Top Ten Films of 2005

I've never tried to do a top ten before and found it painfully difficult not only to reconstruct my moviegoing experience of the past year but to then cull out these two fistfuls. As criteria, I followed Adam Hartzell's cue that the films had to be features released in the past few years, which I was able to see on a screen in my vicinity in 2005. There was no way I could rank them so I offer them here alphabetically and will follow-up in the next few days with detailed reviews.

Best of Youth
Duck Season
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Moolaade
Mysterious Skin
Nobody Knows
Old Boy
3-Iron
Tropical Malady
Turtles Can Fly

Random Thoughts No. 1: Asian film as an evening class, a symptom of crisis, and constructed meditation.

Every now and then I feel like writing about film itself, rather than review any particular movie. So here is the first in a series of rambling ruminations.

Shelly Kraicer offers an insightful overview of Chinese film in an online Cinemascope article: "Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Beijing Film Culture in 2004."

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs21/fea_kraicer_beijing.htm

If African film master Ousmane Sembene can visualize cinema as an "evening class" whereby audiences are taught approaches to the social concerns of the day, Kraicer visualizes cinema "as a symptom of crisis; films as alarm bells, summoning us to rethink the way we live." Outlining how the People's Republic of China is a "society living asynchronously, without a vital link to its past or a sense of its own future" due to a Cultural Revolution that, within a mere decade, left a "still unexamined raw wound," Kraicer lays bets on the cinema arts to provide "criticism, guidance, reconstruction, and/or consolation" even as they entertain "for distraction or denial."

I have come to think that there are some forms of visual acuity that are fundamentally philosophical. That is to say, that there are as many ways to look at a piece of film as there are ways to believe in film. Trust me, though it might seem to the contrary, I did not come easy to the work of many of the Asian filmmakers. I used to be a special effects and action man. Why a thirst for one kind of cinema subsumes another or morphs into another is, perhaps, too personal to admit; but, only underscores for me the wondrous transformational quality of film, not only in itself as a medium, but upon the individuals who watch them.

Last year around this time I began reviewing the online critical work of Doug Cummings whose website filmjourney.org I find so professionally executed that it grants his personal opinions added valence. Cummings, in turn, credits the influence of Andre Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers du cinema and, considered by some, to be the "high priest of realism."

In a profile written for Sight and Sound (which is, unfortunately, no longer online), Peter Matthews capsulized some of Bazin's concerns in such a way that it made me wonder just how influenced or, more importantly, in what specific ways were Asian directors influenced by the works of the French New Wave? I'm sure countless ink has been spilled on that very topic, and I look forward to the confirmations and refutations that earmark any inquiry.

But here are some random thoughts. "Like a mathematical asymptote," Matthews writes, "filmic representation is always doomed to fall a little short of its goal. But if cinema never quite merges with life, that's what allows it to be an artform whose mission is to reveal life. Bazin concedes that there is no art without artifice and that one must surrender a measure of reality in the process of translating it on to celluloid. The cinematic staging of the real can be carried out in untold ways, so it would be more suitable to speak of 'realisms' than of a single definitive realist mode."

I've begun to notice how many Asian filmmakers propose a form of alterity as a suggestion of identity and alternate realities as a reflection of "this" reality (and I apostrophize that purposely tongue-in-cheek as a comment upon the Western presumption of reality). Thus, if it is true that the "cinematic staging of the real can be carried out in untold ways", and I have no doubt that it can, if not must, then how are we to train our visual acuities to recognize which reality is being cinematically staged, and how successful a director is in his or her own enterprise? The filmmaking process, let alone the filmviewing process, is (as Matthews further states) "inevitably contaminated by human subjectivity. Individual films and filmmakers carve up the unbroken plentitude of the real, imposing upon it style and meaning." Matthews fails to include the audience but they are guilty of the same.

But here is what truly caught my attention in Matthews' profile of Bazin. Acknowledging Bazin's dislike of montage because "montage can only cheat on our experience since it is an art of ellipsis" Matthews then proceeds to describe how "in the name of higher realism" Bazin "celebrated the long, uninterrupted take for its capacity to simulate the most elemental aspect of nature--its continuousness."

!!! Shades of Tsai Ming-Liang! Shades of Joe! Shades of Wong Kar-Wai! Shades of Kore-eda!

"Since everything in the film frame can be seen with equal clarity," Matthews explains, "the audience has to decide for itself what is meaningful or interesting."

And thus, around these directors who have decided to play with the depiction of reality as a static long shot or a documentarian's capture of the moment, it is the filmviewer's state of being that will truly measure the film's efficacy. Comparable to certain tenets of Buddhism. Of meditation.

Cinematic reality as constructed meditation.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Cuidado con las promesas que le haces a un buen amigo....

I am infatuated with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut written by Guillermo Arriaga. Three Burials won Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.

Arriaga expresses a writer's delight in twisting a tale. And this one is, by turns, morbidly funny at moments, as well as whimsically sad. Tommy Lee Jones delivers one of his most compassionate performances ever, noble in stature like Gary Cooper in High Noon or Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Barry Pepper, who has always given me the creeps, continues to do so in this movie, though his character arc allows him a delightful comic range. Dwight Yokum, whose character is admittedly one-dimensional, nonetheless exudes such presence on-screen; he's a natural.

Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Three Burials for the Chicago Reader by way of comparing it to Michael Haneke's Cache. Both deal with the abusive treatment of immigrants. He highlights some key scenes in the film so his review is not for spoiler-wary:

More locally, Mick LaSalle suspects the film has an elusive charm that might elude everybody and finds it "dreadfully slow." LaSalle thinks he speaks for too many people, IMHO, and has issues with corpse-violation humor, but his review is an effective counterpoint to Rosenbaum's. One man's masterpiece is another man's mess.

Dave Hudson weighs in at the Greencine Daily with pointers to Rosenbaum's review, as well as Susan Gerhard's for the Bay Guardian:

Scott Tobias' reviews Three Burials for the A.V. Club. Scott Foundas does so for the L.A. Weekly. And, finally, Roger Ebert for, well, Roger Ebert....

I really like what Ebert, who gives the film four stars, says: "In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged." Pepper's final line in the film, the film's final line period, is resonant with redemption.

IndieWIRE / Reverse Shot has a triptych review.

David Lowery explores the "substantiating connective tissue" between book and film adaptation at his Drifting film blogsite.

"Tony Takitani" on DVD

A friend of mine interested in Japanese film has asked me to post commentary on some of my favorites. Here are my thoughts on Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani which I recently watched on dvd.

Tony Takitani is a beautiful, melancholic film!! I completely understand why several critics included it among their top ten of 2004. Several even included it in their top ten of 2005, myself included.

Tony Takitani received its North American premiere at the 2004 Vancouver Film Festival, and was also screened as part of the World Cinema series at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. I was wowed by it and watched it twice in a row. I love it when a film makes me want to see it again right away!

First and foremost the elegant art direction of Yoshikazu Ichida is masterfully shot by Taishi Hirokawa and textured with a desultory tinkling piano score by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The overall effect is like a still introspection in soft snowfall. I appreciated the braiding of set design, music and narrative/spoken dialogue to render this poignant story of isolation, alienation and loneliness.

From the moment you realize that Tony Takitani is a child who will draw leaves rather than flowers, and mechanical illustrations rather than "great" art, you realize that what is often "natural" about a human being is exactly what will isolate them from others. An eye for detail and loneliness become natural.

John Beebe, film theorist at the C.G. Jung Institute, taught me his impression that when a camera pans from right to left it implies a psychological gradient towards the past; from left to right a movement towards the future and individuation. As narrative device the camera in Tony Takitani slides along in measured, stately fashion towards the right. Episodes in Tony's life are depicted as isolated rooms, divided by thick walls. As a further narrative device to reinforce the alientation, Tony's life is talked about by an omniscient narrator, but no more so than Tony and the personages in Tony's life talk about themselves in third person. As if the loneliness is so acute that it can only be described indirectly.

This film also reminded me of Coco Chanel's admonition that two people who marry to rid themselves of loneliness only double their loneliness. Tony's wife is addicted to buying clothes precisely, as she admits, to fill an emptiness in herself. She personifies what Simone du Beauvoir (in her best resemblance of Sartre) capsulized about the plight of commodity-hypnotized women: to have is to be. Identity becomes based not on something substantive, something at core, but rather something stylish, an appearance, the self-delusion of persona. This creates an interesting and peculiar tension between Tony and Eiko (his wife) because he has filled his emptiness with his love for her. He has come to understand that leaning into the gentle presence of the beloved is the only escape from the prison of loneliness; but, even though Eiko loves him, she still needs to fill her emptiness through buying clothes. When he asks her to stop this, they are startled by the sound of a silent glass shattering.

He has, of course, undone them both.

The addition of jazz into the equation furthers the theme that jazz expresses the undeciphered glyphs of the human heart and that, over time, memory becomes the heart's cargo. I remember my elder friend Lee telling me when I was a young man not to hurry too quickly to create memories because, in time, they would only burden me. Tony Takitani attests the same as, first, his wife's clothes, and second, his father's music, become more than his heart can carry. Finally it is only his natural state of loneliness that will allow Tony Takitani to live.

This film is a beautiful, poetic meditation on the heart's existential plight among others.

One of my favorite bloggers is Doug Cummings. He and Darren Hughes were instrumental in motivating me to finally share my love of film with others. Here's his commentary on Tony Takitani:

http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/discuss/msgReader$2853

2006 SFKAFF: TaeGukGi: The Brotherhood of War (2004)

Closing night at 2006 SFKAFF saw the return of Je-Gyu Kang's Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) to the Bay Area after its initial run last Fall. This go around, however, director Je-Gyu Kang introduced the film and fielded questions from his Presidio audience afterwards.



Taegukgi was Korea's official submission to the foreign language category of the 2004 Academy Awards®. As I expressed to Je-Gyu Kang, I found the film a scathing indictment of war as well as a powerful historical corrective. Je-Gyu Kang admitted his pleasure that the film has screened in more than 40 countries.



Though markedly different in tone and scale, Taegukgi and Spring in My Hometown (1998) both assert that the Korean war was not a war Koreans really wanted to fight. They were pawns ground up between democratic and communist ideologies. It was, in effect, not really their war even though they killed their own kind and ravished their own country. Of course Koreans wanted the war to stop so they could return to their homes and get on with their lives. Whereas Hometown depicted the effect of the war and American presence on Korean family life in a village far removed from battle, Taegukgi marched fearlessly into the trenches, replicating battle carnage to a degree I've rarely seen. Its unflinchingly melodramatic flourishes elevated its characters above the bloody clamor to achieve a heroic stature. The grand, sweeping score by Lee Dong-jun securely manipulated sympathies.



Asked whether films like Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan had exerted any kind of pressure or influence upon the kind of war movie he wanted to make, Je-Gyu Kang's asserted his film was different. Its focus was not on any one side winning out over an enemy; but rather, a movie where both sides won out against war. Asked which scenes were the most difficult to shoot, he responded that the multiple battle sequences were filmed in the mountains under severe weather conditions. Further, because they needed so much smoke for the movie, and because their budget would not allow the usual Hollywood price of $50 per smoke canister, Je-Gyu Kang was forced to burn tires, sometimes up to as many as 300 a day. Not only did this deplete the stock of tires in the region but polluted the air so badly that breathing the smoke day in and day out proved problematic for actors and crew.



Well into the film an oversized Hershey's chocolate bar is introduced into the narrative as an indication of the arrival of an American military presence in Korea (and its concomitant colonial implications). I asked if the product placement was thematic or commercial? Je-Gyu Kang assured me the Hershey's corporation did not give him the license to use the product, let alone any funding. This scene has been deemed "anachronistic", however, by Sanjuro, reviewer for Love HK Films.com who observed that "companies weren't required to list the 'Nutrition Facts' until the 1990s."



Both lead actors—Jang Dong-gun as the older brother and Won Bin as the younger—successfully carry the weight of the film to its anticipated denouement where brother is pit against brother in the hellish confusion of battle. Won Bin especially conveys a vast array of emotions in contrast to his stern, steel-faced brother. Whereas Won Bin cries frequently thoughout the film, Jang Dong-gun cries but once.



Of related interest: Darcy Paquet provides background at the Korean Film Page.

Blogathon No. 2: Michael Haneke's Code Unknown

In late January 2006, Girish Shambu announced his second "blogathon" on Michael Haneke's Code Inconnu: Récit Incomplet De Divers Voyages / Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000) and invited the blogosphere to contribute. At the time I considered myself a "new kid on the blog" (har har) and thought, "Why not join in? You want to interact with others and maybe—despite the fact that these experienced bloggers seem to have more to say than you—it never hurts to speak your piece at the table, even if it's just to have someone pass the salt." In retrospect, this was my inauspicious entry into an online engagement with film.



A mere handful of years later and the landscape of the blogosphere has changed significantly. The key players have either moved on to other projects or morphed their cinephilia into new critical practices. My humility at the beginning has, quite honestly, evaporated and been replaced by a more confident assessment of who I am within this phenomenon of internet cinephilia and what it is I might contribute that will be of any lasting value. Then again, who's to say? One of the striking facts about an online presence is its sheer evanescence and this has been proven no less by taking another look at this particular entry. I have been surprised—if saddened—to find that so many of the original contributions are now lost with the dismantling of their host sites.



Aaron Hillis shelved Cinephiliac in January 2009 to helm The Greencine Daily. He also helped found Benten Films and has curated the reRun Theater based in New York. Girish Shambu has become one of internet cinephilia's most visible proponents and—entertaining the credit of hosting the first "blogathon" (on Paul Verhoeven's 1995 Showgirls)—has graduated to soliciting scholarly essays on film for his new online film journal Lola, which he has co-founded with Adrian Martin, even as he still maintains his eponymous blog. Darren Hughes has archived Long Pauses. Eric Henderson's site When Canses Were Classeled has bitten the dust, as has Andrew Grant's Like Anna Karina's Sweater, and Flickhead's and Michael S. Smith's, while Matthew Clayfield has folded Esoteric Rabbit into a self-named critical repository, unfortunately excluding this blogathon entry.



What follows are my initial thoughts on watching Code Unknown for the purpose of participating in the blogathon and an assessment of the contributions of my fellow participants. In retrospect, I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to take part in this significant and unique moment in time.

* * *

Code Unknown's opening sequence is of a mute girl using charades to express what she is feeling. Her co-students venture guesses: Is she alone? Is she in a hiding place? Is she threatened by a gangster? Is she experiencing a bad conscience? Is she sad? Is she imprisoned? With each guess, she nods no. In the film's final sequence a mute boy expresses himself through sign language, but—without a command of sign language and without the safety net of subtitles translating his gestures—the viewer can only guess the mute boy's intent. These scenes of muted children struggling to express themselves bookend the film and suggest that—even if communication proves difficult—it's important to hazard self-expression. Haneke suggests that the consequences of Babel are artistry and ingenuity, not silence and despair.



Narratively, the film's irresolution is frustrating even as its irresolution approximates truth. Any spectator with a short attention span will suffer the eschewal of seques and dissolves in favor of abrupt cuts to darkness. Code Unknown essays a sequence of dead ends. Each is as if the viewer is jerking awake from a dream, struggling to salvage continuity, even as they are reminded—yet again—that narrative continuity does not insure resolution.



Haneke plays with what is heard but not seen and what is seen but not understood. He considers that still photographs cannot truly capture a movement of violence. His voiceovers seem eerily disconnected from their subjects and there is the palpable sense that many experiences are to be had similarly by disparate personalities: a Romanian refugee reduced to begging on the streets of Paris can be as humiliated and dehumanized as a French actress on the Paris metro. There is no difference in shame.



There are two scenes that particularly moved me. The first takes place at the cemetery where Anne (Juliette Binoche) accompanies her elderly neighbor to the burial of a young girl who—it becomes evident earlier in the film—has been beaten. Should Anne do anything? She receives a note pleading for assistance and—recognizing the handwriting as that of her elderly neighbor—Anne confronts her neighbor who denies the assertion. She's sorry, the old woman protests, but, no, she didn't write the note. Later at the burial, Anne walks silently alongside the old woman who is weeping. Their tacit complicity in silently allowing the girl to be beaten to death is painfully pronounced.



Secondly, one of the film's most beautiful scenes is pastoral. A tractor tills soil. Sunlight shifts over the tilled fields as clouds sweep overhead. It's a long, protracted take of a familiar experience, but one I've not seen on film before. This play of sunlight on an open field has lingered with me, reminding me that emotions are, indeed, weather.



At Cinephiliac, Aaron Hillis mused: "What demand is not met with unipersonal film blogging that could be achieved with a diverse force of viewpoints focused on the same topic? What roused our communal hunger to tear into this esoterically specific film—an underseen work, admittedly, but one that has still been thoroughly well-plumbed since its release?" [It was a fair question and one I'm especially glad to have quoted now that the original source has disappeared.]



I had to ask myself the same question. Why would I even want to participate in the realm of "unipersonal film blogging", let alone a "blogathon", when my earlier efforts to discuss film in the Movies Conference on The WELL didn't go over so well? The WELL's thumbs-up thumbs down mentality didn't satisfy my need for a richer discussion on film. For me, it wasn't enough to simply like or dislike a movie. I wanted to know why and determine that by articulating my own thoughts while listening to the thoughts of others. By "listening", of course, I mean reading (the equivalent of listening in this disembodied medium). Poet Robert Bly claims to write for an imagined audience and—if, at times, we populate that imagined audience for others—this seems only apt and fitting.



"Unfettered by advertising dollars, bottom-line publishers, competing brands and other burdens that typically don't concern online critics, how can we take better advantage of our collective status to reach a greater mass?" Aaron wondered. "For me, film writing is about education, enlightenment, entertainment and helping to better the state of cinema."



Girish has imaginatively staged a conversation with himself whereby the best of his reactions step up to the front. For this witty conceit and his welcome moderation, Girish deserves praise. Let alone that his insights are spot on.



When I first discovered Darren Hughes and his site Long Pauses, I raved about it on The WELL, enamored with his poetic grasp of narrative themes and his accomplished aesthetic sense. It was reading Darren's work at Long Pauses that turned up the heat under my own creative juices. His writing reminded me of being in service to beauty and the responsibility of writing about beauty the best one can. Darren seemed to understand more than most that poetry educates and that criticism is not about tearing something down as much as it is about elevating what you love aloft.



Darren highlighted that Code Unknown's Paris metro montage was comprised of Luc Delahaye's photographs. Ignorant of this source, however, when these photos appeared in Code Unknown, within the film's narrative I experienced a wonderful "aha" moment realizing they were the photos achieved by Georges (Thierry Neuvic) through a brazen technique of shooting subjects unaware. I recalled once using that same technique wandering a Mayan marketplace. I wanted those Indians—as Haneke has intimated here and again in Code Unknown—to reveal their vrai visage, their true face. It was a technique I used once but never again because afterwards I felt guilty for such predatorial desire.



"In Haneke's films," David Lowery wrote at his site Drifting, "the gray area where classes merge is a dangerous one." That this happens right on the street or on the metro between races from different countries and different cultural backgrounds makes everyday interaction a walking time bomb, as demonstrated by a hierarchy of humiliation in one of the film's opening scenes: a Romanian woman is humiliated by a French boy who is humiliated by the life his father wants for him and who is called to task by a Mali male who, in turn, is humiliated by the police. There is no safety from humiliation, Haneke suggests, no security, especially when we are patrolling the perimeters of our individual lives and subcultures.



At Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Dennis Cozzalio astutely traced connections between Haneke's Unknown Code and Paul Haggis's Crash (2004). Although I find Crash improbable for its repeated coincidental placement of characters who, in themselves, allegorize race and class, the broken episodic treatment of the ensemble in Unknown Code is, in my opinion, far more successful.



"What strikes me as the most interesting part of Haneke's optimism," Dipanjan Chattop Adhyay opined at Random Muses, "is his idea that any meaningful discourse between classes or races, which in the western world often overlap, needs to be initiated by the young generation of the oppressed class and targeted to the young generation of the privileged class. Older characters of all classes (races) are almost pathologically incapable of any successful communication." I'm not completely convinced of Dipanjan's final assessment but it has certainly caused pause for thought.



Eric Henderson's contribution to the blogathon at his site When Canses Were Classeled was one of the most fresh, creative takes on a film I'd ever read. It made me laugh out loud, which proved a relief after thinking out loud for too long, and helped me realize what a long way I had to go before becoming an accomplished blogger. Still, in the face of such amusement and wit, it jacked me up for the challenge. [In retrospect, I regret not quoting from Eric's piece since it is no longer available.]



Andrew Grant's analysis of Haneke's repeated usage of the character names Anne and Georges made me want to watch Haneke's complete oeuvre one film after the other to see if there weren't more continuities I was missing!! Great catch, Andrew!!



In his entry, Flickhead asked all the right questions, especially "Are the questions answered?" Because, of course, one has to consider they never fully can be.



After establishing that each sequence in Code Unknown felt like an unfinished sentence, Matthew Clayfield summarized his thoughts at Esoteric Rabbit: "The only problem with all this, of course, is that these unfinished sequences don't, in fact, frustrate understanding at all, but rather, paradoxically, engender it. All these various formal and narrative examples of the impossibility of shared understanding and the impotency of language ultimately lead to a better understanding of these very actualities. As the unfinished sequences pile up, a more complete discourse emerges. And it is in this paradox—a shared acknowledgement of the impossibility of shared understanding—that I sense the slightest hint of optimism in Haneke's otherwise seemingly pessimistic film." Word! And hardly a lightweight word at that.



Like Darren Hughes, Michael S. Smith applied Sontagian insight into the form and structure of Haneke's film with remarkable erudition.



Finally, Zach Campbell celebrated his 100th blog entry with yet more rich commentary at his site Elusive Lucidity.



Originally written February 13, 2006 and revised on August 18, 2011.

IndieFest 2006: Two "Masters of Horror"—Q&A With Don Coscarelli & Angus Scrimm

Caught the IndieFest program "Two Masters of Horror" at the Roxie last night: Don Coscarelli's Incident On and Off A Mountain Road and Dario Argento's Jenifer. Both were one-hour segments from the Showtime Masters of Horror series, which aired last Fall. Both were films about faces only a mother could love. As an added treat Incident was introduced by Coscarelli himself and "Tall Man" actor Angus Scrimm (of Phantasm fame). Coscarelli and Scrimm flew themselves up to San Francisco and housed themselves, knowing IndieFest had no budget for guests, and solely because they had such a good time a couple of years back when IndieFest screened Bubba Ho Tep. Largely because of the resounding affirmation he received for Bubba Ho Tep, Coscarelli pursued national distribution. To reward San Francisco's IndieFest crowd, Coscarelli brought his own print of Incident.



Coscarelli outlined how the Masters of Horror project originated. Invited to a dinner hosted by Mick Garris, Coscarelli discovered the invited directors were all horror geeks. The dinner provided the opportunity to meet his peers Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Guillermo del Toro, among others. At the same time that Garris was hosting his dinner, his neighbors were hosting a birthday party. They complained about the rowdiness of the Garris dinner and, spontaneously, del Toro shouted over the fence, "Happy birthday from the Masters of Horror!!" The appellation stuck and morphed into the series.



Asked whether or not a sequel for Bubba Ho Tep was in the works, Coscarelli recalled that at IndieFest a couple of years back he and Bruce Campbell joked about a sequel Nosferatu Ho Tep and the joke turned into a treatment, hopefully to be produced with Bruce Campbell returning to play Elvis.



Sporting fashionable white shades, Angus Scrimm detailed his admiration for Coscarelli's films and his delight in being asked to act in them. When Coscarelli was asked whether another Phantasm film was in the works, he relayed that Angus had told him he hadn't hung up his balls yet and then fielded the question to Angus: "Should we do another?" "Why not?!" Angus replied enthusiastically. He plays the character Buddy in Incident.



Incident, the inaugural episode for the Masters of Horror series, is based on a Joe Lansdale short story (as was Bubba Ho Tep). Coscarelli joked his intention was to show the effects of a bad marriage. Raised in a feminist family, he also wanted to invert the horror formula to create a kick-ass female hero. He achieved just that. Ellen (Bree Turner) appears weak and defenseless but ends up showing the film's villain Moonface a thing or two. Moonface likes to gouge out the eyes of women he lures off an isolated stretch of road and then likes to hoist them up like scarecrows in his front yard. Two of the most incredible images from Incident are Moonface leaping through the air against a full moon backdrop (which Scrimm termed "iconic" and which can be glimpsed in the website trailer) and moonlight shining through the vacant sockets of his victims' eyes. Scrimm noted that one of the things he finds most effective about Incident is the "reveal" of each character. Myself, I found the blend of horror, humor and beauty perfectly poised. Staci Layne Wilson's review of Incident can be found here.



The second Masters of Horror installment offered at the Roxie last night was Dario Argento's Jenifer, a truly horrifying and engrossing story about an "awesome Morlock." Here, an appetite for entrails creates an appetite for sex. Steven Weber, who adapted the teleplay from a Bruce Jones comic book, also stars as a policeman who unwittingly saves a young woman. Her disfigured face and luscious body confuse him into pitying and protecting her for sexual favors. This episode reinforces the vampiric conceit that evil must be invited over the threshold. The score is Hermannesque via Hitchcock and Argento even pays momentary homage to "Frankenstein" through a pretty little neighbor girl throwing daisies into her inflatable pool.



Again, synopses, clips, and biography can be found at the above-linked Masters of Horror website. Staci Layne Wilson's online interview with actress Carrie Anne Fleming can be found here.



My only complaint about the screening of Jenifer has nothing to do with the piece itself but with the fact that—moments before it was projected—the audience was notified it would be watching a screener. This meant that the projection was periodically marred by corporate watermarks flashing on the screen. This was completely annoying and distracting and—even though we were offered free admission to a midnight kung fu movie as compensation, and even though Coscarelli and Scrimm were in attendance for the first installment—I was disheartened by IndieFest's lack of professionalism and their false advertising. I don't like slapping down ten bucks only to find I'm being conned. I wonder if this is even legal?