Hands up if you’ve seen the Oscars. I’m not doing that because I want to count how many people tuned in, I just want to rob you from your money for doing that. Just like you’ve already been robbed from your soul by watching the awards show.
All kidding aside, the award ceremony wasn’t broadcast in my area (well, not if you don’t count a subscription-based movie channel owned by evil people whose phone number does not end in 666 for no reason, I assume) and I was left to view red carpet footage (two hours of “Who are you wearing?”) and a montage offered by Daily Show fora (as Jon Stewart was this year’s host).

The Oscar ratings were the lowest ever recorded and most of this has to do with 2007 being not a very strong year. In fact, the only nominated movie to make more than $100 million was Juno.

So let’s avoid the Oscars once again and focus on a more prestigious award ceremony: The Kermodes.

Movie critic Mark Kermode used BBC2′s Culture Show once again to give his own prize away. The winners received a statue and their names will be remembered forever. Here’s the list:

Best Actor: Sam Riley (Control) (Kermode: “And I can’t even stomach Joy Division.”)
Best Actress: Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)
Best Music: Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood) (banned from the Oscars for including a previously released track)
Best Foreign Language Movie: Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
Best Director: David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises)
Best Movie: Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)
Lifetime Achievement Award: Ken Russell

Now how’s that for a list?

I was talking to a manager of my local cinema the other day and he told me that last year one of the projectors didn’t want to start working. The movie was INLAND EMPIRE and it took ten minutes before someone thought it may not be the director’s intention to start the movie with ten minutes of a black screen.

Ah, the things you can do to an arthouse crowd…

Another example: Who Wants To Kill Jessie? played in Brussels last year and had it not been for the fact that the subtitles were also shown upside down noone would’ve complained that the movie was projected the wrong way.

Between February 2003 and May 2004 I had the chance to introduce movies to a crowd of students. Noone believed it could be done (at least not more than once), but in total there were 30 movies shown and introduced by me. From better known films (Requiem for a Dream, Fucking Amal, Ghost in the Shell) to the more obscure (The Company of Wolves and B. Monkey were both seen by one person), the list contained weird features one wouldn’t believe one could see in a school building (be it after hours). And yes, why shouldn’t one combine Requiem for a Dream (2001) with The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916)? Or show “Tesis” with a few scenes from “Snuff” during my introduction?

Some films never made it to the final 30: amongst them “Quien Puede Matar A Un Nino?” (Spanish without subtitles… bit too diffucult), “The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue” (one zombie movie per season was enough) and Thomas est amoureux. Mainly because of the tagline “the doctor ordered cybersex” and the first scene (cybersex) which would be shown around the time most teachers would leave the vicinity (I was already under fire for showing too much horror…).

Which is a shame because “Thomas est amoureux” is definitely part of Belgium’s film history. Not because it did exceptionally well (I believe 0.1% to 0.3% of the Belgians saw it at the cinema), but because the movie was shown on a cinema site a week before it opened. It was a Tuesday night, around 8pm and if you were online you could watch the streaming of this film (totally ‘gratis’!).
It’s still relatively unknown… it’s rarely shown on tv (once on a Dutch channel well after midnight, once in Wallonia around 9pm) and the ugly DVD isn’t something people would like to buy.

“Thomas est amoureux”, contrary to what’s said on the DVD or how it was marketed to the Dutch audience (when shown on tv), is not a sex movie. Yes, it does start with a cybersex scene. Yes, there’s more sex later in the film. Still, one wouldn’t say “The French Connection” is a movie about cars.

So what is the film about? It’s about Thomas, who is extremely agoraphobic. He communicates with the outer world via his computer. He never leaves his place and noone is allowed to visit him.
As a viewer, you’ll see what Thomas sees: whatever happens on his computer.

“Thomas est amoureux” is futuristic, but it is quite clever: the virtual world looks very virtual. Most movie aim for realism, with the result that the movie is already old-fashioned by the time is released. Which is why the penguin in “Fight Club” is still relevant now, whereas “Men in Black” is famous for being out of time by the time it was released on video/DVD.
All the settings from “Thomas est amoureux” look totally unreal, but as there is always an actor present in this weird setting you’re willing to accept it.

Being from Belgium, I know how hard it is for a filmmaker to raise money for your film. Most movies are made for budgets a beggar would complain about. The only exceptions are usually tacky family movies with our biggest comedians or movie adaptations of overly promoted kids tv. “Alias”, a Belgian thriller (I’d say giallo), was made for a ludicrous amount of 2.5 million Euro. Most films are allowed to cost 1 million at most.
With that knowledge, it’s amazing to watch “Thomas est amoureux”. How can a movie, made for a shoe-string budget, look so nice?

Each director will have to put up a exhausting fight to get his next film made. It’ll often take 5 years before a next film can be made. “Thomas est amoureux” was Pierre-Paul Renders’s first film (in 2000) after a short in 1992. His second feature, “Comme Tout Le Monde” will be made in 2006.

“Thomas est amoureux” isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a very exceptional film. It’s hard to think of other movies that’ll fall into this category. And if you’ll think of the shoe-string budget it was made for, you’ll love it even more.

As you may have noticed, it’s Valentine’s Day today. In case you were aware but think the whole day is far too mushy, don’t worry: here’s my suggestion for an Alternative Valentine’s Day Film Festival.

1. KISSED
(R: Lynne Stopkewich, CAN, 1996)

Kissed is a romantic movie, be it with a twist: while Sandra Larson (Molly Parker) loves boys, she prefers them when dead. Which is why it’s pretty handy she works in a mortuary. A beautiful film on love (if you can look past the necrophilia, but that’s just a detail). When I saw this film in Antwerp at a late night screening, I was the only one in the theatre. A shame as this was one of the most impressive films of the nineties. For Kissed is as beautiful as it’s morbid. Fine performances by Parker (accidently, this movie is how I discovered her) and Peter Outerbridge make this, Lynne Stopkewich‘s debut, so outstanding. Not to be missed.

2. BLUE VELVET
(R: David Lynch, USA, 1986)

The movie starts in a idyllic place, but the camera moves to a grass field and shows an ear, neatly cut off and (if I remember correctly) with some ants walking over it… David Lynch has always had a peculiar relationship with love and romance. Remember Eraserhead, the boy who didn’t have a grandmother and decided to grow one himself in Lynch’s short The Grandmother or the truckload of fetishes on display in Twin Peaks.
The scene where Isabella Rosselini is forced by Dennis Hopper while Kyle MacLachlan is forced to watch everything in the closet may give you an alternative idea for things to do on your Valentine’s night. Violent and perverse, not the sort of movie most people would classify as ‘romantic’. But we do.

3. LA MORTE VIVANTE a.k.a. THE LIVING DEAD GIRL
(R: Jean Rollin, FR, 1982)

A leak of radioactive gas is the reason a girl comes back to life. The only problem is that now she’s a zombie, she can only survive on fresh human blood. No problem, her lesbian lover will take care of that… It’s Feb 14 and we were talking about love and can it get more romantic than killing people or give your own blood so that your lover can survive? I didn’t think so.
La Morte Vivante, being a Rollin movie, focuses luridly on nudity (you might argue whether Rollin had a fetish for nude women or if his budget was so tiny there just wasn’t any money for clothes) and the blood is way too read to be even slightly convincible (mind you, Rollin’s Zombie Lake featured people with green paint on their face and forced us to believe they were zombies… so we really shouldn’t complain too much about redness here), but all that doesn’t matter. On a romantic scale, this third film of our festival will get the highest points. On a quality scale, not. Then again, if you watch all three movies in a row, it’s already way passed bedtime when you’re watching La Morte Vivante and that’s exactly when you should watch this sort of movie.

Yes yes, you’re shaking, but you know what you’re shaking to? Contrary to what most people assume, my Finnish is a little rusty, so I really don’t understand the lyrics of Eleanoora Rosenholm. Now while that doesn’t seem to matter when you’re listening to poppy songs, you might feel a bit uneasy when you read the lyrics to Maailmanloppu, the band’s brand new single. But more about that later…

Eleanoora Rosenholm are from Finland and are a band, not the name of the singer (whose name is Noora Tommila). They have released an album with the title Vainajan Muotokuva. The album contains 9 tracks and 7 of them contain lots of bells, cheery music and upbeat tempos.
But do not be fooled: the instrumental tracks 5 and 8 are not the odds one out here, they reveal the true nature of Eleanoora Rosenholm.

(In case the cover hadn’t given you a hint already…)

If track 8 (“Puutarhakatu 36″) sounds like an eerie place when the ghosts of murdered children are still roaming around, you may have watched too many horror movies, but Eleanoora Rosenholm have described their music as “pop music for housewives and serial killers”. This truly hits the nail on the head: while the music sounds cheery enough, the lyrics and the odd soundscape buried inside a song show you that all is not what it seems.

Take track 9 and the video: it starts quite normal and boring, but within 20 seconds you see blood running down the girl’s legs and that’s just the start. Some kind spirit put the English translation of the lyrics on the site and that gives you further insight. But before you’re allowed to read those, have a look at the video first. (Ideally, you should listen twice: once with your eyes closed to hear the song and once to see the video, but I assume you’ll have other things to do today…)