We nearly forgot to mention it, but 2010 also meant the welcome return of ARTE Trash, a season of extraordinary films on a pan-European channel. In the 90s we complained when we had to stay up until 2 am to watch Moviedrome, but in 2010 we welcome any sort of television channel dedicating some night to cult movies. And even if you missed them, there’s still the world wide web to catch up on those films, because ARTE Trash may offer a couple of films you’d never heard of.

JANUARY
Jan 15: Marquis
Jan 22: Animal Love (Ulrich Seidl)
Jan 29: Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont)

FEBRUARY
Feb 5: Geierwally (Walter Bockmayer)

MARCH
Mar 12: Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance
Mar 19: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx
Mar 26: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

APRIL
Apr 2: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril
Apr 9: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons
Apr 16: Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell
Apr 23: Daddy, Darling (Joseph Sarno)
Apr 30: Abigail Leslie is back in town (Joseph Sarno)

MAY
May 7: The Happiness of the Katakuris (Takashi Miike)
May 21: Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf De Heer)
May 28: Attack of the Giant Moussaka

JUNE
Jun 4: Zinda Laash (Dracula in Pakistan)
Jun 11: Mercano, El Marciano (Mercano The Martian)
Jun 18: Gib Gas, ich will Spass
Jun 25: O Fantasma
(For more info on June’s movies, go to this post)

JULY
July 2: The Battle Wizard (Shaw Brothers)
July 9: Love Camp (with Laura Gemser)
July 16: Go Go Second Time Virgin (Koji Wakamatsu)
July 23: Avant que j’oublie
July 30: Beauty’s Exotic Dance: Torture! (pinku)

AUGUST
Aug 6: Alucarda

Arte’s schedule only runs until August 6 at this point, so further episodes of Arte Trash – if any – will be posted here soon.

Because some of you may not believe Turkish Star Wars was genuinely a seriously made film, here’s another helping by way of a three-minute montage. Featuring convincing alien suits in the final minute and the epic fight between man and rock in the second minute. For some reason, this just doesn’t grow old.

The internet ate my essay! No really, 70 minutes of work down the drain and even the draft cannot be retrieved. Which is why I’ll use WordPress from now on to write my articles: at least it saves the latest draft every five minutes. So no article on the BIFFF today (there’s only so much energy in my body and I can’t waste another 70 minutes tonight), but a toned-down version of the original text. The 28th BIFFF (or Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival) has closed its doors, but not without awarding lots of prizes. Let’s take a look at the winners… (the blurb comes straight from the BIFFF site).

The jury, fronted by The Howling‘s Dee Wallace, awarded the Grand Prix (Golden Raven) to Jaume Collet-Saura‘s Orphan, a film already reviewed on DV. The film never got a cinema release in Belgium, despite being bought by a distributor, so the BIFFF decided to add it to their line-up and the jury really liked it.
The jury also awarded a Silver Raven (Special Prize) to two other films, Thirst by Chan-wook Park and Symbol by Hitoshi Matsumoto. Symbol was also given the 7th Orbit award.

The award for the least fashionably titled award goes to the Best Thriller Award. The winner is a Spanish-French co-production: Cell 211 (Celda 211) by Daniel Monzon. The jury also gave a special mention to Uwe Boll, for the “Bingo scene” in Rampage.

The Silver Méliès is the award given to the Best European Film. The German film Die Tür (The Door) by Anno Saul was the winner and a special mention was given to Cargo by Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter.

And finally the viewers’ say: the audience liked a fake documentary on vampires best: Vincent Lannoo‘s Vampires.

It looks as if Belgium has a new giallo on its hands (that’ll be n°3). It’s called Amer (Bitter) and it’s released in April in France (01/04) and Belgium (28/04). The film’s poster is dedicated to classic giallo posters and one of the trailers genuinely looks and sounds like a giallo. And this in the same month as Argento’s mediocre Giallo is released in Belgium.

To celebrate Amer’s release, Cinema Nova will have the premiere with both directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani and a mini-season of gialli: The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Blood and Black Lace and Autopsy.

Gilles Vranckx is the man who designed the film’s poster and did such a good job Mondo Macabro asked him to design a couple of posters for them as well. His blog can be found here: http://gillesvranckx.blogspot.com/

Amer itself will be reviewed later, for now here’s the film’s site … http://www.amer-film.com/ … and the trailer:

The story of my solitude
if my solitude were a fish
it would be so militant
a whale would fear it

Listen to this song, it’s an important song. It was recorded in 1975 by a Japanese band, punk avant la lettre, one year before the Sex Pistols were formed. The band wasn’t successful and the song is only available on the first vinyl pressing, but it is this song that will save us all in 2012. This song, “Fish Story”, will be the reason why a comet won’t hit our planet. Not bad for a song by an unsuccessful punk band, a song that’s remarkable because in the middle of the track there’s suddenly a long pause.

This is the story of Fish Story (or Fisshu sutôrî), the latest film by Yoshihiro Nakamura which was recently shown at the BIFFF. It’s hard to talk about the film, without spoiling your pleasure, but I’ll have a go anyway. The film starts in 2012 and the streets are abandoned. Well, almost abandoned… there’s an older man in an electric wheelchair and he’s riding around the town. All of a sudden he spots a record store that isn’t closed. In fact, there’s even a customer who is quite happy he’s learned to know the Sex Pistols cover of  “My Way” (listen to it here). The guy behind the counter alerts the customer to a rare vinyl album, made by Japanese band Gekirin in 1975: a punk album one year before punk was launched. The customer is amazed, but the old man isn’t: how come these two people aren’t afraid? The answer is simple: they hadn’t heard the news that this was the day a comet would hit the earth, the day Japan would perish in a tidal wave. The news scares the guys, much to the amusement of the older man, who doesn’t understand why the record store guy has the idiotic notion that music will help soothe the pain.

But it’s not idiotic, as Fish Story will prove. Hovering between 1946 and 2012, the film tells the story of a handful of people: the three guys in the record store, an unsuccessful band, a virtually bankrupt publisher of literature, the tv show Go Rangers (granted, it’s only a cameo, but it pops up in the film a couple of times), a girl who falls asleep on a ferry and who’s forced to stay on the ferry until the next stop, the young waiter who tries to console her and who always wanted to be a ‘champion of justice’ and the ridiculed driver of two men who collect ghost records (songs which may be haunted). These stories may or may not be connected but these people (or people they meet) are all a cog in a giant machine, cogs that’ll help one song to save the world.

Fish Story doesn’t offer you something you haven’t seen before: there are a lot of movies where the characters’ fates are part of a bigger story, but it’s a sort of film that isn’t easy to make. Either the story is so thin the viewer is able to predict the final after twenty minutes or it’s so complicated people will either lose track and switch off or will stop caring. One director who’s keen to make such films is Atom Egoyan and sometimes it has helped him to make brilliant films (Family Viewing, Exotica, …). The trick is – and I know it’s easier to describe than to make such a film – to tell the story bit by bit, just enough to draw the lines, but not enough to see the entire picture. Yoshihiro Nakamura has found a brilliant trick: not all of the stories are told until the end. What comes later will only be shown at the end of the story, when we see which story lines helped to save the world. (I had a long thought about this part of the review: whether or not it would spoil the film, but I don’t think it does: you know that you’re watching story lines and that somehow these stories must be connected. The only thing you don’t know is how they’re connected and that’s something I won’t tell you. So no spoilers here.)

Fish Story is not a perfect film, but it’s the sort of film you’ll love more than flawlessly made films. All of the stories tackle the subject of despair in one way or another, a bit like the beginning of the song “Fish Story”: if my solitude were a fish, it would be so militant a whale would fear it. This film may not be perfect, but it’s militant. Fear it.

8/10

Odd, isn’t it, that the best known Turkish adaptation hasn’t been mentioned here? It’s Turkish Star Wars of course (or: The Man Who Saved The World). Perhaps we thought it had already been mentioned? Because there’s no reason one can forget this one. In fact, it’s so inept a trailer or a scene won’t do it justice. Luckily someone had a brilliant idea: putting a couple of clips under the Beastie Boys track “Intergalactic”. So there you go, four minutes of superb cinema history. Fluffy monsters will be decapitated and – thanks to state of the art special effects – you’ll almost believe a man is cut in half. Almost.

It’s a tricky thing, to name a film after a genre. Especially if it seems like you’ll be perennially associated by the genre anyway. A handful of lucky punks may have called their short “Film Noir”, but no feature film seems daft enough to go with that title. (We’re not sure if we want to include Masahiro Kabayashi here, whose Koroshi allegedly means “film noir” in Japanese – as the international title became Killing.)

Enter Dario Argento, whose career boomed in the 70s with films like The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and Suspiria and whose recent career has been so successful we’re still referring to the films he made in 1970 and 1977. One of the thrillers Argento made at the start of his career was recently released on DVD – finally, we’d like to add – and this Four Flies on Grey Velvet got a lot more buzz than Argento’s two recent films: Mother of Tears and Giallo. There, I’ve said it: the latest Argento film is called Giallo. Can you smell the problem already?

“Giallo”, you see, isn’t only the Italian word for “yellow”, but it’s also the movie genre that Argento got his fame from. Allegedly, his Bird with the Crystal Plumage was supposed to be the real start of the genre – even if there had been some giallos (or gialli) in the 60s and Mario Bava should probably get the credit for Blood and Black Lace in 1964. Anyway, even now there probably won’t be a giallo retrospective at a film festival without including at least a film by Argento or Bava. And whereas Argento’s current status may be overrated, there’s no denying the man’s gialli (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Profondo Rosso) were good movies. It’s Argento’s later work that a lot of fans have problems with: despite the odd movie that was got a more welcome reception, pretty much all of the man’s films from the 90s and 00s was met with less than lukewarm reviews.

But lately it seems Argento seems to have found a new hobby and it’s called: spitting your fans in their faces. Twenty-seven years after Suspiria and Inferno, he completed his Three Mothers trilogy with Mother of Tears, probably the worst film Argento ever made. The general consensus was not only: “Did we have to wait a quarter of a century for this?”, but also the status of the two earlier films seemed suddenly smeared. By comparison, the Star Wars prequels seemed like cinema gold. But Argento wasn’t happy just by killing off half of his legacy… no, the other half (his gialli) had to go down the drain too.

Gialli were in essence film noir movies but with more nudity and gore. Outrageous at the time, a lot of them can now only be served as an appetizer before watching a torture porn film like Saw or Hostel. And that wouldn’t be a terribly wrong way to describe Giallo: Argento does torture porn. In this film, you see, there’s a mad killer on the loose who kidnaps and tortures beautiful young women. The mad kiler goes by the name Yellow or Giallo, not because of he wants to pay homage to the genre but because a disease has made his skin go yellow. As far as motives can be stupid, this one can be par with that Japanese flick where a man tortures and kills people because his body odour has made him unpopular with the ladies.

To be fair, Argento shouldn’t be the only one to take the blame: the script was penned by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller especially for the Italian director. Keller was responsible for a couple of “original Sci-Fi channel movies”, to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here. But that neither Argento nor the other two writers came to the conclusion that giving a thriller such a title could only be considered as hybris, is beyond me.

Mainly because it ensures the film can only disappoint. In all fairness, Giallo isn’t a horrible film but you only notice this if your expectations have been crushed upfront. I couldn’t say Adrian Brody astounded me in the film and his role was quite silly indeed: because Avolfi (Brody) investigates vicious murders, his desk is in the deep dark cellar. A bit like Fox Mulder in The X-Files then, with the exception that Spooky Mulder was ridiculed by the FBI and Brody’s character genuinely investigates gruesome murders. Just imagine the man has a lead: it’ll take him ten minutes just to leave the precinct. Luckily the pizza delivery service still knows where he is. Which is how Emmanuelle Seigner‘s character Linda (whose sister was kidnapped by a man in a taxi) manages to track him down. At first, Avolfi doesn’t take her serious, but then he believes her and suddenly he has no problems talking about the gruesome murders to a civilian. As one does over a yummy slice of pizza.

Meanwhile Yellow tortures Linda’s sister by forcing her to watch how another victim is tortured to death. The torture scenes aren’t there to show how twisted the character is, it rather looks as if Argento is trying to show us he can still direct gory scenes. But Terror at the Opera this isn’t (remember those pins?) and it actually looks as if Argento is still trying to show how cool he can still be, anno 2009. In all fairness, I was able to find the screenplay of the film and Argento has genuinely improved parts of the film, including some of the torture scenes.

All in all, Giallo is a lot better than Mother of Tears (then again, so would be a testcard, so I’m not sure whether that’s saying anything) and I’m pretty sure I’d like the film better a second time round. Sadly I’m also certain I don’t want to see it again. Blame it on the hybris, kids!

4.5/10

Do you have an idea of how many adaptations of Hamlet or The Taming of the Shrew there have been made? And whereas some may indeed mutter: “Just what we were craving for, another Shakespeare version!” resistance is futile: restaging a play is not an uncommon or ungodly thing. Remaking a film seems like a tougher job, though people like Steven Soderbergh (Underneath and Ocean’s Eleven) and David Cronenberg (The Fly) got away with it, not in the least because their adaptations were personal. And yes, it’s always easier to direct a remake of a lesser known film like The Fly or Gone in 60 Seconds. It seems like the only thing you shouldn’t attempt is to offer the remake of a cult classic. Arguably the worst example is Psycho, Gus van Sant‘s scene by scene remake of Hitchcock’s classic (Gus defended himself by shooting almost exactly the same picture because the original couldn’t be improved). Some things, apparently, just shouldn’t be remade. Just ask Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman who managed to make themselves truly hated by millions of fans for attempting to make a movie version of The Avengers. (Uma even tried to make it worse by posing herself not only as Emma Peel of The Avengers but also Meiko Kaji of Lady Snowblood.) Today we take a closer look at two remakes possibly nobody was waiting for: The Wicker Man and The Prisoner.

First up, The Wicker Man. A British cult classic starring Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland and Christopher Lee. The maypole dances, the veiled eroticism, the wicker man… one would have to be mad to attempt a remake of such a film. Enter Neil LaBute, director of a handful of movies best described as “not the ideal first date movie”. LaBute, it seems, avidly studies misogyny and makes uncomfortable films about the subject. Sounds like the ideal man for the remake then.
Well, in all fairness, The Wicker Man could’ve been a lot worse. It’s hard to care for Nicolas Cage, but LaBute does manage to compare the human world to the bee world without looking too much like a pompous ass. What a shame then that someone felt the need to include supernatural elements (or maybe it’s all a dream – sigh… bored): Cage as an officer you don’t really like forcing a mother to stop her car and being forced to watch how the car, the mother and her daughter are suddenly devoured by flames. Was there really a need for such a scene? No, there wasn’t.
In fact, The Wicker Man seems to have more of such scenes and fast forwarding seemed the easy way out. Still, after arriving at the end credits I felt like I’d skipped some vital elements, rewound the dvd and watched the film again, my hopes for a good film shattered. Funnily enough, the film seemed a lot better now and only Cage (surely a bit miscast) and the alleged supernatural elements bugged me this time. Was the film good? No, there were too many elements disturbing my enjoyment to classify this film as ‘good’, but by no means is it as bad as a lot of people say. At least, LaBute managed to adapt the film into a LaBute film, despite the hammy plotlines and Cage. Neither fish nor flesh then and so a five out of ten was awarded.

Next up, The Prisoner. I don’t think I’ve hated the announcement of a 60s series more since the news an Avengers movie would be made. Only the fact that Patrick McGoohan had an executive producer’s credit seemed like a bit of good news. So let’s start with the good news…
The new Prisoner‘s series didn’t feel the need to have an ocean around. When Jesus (sorry, Jim Caviezel a.k.a. Six) escapes, he finds himself in some sort of desert. Number 2 is also there, this time portrayed by Ian McKellan. He does a good job and the idea of summoning a couple to his place and demanding they’d bring a pie was a great touch. It was virtually pointless, but the shot of McKellan enjoying the cake gave him some sort of monarch status. The worse news is that the remake is more naturalistic when it comes to ‘numbers’ living together in a village: they breed and the result is a baby with a new name… sorry, number. The old series was more sexless and for some reason, that felt better: it gave The Village a more washed-out feeling. The remade Village more looks like a Stanford experiment gone wild.
The worst news is that the original series was almost impossible to remake: McGoohan wasn’t just Number 6, the show was his brainchild and he wrote and directed some of the episodes. Basically, Patrick McGoohan was The Prisoner.
Add to this frequent vapid flashbacks which annoy more than they intrigue and you’re stuck with the notion you’re watching a remake of a show that doesn’t have the personality of the original. After watching one episode, I couldn’t be bothered to make sure I’d watch all the other episodes. I may watch them when accidently stumbing upon them, but I won’t feel a nanosecond of loss if I’ve missed an episode. The photography is good and it’s decently made, but that’s about the nicest compliment I can think of. 3/10, if I’m being generous.

And so, the night of remakes has come to an end and one conclusion stares us directly in the eye: originality can’t be overrated.

(This review of yesterday’s Doctor Who episode contains some spoilers, so don’t read it if you haven’t seen the episode.)

Last night I dreamt of Amy Pond. The feisty new companion to the brand new Doctor Who. By now the series has become so huge only the noise of the Tardis was enough for the Beeb to promote it. But it’s no longer the Doctor Who we’ve had on our screens since 2005… never mind that Christopher Eccleston backed out after one series, the second series still kept a lot of things from the revamp. First and foremost Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), who – never mind the other companions – remained a quinessential companion to Doctors 9 and 10 (even popping up from a parallel universe in the biggest time of need). Doctor Who is back, but every inch of your television set was keen to prove one thing: the times have changed.

Yes, Matt Smith stepped in as the new Doctor, but that’s not all: the Tardis also regenerated into a brand new look and the Doctor met his new companion, Emilia Pond. Step above the scripts and you’ll see more change: this is no longer the brain child of Russell T. Davies, this is the era of Steven Moffat. To prove this, the credits have changed (blimey, there’s a lot of lightning in the universe!), the soundtrack of the credits is different and the series even has a new font. Which, I have to say, I’m not a big fan of: mainly because it’s the sort of font crappy sci-fi series use when they pretend to be Alien.
Moffat was no stranger to the show, having penned already some of the best episodes of the Davies era: Moffat was the first to convince me the Doctor could be scary (remember “Are you my mummy?” from The Empty Child?) and he was also responsible for The Girl in the Fireplace (more about that one later) and Blink, causing lots of kids and even teens to be more aware of statues. If we extend the writers’ legacy to their more adult work, you might say that Doctor Who has now moved from Queer as Folk to Coupling, a change I can only welcome (as a huge fan of the show – apart from the last series). Nowhere did this get more obvious than in the scene where the Doctor causes haywire on all electrical devices in the square at the duckless duck pond and a woman’s electric wheelchair suddenly ran off, with the confused pensioner as a reluctant prisoner.

But back to Amy Pond and Madame de Pompadour… in The Girl in the Fireplace Reinette was occasionally visited by the Doctor in what seemed only seconds to him but years to her. Near the end of the episode, the Doctor was too late to say goodbye to her, making her character quite tragic. Emilia Pond seems to have suffered a similar fate: it was hard not to feel sorry for the young girl who waited all night in the garden, on her hastily assembled suitcase in her best clothes. Miserable as she was, the Doctor (who’d promised to be back in five minutes) seemed her ticket out of this world, but his five minutes became her twelve years and four psychiatrists. As she grew from little girl to young woman and from Emilia to Amy, Moffat provided us with a wonderful red herring: the first images of Karen Gillan showed her as policewoman Amy Pond (one wonders if that was a nod to Torchwood‘s Gwen). Fooled us! And if twelve years weren’t long enough, the Doctor’s short trip to the Moon seemed to have lasted another two years. It took little Emilia Pond fourteen years before she finally saw the inside of the Tardis… you can bet the eleventh Doctor will have a tough companion with this one.

Matt Smith seemed to fit in David Tennant’s shoes, even though the script made it a bit easier for him by explicitly showing him as the successor to the ten previous Doctors, in a montage that showed all ten Doctors and some of the enemies the Doctor had to battle it out with (was I the only one who wondered why the Ood were there?). The flashback bubble burst open and there he was, Doctor n°11. It wasn’t the only time Moffat allowed the new actor to look for an identity: the episode contained scenes where the Doctor was looking for a new wardrobe and a catchphrase to take over from the Tenth’s “Allons-y!”. No success this time, maybe next week…

Next week’s episode wasn’t announced at the end of the episode and even the Doctor Who site is deliberately quiet about it, even showing an archive photo of (guest star) Sophie Okonedo from another show. What we did get to see was a brief glimpse of what lies ahead in the next three months and it looks as if the Doctor isn’t the one with the biggest plans. According to some sources, a romantic scene between the Doctor and Amy lies ahead of us and the preview definitely hinted at this, but then again, was Miss Pond really a policewoman?

All in all, this episode was not unlike The end of time (part two), in that it had to combine an adventure with the need to tie some loose ends. But whereas the 75-minute long goodbye scene suffered a bit from the overkill effect The Return of the King is renowned for, the hour-long introduction to the era of Moffat, Smith and Pond didn’t bore me one minute. All I can say is, in the words of the previous Doctor: Allons-y!

Two “So wh…?” questions you may be asking right now…

1) So when is the Avenue returning with new updates?
Pretty soon as promised: in fact we can pin a date on it: Easter Sunday. Today is the 1st of April and for the rest of the month there’ll be one post every three days, so expect the next article on the 4th, then the 7th, the 10th, … and then your basic math skills should help you out to complete the cycle.

2) So why hasn’t there been a review of the third Millennium film?
Because the Belgian distributors in all their managing wisdom have delayed the film to mid May, mainly because the Millennium films aren’t Easter holiday material or something. Yes, why go and see something decent if you can watch the latest Jennifer Aniston vehicle? Oddly enough, the two-month long delay was considered press material and made it into several newspapers, proving only how popular the Larsson books are (but not popular enough to be shown around Easter then…).
This delay may just be the stupidest decision since they ditched Orphan in favour of Alvin and the Chipmunks 2. Granted, that is some kind of horror too… Anyway, see you in May for the review of Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest).

And see you on Sunday for the next brand new Avenue update!