Film: Bestiality (hilarious!) and men with video cameras (terrifying!)

Here are the second-to-last lot of reviews. The final five shall be coming soon, and my Festival round-up and awards. The Torontonies? I don't know.

There were supposed to be photos, too, but Blogger was decided to be a fuckwit, so whatever. Picture them in your mind.

...maybe try not to picture too much from Sleeping Dogs Lie.

DarkBlueAlmostBlack

This is a likable little Spanish movie about family and loyalty and decisions. Jorge is a business school graduate with a brother in prison and a father with dementia he must care for. At the same time that a childhood sweetheart returns from travelling, his temporarily sterile brother sets him the task of impregnating his also incarcerated girlfriend so she can move to the prison’s relatively luxurious and safe maternity ward. Meanwhile, Jorge’s best friend Israel begins to question his father’s and his own sexuality upon spying his father getting an erotic massage from a man.

This is sometimes sad, sometimes sexy, sometimes funny, and, as mentioned, just plain likable. I questioned some of the character motivations, and it won’t change lives, but it pretty much won me over. Recommended.

8/10

Pan’s Labyrinth

I can’t say a lot about this movie, if only for the fact that I was in the front row, and the screen was approximately thirty centimetres from my face. A bad situation, worsened by the enormous size of the screen, worsened still by the subtitles, which proved to be stunningly difficult to read. This is a sleight against the design of the theatre, not the film or the subtitles. I’ll have to re-view this one to fully appreciate it.

What I got what was that the film is stunningly designed, on all levels. Guillermo del Toro is quite a visionary. The only film I’ve seen of his is Hellboy, which was okay, but I didn’t fall in love with it, although apparently (obviously, really) his indie films are better, and will now be sought out. The film takes place in civil war era Spain, telling the story of young Ophelia (Ivana Baquero, very impressive) as she deals with her new fascist army captain stepfather, terrorising everyone he can, the impending birth of her half brother, and a new (possibly imaginary) fantastical world she keeps being taken into to do increasingly difficult tasks. Both the real and the fantasy worlds are given fairly equal weight in the film, and both provide fear and fascination.

I’ll need to see it again, and perhaps familiarise myself with del Toro’s work as well beforehand. This was a very well made film, which I look forward to enjoying more than a did this time around in the future.

8/10

Guillermo del Toro, by the way, is a funny bastard. His Q&A answers were long and informative and funny, and really seemed to make the Festival worker mediating the session. He seems to have had a very odd childhood, both in reality and in imagination. He’s also pretty self deprecating, having a crack at his 1997 film Mimic.

Sleeping Dogs Lie

Ewwwwwwwwww.

Sleeping Dogs Lie is about a woman who blows her dog. It’s also a smart, sweet, moving and funny relationship comedy.

Amy, played by Melinda Page Hamilton, is the woman. The incident happened years before the events of the movie, in an apparently uncontrollable fit of boredom. Her boyfriend John (Bryce Johnson), upon proposing, decides he wants complete honesty, the disclosure of their deepest secrets to one another. She is unwilling to tell him at first, but then does while they are staying with her parents. Unfortunately, he doesn’t react well. Even more unfortunately, her drugfucked brother overhears her confession.

The films deals surprisingly honestly with emotional issues of truth in relationships, and if our stupid past acts really say anything about us. It’s also very funny, often in an extremely cringeworthy manner. At times it reminded me of Meet the Parents, if Meet the Parents was more than a cheap vehicle for the humiliation of Ben Stiller, and if the relationship in that movie was one that an audience could actually care about. It helps that Melinda Page Hamilton is almost alarmingly adorable and innocent looking, and that Amy and John’s relationship, before the revelation, is really sweet.

The film was shot on a microscopic budget, and this is apparent when watching it. The music is at times annoying. Filmmaker Bob Goldthwait is a better writer than he is a director, although he is adept at both. I think a bigger budget and longer shoot could have him producing even better films. All in all, this is probably the sweetest dog blowjob movie you’ll ever see.

8/10

S&MAN

S&MAN (pronounced “Sandman” or maybe “Sampersandman”) is a study in fear. Literally: it’s a documentary about horror movies, and why people like them, why people willingly allow themselves to be scared or disgusted like this. Rather than focusing on popular horror movies- although these are touched upon- the subject of S&MAN are fake-snuff producers August Films, microbudget horror/porn hybrid filmmaker Bill Zebub, and the make of the S&MAN series, Erik Rost. Also thrown in are interviews of Carol J. Clover, author of “Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Films”, as well as a married couple, one a sexologist, the other a forensic psychiatrist.

The three profiled filmmakers all provide interest. The kids behind August Films are surprisingly friendly considering the subject matter of their films. Also of note is the fact that their fans always write to them asking to appear in their movies- as the victims, not the villains. Bill Zebub is just a character. He looks every bit the death metal freak, with a strange fixation on Christian imagery. His films seem to consist entirely of naked girls on crucifixes.

Erik Rost, however, is the standout of the documentary. His movies consist of him holding a camera, stalking women, whom he eventually “murders” on camera. He claims to audition these girls at first without their knowledge, and is completely unwilling to let director JT Petty interview or even meet any of these girls. It seems at first that he is just continuing his S&MAN persona for the documentary, using it as promotion, but as it deepens, you start to question things, thinking there’s something infinitely more sinister going on.

This documentary is both eye-opening in its discussion of the subject matter, and increasingly disturbing in the subject matter itself, to the extent that it moves from a documentary on horror films to a horror film itself. Absolutely fascinating.

9/10

This is the final run, people. Oh, plus I've seen another movie since I got back- one that was playing at the Festival, funnily enough: The Book of Revelation. That should get a write up too, at some stage. Although I really should be doing uni work.

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Hahahaha.