Double Bill Mini Reviews: Under Your Radar Edition...

Anomalisa:
What's it about?
A middle-aged family man arrives in another identikit hotel in advance of giving another motivational speech on yet another whistle-stop tour. Feeling lost and alone in his life, so much so that everyone but him in this world has the same face and the same voice, he's doomed to misery - until Lisa enters his life.
Who would I recognise in it?
David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan (all voices).
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Sometimes the format in which you tell a story can make all the difference, or put an intriguing spin on the material. With "Anomalisa", writer/director Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) teams up with director Duke Johnson to present this very grown up tale of middle-age melancholy in the form of stop-motion animation...

Click "READ MORE" below for the verdict on this flick as well as Kevin Smith's weirdest movie to date...

Obscura (2012)...

This experimental short, about someone who may, or may not be, a Crime Scene Photographer, was inspired in-part by Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up, as well as the book Another Way of Telling by John Berger and Jean Mohr.

The main theme of the short is the idea – as proferred by Berger and Mohr – of the clash between the photograph, and the memory of the moment that the photograph resembles, as well as the connection between the camera lens and the human eye.

 

 

The film is pieced together from a variety of disparate fragments of footage and photographs that I have gathered over many years on different formats. In addition to newly shot footage and images, there are pieces of footage originally shot for other projects from years passed by, as well as photographs (and light-sensitive photographs) dating back to 1999. Stylistically the film is a sort of 'visual collage', that combines the new with the re appropriated old, which speaks to further themes of the short – namely the idea of fragmented memory, how a picture is not viewed in the mind's eye as a whole, but rather in individual elements that make up that whole picture. For example – an alleyway is broken down into key images: the height and close proximity of the surrounding buildings which created the alleyway, the old exterior light on one wall, and the tangle of steel and barbed wire atop the locked entrance to the alleyway.

 

 

The idea for the film initially came about when I dug out from a drawer, an old stills camera that belonged to an uncle – a Zeiss Ikon Contina I from the 1950s. I drew intrigue from the classic styling of the device, as well as the mechanical consistency of the lens, shutter, and winding operations, which ultimately fed not only into the editing of this strange little experimental short, but also the underlying ethereal plot.

 

 

View the film embedded below, or directly via my YouTubeChannel HERE.

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Double Bill Mini Musings: Brits and South Koreans...

Outpost:
If only more horror movies had a similar vibe to this flick. It's not about big jumpy "BOO!" scares and loud crashing noises on the soundtrack. It's about a creeping sense of dread in an intimidating atmosphere, and while it's not going to freak out horror fiends such as myself, it was a far more convincing slice of genre fare than - for example - The Haunting In Conneticut, which was a case of loud noises and jumpy moments (incidentally that flick was decent for a viewing, but it tried too hard).

It's low budget, it's creepy, it's well pieced together and while the script isn't anything particularly special, the overall package is pleasing - after all, it's ghost/zombie Nazis in a dark, spooky Nazi bunker!

The Good, The Bad, and The Weird:
The last South Korean movie I recall watching was The Host (which also stars one of the same actors) - and I didn't care for it - however this love letter to Sergio Leone (specifically For A Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, and Once Upon A Time In The West) is a corker. Aside from some second act pacing dips, and a mildy confusing interplay of character groups, it has some brilliant action - a raid on a moving train, a market bullet ballet that ascends to the skies, and an all-out chase after the treasure map featuring multiple factions running and gunning like crazy set to Santa Esmeralda's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" (a possible Tarantino nod?).

In short it is a beautiful-looking, beautifully crafted South Korean take on the Spaghetti Western. Your patience might be tested around the middle portion, but it's entirely worthwhile to stick around and enjoy the spectacle of it all.

A recent spot of weird dreaming...

I've been known to have some really weird-arse dreams, and bearing in mind I once had a dream where I attended a news conferance held by my barber, in my high school hall (facing the opposite way to normal), about her going on holiday ... can women be classed as "barbers" or is that more a male label, like "actor" versus "actress" ... then all of a sudden we're in a sewer system just underneath the main hall with gerbil assassins trying to kill me as I surf a pepperoni pizza atop green, gooey water gloop which rushes through a system of toy fire stations from Ghostbusters (anyone remember those brilliant toys from the 1980s, swivelling fire pole and everything...brilliant)...so aye, I've had some corkingly odd dreams before...where the following two fit, by comparison, I certainly don't know.
Nature must have been calling because not being able to get into a toilet was a key theme...basically, I was some kind of agent - along the lines of Agent Mulder - so it's a bit X-Files, but less stoic...anyway, myself and my fellow agent are staying with some Indian family - because for some reason we're in India.

This family literally has about 100 kids - but oddly of all colours - and I just wanna use their bog, but there's a constant stream of kids flocking in and out constantly (as there's so many of them) trying to use it, there's no lock and the curtains for the windows have one of those pulley thingies you yank on, although you have to pull it for AGES to make it move a mere distance.

Ultimately I give up when a swarm of these various kids of this family swarm into the bathroom and scare me out so I suddenly end up on the outskirts of this town at the side of some dirt road with my agent partner investigating some sort of mass murder case - turns out the family we'd been staying with/are staying with are the murderers. So we freak out about that...but then all of a sudden we're sifting through various decomposing - and REALLY F*CKING GROSS - remains (severed hands mainly). Anyway, they're absolutely disgusting, they absolutely stink and they're all slimey and falling apart as I pick at them with tweezers until eventually I'm confronted with a picture list of all the body parts found and there's this one of a severed head with the face all mashed up like a rotten piece of fruit and at that point I start gagging in my dream and then snap awake where I'm also actually gagging, seriously just about to chuck up all over my bedroom wall, hahaha...fortunately I didn't, but how bloody weird.

Then I went back to sleep, concentrating hard on *NOT* thinking of that picture list of rotting body parts found in the town's outskirts, and end up having a new dream where I end up going to some hotel type building which I vaguely remember living at - but due to a car accident I don't even remember, it f*cked up my memory...I know I lived at this place, but have no recollection of it...so I'm there to see if they remember me or not and they seem to, but they're about ready to call up the psychiatric ward and get me thrown away...and this is where it gets really bizarre.

Now, this dream is set in a Miami type place, but in England - just as a side note of information. Anyway, the weird bit, I'm there at the reception with ... dun-dun-dun ... both an Alien and a Predator, but they aren't enemies, mainly because the Alien doesn't know the Predator also hunts his kind. We end up scarpering up the elevator shaft (me being pulled up by the Alien and the Predator) and we end up at this apartment that was apparently mine before this mystery accident...anyway, inside it's actually the Predator's apartment and having seen Predator 2 I know there's gonna be an Alien skull somewhere, so I'm running around trying to find it so I can cover it up, lest the Alien see it and go mental. There's a load of really bizarre skulls all over the walls and it looks like the Predator ship at the end of Predator 2...

And then I woke up...there was a bit more at the start of that second dream, but I forgot it...anyway, bloody weird dreams, eh?