a review from imdb:
A flawless example of what an independent film is all about, 19 November 2000
10/10
Author: hippiedj from Palm Desert, California

Nowadays it seems indie festivals are the chic thing and filmmakers are trying too hard to get the status that winners of those “prestige” events get. If they would only look back to 1985 to a film like Static, they could learn a thing or two.

This film paces itself, and while never snappy, it uses its time wisely. While a melancholy mood prevales, we still are affected in many ways by the different characters we are introduced to.

The story is quite simple: A young man, not quite over the death of his parents, uses his skills as an inventor to come up with a device that may or may not monitor images of heaven. Through the interaction of several eccentric yet not exaggerated characters, they (and we) learn lessons about hope, desperation, and acceptance.

The film’s use of desert landscape adds a lot to the feeling of loneliness (instead of film economics), the careful selection of songs for the soundtrack actually ties in with each scene–from songs by The The to Elvis! Keith Gordon obviously had a hand in that part, as with his choice of songs for his next film The Chocolate War. Goes to show you don’t have to look for trendiness or a hit soundtrack to sell, which can date a film and make it lose its power over the years. Static was made in 1985 and hasn’t lost an ounce of effectiveness.

Admittedly, films are a form of escapism and all don’t have to be made exclusively for intellectual reasons, but when you want a story to touch you without trying to impress you with flavor-of-the-month stars and no “serious” documentary all ready to go for air on the Bravo network, this is the film to seek out. Static is a flawless example of what an independent film is all about.

After all these years, this is the one film that I cherish most and everyone I’ve suggested it to has admitted it stays in their minds. Without any dialogue to sum it up, the film’s final lingering shot along

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The post Mark Romanek – Static (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An eccentric and possibly brilliant young man, troubled by the death of his parents, claims to be readying a world-changing invention.

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The post Mark Romanek – Static (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Abigail Harm is a woman living in a fictionalized New York City, who, after being granted a wish by a strange visitor, asks for love and learns of a creature who might provide it. Inspired by the Korean folktale The Woodcutter and the Nymph.

870MB | 1h 19m | 1280×720 | mkv

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Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Lee Isaac Chung – Abigail Harm (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Winterbottom’s theatrical feature debut Butterfly Kiss was released into UK theatres in August 1995. Set in a dystopian environment limited almost entirely to motorways, service stations and motels, it charted the dysfunctional lesbian relationship between the violent and erratic Eunice (Amanda Plummer) and the credulous Miriam (Saskia Reeves). In so doing it offered up a portrayal of Britain that had not previously been seen on its cinema screens. Although the film garnered mixed responses, a couple of reviewers such as Derek Malcolm seized on it as heralding the arrival of a remarkable new talent in British cinema (2). Indeed, the film was to lay out many of the themes and techniques that would come to define Winterbottom’s oeuvre.

From the very beginning, Butterfly Kiss announces itself as a sometimes challenging and uncomfortable viewing experience. In its black-and-white title sequence, Miriam sits facing the camera, sometimes staring at it, sometimes avoiding its gaze. (Later footage reveals that the material is drawn from an interview in which she talks about Eunice, and that the title sequence edits together only the silences between bursts of speech.) The awkwardness that Miriam’s body language gives forth is compounded by the absence of a soundtrack and by the series of jump cuts. These anticipate the disjunctive editing of the following scene, which introduces us to Eunice as she walks along a motorway. The editing technique serves to disorient and discomfort the viewer, frustrating attempts to predict what will happen next. As it transpires, Eunice enters a petrol station where she acts in a highly agitated fashion, unreasonably convinced that the sales assistant is the woman called Judith whom she obsessively seeks. Cut to a brief shot of the sales assistant’s corpse on the shop floor. The tone of the film is constantly unsettling as Eunice’s volatility combines with a non-linear structure of shots in such a way as to ensure that the viewer rarely has any idea what to expect, in either spatial, narrative or emotional terms.

If the film sometimes arouses apprehension through its elisions, at other times it graphically delivers scenes that are both shocking and unexpected. A scene in which Eunice removes her top to reveal a body laden with piercings and heavy chains, which have bruised it black and blue, produced gasps from many of the cinema audience with whom I first watched the film. One other especially uncomfortable scene occurs much later when Miriam has sex with Robert (Ricky Tomlinson) in his truck. This act is already difficult to watch as it is abundantly clear that Miriam has no desire to partake in it and does so only at Eunice’s behest. It does not get any more pleasurable when Eunice clambers into the truck and bludgeons him to death mid coitus. Although such scenes render the film intermittently shocking, throughout the film there runs a thread of universal themes that sometimes encourage engagement and identification even whilst individual moments temporarily repel.

Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce characterises the theme of Butterfly Kiss as spiritual despair (3). This is a theme that will recur in several of Winterbottom’s features, whether they are scripted by Cottrell Boyce or not. The theme is most apparent in Eunice’s belief that God must have stopped noticing her, or else He would surely see her killing people and do something to prevent it. Such despair is also apparent in Miriam’s life and it is the basis of her attachment to Eunice. The gradation between their degrees of desolation and the extent to which an audience might reasonably be expected to identify with each of them is clearly symbolised by their nicknames: “Mi” and “Eu”, or “me” and “you”. If the narrative may be seen to be centred on these two characters, it may equally be thought of as being defined by the environment they inhabit. The idea that both personal identity and life choices derive significantly from one’s surroundings is another theme that permeates many of Winterbottom’s later films. It is, moreover, a notion that can help to explain (and even justify) a range of behaviours to which an audience might otherwise find it difficult to relate. From: Senses of Cinema by Deborah Allison

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The post Michael Winterbottom – Butterfly Kiss (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Simon Wade is an average young man who goes about his profession as a teacher with the same kind of dedication that he exhibits when taking care of his ailing mother. But, under the seemingly obliging surface of nice-guy Simon there lurks an entirely different side. His unquenchable thirst for fresh blood forces the young teacher to trawl websites in search of suicidal young women, whose blood he can steal.

Shunji Iwai: “I’ve been writing the basic story for this film for over ten years. It was before ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU that I wrote the first image, but, every time a chance to make another film came up, I couldn’t make this one, so I’d keep writing. Four years ago I found a good idea. At the time I was writing, the same thing was actually happening in Japan, a guy was really killing people, and it turns out that all the victims came from a suicide website. This guy was too creepy, too strange to be an interesting character. But this made it harder for me to keep going because the Japanese audience would be against the guy in that case, so I had to leave it alone again. But two years ago, when I was doing NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU, I was talking with some guys at the bar, and they asked me about the murder cases in Japan, and I told them about them, and then I realised I could make my story here in the US. It takes a long time, and dark stories are kind of difficult, but sometimes dark stories are very beautiful, very challenging.”

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The post Shunji Iwai – Vampire (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.