Anne Hathaway Catwoman

.

It's been a slow news day so far today. But hark! Here is the list of films showing at the Toronto International Film Festival this year! I seriously doubt I'll be going since I've never gone before and I can't see that changing now - although Toronto is a lovely city so if they want to invite me they can do that! - but since it's a slow news day let's name five movies playing at the festival that make me wanna slap some marching boots on and storm the north come September.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey) - Everybody's read the book by Lionel Shriver by now, right? I hope so. Go read the book if you haven't! Because this book is amazing. AMAZING. And this movie has Tilda Swinton starring in it. AMAZING TIMES TWELVE.

.

I was a big fan of the first Paranormal Activity movie (my review). I know it wasn't everybody's cuppa but I loved the slow build and the way it forced you to just stare and stare at a static image until you thought your brain would snap from the tension. In the way that The Blair Witch Project mastered its teeny tiny budget through an electrifyingly creative manipulation of its sound-design so I felt that PA pulled a similar trick with its rigid visuals, turning a limitation to their favor.

Unfortunately the second film mucked it all up (my review). There were too many cameras around the house that they kept editing between, slicing any mounting tension up into ineffectual ribbons.

Plus the characters went way too far above and beyond the call of unbearable douchiness. Micah and Katie were deeply flawed characters in the first film - some might call them, and many did, monstrously annoying - but the movie was smart about it, I thought, and seemed to have built their less-than-savory aspects inextricably into the tale they were telling. Their passive-aggressive relationship became a game of one-upmanship and the final frame brought the game, and the camera and the home, crashing down. The awful people in the second movie were just ciphers with no interaction between who they were and what was happening to them. The film never found a purpose, and ended up treading stale steps in the first film's much more successful wake.

Point! We now have a teaser trailer for the third film.

.

.

(via) So it's a prequel way back to the 1980s with the two sisters as little girls who've got access to what would have been at the time super-expensive crystal clear video technology. Mkay. What makes me most sad about this is we won't get to see any more of Micah.


Bye Micah! You were a sexy asshole. The most curious thing here is the fact that this is coming from Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the directors that made last year's buzzy curiosity Catfish (my review), the questionable documentary of a slightly adorable dorky New York douche getting caught up in a sad lady's Facebook espionage. I was pro-Catfish for the most part but didn't really keep up with it once it came out and people began picking it apart.


Anyway I am curious to see what these chaps might bring to the Paranormal table. Catfish was sold as a horror movie but really didn't end up being that at all. But it still managed to wring a lot of tension from that curiosity before you knew what was coming. I vividly remember being freaked out when Nev & Co. get to that horse-farm late at night and are peering through the darkened windows of the barn. So they can maybe handle suspense? I guess we'll see. PA3 is out on October 21st...


... which is a date that's making my brain question a question: What horror movies are we getting for Halloween this year? The Saw franchise is blessedly over and blessedly done with its nearly-decade-long campaign of ruining the holiday, and I thought we were getting Cabin in the Woods but as we found out this morning it turns out that's not coming out until April.

So as long as this is on our brain, let's take a look-see at all the major horror movies coming out between now and All Hallows. (There will probably be smaller films that will get scheduled between now and then that we're unawares of just yet.)


-- The only horror movie out before July is over - if you don't count The Smurfs - is the "teenage British thugs vs. aliens" movie Attack the Block on July 29th, which I reviewed right here. I had a fairly complicated reaction to the film and I'm still sort of plagued by it. Fantastic monster design and some wonderfully staged action scenes though, even if I'm not sure they didn't ruin everything with an erratic tone and possibly irredeemable main characters.


-- In August we get Final Destination 5 on the 12th and the Fright Night remake on the 19th. I've stopped writing about the latest FD movie because I can't look at any more trailers or pictures, I don't want to spoil anymore of the deaths than I already did with the first trailer, but I wanna see this like crazy, like I do with every installment. I hump this series to death. I think Fright Night looks generally terrible but Toni Collette and Sexy Vampire Colin Farrell might get me there anyway.


-- The Guillermo Del Toro produced remake of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark starring the soulless Katie Holmes and the asstastic Guy Pearce is out on August 26th.

-- Shark Night 3D - from the director of two Final Destination movies, including my favorite the second one! - is out on September 2nd. The trailer for this movie is just absolutely awful, but my FD-loving brain keeps arguing with me about it. Whole conversations have been had inside of my head! Crazy ones!


-- Also on September 2nd comes Apollo 18, which is "Blair Witch on the Moon." Space horror isn't done often enough if you ask me - it don't get much more isolated than that! I hope there's a shot of someone being killed reaching towards Earth in the sky for help. That'd be neat-o.

-- September 9th brings us Contagion, Steven Soderbergh's global pandemic movie with an impressively starry and serious cast. Winslet, Paltrow, Law, Damon, Cotillard, and wait what's this John Hawkes! Love him.

-- The closest thing to horror on September 16th is the Straw Dogs remake but that might just be terrifying us because of the basic fact that they remade Straw Dogs. It does have lots of violence and rape though so close enough. But it also has Alexander Skarsgard and Jimmy Marsden swanning around half-naked and there's nothing scary about that. Stimulating, yes. Intimidating, definitely. But certainly not anything even approaching scary.


-- Dream House, which we just saw the shirtless-Daniel-Craig-ified trailer for yesterday, is out on September 30th.

-- As is Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, the supposedly pretty funny horror-comedy starring Alan Tudyk and Reaper's Tyler Labine as two innocent hillbillies caught up in bloody shenanigans. I think the idea is that they get mistaken for serial killers by a bunch of stupid vacationing college kids who then try to kill them as if they're in a horror movie fighting off Jason Voorhees. And it's a really fun idea.


-- The Thing remake is out on October 14th. We just saw the first trailer for that last week. Love the cast and want it to be good but it has been sitting around gathering dust for a little while now. That could just be due to factors other than its worth though - I think, like Cabin in the Woods, it got held up due to studio problems.

-- Also out that same day, at least in limited release, is The Skin I Live In. It's Pedro Almodovar's newest movie. It reunites him with 80s man-muse Antonio Banderas, and it's apparently very dark and very creepy. The teaser trailer scared me. All of these things are making me want it something insane.


-- On October 21st, the same day as PA3 is out, Kevin Smith's Red State finally gets a proper release after Smith toured the country earlier this year with it. But from what I hear it's not really the horror movie it's been sold to be either?


-- Same day, another indie weirdo cult movie (as in a movie about a cult) that got talk at Sundance - Martha Marcy May Marlene also isn't really a horror movie in the oogie-boogie slobbery monster sense but it's supposedly pitch-black and horrifying in its own way. Plus it has John Hawkes again and I will mention him whenever I can. Hi again John Hawkes!

As of right now there's apparently nothing scary scheduled for October 28th, which seems bonkers. Expect something to pick up the slack, I imagine. After Halloween we're into Oscar season so there's not as much spooky scheduled - I refuse to categorize the Twilight movies as horror (except for what they say about our culture); Piranha 3DD is supposedly out on November 23rd - perfect for taking Grandma to over Thanksgiving holiday!; David Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie will presumably be pretty horrific a la Straw Dogs with the violence (a lot specifically of a sexual nature) and the throbbing NIN techno; The Darkest Hour has Emile Hirsch fighting killer aliens.   

.

By now you've probably heard that Jake Gyllenhaal will be guest-starring on the season premiere of Bear Gryll's "fun time in the outdoors" show Man Vs. Wild on July 11th on the Discovery Channel. (Set your Tivos!) They'll be taking on the wilds of Iceland, apparently. Now I've only seen a minute or two of Bear's show before - usually the more ridiculous clips that The Soup highlights - but I've seen enough to have several possible scenarios instantly cloud up my brain wherein Bear could show Jake all about roughing it. Not that Jake's a stranger to huddling up in a pup-tent, of course, but let's take a look at the scenarios all the same, eh?

Constantly Getting Naked - Bear Grylls has never been confronted with an obstacle in nature that can't be met head-on by taking off all of his clothes. If you think the fact that they're gallivanting around in an icy wintry setting is enough to keep Bear dressed, think again.

Getting Peed On - I don't know if there are jellyfish in the freezing cold waters of Iceland, something tells me there aren't, but maybe they'll find one in a hot spring beside a volcano! Or maybe Bear will just pull one out of his rucksack and throw it on Jake's face at some point. I don't care how it happens. (Now I couldn't find an example of this actually happening on MVW, but taking into consideration what's to come, let's just set aside those doubts.)

Drinking his own pee - Speaks for itself, I suppose.

Never know when you might get thirsty.

.

.

Wearing his own pee - Okay, so apparently this is water-sports heavy. I cannot help these things! It's just the way the cookie's crumbled. Take it up with Bear. Urine, like nudity, solves everything!

.

.

Salt Water Enema - Oh dear this has turned out 

all sorts of wrong. Nature's such a pervert!

.

.

Point being, I hope you brought some protection

from the elements, Jake. Lots and lots of protection.

.

July 1st marks the halfway point of the year, and so I figured I'd do what I usually do and take a quick look back at the five movies I've enjoyed the most so far this year. Looking at the movies that open between now and then that I'm most curious about all there seems to be is Super 8 and Green Lantern - it that really it for June? - and I don't foresee either of those topping any of these at this point. (Prove me wrong, JJ Abrams!) There are a few duking it out, I could want something else in five minutes, but let's just roll with this.

Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) - Since seeing it back in March there kind of hasn't been a day that's passed where I haven't wanted to watch Certified Copy again. What baffles me looking back is I never wrote a proper review! I wrote a post telling y'all to remind me to write a review, and obviously you all failed me. Your fault! Anyway now I have a reason to watch it ASAP so I can write up some properish thoughts. There are visuals from this movie that accost me all the time. A slipping bra-strap or a boy following his mother or a sad bride.

Hanna (dir. Joe Wright) - my review - Okay okay so I've said enough about Eric Bana's wet longjohns at this point in the year, probably. There are other things! Wonderful things. Joe Wright making an action movie sort of feels like what would happen if one of those giant-headed bug-eyed aliens beamed down into your living-room and you told it to go and make you a peanut butter sandwich. This is that alien's peanut-butter sandwich. Strange and stranger.

13 Assassins (dir. Takashi Miike) - my review - I'm so glad to have another movie from Takashi to love - he makes more than it's possible to keep up with from this side of the world and the few that have trickled over have seemed more like emblems of his lack of concentration than, you know, coherent films. Not so with 13 Assassins, which is an astonishingly old-fashioned slow-burn to madness for the maestro of mayhem.
.

Jane Eyre (dir. Cary Fukunaga) - my review - It's all there in that scene in front of the fireplace with Rochester and Jane sizing each other up - Mia and Fassy scouring each other's faces and dragging us along for the ride.

Insidious (dir. James Wan) - my review - Lawd knows I have plenty of issues with plenty of Insidious, but at the same time I had such a hoot jumping out of my seat that I'm willing to overlook a lot of silliness. It packs enough bang for your buck. Good old fashioned spook-sanctioned fun.

.

.

The New York Asian Film Festival has just announced their line-up for 2011, and you can read through the list of films over here. It runs the first couple of weeks of July.

A few highlights - they've got Takashi Miike's latest, a swivel from the seriousness of 13 Assassins (serious awesomeness) called Ninja Kids!!! Yes, those are his exclamation points. It is about... okay, you know what it's about. They're also showing the director's cut of 13 Assassins which apparently has 17 more minutes of footage. 

They're showing several films by Tsui Hark, none of which I've seen but I've heard excellent things of, and he'll be there for all of them, it seems. Zu: Warriors From Magic Mountain sounds especially interesting.

The Yellow Sea is the new film from the director of the terrific (and terrifically underseen here) movie The Chaser, and sounds like more nail-biting suspense and action of that sort.

And speaking of The Chaser, they're showing that film and a bunch of the films that followed in its wake - it was a big hit in Korea and spawned all sorts of similarly twisty thrillers. One of them, The Man From Nowhere, is on Netflix and I just watched it a few weeks ago. Won Bin - who played the touched son in Mother - is a pleasure to stare at (especially when he strips down at one point, as seen above) but it was a little bit like a beefed-up Jean Claude Van Damme movie from 1993 (I know, I know, I say that as if its a bad thing?).

There's also a female version of Deliverance called Bedevilled which NYAFF is calling "the greatest women versus men movie ever made," although I've come to regard NYAFF's effusiveness with a very large grain of salt. They tend towards the ultra enthusiastic. Which, ya know, bless em for it. Anyway, "female version of Deliverance" kinda sells itself. Apparently the lead actress won some awards for her performance.

There's also gonna be 10 year anniversary screenings of Battle Royale and Versus, which are both such utter batshit insane delights. Looks like a great fest this year!