Crackie is a beautiful film. I'm not sure how else to begin this article. It's beautiful to look at and beautiful to experience.

Set in a tiny coastal town in Newfoundland, the film is, at heart, a love story, or a lack-of-love story, between a girl and her dog.

Mitsy (played with complete naturalism by newcomer Meghan Greeley, a Newfoundland theatre student) lives with her overbearing, tough-as-nails grandmother, Bride (played with a terrible force by Canadian comedy queen Mary Walsh, breaking down every typecasting wall). Mitsy dreams of becoming a hairdresser, of escaping her world of hand-me-downs and fried chicken dinners, of fleeing Newfoundland to live with her mother in Alberta. Her mother, an alcoholic and a woman of rather loose sexual morals, left her when she was a child.

Mitsy's relationship with Bride is shaky at best. Her resentment for her grandmother's sometimes cold exterior and eccentricities (it seems that there is always a strange man in her bed, and she trolls the local dump in search of products to sell in garage sales) runs deep, as does her need to be loved. This need leads her into a relationship (emotional for her, sexual for him) with the town's bad bay (played with delightful sleaze by Joel Hynes) and to adopt a crackie, an old, useless dog named Sparky, saving it from euthanasia. But the dog's life has been just as hard as Mitsy's, and as in every other area of her life, the mutt can't offer her the affection that she so desperately seeks.

This dysfunctional relationship, according to the film's director and writer, the charming, well-spoken Sherry White, is where the heart of the film lies.

"It's been so long that I've been writing the script that I can't remember what the original genesis of it was," White explained during an interview earlier this week, perched on a couch in the lobby of the Hazelton Hotel in Yorkville.

"But definitely the relationship with the girl and dog is where it began. The idea of a character who doesn't get the kind of love that she wants, or much love, for who love is hard to come by, and thinks that she has an opportunity to save a dog, and the dog has also not had much love and so doesn't know how to love back. It began with that idea."

Mitsy's life becomes even more complicated when her mother returns to her hometown, as outwardly glamorous and distant as ever.

I can't promise that the film is feel-good, and more-often-than-not it tends to weigh the spectator down with its heaviness. But its strength lies in its honest, completely believable characters. And despite its slightly-grim appearance, there is beauty to be found in Mitsy's hometown. The film is shot in rich colour, and shots of Mitsy's red coat against white-panelled buildings, and of the kitsch, warm, gaudy, over-crowded interior of Bride's cabin, and of the wild fields and expanse of ocean just beyond the decaying wooden fence of her property would make anyone eager to pack up and visit Newfoundland.

"I never intended for it to be a grim small town," White said of the film's location.

"Many small towns are kind of grim in a way. They're beautiful too, which I think this town is."

But the film's location meant more to White than to serve as a back-drop for her film. She said that while she didn't necessarily set out to write a Newfoundland-centric story and feels that the story could speak about anyone, anywhere, that her characters had to come to life in a small-town setting.

"In any rural town, no matter how small, you're going to find people who live on the outskirts of it, geographically and socially," she said.

"And there are always rejects. And I find, in smaller towns, those people...Bride might be a street person if she lived in a big city. She might be one of those people. But if she lives in a small town she can actually keep her house. It's easier for her to live, but she still lives on the outskirts of society."

As for her decision to place her characters in her home-province (she hails from Stephenville), White admitted that Newfoundland has always inspired her, and that coming from there, it's hard to forget one's origins.

"Most people who live on islands, your feet are rooted there, more than people who live in a big place," she said.

"So I feel very connected to the place, and it gives me a point of view, in a way. Maybe because I'm way out there in the Atlantic Ocean, that I am an outsider in that way, and that's my point of view, that's why the characters that I write are outsiders."

Crackie is terrifically acted. Greeley is perfect as Mitsy. Her long brown hair hangs over her eyes, a curtain that physically separates her from the people around her. Her lack of confidence is evident in her slouch, in the way that she allows herself to be swallowed up by her hand-me-down coat, and her pain bursts forth from her shrieks when Sparky refuses to conform to her will. White says that Greeley "came out of [her] head when [she] met her" and was "a gift from God."

Kristin Booth (Young People F***ing) is Greeley's polar-opposite, playing here her optimistic hairdressing professor. She adds to Greeley's life and to the film the infusion of positivity that Crackie's other characters lack.

"I really loved her energy," White said of her decision to cast Booth, with whom she worked on CBC's MVP.

"She just has this quality that this character needed. I just wanted her to be bubbly and happy and positive, and just a joy to be around, because I felt that would work in contrast with the other characters, who had a heavy quality to them, a darker quality."

But it's truly Mary Walsh as Bride who shines in the film. Gone is Walsh's penchant for over-acting and flair, as we know her in sketch comedies from This Hour Has 22-Minutes. Instead she gives a minimalist, harrowing, hard performance. Bride is hardly classy: she kicks, she screams, she swears, she claws, she pushes her breasts up to her throat with ridiculous slips and bras.

White says that her decision to cast Walsh came out of knowing the actress personally.

"It's not that different from her type of roles, it's just that the tone of film is slightly different," she explained.

"Mary's tough-as-nails and she's got a heart of gold and she's incredibly emotional...and that's Bride."

For underneath that exterior, is a deep caring. And even after Mitsy is dragged through the mud by everyone who matters to her, the film does not leave its audience with only despair, as it easily could. Rather, even with every odd stacked up against our heroine, at the heart of the film is the sense that familial devotion can save any soul, however ensnared in fog.

"What I would hope is that people get drawn into the movie, and that they feel something," White said.

"That they leave feeling not heavy, but hopeful, despite a rough ride."

As I waited in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel on Bay Street earlier this week to meet with Quebecois auteur Denis Côté, I was filled with no small amount of trepidation. I had just finished watching Côté's entry in this year's festival, Carcasses, and I was terrified that the man behind the film, which was both beautiful and enigmatic, might be pompous or speak in some language of art house cinema that I'm not well versed in.

I was thrilled to discover that Côté, from Montreal, was anything but some art house snob. He emerged in the hotel lobby with disheveled air, and tattooed arms to speak candidly with me about Carcasses and about his role in the cinematic world.

Carcasses is not a film that is easily defined, and Côté admits that he meant for it to be that way. It straddles the line between documentary and fiction, cinema vérité and a formalist love letter. If one had to find a plot within the film, one could say that it follows the day-to-day life of Jean-Paul Colmor, the owner of a car cemetery in Quebec. Colmor's world is one piled high, floor-to-ceiling, with carburetors, toy cars and records. He spends his days visiting neighbouring towns, flea markets, auctions and garage sales, acquiring more and more...stuff. This stuff he repairs and attempts to sell, but ultimately his need to collect, to work to restore junk, is a disease.

Côté films Colmord in his cluttered, isolated world, most of the time from a distance, his camera watching him work. Colmor is a natural subject. He seems completely unaware of Côté's presence, except for when he faces the camera directly, answering questions about his "vie quotidienne" and his peculiarities.

Côté met Colmor several years ago, when he needed to shoot on-location in a scrapyard for another film. He said he never forgot him, but more significantly, he never forgot his property. When he was offered funding from an arts institute in Montreal to direct a new film on a minimalist budget, he decided that that property deserved a whole film of its own. And that's what Côté claims the film is about: that place, rather than about Colmor himself.

"Of course this guy is there, but it's more about getting to the soul of a place," he explained.

"It's a very chaotic and trashy place, but I wanted an elegance. That's why I used framed, very fixed shots."

Midway, the film shifts gears with the arrival of four youth with Down syndrome, who treat Colmor's property like a sanctuary. They arrive with their knapsacks and campfire materials and set up a sort of utopia among the carcasses of cars, playing, preparing meals, loving one another with innocence and tenderness. These scenes have the feel of a children's fairytale, where the children escape their schoolteachers and non-understanding parents to form their own "royaume."

According to Côté, this shift in tone was entirely intentional.

"Some people, like Jean-Paul, he decided by himself to get out of society, outside the rules of normal society," he explained.

"But on the other hand, we have people like the young adults with Down syndrome and we take them and put them outside of society by ourselves. So that place was like a haven for all the outcasts of the world, a place where they could meet outside the rules of society. On paper, I wanted to make a fairytale, an homage to all marginals. It's a twisted fairytale about friendship."

I can't pretend that the film moves at an exciting pace. It's not meant to. What's most striking about Carcasses is what it has to offer spectators on the visual level.

Certainly, close-ups of Colmor's face, with him staring unflinchingly toward the camera's lens, are striking. It's rare to be able to study the lines of someone's face so unabashedly, and for so long. But it's the long takes of Colmor's surroundings which are most striking. Despite the seemingly random shelves and piles of one man's junk, there is an order and a beauty to Colmor's house and scrapyard. There is no shortage of detail to soak up from panning or long shots.

I must admit that I'm slightly worried, finally sitting down to write this article, because Côté said during our conversation that he is tired of being written off by journalists and critics as a mere director of art films. He laughed that every time he picks up an article about one of his movies - Carcasses is his fourth film - the writer always adds a warning.

"Everyone says 'you're such a hard filmmaker; you make no concessions,'" he explained.

"It's hard to hear that. 'When are you going to do this? That? You're not an easy filmmaker.' And every time someone writes about my film it's always 'this film is probably not everyone's cup of tea.' I keep hearing that. Of course, but we've seen much more experimental films than Carcasses."

But the fact is, not everyone will be able to appreciate a film like Carcasses. This isn't a Hollywood blockbuster. While it's characters, real and fictional, are intriguing, it's not a film about character or plot.

Côté concedes that not everyone always "gets" what he's trying to say in his films. He said that many critics and spectators take Carcasses to be a commentary on society's general obsession with possessions, things. While he admits that that metaphor can be seen in Colmor's obsessive collecting, that message was never explicitly on his mind while filming.

"People talk about that metaphor," he said.

"'The place as a metaphor for consuming society.' But the film wasn't made in that sense. You can see it like that. It's like people seeing images and symbols and metaphors in every film - sometimes it's very unconscious, for the filmmaker. But [Colmor] has a disease. He's collecting absolutely everything and he's absolutely convinced he can re-sell that shit. He has a disease. It's a cute image, that place is a microcosm of our consuming society, but the film, it's not heavy-handed."

Rather, what it's more comparable to is a moving work of art. And when one appreciates it as such, as a cinematic art installation, something visual, rather than narrative, it is beautiful.

Côté is very frank about his films and about what sort of audience he would like them to reach. He is well aware that Carcasses screened at only one cinema in Montreal, for only fifteen days. He labels himself a "festival guy," a director whose films travel around the world and screen to critical success at film festivals, but which are not necessarily commercially or popularly successful.

"After four films I can see where I stand," he said.

"It's film festival material and I know it. You know, I'm not very commercially inclined. I just assume it and admit it: it's for film festival people, it's for cinephiles, it's art house. So it's always funny when I make a new film and I read my blurb in Variety and it's always 'this film screams 'art house' and nothing else.' Yeah! What do you want me to say?"

Côté said that, this said, sometimes he can't help but get defensive about his work, something that he joked he needed to stop doing in order to keep the media on his side. Without being prompted, he set about defending his decision to cast the four teen-aged actors with Down syndrome in his film. He admitted that while he had qualms about casting them, worrying that he might be exploiting them in some way, he quickly realized that that wasn't the case, regardless of what harsher film critics might be saying.

"After one day [of filming] I was feeling very weird because they could not understand what I was doing," Côté said.

"And even if you sit with them and you try to explain, they don't understand, they don't care, they don't have the capacity to necessarily understand what you're trying to do. I felt very bad. And one mother asked me, 'you feel bad...why?' And I said, 'I don't know. They're like puppets and I feel like I'm exploiting them and I don't feel good about that.' She said, 'listen, my kid is 18 years old. He's been conscious about his difference for 18 years and he feels inferior to everybody, and for the five-six days you're shooting with him now, it is the most important experience of his life, because he feels he's somebody now. So you don't need to care about explaining to him what you're doing. It's so rewarding for him and for us as parents. We don't care about your film, somehow. He's just making a film and it's good for him.' So she said, 'you go to your film festivals, you talk to your journalists, you intellectualize what you want. You did your job for my son and that has no price.' So from that moment on all the weight I had on my shoulders was gone. So that's why I feel comfortable with the film. I don't feel I'm exploiting these young people."

Côté said that the first screening he had of the film, for his stars and their families, including Colmor's 14 children, was an incredible experience. He said that everyone involved was smiling and laughing and that it didn't matter how much of his meaning was or was not understood. The one criticism that he faced that night, he explained, was that Colmor's children found his representation of their father too idealized. They said that his eccentricity, and his faults, like the fact that, though he's in his seventies, Colmor just married a 21-year-old Cuban woman who speaks no French, are not even touched upon in Carcasses. But Côté never set out to produce a documentary of Colmor's life.

"The film you're watching is very cold, very cerebral, very formalist," he said.

"It's a formalist piece of cinema, but the film on Jean-Paul Colmord needs to be done. You could sit with him and film with him for six months and the story of his life would be an incredible documentary saga. That's not my film. It's not that guy's bio. It's about a place. It's more of a fantasy and a poetic exercise. I wanted to do a dialogue between fiction and documentary, of course, because you think you're watching a documentary and then it spins and becomes a fiction. I like to play with those genres."

Still though, there are undoubtedly moments of truth on Carcasses. Côté has the tendency to script very little of his films, and to let the camera simply roll. This means that sometimes his lens catches moments of touching realism, from the twitch of Colmor's withered cheek when a fly buzzes close to him, to moments of stolen tenderness between his young actors.

"I like to put myself in danger," he said of this filming style.

"Anything can happen! You film it and anything can happen. I really like doing a film like Carcasses. You come in in the morning and have no idea what will happen in the day, and that's great. And at the editing table you have no clue what to do with all that material. Everything has to be done in the editing room. Nothing is set before. Nothing is controlled."

Carcasses screens today at 3:00 pm at Varsity Cinemas.

Excited director Bruce Sweeney have a funny and revealing interview to the National Post today.  Check it out.

The movie is very funny, but also emotional and sexy - comparisons to Woody Allen are not far off.  The world premiere is tonight, one of the last really big Canadian movies to bow at this year's TIFF.

 

 

The Mavericks programme offers audience members to get to know the filmmakers up close.  Yesterday afternoon, Thom Powers had the chance to sit down with comedian, actor, filmmaker Chris Rock.   It did not take very long for Chris Rock to have us all in stitches about one thing or another.  He mentioned he had the idea of doing a documentary about the cultural significance and importance of hair in the black communities as far back as the early 90's; he just wasn't famous yet to afford to have it made.  The idea came to him in Atlanta, GA when he was doing a stand-up show and at the same hotel the Bronner Brothers Hair Competition was also taking place.  Finally, when his youngest daughter asked him why she didn't have "good hair," he decided to go ahead and make the documentary Good Hair (playing at this year's festival).

He talked a little about the making of the film.  He was able to have some famous Black women talk candidly about their experience with hair products and hair rituals.  He joked that a few glasses of wine were helpful with that.  More than that, though, the film is about talking about an topic that is so important yet no one has actually brought it up before.  Having seen the film, I must say that it's funny but underneath the humour the issues of identity and of course, profiting from the art of hair styling and from hair itself are very prominent. 

Later on, Chris Rock mentioned that Michael Moore's Roger and Me made a big impact on him twenty years ago and that he's been interested in documentary films for a long time.  Rock actually attended the premiere of Moore's film Capitalism: A Love Story on Sunday night at the Elgin theatre.  When asked about his many travels as a comedian and his trip to South Africa, Rock described as a goal he had set for himself.  "Rock stars are rock stars because the play the world... I wanted to do that," he said.

 The audience had a chance to ask a few questions... Someone asked what Rock's wife thinks of the film.  He stated that she liked it; she had a "Good Hair party... she's never had a party for any of my other movies."  A young woman just had to ask about one of the characters from the first Transformers movie... Rock, always the comedian, simply said: "How did she get into this festival? Why would you ask a question about Transformers?"  The overall interview was filled a lof of funny bits that I wish I could share with you.  But I think if you know Chris Rock, then you know his type of humour.  

As for Good Hair, it still has some showings at TIFF... Click here for more info.  The films comes out in Canada on October 16th.

MSN pays special attention to TIFF and all the programs and films this year.  But on page 2, there's some extra special love for the Midnight Madness program and Colin Geddes, who talks about a movie he's excited about:

"I'm really excited to show an Australian film called 'The Loved Ones,' that's a directorial debut by a young man named Sean Byrne. And that's one of the joys of being a film festival programmer: being able to showcase and champion a filmmaker that no one knows anything about. I mean, that's basically what happened with Eli Roth when we showed 'Cabin Fever' [in 2002], and I would describe 'The Loved Ones' as 'Misery' meets 'Carrie' meets 'Pretty in Pink' from Australia."

And there's some sound advice:

"Geddes advises you to talk to your fellow line members as you wait for films to get a sense of what they've loved, and maybe get a surprise. "I remember back in the day, 1990 or 1991, there was this one guy I kept seeing all the time who just looked like this hung-over reporter, and I saw him line up all the time," Geddes says. "And then, lo and behold, [writer-director Quentin Tarantino] got up onstage and introduced 'Reservoir Dogs.' You never know who you're gonna be beside. When you're in an audience for a film, you could be sitting beside the director, the director's mother, the producer or just some wonderful person who loves the same films as you do."

The Loved Ones screens at TIFF on: Sunday September 11, 11:59PM - RYERSON / Tuesday September 15, 3:30PM - SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2 / Thursday September 17, 6:30PM - VARSITY 4

Want the lowdown on Bitch Slap? Check out this interview with writer, producer, director Rick Jacobson:

Sanjay Rajput: SR

Rick Jacobson: RJ

SR: Bitch Slap has been described as "An Intelligent Exploitation Film" what does that mean?

RJ:        When Eric Gruendemann and I were close to finishing the script we looked at it and coined the term "Thinking Man's Exploitation Film". When you think of an exploitation film you think of a pretty straightforward storyline. You don't think of it being too complex or the characters being too complex but here we were sitting on a script that had all of this and was quoting from Joseph Conrad, Sun Tzu, and William Congreve.

            More than anything else it has a complex story structure. It has a linear A story that goes along in real time, then it has a B story, like Memento, that runs in reverse. As the A story goes along the B story goes in reverse and they meet at the end with a big reveal and fun twist. It's not just your simple hot chicks running around shaking their tits and ass... Well, it is, but  there's also a fun level of intelligence in the characters that you don't find in typical exploitation films.

More...

Ioncinema! profiles The Loved Ones director Sean Byrne. He talks about filmmaking, his favorite films and a little more about The Loved Ones.

"[I] woke up one morning thinking what if I fused Carrie and Evil Dead, bringing the Prom to the cabin and making its very traditions – the decorations, the dress up, the dancing and, of course, the crowning of the King and Queen – the instruments of torture. I got this image of a bloodied teenager in a tuxedo tied to a chair in the middle of a balloon littered floor. So then I started asking, who is this kid, why is he here and how’s he going to get out?"

He also talks a little bit about the film's eclectic influences from the fighting spirit of Rocky to the dreamy surrealism of David Lynch's films.

"In The Loved Ones, our damaged hero is dragged from the literal world into something vividly surreal. In a way it mixes the slick Bruckheimer/Simpson hero’s journey model with the surreal and subconscious elements you might expect from a Lynch film."

 

The Loved Ones screens at TIFF on: Sunday September 11, 11:59PM - RYERSON / Tuesday September 15, 3:30PM - SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2 / Thursday September 17, 6:30PM - VARSITY 4

So last year with Chocolate star Jija Yannin making her debut at Midnight Madness, I did a little series, "Ladies of Asskickery," posting clips of Cheng Pei-Pei, Sue Shiomi / Shihomi Etsuko and Angela Mao Ying. With Ong-Bak 2: The Beginning set to kick all ass at TIFF, it's time to look at some Gentlemen of Asskickery.

Panna Rittikrai is probably best known to most Madness fans as Tony Jaa's guru and the martial arts choreographer for  Ong-Bak:  Muay Thai Warrior, Tom Yum Goong (aka The Protector) and the co-director of Ong Bak 2: The Beginning, but he's also made over 50 movies in the 1980s and 1990s with his Muay Thai Stunt Team. And he didn't do it in Bangkok. Influenced by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, he moved back to Khon Kaen making zero budget movies built around what the human body can do. Well, what Panna Rittikrai, Tony Jaa and Dan Chupong can do.

 "You've probably never heard of my movies....They are popular among taxi drivers and som tam vendors and security guards and Isaan coolies. My loyalest fans are folk people in the far-out tambons, where they lay out mattresses on the ground and drink moonshine whisky while watching my outdoor movies."

So here's Panna Rittikrai training in Muay Thai Stunt's first film Kerd Ma Lui/ Born to Fight (1982). (Also written, directed by and starrying Panna Rittikrai and recently remade with Muay Thai Stunt member, Dan Chupong). Recognize any influences? 

 

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning screens at TIFF on: Saturday September 19, 9:45am -SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2 / Saturday September 19, 11:59pm - RYERSON.

FEARnet has an interview up with Daybreakers directors (and twin brothers), Peter and Michael Spierig, who previously brought Undead to Midnight Madness in 2002. They talk about vampire movies, their fears and how Daybreakers isn't influenced by I am Legend, the book or the movie at all.

"[T]he fact that we're doing a vampire movie is daunting, because there's so many of them out there. How do you do something that's different? And how do you make it more than just another b-movie, which the genre is? That's the big dilemma. We worked to try and do something different, which hopefully it is."

 Daybreakers screens at TIFF on:  Friday September 11, 11:59pm - RYERSON / Sunday September 13, 12:30pm SCOTIABANKTHEATER 2.

You've probably heard that Ong Bak 2: The Beginning is set hundreds of years before the original, Ong Bak Muay Thai Warrior (2003) and the net is a-buzz with questions about how the films relate. Is Tony Jaa an undead warrior traveling the world tragically in search of a peace he can never know? Has he been frozen in a cavern of ice, only to be awoken when needed by his people?

I don't know. I am doing my best to be spoiler free, though, I have to say my best hasn't been that good.

I do know that Ong Bak is the name of the Buddha stolen in the first movie and I suspect that the statue of a certain enlightened being will return in the second.  More...

Seems like the Survival of the Dead promo character interview, "Survival of the Dead:  Sarge" is back infecting the internets, along with our brains.

George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead screens at TIFF on: Saturday September 12, 11:59PM - RYERSON & Monday September 14, 12:30PM - SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2

One of the dark horse contenders in this year's Midnight Madness line-up is The Loved Ones. Only one audience has seen this before and that was at the recent Melbourne International Film Festival where they reportedly screamed, laughed and cheered - just what you want in a Midnight Madness film! It's the directorial debut by Sean Bryne and you'll be learning more about him in the days to come on this blog. And for all those goth gals, the lead actor Xavier Samuel is destined to blow up big as a teen heart throb due to his casting in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. 

Aussie film freak and Fangoria correspondant Michael Helms (the man who told me I HAD to check out last year's Acolytes) just published a chat he had with Sean about the film. Read all about it at Fangoria!

The Loved Ones screens at TIFF on: Sunday September 11, 11:59PM - RYERSON / Tuesday September 15, 3:30PM - SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2 / Thursday September 17, 6:30PM - VARSITY 4

Our friends over at Homepageofthedead.com did a great interview with George A. Romero on George A. Romero's Survival Of The Dead. The full interview is here (click on Speaking of the Dead: An Interview with George A Romero.)

A few tidbits (for those who stayed up too late to read the whole thing):

George's message this time out. "It's mainly about tribalism, which I think is what is screwing the world up - tribalism, nationalism, religion -people taking sides. All of my zombie films have had a little touch of that, but this is specifically about it."

For you gorehounds out there: "It's restrained compared to Day or Dawn... It certainly has more than Diary and there's one really sort of spectacular sequence, but we're worried whether the MPAA will allow it - where they pull a guy apart..."

And a message to the fans: "Basically what I want to say is forgive me... the biggest thing that bugs me is that fans want me to do either the last movie I did or do another Dawn or do another this or do another that - and that pisses me off! That's not what I'm about! I'm gonna make a movie, look at it, if you don't like it that's fine. If you like it, then I love it. In other words don't punish me because this was not as good as Dawn. This is what I'm thinking right now..."

George A. Romero's Survival Of The Dead screens at TIFF on: Saturday September 12, 11:59PM - RYERSON  & Monday September 14, 12:30PM - SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2

Watching Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and the Weird at the Elgin, all I could think was, ?I wish I were seeing this with the Midnight Madness audience.? It's interesting to see how the daydwellers live, the Elgin is beatiful and being short I love nearly any theater with stadium seating. I'm not ashamed to admit it's a big part of why I miss Midnight Madness at the Uptown. But still, I missed the enthusiasm.

I guess I should also admit I'm exaggerating just a little how much I thought about the daytime crowd since from the opening shot, I didn't think about anything but the movie.

I like Kim's films (A Tale of Two Sisters, The Foul King and The Quiet Family, remade as The Happiness of the Katakuris by Takashi Miike) and he makes a damn fine Western. The opening tracking shot following Song Kang-ho's (The Host and yay!) back as he walks up a train selling rice cakes and candy rivals the opening tracking shot in JCVD. Not in the complexity of action, but maybe in the beauty and in a different low tech complexity. I think that Kim Jee-woon's ?steady cam? wasn't just a ?human-cam? as he mentioned in the Q&A. It seemed like it might've been hanging from a board a la Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films. Kim Jee-woon mentioned Sam Raimi's Spider-man as an influence, so I can't help wondering. But regardless, the shot's amazing.

The Good, The Bad and the Weird is funny and there are anachronistic elements intended to translate through time, but it's not detached from the characters or the situation. There's no fear of engagement. Kim Jee-woon told us afterwards that he always thought that Manchuria in the 1930s was incredibly postmodern. Miike uses similar postmodern elements in his Western, Sukiyaki Western Django, and they seem to move his film out of time. But I never doubted that The Good, The Bad and the Weird was in a particular time and place. Even the Sergio Leone references aren't intended for abstract appreciation and it didn't really matter that many in the audience might not catch little things like Park Chang-yi's (Lee Byung-hun) suit or hat-shooting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look at that suit!

You can line parts of The Good, The Bad and the Weird up against Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy, but it doesn't matter all that much. Kim Jee-woon isn't playing collect them all. There's a lot more to this film than that.

I did really like the musical references, though. Westerns are about landscape, it's true, but they're also about sound, or maybe about silence and when to break it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look at him go!

Also, Jung Woo-sung rides better than any actor I've seen. Maybe even better than Mifune Toshiro in The Hidden Fortress.

He also successfully wears a cowboy hat in Manchukuo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Lau Ching-Wan also successfully wears a cowboy hat.

After The Good, The Bad and the Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django, Tears of the Black Tiger and even Johnnie To's Exiled, the world is clamoring for more Asian Westerns. Or at least I am. They seem like the best ones around right now. Well, except maybe weird Westerns, like J.T. Petty's The Burrowers.