I attended last year and I gotta say I hadda blast. I was really impressed with this upstart fest: it was well organized, the programming was international in scope, it included short programmes as well as features, it cut a pretty wide swath of genres (horror, SF, documentary, animation, cult, musical, and unpredictable combinations thereof), and it attracted thousands of patrons who weren’t averse to a little grue. Or a lotta grue, for that matter.
…That is how an early L.A. screening of Erik Nelson’s Dreams With Sharp Teeth was billed, and it is as good a description of what this film is as anything. There are few moments in this film when Ellison isn’t unruly. Hell, there are probably few moments in his life when he isn’t unruly.
Co-presented by Toronto After Dark, this film was at the top of my list of my what-to-see list when I was planning my schedule for Hot Docs this year.
I was introduced to Ellison’s work by Stephen King, in his non-fiction look at genre fiction in literature and film, Danse Macabre (1981)… pronounced “McBare” by those who’ve read it and if you are a fan of horror fiction and haven’t read it, WTF is going through that noggin of yours?! Here. That very book has played a major role in my life for reasons like the one I just cited–see pp. 242-247. In the early- to mid-80s I went through a major speculative fiction phase and Ellison’s work was a major part of it.
So I knew what to expect when I sat down last night to watch this portrait of the artist as an angry man. I knew to expect to be thrilled by this man’s mastery of the language (peppered with expletives more foul and frequent than even my own), both tickled and spurred by his rage against the various kinds of stupidity accepted by our society, and delighted by his confrontational fearlessness. I adore the mouthy little bastard!
That goiter was fucking nasty, though. If’n I’d been eating popcorn, it’d've put me off it. Pah!
Described by some critics as more hagiography than biography, Nelson’s portrait of Ellison is presented through the subject’s own words (not just conversations but also readings from his work) as well as those of friends, colleagues, and critics (see the list of thank-yous at the end of the review I linked to at the beginning of this post–that article is very good!). We see him at home–in the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars (curiously but accurately named) in the Santa Monica hills–and on the road for speaking engagements, yelling at drivers as he’s walking across the street, yelling at pedestrians as he’s driving down the street, at Pink’s, and always he is on on on and I am laughing laughing laughing–‘If you had to live with me 24/7, you’d put a gun in your mouth… or my mouth,’ he says.
And if it is too affectionate a portrayal of the subject, then so be it. I don’t blame Nelson. I mean, I wouldn’t wanna risk getting thrown down an elevator shaft, either.
It seems to me that it is easier to do something innovative and challenging in a short feature than it is to try it in a full-length feature. Certainly the most satisfying horror films I saw at After Dark were the ones in the Cutting Edge Horror shorts programme.
For me the festival started out with a gut-punch: Wok, written and directed by Australian Mark Alston, can be watched online, here (click the film’s link under Play Videos). It was the first thing I saw at the festival and, fuck me, but did it ever raise my expectations for everything that hadda follow it! As far as I am concerned, this is how to combine comedy and horror. If you have a fear of foreign food or a fear of less-than-pristine public washrooms (both somewhat common and reasonable fears, I reckon) or a fear that something is gonna come up the pipes while you’re sitting, vulnerable, on the throne (mebbe a titch less reasonable, but still… not altogether uncommon), then I suggest you watch this because it’ll freak you out. And that’s the point of all this, isn’t it?
Happy Birthday 2 You, by Spaniard David Alcalde… You think it’s gonna be one thing, and it turns out to be another. Then it turns again. Nobody in this story is who you think they are. Each revelation produced a delighted gasp from me. It appears that it is a story about a good-hearted social worker who thinks she has found a case of child neglect. But that’s not really what she is, and that’s not really what she’s found. Then there’s that cat. Which makes me shudder whenever I look at it. The trailer is out there on the director’s website, but it gives away too much. If you think you’ll get a chance to see the film sometime, then don’t watch the trailer.
There were a couple of animated shorts included in the programme–both of them quite striking, both of them using similar–almost painterly–animation styles, and both of them telling bleak stories: Roland Becerra’s Dear Beautiful and John Bergin’s From Inside (both U.S.). Bergin’s film is an intro to the feature-length film he is adapting from his post-apocalyptic graphic novel of the same name. You can see clips and trailers here. Becerra’s film is about a virus that makes the infected go mad. You can watch Becerra’s film online here.
Speaking of bleak, there was Brazilian Carlos G. Gananian’s Akai, which tells what is probably a pretty accurate story about how lonesome and miserable and hopeless it would probably be to be a vampire. A nice tonic to the romanticized version of the vampire that we’ve been fed by Hollywood for years… Here is the trailer:
Ange, by Belgian Nikolas List, is a creepy but beautifully-shot film about a dollmaker who seems to fall in love with a woman he finds in a carny sideshow. She has no spine and is held vertical in a metal cage (the carny barker bills her as a fallen angel). Does Our Hero rescue her? Er, not exactly… The trailer is online here (scroll down to find it).
Australian Daniel Knight’s The Morning After, like Wok, is a one-gag story. But Knight’s cartoonish film beats you over the head with it so, for me, it loses its edge pretty quickly. Like, it was 7 minutes long and prolly coulda been half that. In any case, anyone who’s ever had “morning-after regret” will, at very least, smile ruefully.
There were a couple more shorts in this progamme but I hated ‘em so much I hardly even wanna talk about ‘em. One of ‘em was a puppet zombie western that was so fucking unfunny it made me wanna gouge my eyes out with a spoon. The rest of the crowd seemed to eat it up, but mebbe they were just being polite because the film’s producer had come all the way from Denmark for the screening. Or mebbe I just didn’t get it. Dunno. But the producer said they’re trying to get the money together to make it into a feature-length film. Gah.
I didn’t go to the Cutting Edge Fantasy programme the next afternoon, but I did see some of the Cutting Edge Canada shorts that screened before each feature in the festival…
Terror on 3918, directed by Mathieu Fontaine, is a play on a science fiction story like Alien, in which the crew of a ship is menaced by a (mostly) unseen horror that is consuming the ship’s fuel. Those who do catch a glimpse of it are struck mad and are left to gibber and gnash their teeth. The joke is that the spaceship, in this case, is an apartment and the everyday items that fill the apartment stand in as the ship’s equipment. So the overhead fan is how the captain steers. And the engine is the toaster (powered by toast, natch). The toilet is a video communication device. The sound effects are from Star Trek. It’s inventive and fun and silly and, hey, it even has a nice little twist at the end. You can see a clip from it here if you click the button that says “voir un extrait” on the middle of the page.
Last, but certainly not least, is Steve Miller’s Zombie Jesus. Yes, a movie based on a t-shirt. Absolutely as goofy and blasphemous as you’d imagine. The crowd loved it.
There were a few themes and techniques that ran through the shorts I saw… A lot of them had no diegetic dialogue and either were silent (very effectively, in most cases) or used voiceover narration. Lots of use of muted colours or limited colour palettes–each variation of which always included red. And I was astounded by the number of times I encountered a director’s willingness to transgressively kill children or have children kill others. Notta lotta faith in the next generation! All in all, the most interesting work I saw at the festival was in these short features. The three Cutting Edge series were very well programmed by Peter Kuplowsky. Kudos to him!
I didn’t go see the latter film. Had The New Pornographers concert to go to that evening. I did take a pitcha of the director, though. Lloyd Kaufman is a Troma diety…
I also skipped the fantasy shorts programme earlier in the afternoon. I’d've liked to’ve seen the Zombie Walk but it turned out that it conflicted with the Audience of One screening. (Next year, mebbe the organizers of the film fest and the zombie walk can make schedule allowances for each other.) But when I came out of the Bloor after that one, I found myself surrounded by the walking dead. Some in the passholders line…
And here’s my pal Rob, studiously avoiding making eye contact with the zombie who’d sidled up next to him in the ticket-buyers’ line…
The film we were waiting to see was the Canadian premiere of Steven C. Miller’s Automaton Transfusion.
To be honest, I’d seen the trailer for it and didn’t have high hopes for anything particularly interesting. I mean, the genre has been wrung pretty dry over the years. But I was pleasantly surprised.
The thing was shot in 9 days on a shoestring budget of $30,000, but you wouldn’t know it by watching it. Granted, the script is a bit heavy-handed in places and some of the performances are kinda ripe but the effects are great and, all in all, this film is a nice little rush.
Like George Romero’s latest entry in the genre, Miller’s looks at the initial onslaught of the reanimated dead through the eyes of a bunch of young people. They were college-age in Romero’s, but they are high-schoolers in Miller’s. In the calm before the storm, there is a low vibe of suburban unease in shots of deserted commuter routes and lawnmowers left running unattended in front yards. Something’s not quite right…
When I got my first glimpse of the zombie hordes, 28 Days Later lept to mind. Miller’s zombies are fast like Danny Boyle’s infected. There’s no slow Romeroesque lurching about here. But it wasn’t just the fleet-footedness of the undead that reminded me of Boyle’s film. Although the movie was shot on digital video, they used some technique that mimics undercranking in film so, like in Boyle’s, frames seem to be dropped and the action scenes move at a clip a step or two faster than reality. Frankly, I’m glad that Rob and I were sitting at the back of the theatre; it would’ve been a little headache-inducing any closer, methinks. Consider y’self forewarned.
While some reviews I’ve found in my trolling have mentioned the undercranking (for lack of a more accurate word for it–sorry, me no know what it’s called in video) as a fault, I think it was a practical choice and ended up as a virtue. When you’re dealing with such a small budget you don’t have a lotta wiggle-room, and when the camerawork and cutting is fast and furious you don’t get a chance to notice that mebbe there are just 20 zombies in the pack rather than, say, 60, so I think that the technique actually covers some holes. It also means that you don’t always get a close look at the zombie makeup effects. And they are makeup effects–not CGI. That is impressive in itself, as far as I’m concerned, because that’s how the originals did it and that’s the way I like it. CGI’d zombie hordes is cheating, sez me. Look–I know it’s a movie, but I’ll still squirm when somebody onscreen is being chased by a real something onscreen rather than some damned thing CGI’d in later. In this case, the makeup effects we do get to see up close and personal are pretty remarkable–especially considering the budget. There are some really nice effects (and by “nice”, of course, I mean “grotesque”), as a matter of fact, including the highlight for me: a cheerleader’s jaw is ripped right the hell offa her face. I’ll tellya, my own jaw was in my lap at that point!
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
When the film was introduced by festival director Adam Lopez, he warned us that the ending would seem abrupt, and explained that Miller had envisioned this film as the first in a trilogy. So that’s the way he constructed this first chapter. It isn’t until the end of this chapter that we get the explanation behind the rise of the dead(ish). And, yeah, it’s the military who’s behind it. Back in the early 70s, the ‘merican government was getting a little peeved with all the protest about sending kids off to Vietnam, so somebody came up with the idea of reanimating the dead and sending them instead. Okaaaaay. The project ended up getting shelved. Of course, the ‘merican government finds itself in a similar situation today and so, natually, some genius decides to reopen the project. They loose the subjects and discover, to their chagrin, that they can’t control ‘em. Which mighta been why the project was shelved in the first place, professor! We get all this plot backfilling at the end of the film, and then we see “To be continued…” onscreen (to audible groans). This method of storytelling is a bit awkward and means that this film doesn’t stand as firmly on its own feet like other films that turned out to be the first in trilogies do (I am thinking of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars: A New Hope, here–they function just fine without sequels). But Miller’s film has been picked up for distribution in January of ‘08 by the Weinstein Company and so that may bode well for the possibility of the second and third film being made.
[/SPOILERS BEHIND]
I have one question for you, though: of all the vehicles to choose from, would you choose an open-sided open-roof Jeep to try to make it through zombie-infested woods and neighbourhoods? I think I’d rather be tucked inside something with locked doors, closed windows and a roof, away from the grabbing and gnawing. But mebbe that’s just me.
Throughout history, humankind has done some pretty weird and fucked up things in the name of God… and San Francisco-based Pentacostal Pastor Richard Gazowsky joins that long parade of weird-and-fucked-upedness when he decides that God has told him that He wants the pastor to make a big budget science fiction film about the story of Joseph, called Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph. So, despite having seen only his first film at the advanced age of 40 (it was Disney’s The Lion King) and having absolutely no background in either the art or the business of film, Gazowsky writes a script, forms a film production company, solicits funding (and gets it from his congregation as well as a promise of it from some mysterious German investors who are allegedly high on the idea of Christian film), hires a crew, casts the roles (all non-professionals and all embarrassingly bad), and piles everybody into a plane and heads to Italy for location shooting.
All on faith.
Or something.
Whether or not faith is whats fueling all this is debatable. And how you, as a viewer, determine what is driving Gazowsky depends on your level of cynicism, I reckon. As I sat at the back of the Bloor watching the Toronto After Dark screening of Michael Jacobs’ documentary Audience of One (co-presented by Hot Docs), I wasn’t marvelling at his faith. I was flabbergasted by his egotism and dishonesty and arrogance. I should confess, though, that as soon as Gazowsky said that God told him to do it that my mind clanged shut–keerrang!–and I spent the rest of the film scowling or arching my eyebrows at the screen.
“You will smite the Earth with seven arrows,” Gazowsky remembers the Lord telling him. “These seven arrows are seven Christian television networks that will be launched simultaneously over the direct broadcast satellite system.” God also told Gazowsky that he was to make “47 film projects a year,” the first four of which would be feature films “for movie theaters” that would later be shown on the seven channels. Gazowsky’s prophecy was confirmed a few weeks later when a visiting Swedish hockey player attended a service at VOP and “out of the blue” (according to Gazowsky) said that the Lord wanted Gazowsky to work in television.
You wanna know the rest of Gazowsky’s Honey Do list from God? Aside from the myriad films and television stations, God told Gazowsky He wants him to invent the first ‘organic living (computer) chip’, He has ordered an airline complete with an airline terminal (not sure which airport), He wants Gazowsky to build 27 resort cities, a Christian theme park (er, didn’t somebody already try that?), and He has ordained that Gazowsky and his merry crew faithful followers will go into outer space (some might argue that they’re already way the fuck out there) and be the first humans to colonize another planet.
Whew. He’s gonna need more than one trip to Home Depot to get all this shit done.
In Audience of One (the title refers to the audience for whom Gazowsky et al are making their film–an audience of one, with the One being God), what I see is an obsessed man running roughshod over toes as he forces his will to be done. (Of course, he claims it is God’s will being done.) For example, his film company rents a huge studio space in town (against the recommendations of many industry insiders, including Arne Johnson–editor of Film/Tape World, a San Francisco-based industry publication and co-director of one of my favourite films at this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, Girls Rock!), only to ignore that niggling little detail of actually paying the rent for months on end. When the city finally tires of waiting for its money and asks for proof of the financing Gazowsky has assured them is coming from German investors (and he does have them–the only trouble is they haven’t actually coughed up any dough), he has the audacity to advise the city managers to just have faith that it’s coming.
Whereupon he and his crew are evicted from the studio for non-payment of rent. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?
Look–Gazowsky may be the real deal. He may genuinely believe that God spoke directly to him and told him that He wanted this film made (along with the Christian theme park and the organic computer chip and all that other crazy-sounding shit… I mean, hey, this is allegedly the same God who told Noah to build a honkin’ big boat and put two of each animal on the planet onto it, so He does have a history of making unlikely-sounding requests…), and mebbe Gazowsky really is as naïve as he’d hafta be to think he could just barrel ahead and get it done without a clue about how these things get made. But I can’t help but wonder at the way his own mother–the founder of the church where Gazowsky preaches–casts a chagrinned blush at the camera and admits that she wishes she’d never retired and handed the pulpit to her son. Does she see something disingenuous about his drive, too? Mebbe it’s just me and my über-cynicism.
And, yeah, ‘Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments’ is how he describes the plot of his film script.
This is Michael Jacobs’ debut as a feature documentary maker and he has made an interesting and entertaining film. He has kept himself outta the pitcha and let the principals tell their own stories. I like that approach. Give folks enough rope, sez me. I dunno if this will get a theatrical run or not, but at least keep an eye out for it on dvd. Nice bit of programming by the folks at After Dark!
