Saturday, September 26, 2009

TIFF Part Three: Survival of the Dead Review, With Added Zombie Walk!

Three things:

Stuff goes on in Toronto that can be described as "rad". One such thing - and it goes on elsewhere, including in Sydney - is an annual zombie walk, where people make themselves up as undead, and shamble through the city's streets.

George A. Romero, the man responsible for zombie as we know them, is now a Canadian citizen, living in Toronto.

George A. Romero's latest film, which was shot in Canada, screened on the third night of TIFF's Midnight Madness program.

These three things come together. The zombie walk is ordinarily in October, but an extra event was organised to celebrate Romero's new citizenship and he premiere of his new film. Zombies of Toronto walked through downtown, arriving at Dundas square to be greeted by Romero before a free public screening of Night of the Living Dead. His first film. Later that night, his newest.

Survival of the Dead

It is without question that George A Romero is the godfather of the zombie film. His slow-moving, mindless creatures are iconic and unforgettable. Sure, we have the creatures of Return of the Living Dead and their cries of “brains”, and the more recent development of zombies running, but Romero’s creatures are the classics. After the 1968 release of Night of the Living Dead, he made one zombie film a decade; the 70s had Dawn of the Dead and the 80s Day of the Dead. Then, after a quiet, this decade has had the man bring zombies to cinemas three times. It should be something to celebrate. While 2004’s Land of the Dead was decent, Diary of the Dead, Romero’s found-footage style reboot of the series, was a mess. It does not bode well for Survival that it uses a minor character from that film as a launching pad.

Said character is Crocket (Alan Van Sprang), a former army man who now leads a small troupe around the zombie-ravaged land, trying to survive using general amorality. We are also taken to an island off the coast of Delaware, to a pair of feuding Irishmen, Patrick O’Flynn and Seamus Muldoon (Kenneth Welsh and Richard Fitzpatrick) and their kin. O’Flynn has been traveling the island, killing the infected and the undead without mercy, while Muldoon believes that there must be a cure, or a fix to the problem. O’Flynn is banished, and soon meets with Crocket and his crew, before the whole group takes a stolen ferry to the island.

As expected, amongst the anarchy, social commentary is at play. Romero’s target in Survival is conflict. Not just war; this metaphor can be applied to something as large as that, or, on a smaller scale, the two main opposing sides of western politics, or any opposing fundamental beliefs. O’Flynn and Muldoon opposing viewpoints, neither of which is wicked at heart, but their conflict is so strong that what their fighting is about is overshadowed by the fighting itself, and the destruction that comes with it. It’s a worthy message for the film, and a relevant one, but the film itself is the opposite of that. Romero is an important filmmaker, and his past work has earned him deserved and everlasting respect, but Survival of the Dead is a tired film. The scares are barely there, and arrive with cheap shock sound effects. The characters are for the most part weak, speaking flat dialogue. The gore is fine, but good zombie effects are not a rare thing. There are some fun moments, and the characters of O’Flynn and Muldoon provide some laughs. Overall, however, this film is, unlike its moral, unimportant and uninspiring.

It is heartening to see a director, going into old age, continuing a filmmaking career with the same soul and passion forty years after starting. Perhaps he is messing with his audience: a major sequence of Survival involves the question of whether a zombie will or will not bite a horse. It takes guts to put that kind of surrealism into a horror movie. The film’s final shot, too, is a killer. But it might be time for the auteur to move on. Not away from filmmaking; not even away from horror. Perhaps he needs to find a new theme, to tackle something different. Romero should not be written off, but he needs to make better films than this one.

4/10

Some more pictures of the zombie walk, and of Romero at Survival:


This guy is done up as a zombie from early in Dawn of the Dead. Technically, he's in blackface, but it's a pretty excellent costume.

Security at the event, backed up by police officers on bikes - in the background - was handled by people actually dressed up as Umbrella Corp guys from Resident Evil.

George Romero and Colin Geddes after the film.

More to come!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

TIFF Part Two: Daybreakers Review

I continue to be a bad blogger. Here's the second of the Midnight Madness lineup: the Australian/US co-production, Daybreakers.

Daybreakers

The Spierig brothers had a minor hit on their hands five years ago with Undead. As poor a release as this film received in its home country, it still brought them attention: a pair of brothers from Brisbane had managed to write, direct and produce a micro-budget film look much bigger than it really was, with the the vast majority film's extensive special effects handled by the Spierigs themselves, on their own computers. It was a huge effort, creative and impressive. The film itself was not great, with muddled plotting and mixed performances, but it served to show the brothers as filmmakers with great promise.

Promise fulfilled.

Where Undead took an original spin on zombies by throwing aliens into the mix, Daybreakers takes the fast-becoming-stale vampire mythology and gives it new life. We are introduced to a dystopia populated by vampires. Vampirism spread like a virus to the point where humans are almost extinct - and vampires are almost out of food. Running out of blood is causing the vampires to turn into psychotic and dangerous bat-like creatures. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a doctor and researcher working for a blood production company, trying to create an artificial blood while becoming increasingly aware of his conscience, to the chagrin of his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman), and boss, Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). A chance encounter with a group of humans on the run - among them Lucy (Claudia Karvan) - leads Dalton to Elvis (Willem Dafoe), a vampire who has been cured.

The world of Daybreakers is endlessly inventive. The brothers fashioned a witty and believable update of our own world and how it could be adapted to suit a population who cannot go in daylight. A lot of dystopic films are creative in this way, and that's all, but Daybreakers is also a very solid genre action piece. We have sequences ranging from an intense attack by a malnourished vampire, to car chases, to huge shoot-outs. All the while the plot, and its intruiging turns, powers along.

Daybreakers may not quite be a film to rise to the top of the dystopia subgenre, but we do have a crowdpleaser that isn't stupid, a great Australian action movie, and a return to the highs of Australian genre filmmaking.

8/10

Advice if you're going to TIFF, or any film festivals with a lot of Q&As: get a camera with a zoom.

Left to right: Colin Geddes, the Midnight Madness programmer, The Spierig Brothers, Sam Neill, and Willem Dafoe, introducing the film.

After the screening, Dafoe had to leave. I asked if they had always planned to make the film an American-set one. They said that with the budget they wanted, it always would have been the only choice. Neill chimed in that he was playing Canadian, not American.

And from the night before, Jennifer's Body. So many fucking photographers. This is just a handful, blocking the view, just to see Megan Fox standing on stage. They didn't even stick around for the film or Q&A, they just wanted an image of her, standing on a stage. Just to make sure that she can, I guess.

And the Q&A. We have Geddes, director Karyn Kusama, Megan Fox, Johnny Simmons, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody, Diablo Cody, two producers, and Jason Reitman.

It was a pretty lively Q&A, mostly dominated by Kusama, Cody and Fox, with some loud remarks from Reitman. Reitman produced here, and was also showing his next film as director, Up in the Air. That looks to be a quieter drama, so Reitman was letting loose here, with his first horror crowd. Seyfried and Simmons were adorably shy. Kusama and Fox spoke of having no idea what some of Cody's dialogue was even about.

It was an enjoyable enough session, except for the idiots who wouldn't stop shouting their questions about the film's lesbian moments, sounding like drunk patrons at a strip club begging for another little bit of titty, while the girls on stage just want to go home. There are plenty of those places in Toronto, guys. Head there.

More to come!

Sunday, September 20, 2009

TIFF Awards: Aussie Aussie Aussie!

More reviews to come - I promise - but a huge congratulations is in order. For the first time this year, Midnight Madness films had their own People's Choice award. The runner up? Vampire dystopia flick Daybreakers, from Brisbane's Spierig Brothers. The first prize? The Loved Ones, an Australian horror film from writer/director Sean Byrne, which came from nowhere to wow everybody.

It's good to feel proud of Australian genre cinema.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

TIFF Part One: Jennifer's Body Review

I've been a bad, bad blogger. Currently in my hostel in Toronto. Before that, Vancouver, seeing friends I've not seen in a long time, which was wonderful. Before that, Portland, which after two nights became my favourite city in the USA. But now, Toronto. I was there three years ago but am seeing more of the city this time. It's big; bigger than I remember. It is not as welcoming as it seemed last time, although the hostel (The Clarence Castle) is great. Even if it is far away from Ryerson University, where the Midnight Madness screenings take place.

Midnight Madness seems to open with the big ones. in 2006 it was Borat, and this time, Jennifer's Body and its accompanying media circus. Megan Fox is the titular Jennifer, and dozens of photographers were there to confirm that, yes, she can still pout, and, indeed, still has breasts. Of the actors on stage for the Q&A, it must be said, she held the room better than the others, and even managed to be, once or twice, funny. Adam Brody didn't say that much, and Amanda "The Only Good Thing in Mamma Mia" Seyfried and Johnny "I Was in Hotel For Dogs and Will Soon Be in Scott Pilgrim; How's That for a Trade Up?" Simmons were charmingly shy. Writer Diablo Cody was as outspoken as you'd expect, and director Karyn Kusama ran things well. The Q&A was amusing enough, but the endless questions to Fox and Seyfried about lesbian shit grew tiresome.

So how was the film?

Jennifer's Body

For a genre seen to be so aimed at males, it is worth noting just how many main characters in these films are female. Jennifer's Body has women in the roles of writer (Diablo Cody), director (Karyn Kusama), hero (Amanda Seyfried) and villain (Megan Fox). It's refreshing, and should happen more often; perhaps it could next time result in a better film.

Needy (Seyfried) and Jennifer (Fox) are long time best friends, now in high school. Needy is dating Chip (Johnny Simmons), while Jennifer sleeps around while wielding power over her friend. As best friends, they don't match; Needy is the high school movie version of a nerd while Jennifer is the high school movie version of a beautiful and popular girl. And yet, they share a bond. This bond leads to Jennifer dragging Needy to a seedy bar to see a band, headed by Nikolai (Adam Brody). a fire burns the bar down, and an in-shock Jennifer by the band. When she returns, she's different. And covered in blood. And, it seems, demonic.

The two most audience-grabbing things of this film are the presence of Fox, and a script from the writer of Juno. Fox is fine; the way she plays evil is bored and pretty, which suits the character; she is almost playing a murderous version of her own public persona. Cody's script is a bigger issue. Juno split audiences, but those who like it do so not just for its wordplay, but its heart. Her TV series, The United States of Tara, proved that the heart of Juno can be, at least in part, attributed to Cody's writing. Her script here, however, just has the wordplay. Jennifer's Body is funny enough to be a decent - but not brilliant - comedy, but is too self-aware, winking too much at the audience, to pack any emotional punch, or to be a very good horror movie. Points are also lost for unnecessary narration and flashback structure. Scream proved that self-aware horror can be scary; the Buffy series proved that funny and self-aware can also be emotionally arresting. Jennifer's Body seems content to be without these elements. Kusama's direction takes Cody's script to the next logical level; scenes that could have been scary are played, instead, as parodies of horror tropes. Questions can also be raised about how much of the film was constructed around public awareness of Cody and Fox rather than being created in a more organic way. Were the Cody-isms increased upon the success of Juno? Would the lesbian elements have been so played up were Fox not so fetishised by the media for being hot and pouty?

Seyfried, as usual, is very good, and Needy and Chip's relationship is cute and believable. Cody's script, as much as it lacks what it needs to be a good horror film, is far more frank and honest about sex than any teen film in recent memory. JK Simmons and Amy Sedaris are as funny as expected in small roles.

Jennifer's Body is a servicable comedy with okay gore, loosely explained paranormal elements, and a few great one-liners that. It could have been a memorable horror film, but isn't. It isn't as bad as its soundtrack - full of Fallout Boy-inspired pop-rock - would suggest, but on the echelon of great high school horror films, Jennifer's Body won't rank very high.

6/10

I owe some reviews. They're be here soon, I swear.

Friday, September 4, 2009

A Review

The Final Destination in 3D

God fucking awful.

0/10

Looking Too Much into District 9

I'm in Vancouver! Alas, too busy holidaying to write much, and the battery on my computer lasts under three hours, so even on long trips I can't write much.

The plane journey, by the way, had a decent selection of films. Not being an idiot, I opted not to watch The Proposal, My Life in Ruins, or 17 Again, but (re)watched Jackie Brown, In the Loop, and (for the first time) saw Adventureland, which is decent but should not be advertised as a comedy. I also started State of Play, confirming that it's not nearly as good as the miniseries it's based on, but the plane landed before it finished.

Also I saw Up in a three-dollar theatre in the delightful city of Portland and it turned me into a giant girl. Review to come.

Review!!!

District 9

It’s a subversion of the typical alien invasion movie. Set not in an American metropolis, but Johannesburg. With aliens that are neither unstoppable and malevolent nor good and wise, but, rather, lost and confused. With a hero who is not a muscle-bound action hero, a wise-cracking pretty boy, or a beautiful but deadly woman, but a character whose nearest cultural touchstone is Murray from The Flight of the Conchords. Using, for a significant chunk of the film, a documentary aesthetic. Here we have a film that turns so many sci fi tropes upside down that it should be brilliant. It isn’t.

District 9 takes us to Johannesburg, twenty years after an enormous spaceship began hovering over the city. Inside the ship were about a million alien creatures, lost and starving. In the city, they were met with hostility, and moved into a huge slum: the District 9 of the title. An initiative has begun to relocate the creatures (or, as a speciesist term would have them, “prawns”) to a new, cleaner slum, hundreds of kilometers from the city. Wikus Van Der Merwe (Sharto Copley) is the hapless middle-manager type, and CEO’s son-in-law, charged with heading up the operation of getting the aliens out of District 9.

As mentioned, the first section of the film is set up like a documentary. We have interviews with Wikus and others involved with the relocation, as well as experts and lecturers on the aliens. The footage seems to come from some unknown crew interviewing people; from news broadcasts; from people within Wikus’s corporation filming; from CCTV footage. As the story develops, the film does away with the documentary style, switching to straight narrative. The story goes to places a documentary could not, so, little by little, it is abandoned. Here is the catch 22 of the film: the documentary is the most successful part of it, and it is what undermines it.

A documentary style – even a fake documentary style – suggests realism. Its aim is to make you believe in what you are seeing, and make you relate to a film set up as pure fiction. There are things that might be excusable in an ordinary film that documentary style films cannot get away with, because they’ve told you they’re real. Take the creatures themselves. They are designed to be somewhat grotesque – very well designed, it must be noted – and, yes, alien. But they are simply too human. They might resemble walking prawns, but they have arms and legs; they stand upright; they have recognizable eyes, and mouths that they eat with and talk and vomit out of, and they urinate from the same place humans do. We are asked to identify with the aliens, so of course they had to have recognizable features. But for creatures from another planet to have evolved so similarly to humans? It’s too much to take. So too are the films other contrivances; the plot conveniences that occur too easily, to move the story forward. An ordinary sci-fi thriller could get away with these things, but not one that is, even in part, presented as a documentary. Furthermore, the way the documentary style is discarded makes it seem as if its purpose was not social commentary, or realism, or satire, but an easy way to get mass amounts of exposition onto the screen, as if it were too difficult for ordinary dialogue to set up more than twenty years of history, so direct-to-camera interviews were used instead.

Things get worse once the film crosses into pure action territory. The action itself isn’t directed with enough drive or tension. It also, like executive producer Peter Jackson’s early work, moves towards over-the-top, gross-out violence. Alien weapons used make things and people blow up, and the film asks us to enjoy seeing people explode into goo. This splatter comedy is incongruous with the documentary section of the film, even though it doesn’t occur until we’re watching an action movie, complete with mismatched buddies and a precocious and tech-savvy child. This is the film’s final downfall. What started out so different – if flawed – ends up in a place no different to any other action movie. The end of the movie is open, yes, but that feels less like shunning convention and more like setting up a follow-up film.

It’s not without merit. Copley does fine work, playing for both laughs and pathos. For this to be his first acting role is a feat. The apartheid commentary is, despite being a little heavy handed, is a worthy enough message. The animation, too, is very good, especially for the thirty million dollar budget. Director Neill Blomkamp shows promise; with tighter direction of action sequences, could yet make something great. This is not that film. This has not changed the face of sci fi cinema. Perhaps we can hold out hope for the obvious sequel.

4/10

Totally alone in that opinion. There must be something I'm missing here. It wasn't just a film that didn't live up to its huge hype, though. It was just flat-out not very good.