Pages tagged “fantastic fest”

Academy Award nominee (Best Animation for Rejected) Don Hertzfeldt, one of the most inventive animators today, spoke with Paste about his newest short film Everything Will Be OK, which won Fantastic Fest’s animation competition.

Paste: We were talking earlier about how you can evoke emotion from these simple drawings and about “Peanuts” and how Charles Schulz did things.
Don Hertzfeldt: I was talking to someone at Sundance about how everyone in the world has enormous empathy for this character Charlie Brown who’s just a circle and a couple of dots and a squiggly line. We were talking about how that relates to Bill in Everything Will Be OK, his triumphs, his tragedies. How it has a similar effect on people. It’s been interesting to see the film on the road because it’s brought people to tears. That’s something real new for me. I think it’s the whole death thing. I tend to write, sometimes, not just what I know, but what I’m afraid of. In the earliest draft, [Bill] was going to die but that was like letting him off the hook. Death is the easy part. What’s hard is living and going on with all this stuff he’d been dealing with.

It’s probably the most fun I’ve had working on something since Rejected. I knew right away it was going to be a longer thing. Like, okay, this is just chapter one. Chapter two—it’ll be in theaters next year. And chapter three, I’ve kind of got the first bits of writing for that.

On his unique animation technique:
I’ve got an antique, 35 mm camera rig. It’s an animation stand. My best guess is it was built in the late 1940s. It was very likely the same camera that was used to build the old “Peanuts” cartoons from the 1960s.

It’s got an amazing history to it. It’s beautiful because it’s simple. Without exaggeration I can say my last two or three films would not have been possible without this camera. There’s no computer. There are no visual effects, post production, using nothing other than 1940s technology. It’s kind of a shame that you’re going to find these cameras dumped on the sidewalk in Burbank these days. We’ve got a hundred years of amazing film technology to play with so why would we want to limit all these toys? I want to see Technicolor come back. Most animators and students these days are stuck using equipment that’s maybe only three or four years old. And when you see everyone working from the same palette like that, in animation especially, you start to notice that everybody’s movies are looking the same.

On creativity:
I’ve had many nights where I’ll wake up and I’ll look at the pencil tests from last night and look at the piles of artwork and it’s almost like the “magic elves” came out and did it for me. I don’t know where half the ideas came from. It’s almost like they’re not mine anymore.

On the tube:
It’s very young right now, but I’m developing something for television that’s kind of top secret. It’s brand new and it’s not related to anything I’ve done yet.

You can find out more about Don Hertzfeldt’s films at BitterFilms.com.

El Orfanato (The Orphanage)
After directing one of the best films of 2006 with Pan’s Labyrinth, Spaniard Guillermo del Toro is producing rookie director Juan Antonio Bayona’s El Orfanato about a ghostly, old orphanage that keeps dark secrets. In the spirit of 1963’s The Haunting, this project is beautifully filmed with a gritty performance from Belén Rueda.

Aachi and Ssipak
Fantastic Fest ringleader Tim League believes Pixar and Dreamworks could learn from this way out Korean film. I agree that it deserves kudos for imagination, albeit a very sick one. In a future, post-apocalyptic time, defecation and popsicles save the world.

Death Note and Death Note: The Last Name
Two of Japan’s most popular films, Death Note and its sequel, Death Note: The Last Name, make for a great double feature. Manga influenced, but not animated, it follows the trail of a book that gives its holder the power to kill simply by writing the victim’s name. Although a little predictable, it's still worth a night on the couch when the DVDs come out. More sequels are said to be in the works.

The Girl Next Door
It’s interesting that the most horrific film of Fantastic Fest—an event known for its celebration of exaggerated fiction teeming with creatures of the night, sci-fi psychos and apocalyptic possibilities—is a film based on a true story. Adapted from the novel by Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door graphically follows the torture, rape and eventual murder of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of her aunt, cousins and neighborhood children. It is a hard one to recommend, however, in that the aforementioned films on defecation and ghosts have more redeeming value. The script is big on explaining what happened but falls extremely short on explaining why. But Blanche Baker’s portrayal of the sadistic Aunt Ruth is nonetheless riveting.

The Cold Hour
Fortunately, Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League does a competent job of monitoring the temperature in his theaters, unlike most movie houses where you’re well advised to bring a sweater. This is important because The Cold Hour is chilling enough without frosty environs. Spanish filmmaker Elio Quiroga has made a first rate, post-apocalyptic thriller where a group of survivors have created a livable community within a building complex. But supplies are running low as they defend themselves against creatures known as “strangers” (the infected ones) and “invisibles” (the cold ones). A suspenseful movie, it saves the real wow factor for the ending.

Mirageman
A bar bouncer decides to become a super hero in this better-than-average, low-budget martial arts film. When it’s funny, as when the hero designs his supersuit and works on his marketing, the film is wonderfully entertaining. And the fight scenes are well choreographed. The film’s downfall, however, comes when it takes itself much too seriously.

Far Out
In this '60s-style, Valley-of-the-Dolls-meets-Vampires short, the party goers get stoned on psychedelic punch while one of them gets thirsty for a different kind of liquid. Corny, but funny. Thankfully, also very short.

An Introduction to Lucid Dream Exploration
An interesting look at the subconscious mind is mind blowingly animated with an Etch-a-Sketch—frame by frame by frame by frame...

[Above: Zack Ward and Dave Foley in Postal]

Writer/producer/director Uwe Boll (BloodRayne, House of the Dead) came to Fantastic Fest on Saturday to screen his newest assault on taste. Paste spoke with the German film maker about the film, Postal, and his forthcoming 2008 movie about Vietnam.

Paste: There’s a lot of shooting in the movie.
Uwe Boll: I get shot in the balls, actually, and I play myself like a little lederhosen Nazi guy. I think, basically, Postal makes fun out of everything. It’s an all-time offender. The whole point was to make a comedy in the style more like Naked Gun and Airplane. All the movies in the past few years were like date movies, and I wanted to do something more radical.

P: I was reading the Fantastic Fest description of the movie: “One of the most coarse, vulgar and offensive comedies ever put to celluloid.”
B: (Laughing) I think it’s true. It was time to do something like this, to pull out the big hammer and make fun out of everything. We have Bin Laden, we have Bush, and no one gets out.

P: The character Uncle Dave is played by Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley?
B: And he’s full frontal naked in one scene.

P: How does a film like this play in Germany as compared to the U.S.?
B: The humor that plays good in North America plays, normally, very good in Australia, the U.K. and Germany. In Italy they have a different kind of humor, and in France.

P: Your next film—are you going to do something similar?
B: I did a movie about the Vietnam War, Tunnel Rats, that will come out next year. [It will be] 40 years since Bobby Kennedy got shot, since Martin Luther King got shot, the Vietnam war. I felt that the Vietnam war is more like an icon of the last hundred years and it changed a whole generation...with music also. We’re trying now to get music, like Sly & the Family Stone, from that generation into the movie. It’s tough because of the [legal] rights thing but I’m optimistic that we will get a few very good songs.

Dai-Nipponjin (Big Man Japan)
The boundaries of mockumentary filmmaking are stretched to the extreme in this unconventional import from Japan about an unassuming citizen who transforms himself into a giant and defends Tokyo against monsters he calls “baddies.” The casual documentary style and excellent performance by Hitoshi Matsumoto, along with great character-generations make this one of the best films of the festival. Magnolia Pictures distributed last year’s innovative, South Korean creature flick, The Host, and has now acquired the rights to Dai-Nipponjin, so expect a release in the next year.

The Un-Gone
In this inventive and well-filmed short, a couple uses a matter transporter (a'la Star Trek) to take a trip—a seemingly standard procedure in the future. But a malfunction leads to a drastic, and lethal, remedy.

[Above: Spiral]

Spiral
Playing the central character in a film he calls a “Hitchcockian type drama,” Spiral co-director Joel David Moore told the packed Fantastic Fest audience Friday night that the filmmakers had to do “a lot of ‘this isn’t a crazy horror flick’ talk” in advance of the movie’s release. That was because his directing partner Adam Green made the crazy horror flick Hatchet, which played at Fantastic 2006. And he’s right, the two are completely different, and Spiral is better. Moore, who we’ve seen in films such as Art School Confidential and Dodgeball, expertly plays a nervous artist whose infatuation with women is creepily similar to Hitchcock’s oft-imitated Psycho character Norman Bates. But it works, as does his chemistry with co-star Amber Tamblyn (TV’s Joan of Arcadia).

The Backwoods
Unfortunately, Gary Oldman’s performance can’t save The Backwoods, a film that leaves us hanging with even more mysteries than we started with.

The Entrance
Mixing The Exorcist with Saw, this Vancouver thriller almost overcomes its over-the-top performances and flat cinematography.

The Fifth
One of the best shorts of the festival so far, this dark comedy centers around four friends’ pursuit of a fifth player for their weekly poker game. Who would think serial killing could be this much fun?

King of the Box
In this hilarious short, the Jack in the Box restaurant chain title character gets a trick-not-treat Halloween visit from his Burger King rival.

Coming soon in Paste's ongoing Fantastic Fest 2007 coverage: an interview with Uwe Boll, proud master of distaste and director of Postal.

To read Tim Basham's first dispatch on Fantastic Fest 2007, click here.

[Above: George Romero in Austin for Fantastic Fest 2007]

As festival attendees reveled in a blood-and-gore opening party nearby, director George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) describes Fantastic Fest better than anyone: “Everybody here wants to be here. [It's] less business and more fun.” Romero was so taken by his first visit to Austin’s international horror/sci-fi/fantasy festival that he chose it as the sight for the U.S. premiere of his newest zombie-ode, Diary of the Dead, which kicked off the eight-day fest Thursday night.

Now in its third year, festival co-founder Tim League teamed with Ain’t It Cool News maven Harry Knowles and others to offer a stream of films any festival would envy. Last year, Fantastic surprised audiences with the U.S. premiere of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto with Gibson himself in attendance for an extended question and answer period. This year’s special screenings will again be a secret with the first of three coming Saturday night.

Diary of the Dead
Maybe the best Romero Dead film since his 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, and 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. Contains some inventive social commentary on what Romero calls the “multi-tentacled media machine which is capturing us all. We’re all getting invaded by it and seduced by it.”

For more on Diary of the Dead, click here.

Timecrimes
Some complex twists and challenging deduction give director Nacho Vigalondo's story about an average guy’s accidental journey to the past a bigger punch than your typical time-travel film.

For more on Timecrimes, including a trailer, click here.