A Company of Vampires

Irma Vep (1996) is a matryoshka of a film, one built of nested meanings with a black vinyl doll at its center. It’s a tribute to Louis Feuillade’s 1915 classic, Les vampires, a brief history of French cinema, and a meditation on various degrees of crime. But Olivier Assayas’ cult hit is also a treatment of drama both artistic and interpersonal—a condemnation of our preference for hollow histrionics over still honesty, onscreen and off. Assayas has drawn a paradox: a criticism and a celebration of French cinema and the problematic passions of its individual creators.

Full retrospective below the fold.

Way back in the summer of 2010, the InRO staff planned a series of articles that each paired two recent (i.e. post-2000) Westerns. The project fell through, but not before I’d written my assignment: a retrospective on Seraphim Falls and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. My editor at InRO recently posted that article to celebrate the release of Meek’s Cutoff.

The spectre of death is as present in the Western genre as leather, horses and guns, and it nearly always comes in the form of homicide. Characters don’t die by accident or illness — if you own a ranch or a saloon in the classic American West, or if you wear a badge or ride where the wind takes you, expect to meet your maker with the help of a bullet. Death at the hands of another is inscribed onto every plot and every finale, a solution to treachery and wrongdoing of all stripes, an art practiced by the good and the bad. The genre’s images of death are loud, dusty and sudden, but they aren’t always as cut and dried as a gunshot at high noon. In some Westerns, death isn’t a full stop but a beginning, of sorts. The leather and the dust lose materiality and give way to the supernatural, while the landscape onscreen reveals itself to be a halfway space between the hard world and the afterlife, where matter itself is doubtful, and where characters set for a time to sort through their differences, which almost always amount to questions of honor and revenge.

Full retrospective and comments below the fold.

It’s official: I’m on hiatus from film writing. The books have me. – RR

Dilettante Steve Antin proves the adage that persistence counts for more than talent in Hollywood. His resume is a scatter of acting, writing, production, and directing credits, all seemingly acquired by the skin of his teeth. The directing credits add up to exactly two since the opening of Burlesque, a vehicle for the distinct vocal stylings of Christina Aguilera and Cher. This latest endeavor won’t see Antin vaulted into the VIP room at long last, however — although, given the moderate success of some of its musical numbers, Burlesque might open a few doors for him as a Broadway choreographer or music video director. And that’s by no means a dig. Say what you will about the dead space between those numbers, where dialogue ails and characterization gasps for life; those sassy jazz-hands moments count for a lot when, as with porn, they’re really the only moments your audience anticipates going into the film, or recollects a day later.

Full review and comments below the fold.

Bacha's "Budrus" takes on the Israel Separation Border

For the past 20 years, Ottawa’s been home to the One World Film Festival, which raises awareness about social and global issues while exposing audiences to great documentaries. Now in its 21st year (and co-chaired by a friend of mine, so pay attention), the fest is the brainchild of World Inter-Action Mondiale (WIAM), a non-profit org that uses art and film to spread its message about economic, political, and environmental challenges the world over. That message — and its medium — has proven to be popular; 21 years is a lion’s age for a volunteer-run film festival, and its organizers year in and year out have our gratitude.

Investigating farmer suicides in Bhatia's "Nero's Guests"

They also best describe their mandate, so let me step aside for a piece: “The Festival is committed to presenting innovative forms of film and video as a medium for raising public awareness of world issues.  It is both a celebration of documentary film and a powerful forum for filmmakers, activists, the public, and social justice, human rights and environmental organizations to engage in issues currently facing our global community.” It’s a mouthful, but it makes for relevant and revelatory cinema.

Iraq war exiles eke out new lives in Fisher's "The Unreturned"

This year’s theme is “People Power Promises” and features movies from Canada, Germany, India, Australia, Iceland, the UK and the US. From war refugees to the dying bee population, the program explores how governments and environments affect individuals not just professionally or culturally, but personally as well. This fest, in other words, helps make abstract, large-scale issues intimate. Screenings will take place at Ottawa’s National Library and Archives Canada (395 Wellington St.), between November 5-7. You can read more about the films here, and about the festival (location, ticket price, festival details) here. I hope to report back on Dreamland and The Vanishing of the Bees, two titles I’m particularly interested in checking out. – Ranylt Richildis

Full disclosure: I’ve never been an Oliver Stone adherent, not even in those embryonic days of cinematic discovery, when our prospect is limited and our idea of “good film” comprises mainstream projects that seem to (but don’t really) flirt with the fringe. This is Stone all over: a flatulent bomber who drops controversial topics from screaming aircraft and seems inordinately proud when they land like duds. I’ll cop to a fondness for Talk Radio, which has more to do with my ambivalence towards the kinetically churlish Bogosian than anything (pitch-perfect casting will take a movie further than it can go under its own steam), but by and large Stone’s projects have as much meaning as a toddler’s grocery-store meltdown — while insisting they have much, much more. Perhaps some viewers spot insight in Stone’s anxious bluster, but all I see is a rather inarticulate man reduced to communicating his frustrated entitlement with clenched fists, all in the guise of Telling the Truth^TM. Stone’s signature shot — a swooping, revolving Steadicam maneuver that he uses in most of his confrontational scenes — is a trick that lends a false sense of mastery, I think, to his projects. The shot itself is appropriate and even thrilling, slick and attractive, but it’s all the director really has. It’s a visual whoop-and-holler that creates a pounding in our aesthetic ear that substitutes for significance.

Full review and comments beneath the fold.

An abiding love of lore compels horror fans to wade through countless bad and mediocre movies looking for something that gets it right. Folklore is in my blood — a taste that’s somehow been enhanced, rather than eradicated, by my extreme skepticism. It’s axiomatic: those who love both folklore and film can’t help being drawn to horror movies however so often they fail to entertain or even interest us. And of all the horror subgenres, the occult subgenre fascinates me most of all because it invests a great deal into tonal affairs while purveying mythic exegesis. For some of us, atmosphere is everything; if it doesn’t brood, it’s crude. This bias of mine is what permits me to look back on M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout hit, The Sixth Sense, with something like gratitude — it marked Hollywood’s return to mood-drenched horror pieces after long years of over-shiny horror-comedy projects like Scream that lacked the brood and the mood and the subterranean fissures. Earnestness has been undervalued in recent years, in part because it’s so damned hard to pull off. Shyamalan’s own body of work proves this adage; from Signs on down, his films have failed to convince a growing number of viewers to follow his earnest train. A decade after The Sixth Sense revived the eerie brood piece, its director’s name inspires what’s come to be known as the Shyamalan Groan (the sound of communal derision we hear in movie theaters whenever his name appears onscreen). That Shyamalan produced and co-wrote Devil is enough to generate cynicism, but the curious horror fan soldiers forth despite it all, determined to investigate all comers.

Full review and comments beneath the fold.

(Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2002) German student Paula (Franka Potente) wades into a stew of eugenics, vivisection and arcane cabals when she accepts a place at a prestigious medical school and winds up mired in a murder mystery. While Anatomy‘s thrills are enough to sustain attention, and while its narrative is sufficiently taut and its clinical atmosphere moodily appropriate, the movie’s more renowned for what’s on set: the plasticized corpses made famous by the controversial Korperwelten exhibit, created by Heidelberg’s Dr. Gunther von Hagens. Along with the impact of seeing Von Hagens’ anatomical art up close and eerily lit, the film also delivers scalpel-sharp grue and deboned stereotypes (like the blonde bombshell with the genius IQ) — and for the most part it succeeds. Part of a suggestive pattern in retrospective, Anatomy is one of several millennial Euro-thrillers that focus on biomedicine and its uneasy psychological imprint, filmed as Western minds weighed the fate of humankind in the next one thousand years (see The Crimson Rivers). –Ranylt Richildis

What’s the Euro-Horror Project?