Fantastic Fest 2007–Princess/Southland Tales/Sex And Death 101/Exte: Hair Extensions
“Can I see the Cockchuggers?”
After staying up until 7am hanging out with a friend at a coffee shop, I was WAY too tired to be getting up by 10 or 11 to see the first movie. Too bad, too. I was going to see The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a new Japanese animated movie.
Oh well. I still got some good ones in today.
SHUTEYE HOTEL (2007)
Directed by: Bill Plympton
Written by: Bill Plympton
I love Bill Plympton. Anything he does is pretty awesome. His features can be a bit too long, but they’re still good for a laugh. A lot of them, actually.
This new short is about a killer room at a hotel. People check in, but they don’t check out. And it’s up to a couple of cops to figure out why. And it’s not what you think. It never is in a Plymptoon.
Shorts are really the way to go for Bill. He tends to overfill his features a bit. But this never wore out its welcome. It wasn’t nearly as perverse as his features tend to be, either. (Which isn’t good nor bad. It just is.)
Loved it. If you’re a fan, check it out. Hell, even if you’re not a fan, check it out. This one is for everybody.
Directed by: Anders Morgenthaler
Written by: Anders Morgenthaler/Mette Heeno
Just to show that Americans aren’t the only freaks out there, this animated feature is from Denmark. It’s about a little girl and her uncle and how they fight to get all of the porn that her recently deceased mom was involved in off the streets. It’s violent. It’s depressing. And it’s animated!
Anders Morgenthaler has made what will probably be the most depressing movie of the Festival. Mia, the little girl, is so adorable that it’s hard to believe all of the abuse that she’s taken in her five years of life. Her uncle, August, (an ex-priest) does his best to understand, but he’s so pissed off at the porn industry that sometimes he forgets about the needs of the little girl.
Hard to watch at times, it’s a very good movie that is definitely not for everyone. It mixes live action flashbacks and home movies with the animated present and, as Matt Dentler explained in his intro, it kind of uses the ideas of anime and Dogme ’95 and mixes them into a big, dark ball.
It will probably never get a true American release, but someone will put it on DVD. I highly suggest checking it out, if you can find it. It’s sure to disturb the hell out of you and make you really care about the fate of Mia.
Directed by: Richard Kelly
Written by: Richard Kelly
For the first secret screening of the Festival, we got Richard Kelly’s long gestating second feature. You might remember that a few years ago he directed one of my favorite movies, Donnie Darko. I’ve been hearing about Southland Tales for a couple of years now. After making the rounds at other festivals (and taking abuse at them), he has recut the film and showed it tonight for the first time in its final cut.
And just so you know, Harry Knowles called this the first religious sci-fi political film noir satire. That’s how weird this movie is.
The world is at war again. An unknown group of people started it with a nuclear attack on Texas. El Paso and Abilene were pretty much devastated. Security has gotten so tight that you now need a visa to get from state to state. Homeland Security has taken on a whole new meaning.
Boxer Santaros (Duane Johnson…used to be The Rock) is the biggest movie star in the world right now. But he’s gone missing. When he shows up again in the Nevada desert, he’s lost his memory. He falls in with porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and writes a prophetic screenplay about Armageddon.
Meanwhile, the Republican party (which Boxer is married into) is trying to maintain its hold on the country. Texas senator Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne, the dad from Donnie Darko) is running for president with the help of Vaughn Smallhouse (John Larroquette). His wife, however, seems to have the most power. She is the head of US-Ident, the newest in a recent glut of federal agencies designed to take away freedoms.
But the Neo-Marxists don’t want the Republicans to get any more power than they already have. Cyndi Pinziki (Nora Dunn) heads them up and gets some help from Zora Carmichaels (Cheri Oteri).
A pair of twins (Seann William Scott) are also involved in the mess. One of them was in Iraq and accidentally blew up and scared his best friend, Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake). The other one is involved with the Neo-Marxists.
Oh, and there’s a fuel crisis that Wallace Shawn, Curtis Armstong and Zelda Rubenstein (the creepy little lady from Poltergeist) think they have solved. But do they really have our best interests at heart?
And, really, that’s only about half the story. I can’t begin to tell you the whole story. There is so much going on in this movie that I almost had to walk out from sensory overload.
Which, of course, doesn’t mean that I didn’t like the movie. Actually, I liked it a lot. I didn’t understand hardly any of it, but I loved the ride, even if it took about two hours to get to a point where there really seemed to be a goal for any of the characters.
There are a LOT of political and religious overtones in this film that make me really want to check it out again in order to piece it all together in my mind. Like Donnie Darko before it, it’s definitely going to take a couple of viewings.
One thing that I think will really help is that there are three prequel graphic novels out there. The movie is actually chapters 4-6. (Luckily, Richard gave the whole audience the books. I’ll let you know if they help.)
The movie ended up being kind of an emotional roller coaster. I reacted to it from beginning to end. It’s funny, tragic, life-affirming and just plain weird all the way through. The actors play against type (even, to some extent, making fun of their images…like Johnson being kind of wimpy and indecisive) and seem to be having a lot of fun with it. But then the end hits and it turns pretty tragic and almost heartbreaking.
So, yeah. I didn’t understand it completely, but I really liked it a lot. Give it a chance. If you dug on Donnie, you’ll probably think this is pretty cool, too.
Directed by: Mike Williamson
Written by: Mike Williamson
A pretty long short from a local boy, Mike Williamson, who is a HUGE fan of the Alamo. He said that he used to go there just about every day, even though he was underage. (He never drank for that first year. Don’t worry, Mr. Policeman.)
Like an Edgar Allen Poe story, this one involves a body that won’t let its killer get away with murder.
A young pregnant woman has had enough of her lazy, fairly abusive husband. When their air conditioner breaks down, things get even worse. A flying hammer certainly doesn’t help matters. But maybe this new hole in the wall will help hide the body.
Or maybe not.
Gripping from beginning to end, this is one of the best live-action shorts I’ve seen at the festival. It’s creepy as hell and works on just about every level.
Which makes me (and everyone else, including Tim League) wonder why they programmed it with the next movie.
Directed by: Daniel Waters
Written by: Daniel Waters
Roderick Blank (Simon Baker) is about to get married. But when he gets an e-mail with a list of all of the women he has slept with, his life changes. You see, it not only has the past on it, but it also has all of the women he is going to sleep with on it. And there are a LOT more names after his fiancee. What does that mean?
A very funny movie from Daniel Waters (Heathers), Sex And Death 101 explores what would happen if someone, who appears to be a nice guy, suddenly gets too much information about their life. Would he try to buck the system? Or would he go with the flow and fuck as many women as possible?
Kinda looks like both, actually.
Winona Ryder also stars as Death Nell, a woman who has sex with men and then puts them into comas with pills of her own design.
Apparently, Winona really, really wants to do Heathers 2. Daniel isn’t so down with it. A buddy of mine and I kind of see this as a good enough sequel. And it has Patton Oswalt being funny in it, which a sequel probably wouldn’t have. So, there!
Besides, this gets about as dark as Heathers did. It seems like a really light comedy. Then it suddenly takes a turn for the VERY macabre. Which makes it that much more awesome. Loved it.
Take a close look at the names on the list, by the way. They are all movie references.
THE BIRD, THE MOUSE AND THE SAUSAGE
Directed by: Max Margulies/Naoko Masuda
Written by: Max Margulies/Naoko Masuda
Based on tale collected by: Jacob Grimm/Wilhelm Grimm
I have never heard of this particular Grimm fairy tale, but it apparently exists. Those guys were weird.
The three title characters live together in perfect harmony until the bird meets another bird who tells him that things must change. When they do, things start to go terribly wrong.
Like all Grimm stories, this one is pretty grim. We always got the watered down versions, but there was always a lot of blood and death in the Grimms’ stories. And that’s why they’re awesome.
This stop-motion short is very good, but it’s definitely a first attempt. Naoko Masuda has a little bit to go before she becomes a really good director, but this is a very good start.
Directed by: Shion Sono
Written by: Shion Sono/Masaki Adachi/Makoto Sanada
It seems that the Japanese just can’t get away from hair these days. Between this and The Rug Cop, I think I’m done with Japanese hair.
This one, though, is a J-horror film. And, like ALL J-horror films, this one involves a vengeful ghost. A dead body is found in a shipment of human hair for hair extensions. When a really creepy dude steals the body, he finds out that she grows hair from her head, her eye socket, her cuts and her mouth. He cuts it off and sells it to hair dressers for extensions.
Kind of a creepy premise makes for what ends up being a pretty funny parody of everything we have come to expect from J-horror. (They have become such cliches that Tim almost didn’t see this one. But then he heard that it was great and noticed that it was directed by Sion Sono, director of Suicide Club and Strange Circus.) All of the conventions are messed with until we start to think that they might be fresh again.
Ok, maybe not quite that much. I still think it was a bit over-long and drawn out. But the hair was very strange, if not really very creepy. The creepiest thing was the dude with the body. I kept expecting him to bust out into choruses of “Goodbye Horses” while asking, “Would you cut my hair? I would cut my hair. I would cut my hair real hard.”
But there was a cute kid, a pretty girl in peril (Chiaki Kuriyama from Battle Royale and Kill Bill) and lots and lots of hair. So much hair that I was kind of tired of seeing hair.
Pretty good J-horror with a weird sense of humor. (Check out the ending….VERY strange and funny.) But I never really understood who the vengeful ghost was after. It started off killing anyone who came in contact with the hair. Then it was only bad people. Then it was anyone again. I just didn’t get it.
