Tag: comedy

Kids and grown-ups love it so!!!

Posted on by Paul Risker

In Steven Kostanski’s independent American sci-fi, horror, comedy Psycho Goreman, siblings Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and Luke (Owen Myre) unwittingly resurrect an ancient alien overlord, who was entombed on Earth millions of years ago. Nicknaming him Psycho Goreman, PG for short, they discover they can control this tyrannical force, that once threatened to destroy universe with a magical amulet. Forced to abide by Mimi’s childish whims, PG’s presence soon draws the attention of allies and foes from across the galaxy. In small town America, the fate of the universe will be decided.

No stranger to genre cinema Kostanski’s previous directorial credits include Manborg (2011) and The Void (2016), co-directed with Jeremy Gillespie, and Leprechaun Returns (2018). He has also worked on makeup prosthetics and effects on features and series including Star Trek Discovery (2017-18), Hannibal (2013-14), Crimson Peak (Del Toro, 2015) and Suicide Squad (Ayer, 2016).

In conversation with DMovies, Kostanski discussed the need to change the culture around movies and keeping our inner child alive.

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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?

Steven Kostanski – I come from a very artistic family. My mum is an artist and while my dad’s not an artist, he was a technical drafting supervisor. He’s now retired, but he’s a technically minded guy, and the combination of that and my mum’s artistry turned me into what I am.

I like the problem-solving of filmmaking, and I also like the creative expression behind it – of being able to create weird fantasy worlds. I was a kid that was raised in the video store, watching sci-fi, horror, fantasy and action movies, Saturday morning cartoons, and playing video games – all the typical stuff of a late ’80s, early ’90s kid. It’s all burned into my brain and it influences everything I make.

When my dad moved one of our VCRs into the basement, I had free reign over what movies I was watching, and it opened up the world of filmmaking. I was able to obsess over movies, and this predates DVD and watching clips on YouTube. Being able to pause and rewind, and watch an effect over and over again, and obsess over how it was made was influential.

Up until that point I liked drawing, sculpting and painting. I was always making dioramas in school and I realised that all of those things could come together in one form of expression, which is movies.

PR – Youth is a special time to discover film because at that age we’re sponges. We absorb everything, and as we get older how we relate to cinema changes. It’s not that we love film any less, but it’s a different experience, and one that I find feeds a nostalgia.

SK – The internet and the connectivity we have is great for some things, and for the post-movie discussion it’s fine, but I find it spoils the experience of just watching a movie now because there’s expectation. The hype-machine that’s built around movies and TV now is so empowering, and it’s also instant – it happens and then it’s done.

It’s newer and it’s a little outside of the VHS era, but one of the last times I went to a movie and was blown away in that child like way was when I saw The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, 2001). I’d not read the books and I didn’t know anything about it. I was more into sci-fi and horror at that point, and so I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be elves and fantasy stuff, this is going to be boring’, and I remember being blown away and overwhelmed. I was pulled into this universe that was epic in scope, but also singular in Peter Jackson’s vision. I always felt he had me in the palm of his hand, ‘I’m telling you this story and you’re going to listen.’

I also think back on that experience because it was such a surprise, I was so blindsided. Immediately after I read the books and then the experience changed. There was hype and expectations around The Two Towers (Jackson, 2002) and The Return of the King (Jackson, 2003). Neither of those hit the same way that first movie hit because I didn’t know what I was getting into, and so I was overwhelmed by the experience. I wish more movies could do that, where they come out of nowhere because nobody is talking about them. You just go to check it out and it punches you in the face. We need a little bit more of that with our movie consumption.

PR – It occurs to me that it’s unlikely you’re alone in these feelings, and equally that it’s near impossible to reverse the power of the hype-machine.

SK – It’s impossible because we’re in an age where people are racing to spoil everything, and not just spoil, but also give their opinions. It becomes more about going to watch a movie and wondering if I’ll agree with someone, as opposed to going to watch the movie because you want to enjoy the experience.

The culture around movies has changed a lot, and not necessarily for the better in my opinion. It makes me yearn for that childlike excitement where the only hype around a movie I would get is one of my cousins telling me how terrifying Hellraiser 2 (Randel, 1988) was. The hype-machine back then was my cousins and my friends at school saying, “Oh, you’ve got to see The Puppet Master (1989-2018) movies, they’re crazy.” That’s all the lead in you’d get, and we need to bring that back. I’m not sure how, but we’ve got to figure it out.

PR – Is Psycho Goreman the type of film with a vibrant energy and confidence that it demands to be seen, therein making it difficult to adequately review or spoil through criticism?

SK – I feel like I’ve experienced that with PG, where there’s polarising opinions. What I’ve loved is that in the online discussion, even people that are not onboard with the movie are still telling you to see it. I like forward momentum, like what you’re saying. You just have to experience the thing, and I appreciate that because even with bad movies, it shouldn’t be a case of going to Rotten Tomatoes and thinking, “This has a lower rating, I’m not going to watch it.” I love misfires and I find them very interesting. Having made a movie that has this discussion around it, where people that have experienced the movie, regardless of whether it’s necessarily their cup of tea or not, are pushing people towards the film, is exciting. It’s getting us towards that movie culture that I’d rather be in, where it’s little more communal and accepting.

I’m not trying to spin anything, but I find that in this world where everybody is so polarised, it’s either love it, it’s the best thing ever, or they want to murder the filmmaker. Going back to childhood, there’s that middle ground of it’s a fun thing to talk about. It’s just a movie and it should be a fun pastime, and not so much of this industry of criticism and review, which I feel a lot of people have clung onto as their bread and butter, which feels very weird to me.

PR – As kids we’re dreamers, and films often fuelled our youthful dreams and fantasises. Is your film one that can offer nostalgia to reconnect with our inner child?

SK – My whole life and throughout my adulthood, I still feel like a twelve-year-old in an adult body. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away, and I’ll have moments of clarity in meetings with studio executives where I just want to go and play Nintendo 64.

You have to keep that spirit alive because I don’t get what the alternative is. As a kid, growing up meant I’m allowed to watch Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991) and Predator (McTiernan, 1987) as much as I want. To me the adult content was just amped up kids content, and so that’s why I make the movies that I make. You’re allowed to like fantasy stuff as a grown up, there’s nothing taboo about that.

I don’t get what the expectation is otherwise – are we all just supposed to watch sports and wash our truck in the driveway every weekend, and barbecue? I don’t get what the alternative is and so to me adulthood is the same shit as when you’re a kid, except now there’s gore and nudity – what’s wrong with that!

To me it’s not so much reconnecting with being a kid, it’s about keeping the spark of life you had when you were a kid, and that seems to get extinguished in a lot of people in adulthood. It’s understandable, the consequences of reality can beat a person down, but I feel like you can use that guiding light of fun and whimsy to keep your spirit going in the dark times. I want to keep that energy going because otherwise what’s the point? Why even bother getting up in the morning?

Psycho Goreman is streaming exclusively on Shudder from May 20th.

Ivana the Terrible

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Ivana is perfectly healthy. Multiple trips to the doctor make sure that there’s absolutely nothing physically wrong with her. But she’s convinced of her own sickness. Constantly claiming her hair is falling out while complaining of dizziness, she might be the most memorable hypochondriac since Woody Allen’s Mickey in Hannah and her Sisters. Played with perfect irascibility by director Ivana Mladenovic, she lashes out at friend and family alike, providing a bristly portrait of a returning expat who really doesn’t enjoy being home.

Based on a true summer in 2017 of the Serbian-born, Romania-based director, when she returned to the border town of Kladovo, Ivana the Terrible provides the metafictional director with plenty of space for self-reflection and insight. It comments on the relations between the two Balkan nations with tenderness and acuity.

There’s a lot to absorb that might goes over the head of those not well-versed in inter-Balkan relations. Thankfully Mladenovic’s talent as a director keeps us invested throughout this awkward comedy slash documentary experiment which recalls the best of Abbas Kiarostami in its blending of reality and fantasy as well as the self-absorption of Woody Allen’s most self-reflective work (the seasoned filmmaker receiving a prize in Stardust Memories most readily comes to mind).

This is brave filmmaking, especially for a woman returning to a small, patriarchal-minded town. Unafraid to make herself positively unlikeable — at least in the reflection of her family, remarkably also playing versions of themselves, who constantly ask her when she will either get a real job or become a mother — she moves beyond a conventional portrait to create a bristly, exciting and restless film.

Ivana the TerribleT

Her first mistake — also sharing similarities with many Woody Allen protagonists — is in sleeping with a man 13 years younger than her. Her second is in her lack of deference towards the local politicians of the city, who want to use her as one of the headline acts of a cross-cultural Serbian-Romanian festival.

As a woman, she constantly has to be grateful: grateful to the family who raised her, grateful to the town that now praises her. Yet Mladenovic keeps asking questions as to how much they really participated to her success. In the background is the awkward tension between Romanians and Serbians, sharing a complicated history that grows and grows in significance until a Radu Jude-esque final scene.

Despite the ambition in realising the film, the filmmaking style is grounded in realist traditions. Nonetheless, it still uses a few clever wide shots to produce a sense of alienation, especially coming at odds with otherwise intimate scenes. One moment in particular, framing an awkward conversation streamed on Facebook Live behind men dining in a restaurant, is a masterclass in using depth-of-frame to deepen a comic moment.

For one thing, the fact of its mere creation shows both Mladenovic’s family and the local forces in this Serbian town — who really do have a festival in Kladovo every year — to be far better sports than the movie asserts; able to laugh at themselves in service of strange and compelling art.

Ivana the Terrible is showing during the month of December as part of ArteKino. You can watch it at home and entirely for free – just click here!

Goodbye Soviet Union (Hüvasti, NSVL)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A coming-of-age story set against the waning years of the USSR, Goodbye Soviet Union is a nostalgic and heartfelt invocation of a unique time and place. Likely to be a hit in both Estonia and Finland (tickets were sold out for the public screening here in Tallinn), it breathes new life into the teen indie drama.

Johannes (Niklas Kouzmitchev) and his family are Ingrian Finns. Neither Russian or Estonian, they occupy a strange place in the multicultural patchwork of the ESSR. His mother (Nika Savolainen) never reveals the identity of Johannes’ father, leaving them to put none other than Lenin as the father. Johannes Leninovitch grows up with his parents in the closed city of Leningrad 3, an idealised Soviet space hiding a secret radiation facility. But they are kicked out and sent to Tallinn after a dangerous accident.

If Leningrad 3 felt like a remnant of the 50s, Tallinn in the 1980s is a land full of paradoxes, best expressed by Johannes’ beloved Lenin statues being defaced by punks wearing Kino jackets. This is a marked contrast with the earlier sweetness of Johannes playing with Gena the crocodile, an iconic figure of animation, whom he calls his best friend. After his Gena doll is destroyed, he becomes friends with a young Chechen with the same name and falls in love with his sister Vera (Elene Baratashvili). Together he must navigate between his new-found love and desire to discover the freedom of the West.

The drab colours one may associate with Western depictions of the Soviet Union are replaced by a bright and expressive ’80s palette: from the deep blue pioneer school uniforms to the yellow of a Gorbachev doll’s sweater. The soundtrack, a mixture of 80s Estonian punk like “Tere Perestroika”, the Soviet National anthem played on a music box, and Russian pop songs like Anne Veski’s “Love Island”, truly immerses you into the era, giving the film that authentic coming-of-age feel.

This is a deeply personal story from debut Finnish director Lauri Randla. Born in Estonia in 1981 before taking the boat to Helsinki, he revisits his youth with great tenderness. The use of voiceover gives the film an intimate feel, as if he is simply recounting this story in person. But this sense of nostalgia doesn’t cloak the difficulties of the time nor the importance of freedom for all people.

Eventually, Randla places love over any sense of country, Johannes boldly stating that with love, all you need in life is the air you breathe. With shades of youth classics like Submarine (2010) and Lady Bird (2017)— also contrasting bold children against a place they want to escape — Goodbye Soviet Union ups the stakes by situating this mostly comic genre within a dying republic and focusing on a marginalised ethnic group rarely seen in contemporary cinema. The Soviet Union might be on the way out, but the lessons learned are truly universal. Hopefully it sees the same recognition as the dozens of American and British bildungsromane we see every year.

Goodbye Soviet Union plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Zombie for Sale (Gimyohan Gajok)

Posted on by Paul Risker

When illegal human experiments go wrong, an undead test subject escapes from Korea’s biggest pharmaceutical company and winds up at a shabby gas station run by the Park family. Upon discovering their strange visitor, the head of the household is bitten, but instead of transforming into the undead, he is revitalised and full of life. Seeing this the misfit family that spans three generations, hustling passers-by to make ends meet decide to monetise their fountain of youth, and soon the locals are queuing up to be bitten too.

Director Lee Min-Jae describes his feature debut Zombie for Sale (Gimyohan gajok) as, “…a slightly unfamiliar and odd zombie film.” The quirks of a zombie that likes human flesh with ketchup and whose bite revitalises his victims, brands this as one of the more curious entries in the sub-genre in recent years.

Min-Jae flips the tropes of the genre, reframing the monster as a fountain of youth or elixir of life, as opposed to its familiarity as an harbinger of walking death. It’s a creative move, but as he proves, you can only push back so much before the familiar reasserts itself. Zombie for Sale is an experiment in offsetting familiar conventions with the unusual, but the peril the filmmaker faces is from an audience a film of two halves may divide – creativity that descends into the familiar apocalyptic mêlée.

Cinema is saturated with the zombie film, the image or scenes of characters under siege and pursued by the undead a familiar sight. From conversations with critics and friends, I’ve picked up on a feeling that the sub-genre has become tedious. This exposes the irony of the familiar to both attract and repel. For any new addition to the undead canon that wants to appeal beyond the die-hard fan, it needs to repackage the familiar, but is this enough, and is it possible even?

A mix of zom-rom-com, well over half of the film is devoted to the comedy – around 70 minutes in total of its 122 minute runtime. The horror is held until the outbreak inevitably hits, and its here that the filmmakers creativity begins to feel stifled.

The earlier comedy had me chuckling along more than any film has in a while. This is in part due to the emotionally expressive nature of the Korean characters – a friend who has spent time in Korea has told me that they are as passionate and expressive offscreen as they are onscreen. I find there’s something larger than life to the Korean character, truth merged with emotion that feels untruthful and heightened for performance in Western cinema. In Zombie for Sale, such emotionally expressive characters add to the appeal of the comedy and charm of this dubious family of hustlers.

There is a lack of character development, but Min-Jae shows the effectiveness of sparing character detail, particularly for Hae-Gul (Soo-kyung Lee), the daughter of the family, who confides in their undead guest, her love interest about her mother’s death during child-birth. A seed of information replaces her dramatic arcs, re-surfacing to have the chaos resonate for her on a personal level. Similar touches for the other characters would have been welcome, although the characters serve their purpose, provoking a mix of laughter and suspense.

What is striking is that the earlier visual expression of the budding romance conveyed through a visual style or language, feels new to the sub-genre. It channels a modern expression of silent film, that merges painting, photography and cinema, an aesthetic rarely championed in this type of genre storytelling. Here is a filmmaker that conveys his appreciation for expressing feeling in cinema through image and sound, not exclusively dialogue or text, showing glimpses of an artistic flourish in which film as art leaps above film as an exclusive narrative form.

One wishes the filmmaker had continued to flip the script, but even before the genre reasserts itself and the apocalyptic mêlée begins, we find ourselves questioning what the film is and what it wants to be. It is difficult to push back against a sub-genre with such a firm, even self-conscious identity, and so, the director is right to say that it’s a, “slightly unfamiliar and odd zombie film.” Yet it’s also a product of our contemporary world because amidst the current pandemic crisis, Min-Jae’s film has an allegorical presence of mind. In another time it may have been more escapist, but in this current time the film resonates disturbingly because when one looks to the U.S, an ally of South Korea, the film can be seen as a satirical piece of storytelling – the priority of capitalist and economic needs over containing a potential contagion. Zombie for Sale is a reflection of present day anxiety, a snapshot preserved for posterity.

Zombie for Sale is out now on Blu-ray and is streaming on the Arrow Video channel.

Extreme Job (Geukhanjikeob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Radio voices. “Target in position.” “Unit 2 on roof.” Four criminals in a dimly lit apartment playing Mahjong. A knock at the window. A raid. But embarrassed lady cop Jang (f) (Lee Hanee) and her male boss Captain Ko (Ryu Seung-yong) can’t operate their window cleaning slings. The cliched, action packed raid by SWAT in which the criminals are swiftly arrested is visualised by the villain, but the actual police operation is a series of hilarious bungles, the criminals only “caught” when one of them is hit by a coach and the others are stopped by the resulting multiple car crash pile up. In a brutal debriefing with their chief, Captain Ko loses his position to young rising star Captain Choi, who’s just successfully caught a major criminal gang.

In order to save their reputation, Ko’s unit set up surveillance on the gang’s apartment where Hong and his men are awaiting the return of big boss Mubae (Shin Ha-kyun). There being a Chicken restaurant opposite, the cops take it over as a cover to watch the criminals’ premises. It turns out that one of their number Ma (Jin Sun-kyu) has an incredible family recipe for Suwon Rib Marinate Chicken which is an immediate success and overnight turns their fast food joint cover into a hugely profitable business. The team discover the joys of running a food emporium except for Young-ho (Lee Dong-hwai) who finds the others are becoming to busy too fulfil their police duties and back him up when needed.

Other memorable characters include merciless, ruthless and highly effective, female fighter Sun-hee (Jang Jin-hee) who uses a knife to put Hong on crutches on a whim from Mubae and rival gang leader Ted Chang (Oh Jung-se) who threaten to atart a turf war with Mubae.

Starting off as a lightweight caper, this is one of those movies that effortlessly shifts genre throughout, from caper to violent actioner to comedy to food porn and back again innumerable times. It’s aided no end by a clever soundtrack by a composer who understands the effect different pieces of music have on the audience, from the opening pizzicato caper strings to the closing titles which sounds like a spaghetti Western. Somewhere in the middle, a wounded character who may die is briefly underscored by the cantopop song from Asian mega-hit gangster outing A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, producer Tsui Hark, 1986).

As if this wasn’t already a huge crowd-pleaser, for the climactic fight sequence it reveals that Ko’s five man team are, for example, a Chinese national Judo champion (Ma), an Asian Muay Thai champion named Jang Bak after Ong Bak (Jang) while he himself has the nickname ‘Zombie’ because he’s sustained 12 stab wounds and just doesn’t die. These and other attributes are pressed into service with Ko taking bullet after bullet in pursuit of Mubae. This South Korean gem is proof positive, if it were needed, that even for the kind of entertaining movies on which it prides itself, Hollywood really isn’t the only game in town.

Extreme Job plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Thursday, November 6th, 20.35, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 15.30, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham – book here.

Watch the film trailer below:

Exit

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Yong-nam (Jo Jung-suk) can’t seem to find gainful employment. A text message tells him another job application has been turned down. He spends his days at the local playground, working out on the climbing frame watched from a bench by old ladies. Passing by with schoolmates, his prepubescent nephew Ji-Ho (Kim Kang-hoon) does his best to shrug off the embarrassment he feels if he goes anywhere near his uncle. But Yong-nam scarcely notices: he’d much rather wallow in self-pity about Eui-ju (Im Yoon-ah), the girl he fancied from the rock climbing club who was not only a better climber but also dumped him. His grown up sister Jung-Hyun (Kim Ji-yeong) constantly berates him both for his failure and for his keeping lots of climbing gear in his bedroom cupboard.

So when his family gathers to celebrate his granny’s 70th birthday, Yong-nam suggests the skyscraper hotel where Eui-ju is rumoured to work. Sure enough, while he’s doing his best to sit at his table and not get roped into singing with everybody else, she appears. As he tries to impress her, inventing stories about how well his corporate career is going, you can feel the impending romantic disaster. She, meanwhile, may look successful in her job as hotel vice-manager, but her slimy manager in who she has no personal interest is constantly trying to date her and can barely do his job (holding the position simply because his dad owns the hotel).

Then the film switches gear as a disillusioned industrialist releases a deadly gas from a lorry in the centre of Seoul, not far from the hotel, which burns up the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to come in contact with it. Cue drivers clutching at their necks and fatally crashing cars and pedestrians fleeing before the advancing wall of toxic gas. Cue also Jung-Hyun with Ji-Ho in tow, having briefly nipped out of the hotel, suddenly facing the approaching gas. While the child gets himself safely back to the lobby, the mother is overcome and suffers facial burns and unconsciousness before the quick-thinking Yong-nam rushes down from the floor where their party is taking place and carries her back to the sealed safety of the building.

With the gas cloud both spreading and slowly rising, the guests go up to the top floor to access the roof in the hope of being rescued by helicopter, but the door is locked and the incompetent manager has lost the key. Back on the party floor, Yong-nam improvises with rope, breaks a full storey glass window and goes climbing up the side of the building to access the roof, forced to unhook his safety line en route because his rope isn’t long enough.

When a ‘copter eventually reaches them with a rescue cage, there is room for everyone but himself and Eui-ju, who as manager commendably wants everyone else airlifted first. Remaining behind, the pair must negotiate a harrowing series of building to building jumps, Parkour and side of building climbs as they ascend higher and higher on the Seoul skyline in the hope that a ‘copter will reach them before the rising gas does.

It’s no surprise that this obvious audience pleaser has been a huge box office success in its native South Korea, juggling as it does deftly observed family comedy with nicely underplayed romantic subplot and genuinely gripping climbing, jumping, running and other action scenes. If the chemistry between the two leads accounts for some of this success, that wouldn’t matter without all the thought that director Lee has clearly put into his script to make an essentially simple idea work very well indeed. The feeling for family culture which grounds the film for its first reel pays dividends in terms of audience sympathy for the lead character and the film throws in not only some clever ideas involving drones but even at one point the extraordinary visual distraction of a giant model of a spider crab half way up a building over which our leading man and lady must climb.

The film highlighted the problem of locked roof access in buildings and the ensuing controversy has thrown up a government reaction that will hopefully in due course result in changes to South Korean law. On a wider note, it says much about a society which values people in terms of their job while marginalising any other talents or interests they may possess. When the chips are down, the hero who saves the day here is a social outcast whose frowned upon hobby is exactly what’s needed to survive the unexpectedly perilous situation in which he finds himself.

This is light, frothy entertainment and a thoroughly engrossing experience, well worth seeking out if you get the chance. LEAFF are to be congratulated for choosing it as their opening film.

Exit plays in LEAFF, The London East Asia Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Extra Ordinary

Posted on by victorfraga

In a rural Irish town, Rosie (Maeve Higgins) runs a driving school. One of her passengers, the eligible and handsome Martin (Barry Ward), turns to her to ask her to speak to his dead wife. The daughter of a clairvoyant, Rosie has ceased to use her powers since she accidentally killed her own father. Unknown to both of them, Christian Winter (Will Forte), a Rockstar hunched up in his castle long past his prime time, has entrapped Martin’s daughter in a spell, hoping to sacrifice her pure soul for returned chart success. Reluctantly agreeing to Martin’s request, Rosei re-opens her abilities to talk with ghosts, and by doing so, opens herself to love.

This is a very bizarre and twisted 90-minute comedy, which at one point sees a floating goat explode in front of a congregation of shocked passers-by. Elsewhere, a recycling bin haunts an old woman while Bonnie, Martin’s deceased wife, haunts both her widowed husband and Rosie. Just as Rosei learns to let herself go, so too does Martin, in an effort to rid himself of his wife’s image. These attempts to self-exorcise results in her presence within his body, Ward switching from bewildered husband to possessive, cigarette chomping wife with slapstick brilliance.

Less successful is Winter, the emaciated rock star desperate to return to the top of the charts. His flirtations with the dark arts leads to a litany of tiring phallic jokes, especially when his girlfriend refers to his magic implement as the “dick stick”. Much better is his rendition of Cosmic Woman, an eighties synthpop track which shows Winter crying out in excessive rock regalia. His treatment of women echoes the thinly veined misogyny eighties rock stars display on a daily basis, though the way in which he rids himself of his clawing girlfriend might shock some viewers.

And yet there’s a lot of heart to the film. A lowly image of Martin serenading his slumberous daughter (trapped in Winter’s spell) is strangely potent, while Rosie, lonely as she has been the whole film, falls delightfully in love with her companion. All of which leads to the haunting finale, as Winter serenades the dark lords to savour his virginal sacrifice. The libidinous punchline that ends the scene is a very funny one, though the hammy special effects are painful to sit through. There are too many dick jokes leading to the climax. Never the less, one of the more inspired Irish comedies since Sing Street (John Carney, 2016).

Extra Ordinary is out in Irish cinemas on Friday, September 13th. On VoD in the UK and Ireland in April!

The dark humour of fatherhood

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The movie A Voluntary Year (Das Freiwillige Jahr), which played in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, is the second film in two years from Ulrich Köhler after In My Room (2018). Co-directed with Henner Winckler, it tells the story of generational conflict. A father drives his daughter to the airport to take part in a voluntary year in Costa Rica. But when her boyfriend Mario resurfaces, she finds herself unable to truly figure out what she wants, much to her father’s chagrin. The result is a bitterly funny exploration of home, father-daughter relationships and the inability to see past one’s own perspective. We sat down with the two directors to discuss the process of making the film, what the actors brought to the film’s point-of-view and how to maintain narrative conflict when your characters refuse to change.

Read our A Voluntary Year review here!

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Redmond Bacon – What was the main idea behind the film?

Ulrich Köhler – The main idea was to make a film together. During Sleeping Sickness (Schlafkrankheit, 2011) I felt: “This is really too much for one person.” It’s a very uncreative process because you never have a view from a distance where you can say: “This is the problem” or “This is the possibility.” This was the first starting point. Then we have a lot of matching biographical experiences. We are both fathers of children and we hope for them to have a happy life. We have a certain vision of life but we have to learn that our vision of life is not automatically the thing that will make them happy.

RB – The film deals with the concept of a Voluntary Social Year: a strong concept in German culture. Can you tell me more about what it means?

Henner Winckler – We had military service as a duty for our generation. When they stopped it they invented this idea instead. Lots of kids go abroad. I’m not sure if it’s always a good idea. These young people are not trained for anything. They go into the world and they want to help, but they don’t know anything. For the young kids it’s very interesting. For the countries they go to, I’m not sure it’s really helpful.

UK – You’re not automatically an expert just because you went to school in Germany.

HW – It’s controversial.

RB – Is it a hangover from colonialist ideals?

UK – It was a very populist move from a Social Democratic Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, who wanted to say that he’s doing something for the Third World. In a way it’s neo-colonialism. It’s absurd to think that just because someone went to high school in Germany he’s automatically highly qualified to help people in less privileged parts of the world.

RB – The film flips stereotypes on their head. In conventional cinema it’s usually the daughter who wants to break free and the father who wants her to stay at home. Here it’s the other way around. Was this a conscious decision?

HW – On the one hand yes. On the other hand this is something we experienced as well. In our generation the parents think this is how it should be, to go out and see the world, but some just want to stay. They have their friends. There is no need to go abroad because they have everything on Netflix.

RB – The use of perspective in the film is very interesting. There are no crosscuts between characters. We only switch if they have interacted in the same scene. Is this an intentional move to immerse us in the lives of these characters?

UK – It comes from the formal idea that a lot of this film should take place in the car. And that the car was like a relay race. Every time someone has the car, then we’re with them.

HW – This was one of the main ideas when we started: to tell the story from the view of a car.

RB – It’s funny because it’s a Volkswagen Camper Van too.

A Voluntary Year

UK – That’s like the embodiment of socially liberal Utopia. There were those parents who went on traditional vacations in hotels in Lago die Garda or Rimini. Then there were those like our parents, who either had a boat or a VW van and went wild camping in France.

RB – This generational change forms the conflict between father and daughter. I found it to be bitterly funny; a dark comedy of awkwardness. Would you agree?

UK – For me it’s a situational comedy. Humour is always a question of perspective. If you go back far enough in history, then even the war between Gallics and Romans can become comedy. Something that feels very serious and very emotional for a person when they’re living through it, might seem very different when he looks at it from the outside or five years later. That’s how humour works for me.

RB – A lot of this humour rests upon the performance of Sebastian Rudolph. Did you have him in mind when you were writing the screenplay together.

HW – We had a different character for both the father and daughter in mind. We thought it had to be a “real man” with a beard.

UK – A patriarch.

HW – And for the daughter we had a more narrow-minded girl in mind. So the father is ashamed of his daughter. When we started casting it felt like a cliché. Instead, Sebastian Rudolph’s Urs is more like an older teenager, a softer type, and Jette is much stronger than we thought. She’s not someone who has no idea what to do. She’s just jumping from one thing to another and this makes it more complex.

UK – If you look at what Maj-Britt Klenke made out of this character, it’s very different. We really had the desire to make a film about a boring girl. I found it a dramaturgically risky but interesting thing to do.

RB – In most films people change their perspective from the beginning to the end, but here no one seems to change. How do you keep the narrative full of conflict while characters don’t fundamentally change their perspective?

UK – I think on a superficial level it’s quite simple dramatically. It’s like a film where a bomb is ticking. You always have this decision: Is she getting on the plane or not? When she changes her mind, it restarts, and you have the new decision. If you look at it from a purely analytical, formal and superficial point of view, this very primitive dramaturgy keeps the film going. It’s very character driven but also very plotty in a way.

RB – I thought fundamentally the way father and daughter react to situations is actually quite similar. They’re both impulsive characters. Were you trying to show how father is like daughter and vice versa?

UK – When I look at the film, I’m amazed how much the daughter behaves like the father. It’s not something we had felt strongly.

HW – The idea was the opposite: there’s one that makes decisions and one who can’t make decisions. Now we say the way she behaves with her boyfriend Mario is quite similar.

UK – It’s something I really love because it shows that filmmaking is a process. You start something then it has a dynamic of its own. You’re not just fulfilling an idea you had five years ago.

RB – Ulrich, there were seven years between Sleeping Sickness and In My Room. Now there’s only one year between In My Room and this film. How did you turn around a new film so quickly?

UK – That’s not our decision. That’s the decision of the film funding system. We just had the opportunity to make the film as a TV movie. For me it was an interesting experience. For the first time I felt like a professional director. Otherwise I always start from scratch. This time I was well aware of how the process works.

A Voluntary Year

RB – It seems films for TV can be made a lot quicker.

UK – That was interesting for me. It gave me the feeling that there’s less to lose. That gave me and the actors a certain amount of freedom. It was an interesting experience and it will change the way I work.

RB – I want to talk about the character of Murat, the refugee. Urs says that he will take him in but due to personal circumstances he changes his mind. Is this a pointed comment on how the response to migrant crisis in Germany changed from openness in concept to more complicated in reality?

UK – Yeah. It’s easy to say “welcome” but it’s not so easy to give Murat a room when you’re in a big crisis with your daughter. It’s understandable he doesn’t want Murat in that situation. At the same time it’s very consequential. I think we’d all like to be better people, but we also don’t really want to give away too many of our privileges.

RB – Ulrich, you wrote a political essay around ten years ago explained why your art isn’t political. Have you changed your mind on this?

UK – The point I was making is that filmmaking is not a political action. Well, everything is political. Taking a shower is political. But in a narrow definition, filmmaking is not political. If you want to change the world actively, change it actively: it’s not the reason why I make films. I think there’s a hypocrisy in making a film out of creative or commercial ambition and thinking that you’re changing the world.

RB – Are you two planning to work together on your next project? Have you got anything in mind?

HW – Vacation.

UK – I’m sure we’ll work together in one way or another. I’m not sure we’ll work together directing again.

HW – I think first we want to do our own stuff but I never know how it will.

UK – [laughing] When he’s deaf and I’m blind we will do the next film together.

Discover Iceland in all its glory!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Icelandic movie Echo (Bergmál), which premiered in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, is a major step up in form and content for Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson. Set over the Christmas period, its a wide-spanning portrayal of the nation that’s equal parts profound, funny, and banal. Its standout quality is the way it marries formalist rigour — each scene focusing on a new character and shot with a single static camera — with emotion, humour and philosophical enquiry. We sat down with the director to discuss his unique approach to hybrid forms, Icelandic society, and working with real people.

Read our review now!

Redmond Bacon – Echo is very different from single character portraits Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015). Why the massive change in tone?

Rúnar Rúnarsson – I wouldn’t say that its a massive change in tone. People say to me: “you made some radical changes in your life making this film”. The fundamental difference is that we are portraying society instead of one person, but I think the fingertips of the creative team and I are quite similar.

RB – Echo takes such a panoramic view of Iceland. Do you think it will strike a chord across Icelandic society?

RR – Festival-wise my films have always done well, but I’ve never sold tickets anywhere, not even at home. I’ve been privileged in my life to do the things that I wanted. But you can’t have it all. You can’t have sold out theatres night after night. My main aim has always been to follow my vision. I have no expectations towards ticket sales, in Iceland or elsewhere. To be completely honest, I don’t think in this way. I have a big misconception of my films though. I think they are really audience friendly but I’m still regarded as an “artist director”!

RB – I think Echo is very accessible due to how true to life it is, and its humour. The form of the film is a hybrid between documentary footage and fiction. How much was documentary footage and how much was fiction?

RR – There was a really detailed manuscript. I think there were maybe nine or ten scenes that didn’t end up in the film. The rules we had were made for effect. I think we achieved a sense of authenticity. We decided not to say what is real and what is in full control. Anyway, even when you look at a fly-on-the-wall documentary, there are decisions such as when you come in and out of a shot and how its put together. There is always a sense of the author.

RB – Yes, there’s always an artificiality to a documentary, because you choose what to put in, you choose what to take out and you choose how to present it and edit it together. It doesn’t just happen by itself.

RR – All my fictional films are about things I’ve gone through in my life or people close to me. My goal is to be honest and capture a sense of reality and a sense of my emotions; to put it out for whoever would be interested. Most scenes in this film are in a greyscale. All people in front of the camera are under their own identity; sometimes you hear their names. And it is their real names. Often they are in their native surroundings.

Echo

RB – These are native actors playing versions of themselves?

RR – Sometimes being themselves, sometimes following a script. There are some with acting backgrounds, then they went into farming and play a farmer in the film.

RB – There’s so many different perspectives in the film…

RR – Iceland is a small community. The Prime Minister of Iceland [Katrín Jakobsdóttir] is in this film. We bumped into her while shooting another scene. There are homeless people as well. I know the assistant to the Prime Minister and I know one of the homeless people really well. In a society so small, you know somebody in every situation.

RB – So there isn’t a massive divide between rich in poor in terms of being aware of each other?

RR – No. It’s so small. But the gap is getting bigger. There is private education and healthcare, which didn’t exist when I was growing up. Society is changing, but it still has this Scandinavian Social Democratic foundation.

RB – You tackle the Panama Papers scandal when former Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson had to resign. Was it important to have these contemporaneous elements too?

RR – We shot during Christmas 2018. There were things debated at the time that ended up in the film. But it’s not about the truth of the period; it’s an echo, hence the title, portraying fragments of life from Iceland during that time.

RB – I want to talk about another Scandinavian director. Roy Andersson. Echo has a similar mise en scène to The Living Trilogy (2000-14)? Was this an inspiration?

RR – A friend of mine didn’t understand the project I was working on. I was about to go to the financing place and gave him the script. He went through it and said: “It’s going to be really simple for you to present this film. Just tell people to imagine if Vittorio Di Sica would make a Roy Andersson film.”

RB – In terms of narration it reminded me of the British movie Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003), in that there’s a lot of stories set around Christmas and the season itself becomes the narrator. Was this an inspiration at all?

RR – No. But when I was developing the movie it was at first about these fragments of life. First I thought about doing it over the period of a year. But I wouldn’t ever be able to afford it, and the more I developed it, the more I wanted to have more control. I felt like Christmas was the right framework because it’s hard to sympathise with people you don’t know. In normal films you have the time to build up a character and for the audience to care about them. Here you meet people and then they’re gone and never reappear…

RB – But Christmas gives it this sentimental overlay?

RR – Yes. It’s an amplifier of our emotions. It helps the audience to be put in the place of these people. Many of them have been in these situations. It’s a time of year where people are more observant. They try to be better people; more generous and open-minded. At the same time, for many people, it’s the worst time of the year. It was a good guide to constructing a narrative.

RB – Was it all shot within this two week period?

RR – There was one scene we just had to do earlier. The burning house scene is from another time of the year.

RB – That’s a very evocative scene. It reminded me of The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986).

RR – He had to burn that house two times.

Your

RB – Films are always set against nature, a natural byproduct, I guess, of shooting in Iceland. But this film seems mostly focused on the people itself, which goes against a conventional approach to depicting the country. Was this intentional?

RR – It was never my intention of decorating something in nature. Nature is a part of living in Iceland. Look out the window and there are mountains! Nature is beautiful. But it shouldn’t only be used for decoration or production value. You should use it as a narrative tool. In a perfect film, everything that you see or hear should have a function. For example, the final shot of the film is there not only because its beautiful. It’s a metaphor of life continuing. Water is a transition, a vessel in the water, going through the tides and waves. It’s the year ahead.

RB – There are some great transitions, such as between a Children’s Christmas Pageant and a Bikini Body Building Contest. How long did it take to think “OK, this will go here and this will go there” before putting these scenes together to develop the film’s rhythm?

RR – We slowly put the film together while we were shooting. Working with these tableaus. Whether you go 10 seconds earlier in or out of a scene can have such an impact on the rhythm. So we try to take enlightened decisions. But you shouldn’t be too clever. You have to follow your instincts.

RB – The film has a strong cycle of life theme, best expressed when it contrasts New Years Eve celebrations with a baby being born. How did you gain the trust of the couple to film a live birth?

RR – Like with many other people in the film, it was a search for the right people who were generous enough to share their lives. There were many other people who showed interest then backed out. We have no control over a birth. We are not cutting either. We thought we would have to shoot many different births to have something to choose between. But we were just extremely lucky and only shot one birth.

To get people to participate in this kind of thing is about being honest with what we want to achieve. I don’t want to to manipulate anybody; whether its real people or my fictional characters. They represent something in me and I want to respect myself. Sometimes I’ve been to film school conducting lectures. At the end the moderators ask: “Do you have a message to the students? What should they do?”

And I say “Be honest!”

Photo Credit: Ottavia Bosello. Also pictured: Producers Live Hide (left) and Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir (right). Others photos are from the film itself.

Notre Dame

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The old cliché that no publicity is bad publicity certainly rings true with Notre Dame, the latest breezy comedy from French auteur Valérie Donzelli. She could’ve had no idea while making the film that ancient church’s roof would set ablaze on April 15, making her latest work something of an accidental bittersweet lament for the France’s most enduring symbol.

The burning down of the French cathedral was immediately seized upon as a symbol of the deterioration of France; another debilitating sign, along with Islamist terrorist attacks, the rise of far-right nationalism, the Church sex abuse scandals and the Gillet Jeunes protests, that this is a country slowly losing its way. And Notre Dame eerily captures this downbeat spirit, displaying a capital city and country uncertain of itself, paranoid and on edge. The French Open has been inexplicably cancelled, Lake Annecy has dried up, people randomly slap each other in metro stations, refugees sleep on the streets, and Paris is endlessly drenched by torrential rain. To rally spirits once again, the mayor calls for a “Grand competition for the Grand dame”, putting out an open call for a new esplanade design.

Our unlikely hero Maud Crayon (Valérie Donzelli herself) — built in the mode of Woody Allen’s early comic nebbishes — may be an architect but has little intention of entering the contest herself. She’s too busy paying off her debts, battling with her boss, trying to get her kids to school and finally kicking her ex-husband (although they haven’t signed the divorce papers) out of her flat. Then in a moment of sheer, unexplained magic, her design for a playground mysteriously floats out of her flat window all the way to the mayor’s office. The bold design is picked as a new way forward for the city and she’s instantly put in charge of the most important project in all of France.

Notre Dame

Given that the Notre-Dame itself took one hundred years to build, this premise would be enough conflict for an entire TV series, let alone a zippy ninety minute movie. But Maud’s travails don’t stop there. Firstly her ex-boyfriend (Pierre Deladonchamps) comes back as the journalist covering her story, secondly she finds out she’s pregnant, and thirdly she must contend with her ex-husband trying to win her back. Underscoring this theme, her daughter acutely asks her: “Why do women have to do everything?” To make matters worse, it turns out her design looks kinda like a phallus (the jokes aren’t subtle here), sparking outrage across the nation, and calls for construction to be indefinitely postponed.

France has a fine tradition of protesting its finest symbols. The construction of the Eiffel Tower was once petitioned against by writers as influential as Maupassant and Dumas. Likewise Mitterand’s Grands Projets was looked upon at the time as a sign of grandiosity. Yet now it would be hard to imagine the Paris skyline without the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre without its pyramid. The sheer absurdity of Crayon’s design is the point: showing through satire how even the most outlandish designs should be encouraged due to the way they can help establish and reinforce a city’s unique identity.

Yet if anyone is expecting a serious inquiry into the nature of architecture, they will be sorely displeased. Donzelli’s work is gleefully self-centred, neurotic and strange, casting herself in goofy, off-the-wall tales that make Amelie’s escapades look normal and well adjusted. Notre Dame has a childlike yet bawdy spirit, throwing in the entire kitchen sink, including musical interludes, silent movie homages, quick verbal barbs and politically incorrect sex jokes. Thankfully the movie, flawed as it may be, is inherently enjoyable, Donzelli’s bizarro charm proving infectious and her style strong enough to overcome any imperfections.

At the end of the day, its not really about the Notre-Dame at all, but a woman coming to terms with the chaos of her life, the power of great responsibility, and figuring out what’s actually important. It’s just ironic that Valérie Donzelli will be suddenly thrown into the spotlight due to an event completely out of her control. Talk about life imitating art!

International Sales are handled by Playtime. The film is scheduled for release in France only so far, on 18 December 2019.

A Voluntary Year (Das Freiwillige Jahr)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A tale of adolescent indecisiveness, fatherly overbearance and the inability to communicate, A Voluntary Year is a painful, funny and slyly profound work. Spinning gold from the most basic of premises, it is also another fine addition to the “German awkwardness canon” (a phrase I coined myself).

In recent years, ranging from Maren Ade films such as Everyone Else (2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016), running through to elements of I Was At Home, But (Angela Schanelec, 2019) and The Ground Beneath My Feet (Marie Kreutzer, 2019), German-Language directors have been particularly adroit at mining social awkwardness and communicational failures for bitterly dark comic effect. A Voluntary Year follows in this recent, rich vein, creating moments of genuine comedy from relatable, personal failures. They work because no one acts like they are in a comedy. By treating everyone’s issues very seriously, the comic beats land harder, making you laugh while you cringe.

It starts on the way to the airport. Urs (Sebastian Rudolph) is driving his daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) there so she can take a flight to Costa Rica, where she will spend a gap year in a hospital. She looks less than pleased, still roiling from the breakup with her boyfriend Mario (Thomas Schubert) and nervous about what this future halfway across the world will bring. Not that her father notices. He thinks she’ll have a wonderful time.

A Voluntary Year

“You can’t please everyone all the time,” Urs lectures his unsure daughter, all the while showing how disastrous it is trying to be an expert on everything. An early scene involving a changed lock quickly establishes Urs as an unreliable father; panicking over nothing instead of taking the time to think rationally. Meanwhile Mario turns up to say goodbye, throwing her central conflict into sharp relief. Perhaps she won’t catch that flight after all?

In the hands of a less confident director, these personal issues would’ve been more obviously telegraphed through endless backstories. This limited viewpoint works wonders for the film, which is all about how the desires we project onto others affects our own lives. The flight to Costa Rica is the central metaphor here, seen by Urs as an escape from small town life and by Jette as a great plunge into the unknown away from Mario. The conventional script of teenage escape versus parental provincialism is flipped, the film expertly blurring the lines between the generations.

Sebastian Rudolph does fine work as the hubris-laden father, fully chewing into a screenplay that allows him to be arrogant, stupid, naive and caring all at the same time. Whether it’s his strained relationship with his brother, his joyless affair with his married secretary, or his negative attitude towards his own patients at the clinic, he cannot seem to maintain a truly wholesome relationship with anyone. He’s not a stereotypically bad person, yet his myopic viewpoint — stressed by the film’s use of limited perspective — blinds him to the real issues at hand. Klenke is equally game, flitting endlessly between rash decision-making and indecisiveness, sometimes in the same scene, showing that even if father and daughter have different viewpoints in life, they deal with their issues in often the same way.

Ulrich Köhler keeps the viewpoints close, never cross-cutting, only following characters from one point to another if they have met in the same space. This is a particular effective technique as it truly lays bare how easily miscommunication can happen. Taking place over only a couple of days, A Voluntary Year provides a convincing snapshot of German provincialism. Complemented by overcast skies, sodden fields and barren woods, A Voluntary Year makes a good case for escaping the complications of small town living, but only if you can escape yourself first.

No release date has been set yet for A Voluntary Year, which debuted in the Concorso internazionale at Locarno, but expect a warm release in Köhler’s native Germany.