mother! - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Aronofsky's Worst Movie Unleashed @TIFF2017

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ELLE - Review By Greg - TIFF 2016 - Verhoeven manages unimaginable, makes boring film

Elle (2016)
Dir. Paul Verhoeven
Scr. David Birke
Nvl. Philippe Djian
Starring: Isabelle Huppert

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It seems unthinkable that Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Showgirls, Total Recall) could actually make a boring movie. That he could make a film that's repugnant - in all the wrong ways - is equally shocking. He's done it with Elle, though.

Michèle LeBlanc (Isabelle Huppert) is raped by a ski-masked scumbag in her tony Paris digs, but she doesn't report it to the police. She has other ideas.

Michèle happens to be a dynamo in the world of gaming production. Failure eludes her because she makes her designers, colleagues and programmers suffer her sharp-tongued wrath. She knows what her gameboy customers want and, irony of ironies (ugh), the lads living in front of their gaming consoles want big boobs, blood and rape, especially rape.




Yes, she eventually tracks down her rapist, but not before Verhoeven can provide rape flashbacks and rape dreams. And isn't this all going to be oh-so Francais? She may or may not be out for revenge, but mostly, she seems fuelled by the cat and mouse aspects of the rapist stalking the rape victim and vice versa. Super Ugh!

Working with a ridiculous script, his first in the French language (from what must be a dreadful novel), Verhoeven has made a film that's vagina-stuffed with lame satirical jabs, mostly of the easy-poke variety against gaming and gamers to justify what turn out to be the rape fantasies of his leading lady.

The picture's not funny, nor suspenseful and worst of all, it's a mega-bore. I love Verhoeven, but this is a total misfire. I imagine most psueds and/or film critics will defend the picture and applaud its "bravery" and purported nods to "empowerment", but this is the domain of pinheads, not anyone with taste, compassion and humanity.




THE FILM CORNER RATING: Lowest Rating:
TURD DISCOVERED
BEHIND HARRY'S CHAR BROIL
AND DINING LOUNGE

Elle is a Mongrel Media Release playing TIFF 2016

THE EYES OF MY MOTHER - FANTASIA 2016 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Slaughter Slog

The worst exploitation pretends to be art.

The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Dir. Nicolas Pesce
Starring: Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Paul Nazak, Flora Diaz, Clara Wong

Review By Greg Klymkiw

At only 77 minutes, The Eyes of My Mother feels like it's never going to end. It's one of the more disagreeable pictures I've recently had the displeasure to experience. Offensively boring (and just plain boringly offensive), it's a pretentious, nasty and misogynistic art-house-horror slug of the lowest order. What we're essentially dealing with here is a bottom feeder hoisted to heavenly heights by its makers to bamboozle audiences into thinking they're watching something lofty. Worse yet, its makers even think they've created something high-toned, but have, in fact, generated a movie squarely aimed at pseuds who will laud its affectations rhapsodically.

Director Nicolas Pesce is obviously not a nincompoop. He's put his thinking cap on for this one and he's also gifted visually, creating dense monochromatic images guaranteed to stay with you. You won't really want them cluttering your cerebral cortex, but they'll adhere to it anyway, like globs of agglutinative faecal matter tossed against a wall to see if they'll stick.

This sordid slice of rural Americana begins with a mother of Portuguese descent dissecting the head of a cow for her daughter Francisca and removing the eyeballs to teach her little lassie about the wonderful world of vision. (Oooohhhh, this is getting heady already, mais non?) As bad luck would have it, Mom allows a serial killer into the house and when Dad gets home, he discovers Francisca sitting in the kitchen whilst his wife is being hacked and bludgeoned in the bathtub.

No matter. Dad subdues the serial killer and chains him in the barn - still alive, naturally. With Francisca's help, he hauls his wife's body into the woods and buries it.

Wouldn't you?

Mother teaches daughter facts of life:
How to best remove eyeballs.

We flash forward a few years later and Francisca has blossomed into a fully grown babe (rendered in stultifying monotone by actress Kika Magalhães). Dad is constantly morose. One might think it's because he misses his wife, but since he's always watching "Bonanza" on TV, we naturally assume a steady diet of the Cartwright family is contributing to his ennui.

Francisca seems a tiny bit happier. She's surgically removed the serial killer's eyeballs and spends her days torturing and humiliating him. Eventually, when Dad dies and she tires of bathing, then sleeping with his smelly corpse, she gets a might horny and begins to seek ways to satisfy her natural urges.

This leads to her own serial killer-like tendencies coming to full fruition.

Lacking the razzle-dazzle and dark humour of something like Lucky McKee's The Woman (which it bears a few similarities to) and fraught with far too many dull Terrence Malick-like stretches, The Eyes of My Mother is little more than a wank-fest for its director and an even bigger masturbation-o-rama for the aforementioned pseuds amongst both paying audiences and film critics, all of whom want to impress each other with their nonsense-infused justifications for the sheer, nasty, empty malevolence of this horrendous picture.

THE FILM CORNER RATING:
TURD DISCOVERED
BEHIND HARRY'S CHAR BROIL AND DINING LOUNGE
Lowest Film Corner Rating.
For elaboration on its history, usage and full meaning,
please visit HERE.

The Eyes of My Mother is an Unobstructed View release enjoying its Canadian premiere at Fantasia 2016

THE DARK STRANGER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Promising feature debut opens July 15 in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Halifax on Cineplex Theatre’s Event Screens, followed by July 26 release on VOD via Raven Banner Releasing.

The Dark Stranger (2015)
Dir. Chris Trebilcock
Starring: Katie Findlay, Stephen McHattie, Enrico Colantoni,
Jennifer Dale, Mark O'Brien, Alex Ozerov, Emma Campbell

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Art and horror make for strange, but thoroughly appropriate bedfellows in life and art. True artists must be imbued with obsessive, self-reflective and often selfish qualities to create work of both originality and lasting value. Mental unbalance is not a pre-requisite, but comes in mighty handy amongst the best of the best.

The Dark Stranger is a curious and original genre film which delicately blends the elements of family drama, fairy tale (with literal graphic novel qualities) and outright horror (of the psychological and paranormal variety). Call it an everything including the kitchen sink motion picture experience which is buoyed by a superb cast and an overall one-of-a-kind directorial hand.

Katie Findlay in a star-making performance.
The camera absolutely loves her.

Leah Garrison (Katie Findlay, in a terrific star-making performance), is a young comic book artist in recovery from deep depression, a nervous breakdown and self-afflicted cutting. She lives with her loving university professor Dad (Enrico Colantoni) and typically goofy, but equally loving younger brother (Alex Ozerov) in a gorgeous, refurbished old house in one of the tonier (and leafier) neighbourhoods of downtown Toronto.

So, you might ask, what's this babe's problem?

Well, you'd possibly go bunyip too if your late mother (Emma Campbell), an acclaimed artist who passed mega-wads of talent DNA to her daughter, became increasingly agitated, irrational, roiling with rage and finally, exploding like Vesuvius - not only coming close to murdering her daughter, but in despair, offing herself. (It's also possible Leah inherited some wacko-psycho genes from Mommie Dearest to compliment her artistic gifts.)

Yup, I accept this.

During Leah's convalescence, a series of incidents converge to create a heady brew of horror. Witness: an art maven (Stephen McHattie) wishes to mount a show of her late mother's work, a series of nightmares involving an evil entity who serves as both artistic inspiration and tormenter and finally, an explosion of creativity that yields magnificent work, but in so doing, extracts the payment of self-mutilation.

Is this a psychological manifestation of the young Leah's despair, or is it something much more sinister and downright unholy? Or could it be both? Whatever it proves to be, we're offered a slowly mounting creepy-crawly terror that eventually releases a geyser of outright dread.

The Dark Stranger will certainly feel a bit oddball to audiences accustomed to a lowest common denominator story structure. The family drama elements border on an After-School-style special, the fairly tale aspects (reflected by gorgeously animated renderings of Leah's art) feel more suited to that curious blend of Grimm darkness and gentle naiveté inherent in the classic Soviet Gorky Studios fairy tales of the 60s and the horror itself blends David Cronenberg-like body mutilation with dollops of Clive Barker and Italian gialli thrown in for good measure. Add to this mix a dash or two of romance twixt Leah and her father's Teaching Assistant (Mark O'Brien) and the occasional visits from a well-meaning, but alternately annoying and sinister psychiatrist (Jennifer Dale).

And yes, there will be blood.

Veteran character actor Stephen McHattie.
Villain? Or hero? Or both?

In industry parlance, the movie might be seen as a "tweener", a film lodged between genres, but for those with a more discerning eye, the pleasures are varied and in summation finally create a wholly unique experience. At its most basic level, we have a movie with well-shaded characters and a compelling narrative which seems familiar, but takes turns surprising us just when things get too recognizable.

On yet another level, whether consciously intentional or not, the film provides a unique villain - the sort of entity many artists, especially in the film business, must face - the bureaucrat, the executive, the holder of the purse strings - that soul-bereft entity which causes the greatest confusion and turmoil within genuine creative people. Here our villain takes on properties of split-personality-like malevolence. (Like I said, not unlike the aforementioned gatekeepers.)

On one level, I did wish the more naturalistic aspects of the story had been tempered with a slightly otherworldly mise-en-scene to deflect from the more conventional family drama tropes which stick out like moderately sore thumbs. Ultimately though, this potentially fatal flaw is overshadowed. The Dark Stranger gradually and eventually takes hold with a vicelike grip, offering as many moments of genuine terror as it serves up genuine heartfelt emotion.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-Half-Stars

The Dark Stranger opens July 15 in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Halifax on Cineplex Theatre’s Event Screens, followed by July 26 release on VOD via Raven Banner Releasing. The film is also scheduled for U.S. ancillary release across all major digital, EST, VOD, streaming, TV and DVD platforms in October by genre distributor, Terror Films.

GOODNIGHT MOMMY (Ich seh Ich seh) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Austrian Twins

Goodnight Mommy (AKA Ich seh Ich se (2014)
Dir. Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Prd. Ulrich Seidl
Starring: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Here's a Pop Quiz as administered by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl:

1. If Mommy's distinctive mole is missing after reconstructive surgery, is it best to burn a hole in her face with the sun's rays blasting through a magnifying glass?

2. If you are angry with Mommy, is it best to place an icky beetle on her face and watch it slither into her open mouth as she sleeps?

3. If Mommy's tummy is full of beetles, is it best to slice said tummy open to release said bugs?

4. If you're tired of listening to Mommy, is it best to Krazy Glue her mouth shut?

5. If Mommy is hungry and needs pizza, is it best to slice through her Krazy-glued mouth with an Exacto Blade?

The answers to these and other questions can be found in the new Ulrich Seidl production of Goodnight Mommy, the directorial debut of his longtime collaborator Veronika Franz and her life partner Severin Fiala.

To say the film is creepy is, at the very least, an understatement, but creepy it is and scarier than most anything you'll set your eyeballs upon this year. Oh, and yes, the movie provides plenty of chuckles of the most malevolent kind to catch you off guard and relieve (somewhat) the unbearable tension.

It also helps that for most of its running time, the picture is stylishly directed and gorgeously shot on REAL FILM - yes, REAL 35MM film.

Goodnight Mommy is a deceptively simple tale about a pair of identical twins (Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz) who welcome Mommy (Susanne Wuest) home after a stay in the hospital for extreme reconstructive surgery. Mom is covered in Mummy-like bandages, barely hiding the puffy, swelling bruises and pus-oozing scars, so even she can forgive the boys if they don't immediately recognize her as their mother.

Alas, Mommy's become both addled and stern - reasonable enough to anyone who can understand the extreme pain she's in which must be quelled by oodles of happy drugs, but to the boys, it's cause for alarm, especially since Mom is being extra-cruel and downright dismissive of one of the twin brothers. It also doesn't hurt matters that Mom has poisoned a stray cat the lads have brought into the home after rescuing it from an ancient crypt beneath a forgotten graveyard just outside the deep woods surrounding the stately modern country home.

Not only does Mommy not look like Mommy, she's not even behaving like Mommy. If she's an imposter, the lads needs answers and they'll stop at nothing to get the truth.

Nothing!

This is an incredibly well made film on virtually every level. Mr. Seidl, one of the world's greatest living filmmakers proves to be an ideal producer and mentor for this project. In both documentary (Animal Love) and drama (Dog Days), he's demonstrated an uncanny ability to uproot and expose humanity in the most abominably extreme human behaviour. Such is the case here and it's no surprise that half of the directorial team, Veronika Franz, has been Seidl's chief screenwriter and collaborator on so many of his greatest works.

The pace is stately, but never dull. The chills and weirdness are stretched to expertly rendered degrees which feel almost unendurable, but endure we do. It's simply impossible to take one's eyes off the screen. When the visceral horrors begin to ramp up, you might even require an upchuck receptacle.

There's one unfortunate detail to the whole affair which does indeed disappoint. The story is saddled with a rather obvious red herring which you occasionally hope won't bear fruit in the expected manner. When the BIG REVEAL happens, it's everything you've been praying against. It works on an almost satisfactorily and rudimentary level, but is a huge comedown from a film that you feel is taking turns you'd never expect. For the most part, you don't expect any direction it goes in, except for this one thing. When a trope is meant to throw you off the scent and becomes the very stench wafting across your nostrils, you can't help but leave the cinema a tiny bit dejected.

All that said, though, it's a terrific feature debut which, at the very least points to eventual work that will live up to the promise displayed and might, if Franz plays her cards right, match that of her magnificent mentor.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Goodnight Mommy played in both the TIFF 2014 Vanguard series and the 2015 Fantasia Film Festival.

Klymkiw reviews 3 Classics presented as retrospective screenings at the 2014 (FNC) Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal. Samuel Fuller's THE BIG RED ONE, Ken Russell's CRIMES OF PASSION, King Hu's DRAGON INN

From D-Day to the Liberation of the
Death Camps, LEE MARVIN leads an
all-star cast in SAMUEL FULLER'S
autobiographical masterpiece of
WORLD WAR II.

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (1980/2004)
Dir. Samuel Fuller
Starring: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward, Siegfried Rauch, Stéphane Audran

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Samuel Fuller made films that pulsated with the stuff of life and yet, at the same time, crackled with the pulpy, hard-boiled crispness of paperback potboilers and tabloid news rags. The guy was a true original and his 1980 classic The Big Red One practically reeks with the stench of death.

It's one of the great war movies of all time and is quite possibly one of the few explorations of men in battle to benefit from an exquisite amalgam of both the terrible truths it conveys and Fuller's terse, almost machine-gun-like style of presentation. Fuller, of course brought the life experience of being an investigative reporter to bear upon all his films, but he also infused them with his horrific exposure to the senseless waste of humanity during his years as an infantryman in the legendary Big Red One of the title.

Fuller himself was present at D-Day and made it to the liberation of Nazi Death Camps. He knew what it was like to be in battle and he especially understood both male camaraderie and the sickening heartache of encountering the remnants of massive genocide. He put all of this into The Big Red One.

Though he approved a much shorter version of the picture for theatrical release, he always regretted not holding out for his lengthier version. Thanks to a shooting script, detailed notes and the dogged persistence of film critic Richard Schickel, we're now able to experience a version of the film that's much closer to what Fuller intended.

It's one corker of a war movie - touching, exciting, wildly humorous and finally, deeply moving. With gruff Lee Marvin leading the charge, Robert Carradine as a cigar-chomping Fuller surrogate and a post-Star Wars Mark Hamill, we're told the tale of several survivors through a harrowing tour of duty. Bodies blow to bits, blood splashes liberally, tanks creak over raw terrain and finally, we experience the charred remains in Nazi Death Ovens.

Fuller hands us one episode after another that evokes the horror of war. Lee Marvin, especially, gives the performance of a lifetime. Seeing him befriend a starving child-survivor of the Death Camp is proof positive of Marvin's versatility.

It might also be the only time Lee Marvin will have you in tears.

NOTE: Samuel Fuller's daughter Samantha, who played a war orphan in The Big Red One, will be present at the FNC screening to introduce the film and engage in a question and answer session.

THE FILM CORNER RATING:
***** - Five Stars

I WILL KILL YOU! I WILL SAVE YOU! HARLOT!

Crimes of Passion (1984)
Dir. Ken Russell
Starring: Kathleen Turner, Anthony Perkins

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This is a rare opportunity to see Ken Russell's deliciously scary, funny and perverse thriller in 35mm, thanks to screenwriter Barry Sandler's collection at the Academy Film Archive. (Sandler will also be present for the screening.) It's sometimes hard to believe certain films are as old as they are. Crimes of Passion turns 30-years-of-age and it feels as insanely cutting-edge and over-the-top as it did when I first saw it first-run. FNC will be screening the rare director’s cut which has been available on DVD, but I can assure you, there's nothing like seeing its grotesque colours and glorious grain on actual film. You'll be able to thrill to Kathleen Turner's sexually-explicit, no-holds-barred performance as a repressed housewife who transforms herself by night into the ultra-hote-babe China Blue.

This alluring, albeit low-track street hooker, engages in all manner of aggressive sexual gymnastics as an addictive, though empty antidote to frigidity. Matching Turner's brilliant, outrageous performance is everyone's favourite Psycho Anthony Perkins as a demented preacher malevolently stalking her. He will save China Blue, even if he has to eventually snuff her out. She has another stalker, though. He wants to love her. Oh, what's a $50-per-trick hooker supposed to do? Decisions. Decisions.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** - Four Stars

Beware of sneaky, sword-wielding EUNUCHS!!!

Dragon Inn (1967)
Dir. King Hu
Starring: Bai Ying, Miao Tien, Han Ying-chieh, Shih Chun, Cho Kin, Hsieh Han

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In the middle of nowhere lies the last outpost before the border, a godforsaken hellhole called the Dragon Gate Inn. This is where political exiles are banished to during the Ming Dynasty of ancient China. When the cruel Emperor executes one of his officials, the unfortunate's family are booted out of town and sent packing to the ends of the earth. Sadly, exile isn't their only problem since the big bad ruler has sent a nasty eunuch to spy on them and eventually effect their deathly eradication from the planet. Like some mad kung-fu spaghetti western, a whole passel of deadly killers descend upon the Inn and we're treated to intrigue and action. King Hu was one of the grand masters of cinema and his masterpiece Dragon Inn was recently afforded a gorgeous 4K digital restoration - all the better to take in the sumptuous vistas, cleverly composed (and designed) interiors and the astounding choreography and direction of some of the most stirring sword fights and hand-to-hand combat ever wrought within martial arts movies. Hu's frame is always lively, his moves masterful and his sense of spatial geography always dead-on. Here you'll have the opportunity to witness a director at the peak of his considerable powers, working in tandem with ace choreographer and action helmer Han Ying-chieh. Between the two of them, Dragon Inn is one of the most thriller martial arts pictures of all time - one which influenced Tsui Hark, John Woo, Jacky Chan, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and yes, Quentin Tarantino. It's a classic in all respects. Best of all, it feels like it could have been made yesterday.

The skill and technique on display has not dated one single, solitary bit and you'll constantly be catching your breath, doing double takes and needing to pinch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming. And even though it feels as modern as all get-out in terms of its movie-making sophistication and savvy, the fact truly remains that they actually don't make 'em like this anymore.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** - 4-Stars

For further information visit the FNC - Festival international du nouveau cinéma de Montréal website HERE. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER THE AFOREMENTIONED FILMS FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS BELOW, AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

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In Canada - BUY Crimes of Passion HERE, eh!

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MAPS TO THE STARS (TIFF 2014 - TIFF GALA) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

In Hollywood, the eyes of the Dead are always upon you. Only the Dead see the Truth and only in Death can Truth be found.

Mia Wasikowska
handily
brandishes the
Genie Award
Bludgeon
(the Canadian version of an OSCAR)

Maps to the Stars (2014)
Dir. David Cronenberg
Starring: Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams, Evan Bird

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they've
been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read
the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings,
murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles,
revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is
a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be
violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been
cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing."

- Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

The movie business is creepy.

Its heart and soul resides in the City of Angels and surrounding environs of Hollywood, the Dream Factory. The place hasn't really changed much since 1939 when Nathanael West wrote his seminal novel about the Hollywood underbelly "The Day of the Locust". There's more smog now, but the sun still shines bright and the desperation of its populace, especially those in the movie business, is just as sick, venal and pathetically palpable.

And the business? No changes here, either.

It's mind-numbingly cruel, shallow, exploitative, backstabbing, bereft of truth, lacking in taste and just plain evil. That it's a world full of hustlers, whores, scumbags, flakes and empty-vessel operators is not so much the cherry on the sundae, but rather the undigested peanuts and corn flecking an already-unhealthy-looking loaf of faecal matter. The poor are still poor, and desperate. Even the rich and powerful, are desperate.

This odious backdrop allows Canadian visionary David Cronenberg to take no prisoners and serve up one of his most agreeably sickening films in some time. Maps to the Stars is in deliciously poor taste, nastily funny, blessed with a consistently gnawing malevolence and makes for one hell of a Mr. Toad-like wild-ride through the Indy 500 of broken dreams in contemporary Hollywood, the same living Hell Mr. West wrote about 75 years ago. L.A. still burns.

Cronenberg is, of coursed, blessed with just the right amount of petrol to torch Hollywood. Bruce Wagner's screenplay is imbued with the rather perverse quality of plotting that's often quite compelling, but in its own way, seems intentionally perfunctory. Too often, I found I was pointed precisely where the movie was headed. I don't think, however, that's a flaw in the writing, so much as the point of the film (and screenplay).

First and foremost, the plot is and, in fact, must be secondary to the WORLD of the film and as such, feeds into it. Secondly and perhaps most importantly, the manner in which the plot-points play out are, in a perversely brilliant manner the very thing that contributes to the film's satire. Hollywood, especially now, is built upon is providing plot elements that no longer surprise. Such is the case here, but both Wagner and Cronenberg mask this very well. For half the film's running time you feel like the elements of plot are assembled to obscure the fact that there are only certain directions it can go and by the midpoint, I found it relatively easy to know exactly where the train was headed.

That the film is about the sick vapidity of making movies that are themselves even more vapid and familiar, is the brave sign of a writer fully in command of what makes satire so special. When you experience the real thing, as you do here, it's a wonder to behold.

And can there be anything more delightfully, nastily and appropriately vapid than the central characters in this film? Nope. This, of course, is a testament also to just how brilliant the film's cast is in rendering the emptiness beneath their shells, but doing so with no tongue-in-cheek and always making them real. These are people you'd never want to know (or be), but that's what makes them even more compelling.

Given the utter emptiness of the people in this world, I was delighted that Wagner's screenplay seemed to inspire Cronenberg, his cinematographer and production designer to always hammer home the hollow qualities of the world and characters. Everything takes on a kind of flat smog filtered look. The consistency of the lighting from interior to exterior, from day to night and back again (and then some), all managed to maintain a kind of ugliness that was strangely beautiful and ghastly. The homes most of these people live in are filled with wide, open spaces and yet, they seem empty and bereft of any personal touches on the parts of the characters. The environs appear to have all been art directed, or, if you will, interior designed.

This might be the most hollow film made in the past couple of decades and to that I say: "Huzzah!"

So, speaking of hollow, Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is a gorgeous, self-absorbed movie star who is desperate to land a role in a remake of her late mother'a big starring role. Essentially, she'll be playing her mother. From any reasonable perspective, she'd be perfect for it, but what in Hollywood is ever reasonable? There are mysterious nagging doubts amongst the suits at the studio, most of whom are seldom seen. They also never return phone calls from either Havana or her agent. Via Wagner's script, Cronenberg deftly manoeuvres through the utterly ludicrous ins and out of Havana pathetically attempting to land the role, which is, in many ways, the vessel of emptiness that carries us into the heart of hollow Hell.

Havana's biggest weapon, it seems, are regular sessions with Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a new-agey, ubiquitous paid-programming-TV-fixture who provides massage-therapy-self-help to Hollywood royalty and any stupidly rich person who can afford his outrageous fees. Weiss is married to Cristina (Olivia Williams), a doting stage Mom to their horrendously spoiled child star son Benjie (Evan Bird), who must constantly placate the studio suits that he's no longer hooked on drugs. He is, after all, the star of what must be a loathsome, but successful studio franchise entitled "The Bad Babysitter".

Moving down the Hollywood Food Chain, a bit closer to Nathanael West territory, our seemingly satirical journey places a fair bit of emphasis upon Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a beautiful burn victim with a close Twitter relationship with Carrie Fisher which lands her the coveted job of being a personal assistant to Havana. Agatha is involved in a flirty, but borderline serious relationship with Jerome (Robert Pattinson), a handsome limo driver-actor-screenwriter who's at first repelled by Agatha's burn scars, but gradually comes to accept them. Sadly, whilst relationships in business are everything in Hollywood, relationships on a human level take a back seat. Jerome's limo, of course, has a very big back seat and he's more than willing to use it when aging stars require some backdoor servicing from his trusty sword.

This is probably not what the doctor ordered. Agatha, you see, is completely out of her gourd. Just released from years of incarceration in a Florida loony bin, pumped full of anti-schizo pills and fuelled with a burning (as it were) desire to make amends with those whom she wronged. Many years ago, she set the family home ablaze in a fit of pyromaniacal insanity, attempted to murder her little brother and in the process was horrifically burned herself.

A family reunion is not desired by her Mom, Dad and Brother, but in a town of six degrees of separation, it seems inevitable. Chances are also good, it's not going to be warm and fuzzy.

Have I mentioned the ghosts yet?

No? Ah, good. Well, yes. many of our characters receive regular visits from them and these creepy apparitions are prone to placing horrendously nasty ideas into the heads of those they haunt.

Have I mentioned the incest yet?

No? Ah, excellent. I'll leave it all for you to discover.

Have I mentioned the killings yet?

No? Lovely. You're in for a real treat.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** Four Stars

Maps To The Stars is a Gala Presentation at TIFF 2014.

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THE MAN IN THE ORANGE JACKET - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Latvia Yields Sickness @FantAsia 2014 in Montreal

Proletarian banality in Latvia.

The Man in the Orange Jacket (2014)
Dir. Aik Karapetian
Starring: Maxim Lazarev, Aris Rozentals, Anta Aizupe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This might be one of the most vile movies I've seen in quite awhile. I suspect most audiences will find it either reprehensible or boring (or both), but ultimately, I think it signals the arrival of an especially gifted filmmaker. Aik Karapetian is Armenian and the movie is a co-production between Latvia and Estonia. Given that this is a brutal, nasty-humoured psychological horror film, its peculiar ethnographical pedigree seems to almost guarantee that we're going to see something that's as shocking as it's off the well-worn path.

While it shares similarities to Roman Polanksi's The Tenant and Repulsion. it just as easily conjures up comparison points to John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, David Fincher's Se7en and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (with generous dollops of Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke). Finally though, The Man in the Orange Jacket is all its own movie - a truly sickening and starkly original piece of work. After seeing it, nobody will accuse it of being in the domain of been-there-done-that.

When a whole whack of dock workers are laid-off, one of them decides he's had enough of his lot in life as a labourer within the "new" capitalism of Eastern Europe. He wants a taste of what the 1% have and nothing's going to stop him from getting it. He targets the scumbag corporate CEO (Aris Rozentals) who's responsible for his predicament of unemployment, shows up at the richie-rich's sprawling, isolated country mansion, murders the CEO and his gorgeous young wife (Anta Azupe), tosses their bodies into the basement and proceeds to live a life of leisure in the upscale, though oddly antiseptic abode. There's a bit of perverse fun to be had watching our boy lounging about in expensive clothing, eating gourmet meals, drinking fine wine, sitting in different comfy chairs and "admiring" the works of art on the walls, but it's clear that what he desires is not attainable since he's essentially a proletarian numbskull - albeit of the psychopathic variety. Curiously, what little we find out about the CEO suggests that in his own way, he's as hollow a shell as our working class hero. As for our rich man wanna-be, Karapetian makes no attempt to add any more shading that what little we see.

Thankfully the movie doesn't provide us any excuses or reasons for the psycho's behaviour, beyond the banal desire to have what can never truly be his. Some, I suspect, might dump on this as a major flaw, but any attempts to fill in the blanks would simply have been disingenuous. This is, ultimately, the story of one big fat nothing and as such, it's a damn effective one. Replete with astonishing visual flourishes and a creepy-crawly methodical pace of the most unbearably compelling kind, The Man in the Orange Jacket is as sterling a sophomore effort as we're likely to experience this year.

At a certain point, early on, it's quite obvious that we're not going to get even a smidgen of empathy in this character. As his isolated indulgence progresses, he becomes increasingly bored and we're then privy to a series of harrowing incidents which suggest the house itself is haunted or that he's even more off his rocker than we suspected. When he summons two gorgeous twin escorts to "his" home, he's such an empty vessel that the most "creative" sexual shenanigans he can muster is to piss into the swimming pool and force the hookers to stay in the water.

We should all be so lucky.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

The Man in the Orange Jacket enjoyed its International Premiere at the 2014 edition of the FantAsia International Film Festival in Montreal and has been selected to unspool at the prestigious Fantastic Fest at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas.

STRESS POSITION - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Canuck Avant-Garde Thriller with Guantanamo overtones serves up visceral shocks and astounding, imaginative visuals in its claustrophobic space. An interesting bourgeois perspective that isn't wholly exploited keeps the pic from being a solid grand slam.

Just a little higher & this fella's getting an unwanted penile implant
or a very uncomfortable butt-plug.

This is a very sick man.
VERY, VERY sick.

Stress Position (2013) ***
Dir. A.J. Bond, Scr. A.J. Bond
Starring: A.J. Bond, David Amito, Margeurite Moreau

Review By Greg Klymkiw

At first you think you're possibly watching an Ulrich Seidl-inspired documentary with delightfully youthful pretensions as two young gentlemen face each other in gorgeously lit and composed profile shots. They engage in a casual conversation about who they are, how they met, what they do and how they've been inspired to engage in a perverse psychological experiment. Their inspiration to plunge into this experiential enterprise was borne out of previous conversations about enhanced torture methods in the notorious Guantanamo Bay and how they might be able to conduct and survive such inhuman and immoral torments. A.J. (writer-director Bond) happily wins a rock, paper, scissors toss and his pal David (David Amito) must be the first to succumb to the torture. There is a substantial cash prize at stake, but also the strength of character victory achieved by the person who doesn't crack first. When we enter an elaborately designed movie set with a bizarre metallic (and delectably phallic) structure in the middle of a blazing white room, adorned with a huge two-way mirror and populated with hooded figures manning a variety of cameras, we pretty much abandon the notion of this being a twee mock-doc and feel we're entering the world of a nasty thriller - a kind of Michael Haneke on crack, if you will. And then, the torture begins.

It's harrowingly vicious and personal. From simple spitting in the face, through to denial of washroom privileges to bondage and demands of self-inflicted pain to generate self portraits upon the white floor with bodily parts and, uh, fluids. As the torture intensifies, the friendship between the men appears to have a lot left unsaid until now.

Entering the mix is a chilly babe-o-licious ice goddess (Margeurite Moreau) behind the scenes. She's A.J.'s partner in torture and she's the arbiter of what's real and what isn't. She pushes A.J. to not fake it, so that David will, in turn, not be faking it. She demands that she has to believe what she's seeing. A.J. comes to his senses (if one wishes to call them that) and begins to push the torture to such extremes that even our Valkyrie-like babe is taken aback.

Eventually, the tables turn.

And it ain't pretty.

Seriously.
This man is a sick-fuck!

Stress Position is, for the most part an effective and entertaining thriller. It's unfortunate that the tale doesn't push the political implications of the two male characters and their actions within the bourgeois context they're both clearly derived from. There's a sense of a wasted opportunity to take this so much further. As well, it sometimes feel like the film is actually holding back on really going the distance in terms of the sick-o-meter.

Given that it's a low budget affair with little of the usual nonsense that plagues even indies, one keeps waiting for us to travel along the paths of true demented nastiness like, for example, the brilliant Carré blanc by Jean-Baptiste Léonetti or the Soska Sisters' astonishing American Mary. By hammering home both their respective political bents with utter extremities of depravity, both of those movies take us to genuinely shocking places that eventually yield surprising cores of humanity. Stress Position never goes there and yet it feels like a movie that wants to go there. In the end, the movie feels a lot colder and clinical than I think it needed to be.

In spite of this, though, the movie is dazzlingly shot and designed and the performances, especially by Bond (this guy could surely moonlight as a character actor in roles of total scumbaggery), are always engaging. Even more happily, the film is bereft of that horrendous Canadian tweeness that plagues so much of the country's output and importantly, one feels like we're watching the work of a filmmaker with a voice as opposed to that annoying tendency of too many Canadian directors looking to generate their "Look Ma, I can use a dolly and direct series television" calling card nonsense.

Watching the film, you at least feel you're on the ground floor of a filmmaker who's new and exciting, rather than some competent loser-hack looking for a gig.

Stress Position opens theatrically at the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinema in Toronto on April 18, 2014 and will hopefully roll out across the rest of the country soon.

SECONDS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Classic Psychological Thriller Comes Alive on Criterion Blu-Ray

ROCK HUDSON
UNMASKED

An upper-middle-class businessman has his identity erased, then transformed via cutting edge plastic surgery. He starts life over with a fresh persona. Gradually, he longs for his old life, but trying to go back might reveal a sad truth he'd never imagined and ultimately, lead to a fate he never bargained for.

Seconds (1966) ***** 

Dir. John Frankenheimer
Starring: Rock Hudson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The myth of post-War prosperity in America created an endlessly compelling series of films within a variety of genres from the late 1940s and onwards, but for me, few are sadder, scarier and creepier than the great John Frankenheimer's chilling exploration of identity in a world seemingly bereft of genuine individuality. Based on John Ely's novel and superbly adapted by screenwriter Lewis John Carlino, we're introduced to a shell of a man, living in an upscale suburb with a wife he ignores, endless train rides to and from the city where he manages a bank and in spite of a very comfortable lifestyle, the surface trappings of his success merely mask a living death.

When he begins receiving telephone calls from a long-dead pal he is, at first, disturbed that someone would play this cruel practical joke on him until the voice on the other end of the line begins to reveal details that only his late pal would have known.

This is the middle-aged banker's chance to change his life.

You know, I've gotta say that if it were me, I'd be checking myself into a looney bin and/or visiting a priest or maybe, just maybe, I'd be looking for a better way to change my life. I, however, did not live in post-war America (though Gen-Xrs and beyond certainly suffered its influence in other ways) and given the after-effects of the horrors of World War II upon our fathers, the Korean War, the burgeoning Vietnam War, the Cold War and the horrendous assassination of JFK, maybe I too - like much of America then and now - would be looking for an easy way out.

Of course, what seems to come easy, always has strings attached. Though our banker friend falls for this macabre solicitation from the grave, he is plunged even deeper into a cruel and eerie existence that is as fraught with the surface trappings of prosperity as his previous existence yielded, but his inner life is also tinged with a surface gloss that eventually gives way to heartache and anxiety.

And believe me, the picture's been super-creepy and scary up to this point, but like any great thriller, things are going to get even more horrific than we'd ever imagined.

Seconds is a film that has so much going for it on every level. When scribes refer to "terse" direction, I'm not always sure they know precisely what they're on about, but I will say, from my standpoint that John Frankenheimer might well be the genuine grandfather of a directorial approach that's as concise and trenchant as one would hope for in genre pictures that are rooted in a boldly simple structure that allows for peeling back layers on thematic, narrative and stylistic levels that few have ever been able to genuinely master. Here, Frankenheimer seem to give almost free reign to the unparalleled cinematographer James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) to create one shot after another that, taken on their own, seem like masterworks of lighting and composition. Movement is almost always subtle and crisp, though one's memory always comes back to dynamic activity bordering on the slightly jangling. Even more evocative the use of wide-angle lenses and, in particular, the consummately ghastly fish-eye shots which we never seem to forget.

In spite of these flourishes, they're used sparingly and so many of the compositions - whilst gorgeous - are simple and there to serve both the blocking, narrative and emotion. This was a style Frankenheimer developed in earlier features, most notably The Manchurian Candidate, but part of me thinks, that like so many great American directors of the 60s and 70s he cut his teeth with the kind of abandon afforded so many writers, directors and producers during the truly "Golden Age of American Television" where Frankenheimer directed oodles of "plays for television".

One of his great works during this period was the "Playhouse 90" production of Rod Serling's The Comedian starring a malevolent Mickey Rooney who was never, before or after, so downright brilliant. This "teleplay" (a magnificent amalgam of cinema, theatre and even radio drama that was most often broadcast live before millions on premiere broadcasts) is so original and compellingly grotesque, that it's extremely interesting to watch it within the context of Frankenheimer's best work for the big screen during the 60s.

Of course, there isn't a single performance in Seconds that seems false or out of place, but the movie really belongs to the late, great movie star Rock Hudson. His sensitivity and vulnerability (so often on display in the numerous Doris Day romantic comedies as well as some of his greatest triumphs during the 50s) is uncanny here. Though Frankenheimer initially had hoped for the likes of Laurence Olivier in the role, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than this bonafide movie star. The notion of a formerly dullish, slightly portly middle-aged cog in the upper levels of the post-war machine transformed into this gorgeous, hunky, Marlboro Man among Marlboro Men, is not only a brilliant stroke of casting in terms of an audience connecting to this character, but the film so expertly builds the empty frumpiness of this person's earlier life that when Hudson keeps looking in the mirror, he expertly yields a strange combination of disbelief, elation and yes, sadness. Rock Hudson, quite simply and movingly, breaks our hearts.

For all the creepiness and suspense Seconds delivers, what makes it resonate with such force and deliver several jabs to our collective solar-plexes is the heartbreak, the swirling sadness, the tragic search for a place in a world where identity has been stripped from those who thought it was all going to be better.

It doesn't get more real than that.

"Seconds" has been given the royal treatment on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, but I urge you, as great as the accompanying materials are, watch the movie not once, but maybe even twice before you dive in. I didn't watch any of it prior to even writing the aforementioned and I can assure you this allowed me to experience the film on subsequent viewings with even more appreciation than I'd ever imagined was possible. Here are the disc's highlights: A stunningly restored 4K digital film transfer, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a genuinely great commentary with Frankenheimer, a surpringly insightful interview withactor Alec Baldwin, excerpts from "Hollywood on the Hudson" TV show from 1965 that has on-set footage and a Hudson interview, a fine making-of with interviews from Frankenheimer’s widow and actor Salome Jens (who plays the film's "love interest"), a 1971 interview with Frankenheimer, a decent visual essay by film scholars R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance and the de rigueur booklet that has the added value of a superb essay by movie critic David Sterritt.

Read my Review of John Frankenheimer's THE COMEDIAN, part of the Criterion Collection mega-box DVD set "The Golden Age of Television" HERE.