens onto the theater of his brain to the Amen choir of limousines at the end, Holy Motors is as pure as cinema gets. It is about the thing it is, not the thing it is about. It’s reference point is itself. Carax will pull any rug from under any scene to remind us that we are watching a movie and to glory in the artifice of it all. Holy Motors embraces the history of cinema like a drunken poet throwing his arms around the alphabet.

It’s been 13 years since Carax directed his last feature-length film, Pola X, and he’s returned to film making with the fervor of a man who has a lot to get out of his system. But like Holy Motors’  troll with the perpetual hard-on, Carax hasn’t shot his load recklessly or randomly. Carax is a Tantric Master fucking the sacred machine of his art. He uses cinema like a particle generator creating a red hot beam of alchemical fire directed at the very center of the viewer’s pineal gland. His intent is to get you high and he does. He draws you to the screen like a moth is drawn to light. He draws you to the screen like a camera is drawn to a woman’s face or the stars, in their sparkling suicidal glee, are drawn to blackness. He draws you to the screen with the precision of a Bunuelian razorblade tearing open the curtains of your eyes.

Carax has made a film he obviously had to make. He is getting at something deep within himself and he takes us with him - into a place where others have traveled and are traveling still: Bunuel, Cocteau, Kubrick, Muybridge, Jodorowsky, Noe, Argento, Tarantino, Beineix, Franju, Breton, Lisberger, Melville, Bertolucci, Donen, Godard, Powell and Pressburger, Marker…

Carax has taken a road trip through cinema and we are riding in the catbird seat of his dream machine as delighted as children being handed giant lollipops.

Holy Motors opens in the USA on October 17.

  
 
image
Kanye Hanks. A still from Cloud Atlas.
 

Cloud Atlas

I haven’t read the novel Cloud Atlas so I can’t comment as to whether I would have found the movie it’s based on any less incoherent had I read the book. But I’m a firm believer that a movie should be a stand-alone creation that doesn’t require its source material as a road map for navigation. As a stand-alone experience the movie Cloud Atlas is an absolute mess, a stupendous folly that will be hardpressed to recoup its lavish price tag at the box office. For the handful of scenes that come together and actually engage the viewer, there are dozens that skitter across the screen like blobs of mercury and are just as hard to grasp.

Cloud Atlas attempts to interweave multiple plot threads involving multiple reincarnations of multiple characters across multiple time frames into some kind of cinematic mandala with the intent of raising the consciousness of whoever happens to be staring at it. And that’s what one does while being exposed to Cloud Atlas, you stare at it. In my case, mostly in disbelief. There’s little in this bloated, new agey slop that you can wrap your head or heart around. So you just stare. You stare at the goofy prosthestics the actors are forced to wear as they try to embody various characters you don’t really give a shit about (particularly you, Tom Hanks), you stare at the elaborate CGI that does little to awe or amaze, you stare at the uninspired sets that seem to be recycled bits and pieces from Zardoz, Apocalypto and Star Trek, you stare at actors mouthing dialog that should be inscribed on Hallmark greeting cards and never ever spoken by living human beings (“Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”) and you stare at the abrupt fits and starts of the disjointed editing that striate the film like poorly designed comic book frames stitched together with cellophane tape and paper clips. And as the two hour mark comes around you start seriously staring at your watch wondering when will this fucker finally come to an end. About a half an hour later it does. The loaf is pinched, circles the bowl and disappears.

The Wachowski siblings directed two good movies, Bound and The Matrix. The success of The Matrix hurled them into the front ranks of modern movie makers. But their follow through has pretty much sucked. With Cloud Atlas, they’ve made a movie that is so spectacularly stupid that if it weren’t for its grotesque sense of self-importance might have joined Showgirls in the pantheon of big-budget, high gloss camp classics. As it is, Cloud Atlas is a beast so malformed someone should just throw a blanket over it and shoot it.

Cloud Atlas opens in the USA on October 26.

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.29.2012
01:51 am
|
Fantastic Fest re-imagined as a video game: Austin is amazing
10.02.2010
04:17 am
Topics:
Tags:

 
South Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, Highball bowling alley, and the strip mall their located in, replicated in a video game that was playable at kiosks at this year’s Fantastic Fest. If you’ve been to Fantastic Fest you’ll recognize these venues.

Via zapwizard

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
10.02.2010
04:17 am
|
Dangerous Minds at Fantastic Fest: Roger Corman discusses his wild wild career
09.26.2010
10:27 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
This past Friday night, Roger Corman was presented with a lifetime achievement award at Fantastic Fest and Dangerous Minds was there to film it.

After a screening of Machete Maidens Unleashed, Mark Hartley’s funny and informative documentary on exploitation films shot in the Philippines during the seventies, Corman took to the stage of Austin’s Paramount Theater to be honored for his unique cinematic legacy. Appropriately, Corman had produced many of the films featured in Machete Maidens. As a packed house enthusiastically applauded and cheered, film critic Elvis Mitchell (NY Times, At The Movies) presented Corman with his award: an impressive looking samurai sword. Standing with his wife and collaborator Julie at his side, Roger seemed to thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to talk about his extraordinary career.

In the following video, Roger discusses his past accomplishments and his latest project Sharktopus.
 

 
Watch the trailer for Machete Maidens Unleashed and Sharktopus after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.26.2010
10:27 pm
|
Double O three and a half: The world’s smallest secret agent

image
 
One of my favorite genres of exploitation films is Filipino action flicks. I’m thrilled that Mark Hartley who directed the fabulous documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild Untold Story Of Ozploitation has a brand new film screening at this years Fantastic Fest (which DM will be covering) called Machete Maidens Unleashed, an overview of legendary Z-movies from the Philippines.

During the classic grindhouse era of the ‘60s and ‘70s independent producers began turning out more and more exploitation features for less and less money. As the cycle wore on, there was a demand from audiences for more variety in settings and situations, and a demand from producers for lower budgets. Since it already had an infrastructure conducive to the making of inexpensive films, the Philippines fit the bill to a T. Labor was cheap, there were skilled technicians and equipment and, possibly best of all, the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos looked upon the enterprise favorably, contributing everything from tactical assistance to military firepower. One interviewee refers to the Philippines at this time as the “wild east”, and that assessment certainly seems apt as we hear story after story of gunfights in hotel lobbies, rats the size of poodles and the most insane, irresponsible stunts imaginable. As shocking and lurid as many of the women-in-prison, jungle action, mad scientist and martial arts movies made in the Philippines were, the back stories may actually surpass the films in their shocking details. But when the films being discussed and shown in Hartley’s trademark montage style are as wildly entertaining as For Your Height Only, Mad Doctors Of Blood Island, The Twilight People, The Big Doll House and TNT Jackson, it may be a tie.

I will be interviewing Mark Hartley during Fantastic Fest (Sept. 23-30), so stay tuned.

Here’s a clip from the classic For Your Height Only (aka For Y’ur Height Only) featuring the 3 foot tall martial arts master Weng Weng, the Filipino James Bond.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.19.2010
01:54 am
|
Fantastic Fest 2010: USA’s biggest genre film festival and Dangerous Minds will be there
09.09.2010
07:05 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
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.

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
|
09.09.2010
07:05 pm
|