In October.
The trailer promises the same take-no-prisoners approach Cuaron and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki used on Children of Men. Ooh, chills.
Another movie we’re looking forward to: Elysium, Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9. Looks like it’s a good year for science-fiction movies.
We had no idea what The Reflecting Skin was about; we only got a copy because Viggo Mortensen is in it. In this instance our shallowness paid off: The Reflecting Skin is weird, gorgeous, and not likely to be forgotten.
Childhood is frequently depicted as the most wonderful time of anyone’s life: it’s over too fast, and then life is downhill all the way. But that’s because it’s viewed through the lens of nostalgia. This 1990 film written and directed by Philip Ridley presents childhood through the eyes of a child, and while it is certainly full of wonder it is also terrifying and brutal.
Little Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) lives with his worn-out parents in the rural American Midwest in the 1950s. They await the return of their eldest son Cameron (Viggo), who had fought in the Pacific. Given that WWII has been over for years, you have to wonder what’s taking Cameron so long—and then you realize that amidst these golden fields of gently swaying wheat under endless blue skies (beautifully photographed by Dick Pope), there is nothing. But through a child’s eyes (accompanied by Nick Bicat’s haunting Handel-esque score), this sun-bleached world is teeming with monsters and angels.
Cameron: Why don’t you go play with your friends?
Seth: They’re all dead.
There is a spate of killings in the area—the killers appear to be a gang of youths going round in a Cadillac. Seth is convinced that the murderers are vampires; his prime suspect is a widow (Lindsay Duncan) who lives alone with her husband’s personal effects, animal skulls and weapons from whaler ancestors. We’re never really sure. You could view The Reflecting Skin as a nightmare of childhood, or as a vampire movie without the fangs and blood (If you can imagine a cross between Tree of Life and Fright Night).
Then Cameron finally comes home and falls in love with the widow.
The pace is stately, but every frame radiates foreboding. How could we miss this film when it first came out? Now we have to see it again and again.
During the Game of Thrones panel at Comic-Con 2013, producers screened this deleted scene from Season 3 featuring Lord Tywin and Maester Pycelle.
Lord Tywin fishing. And gutting fish. Presumably this comes before the Red Wedding. Fish is the sigil of House Tully; its lord was getting married and his nephew the King in the North would be present. (Tywin also gutted a stag, sigil of Baratheon, in the first season. Tywin guts things.)
They must’ve decided there was enough foreshadowing. This scene makes Tywin more likeable, though.
In other Comic-Con news, Magneto hits on his younger version.
Sir Ian McKellen announces he’s looking for a husband, casts longing look at Michael Fassbender. In Vulture. Hmm, older Magneto will have to do battle with younger Xavier then.
While we like the idea of X-Men: Days of Future Past, especially the casting of Peter Dinklage as the villain, we are bothered by the presence of so many holdovers from the abomination that was X-Men: The Last Stand. (Cue Noel: Halle Berry is not Storm!) We would’ve thought they’d use the success of X-Men First Class to recast the principals. (Except Wolverine. Hugh Jackman is oddly untainted by bad movies.)
For as mammoth a role it plays in our history, there haven’t been that many movies about slavery in the United States. For as many movies as there are about gladiators and Israelites and subjects as dark and difficult as the Holocaust, the subject has been explored rarely (Amistad, Django Unchained), and often somewhat indirectly (Glory, Beloved), and what movies we have gotten have often focused on white saviors (this category also includes Lincoln, and even to some extent Django). Notably, just about every last one of them has also been directed by a white man—Steven Spielberg, Edward Zwick, Quentin Tarantino, or Jonathan Demme. Watching these, I tend to agree with Roger Ebert, who in 1990 wrote of Glory, “I consider this primarily a story about a black experience and do not know why it has to be seen largely through white eyes.”
Read Trailer Critic in Slate.
In the Podcast episode 2.3, we talk to our friend Jeffrey Jeturian. The film (Kubrador, Tuhog, Pila Balde, etc) and TV (Be Careful With My Heart) has just completed his 9th feature film, Ekstra, starring Vilma Santos. In the first of two episodes, we talk about how he got his start in the movies, and his knack for discovering talents in gas stations and panciteria.
Listen to the podcast, download it, or get it on iTunes.
This podcast was supposed to be uploaded weeks ago, but we had some technical problems. While we were doing the podcast, Garage Band stopped recording. So we opened a new file for the second half of the interview. It seemed fine during recording, but in playback, nothing. So we’ll have to do a Part 2.
Then we sent the file that worked to Ren, and it would only play on iTunes. Aaargh. Fortunately Renly was able to fix it. Enjoy, and don’t forget to watch Ekstra at Cinemalaya. (There will be a theatrical run after the festival.)
Renly’s housemates Sqeeky (white) and Pouncer (demonstrating his doughnut consumption prevention technique). Photo by Ren.
Pacific Rim, the new film by Guillermo del Toro, is very loud and silly and we enjoyed it. We like to think of it as Guillermo’s Revenge, and as the movie got louder and sillier we made up this litany in the voice of Guillermo del Toro.
“You didn’t hire me to make Alien Resurrection, so here’s a bunch of vicious aliens!
“You didn’t hire me to make Transformers, so here’s a bunch of giant robots!
“You didn’t hire me to make Avengers, so here’s a portal between worlds!
“You didn’t hire me to make Godzilla, so here are giant beasts laying waste to an Asian city!
“You didn’t hire me to make Battleship, which is just as well because that was idiotic, but here’s a horde of monsters coming from the bottom of the sea!
“You’re not hiring me to remake Top Gun, so here’s a reenactment of Maverick vs. Ice Man!
“You didn’t hire me to make King Kong, so here’s a monster rampaging through the streets of a big city! (Hmmm, Del Toro was supposed to direct The Hobbit until his falling out with Peter Jackson, who remade King Kong.)
“You never made a live-action version of Voltes V, so let’s volt in! (Stop that. There’ll be no singing of that theme ever again.)
“Let’s set it in the Pacific Rim to get that lucrative Asian market. And let’s mention Manila because the audience in Manila will cheer when they hear “Manila”! (And we did! Hey, we clapped during Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy’s plane flew over the Philippines on a map.)”
Of course he got a five-rating from some of us five minutes into the movie, when we are introduced to Charlie Hunnam and his abs. That’s it, we have to watch Sons of Anarchy. In the near future the earth comes under attack from Kaiju, monsters rising from the deep, and the earthlings defend themselves by building huge robot fighters called Jaegers. (Every time someone said jaeger we thought we were required to take a shot.)
Jaegers are operated by pairs of muscular gesture gamers (not exactly, but sort of). The neural interface requires the pilots to do a kind of mind-meld called “the drift” which requires them to get in each other’s heads. But the monsters get smarter, the jaegers are defeated, and before long the fate of the planet rests on a motley band of fighters led by Stringer Bell from The Wire and featuring Rinko Kikuchi and cast members of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, True Blood, Homeland and The Unit. Go earth! (Now that Hollywood really needs the Asian market to guarantee profitability, we can expect more Asian faces in blockbuster movies. That’s why there are Asians and Anglo-Africans in Thor’s Asgard.)
Idris Elba shouts, speechifies, and gives probably the hammiest performance of his life, but by default (No one else says anything memorable) he is the star of the film. And we like Charlie Day, more so when he’s the resident geek/kaiju groupie.
One of our friends would not get into the spirit of the movie and kept questioning the logic of building giant robots to fight the monsters. Fine, they’re not efficient. Okay, they’re kind of dumb. Here’s a serious question: If you were the President of Earth and hordes of monsters attacked human populations, how would you fight the monsters? Apart from sending fighter jets with nuclear warheads. Any ideas?
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