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Yesterday I discussed JCVD, which will be appearing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Needless to say I am quite excited about this film and am praying it comes to the Vancouver International Film Festival. With that excitement I decided to take a trip down memory lane and watch the action film that started it all for me… Blood Sport.

I was a mere 5 years old when Blood Sport was released, but thanks to having an older brother I watched it shortly after it was released on VHS. Days later I joined a Karate class and was determined to fight in the Kumite. That determination soon faded but my love of action films remained.

Fast forward a couple of decades. This morning I was surfing movie blogs when I stumbled across Twitch’s article on Ong Bak 2. The original Ong Bak is a fantastic film and its pleasing to see the sequel is progressing along despite production delays as you can see here:

Speaking of action films, Super U is running an ‘Our Hero’ contest right now featuring what could be the next great action directors. Make sure to check it out the entries. Voting just started but only lasts for 10 days! – The winners will be announced soon.

With one week to go the buzz around TIFF is as loud as a swarm of killer bees in Texas. With so many films to talk about like Guy Ritchies RocknRolla, the Coen brother’s Burn After Reading, and Ed Harris’ Appaloosa, I struggled with what exactly to write about. That is of course until I remembered JCVD. All it takes is one look at the synopsis and you know its going to be a classic:

Being Jean-Claude Van Damme is tough. Sure, he is an internationally recognized celebrity (and possibly the world’s most famous Belgian), but this star seems to have fallen from grace with a recent history of direct-to-video flicks. In a surprising yet crafty career move, Van Damme plays himself – with all his foibles in plain view – in JCVD, a rollicking action-comedy examination of the nature of fame.

Adding to Van Damme’s worries are a parasitic agent, financial troubles and an emotionally fraught custody battle for his daughter in which the prosecuting attorney rips apart the action star’s bone-cracking collected works to make a case for an unsuitable father figure. In order to clear his head, Van Damme returns to his family home in Belgium, where the myth of the indestructible hero hasn’t been completely shattered.

After bouncing a cheque to his lawyer, Van Damme goes to a post office to make a wire transfer, only to stumble into a heist and be taken hostage. When the police catch a glimpse of the superstar in the middle of the chaos, they jump to the conclusion that he has finally snapped and pulled the robbery himself. Under the barrel of a gun, Van Damme is revealed to be an ordinary guy, filled with fears, contradictions and hopes. How can he live up to the legend he has built?

Both a madcap tribute to the star’s martial arts moves and an examination of the true essence of a hero, JCVD makes sure that its subject is in on the joke, immersing him into a reality similar to that found in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. Aware of his limitations, Van Damme conveys a stoic deadpan that director Mabrouk El Mechri moulds into comedic gold. There is also a dramatic centre to the film, and Van Damme delivers a sincere and moving monologue that must be seen to be believed.

A hilariously entertaining, surprising film, JCVD tells the comeback story of a screen hero who has been on the receiving end of kicks that are getting harder and harder to take.

I am also pleased to see that JCVD is the film that kicks off the midnight madness program in the festival, a staple for hardcore film fans in Toronto. If you are interested in attending JCVD I suggest you get your tickets now as they wont last long. In the mean time feel free to wet your appetite with a teaser as well as the official trailer:

Teaser Trailer

Official Trailer

Recently Peter Bart (Vice President, and Editor-in-Chief of Variety) wrote an article about Why Art House Movies are on the Endangered Species List. In this article he crunches the numbers and comes to find that indie films are slowly declining in popularity with large distributors. His reasons for this are many, however the quote of note is where he says: “The filmmakers out there aren’t coming through, either. There are more indie movies being made but, for some reason, they don’t reflect the passion and artistic clout of films of the ‘60s or ‘70s.” To me this is the key to the article. Many young filmmakers are trying to make these ambitious projects in an attempt to produce a ‘mainstream-indie’ film. Only problem with this is that they miss the point of the indie film all together.

Indie film is supposed to be on the outside edges, its not for mom and pop America. Just look back prior to 2004 when the major distributors decided that indie was good business. Tell me you can’t see that pre major studio interest, these films were on the leading edge. All of them, for their time, were considered ‘edgy’ and ‘dangerous’. Now we just have indie films containing mainstream stories with no marketing budget, and big studio standard marketing plans. When you add this all up you get a half assed mainstream movie with a half assed mainstream marketing effort. Even as much as I dislike Juno I’d rather deal with its pretentious ‘desperate to be indie’ feel then an indie film desperate to be mainstream.

I for one can not claim that I know it all when it comes to the business of indie films. I am in the process of co-producing my friends first feature, and have not even done enough to earn that credit – quite yet. The one thing I do know is that films, like people, must stay true to themselves. There is nothing wrong with being indie so stop trying to be mainstream, and for god sakes if you don’t have a marketing budget stop trying to use the standard big budget marketing plan. Get gorilla, use viral marketing to your benefit, generate a buzz with the leading edge on the internet, and on that note…

Play With Fire Movie

Today I was going continue discussing documentaries seeing as I have been on a documentary kick lately. After batting around the idea of discussing green docs (the original title of this blog post was going to be ‘Going green on film’) I chose to go a different way. That said you must check out the Super U Doc Watchin’ contest winner Q’oyllur Ritti – God of the Snow Mountain, as it is fantastic. Moving on…

I was surfing the Apple Movie Trailer site as I often do and stumbled upon this little gem:

That is the trailer for the new Guy Ritchie film, RocknRolla. All in all its looks like a great flick. I’ve always been a Ritchie fan, with or without Madonna, however there is just one little thing about the trailer, it sure reminded me of this one:

Now before you say anything keep in mind I am not implying Ritchie borrowed any ideas from that trailer. Fact is I know the producers of ‘The Rubb’, Juicy Studios, and Ritchie’s films were a large influence on them. The point I’m making is that its funny when influence comes full circle. In this case Ritchie influenced Juicy Studios years ago, and now the ideas they came up with thanks to that influence are making their way into his films. I must imagine the people at Juicy Studios are a little bit pleased to see, that in a strange way, they were in the heads of Ritchie five years before he even realized where he was going.

Incase you are curious, even though ‘The Rubb’ trailer got posted on YouTube a year ago, I know for a fact that that it was made a number of years before that.

This weekend was full of my favorite movie genre – documentaries!

As previously mentioned I attended the Alexis Fosse Mackintosh documentary Confessions of a Sorta Str8 Drag King at the 20th Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Unlike other films by Alexis this was a light hearted documentary done “Just for fun” in her own words. Needless to say after watching such a quality doc I walked out of the theater craving more. As a result Sunday night I went to my local video store and picked up a few docs to enjoy with dinner.

The first of three I rented was titled Stupidity The Movie. In this highly entertaining film, documentarian Albert Nerenberg asks one simple question: What is stupidity? It’s much harder to answer than you might think, for, as Einstein theorized, the universe and stupidity are the only things that are infinite–and he had his doubts about the former. Amazingly, there has been no real academic study on stupidity, and there are only a handful of serious books on the topic, but that doesn’t stop the film from blazing forward. The result is a sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying look at the human race and the stupid things it has done over the course of time.

After a an amusing film such as Stupidity I decided to get a little more serious and watch Darwin’s Nightmare. The larger, yet less obvious scope of the story explores the gun trade to Africa. Russian pilots fly guns into Africa, then fly fish back out to Europe. The consequences of this are explored, including the pan-African violence propagated by constant flow of weapons into the continent. If it is a “survival of the fittest” world, as Darwin concluded, then the capitalist interests that fund the gun runners are climbing the evolutionary ladder on the backs of the Africans. Much like the foreseeable extinction of the Lake Victoria perch, and death of Lake Victoria itself, the Africans are in grave jeopardy, even as they survive in the only ways they know how.

Truth be told Darwin’s Nightmare, although and excellent film, is also extremely depressing. Due to this I chose not to explore a new documentary with my third and final choice, but to go back to the film that caused me to truly love documentaries, Fog of War. Although Fog of War is not a ‘feel good movie’ it is so good that, in my humble opinion, no documentary released to date can touch it in terms of quality. In the film Robert S. McNamara discusses his experiences and lessons learned during his tenure as Secretary of Defense under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He talks about his work as a bombing statistician during World War II, his brief tenure as president of Ford Motor Company, and the Kennedy administration’s triumph during the Cuban Missle Crisis. However, the film focuses primarily on his failures in Vietnam. The theme of the film are his “eleven lessons” learned during this time. Some of these include improving military efficiency, understanding your enemy, and the frustrations of trying to deal with, and unsuccessfully trying to change, human nature.

If you have never watched a documentary before, or have but never enjoyed one, please by all means rent Fog of War, you wont regret it.

Thanks to IMDB and its contributors, as well as Stupidity The Movie’s website for providing me with synopses for these films.

I have been told Fridays are wine tasting days here at Super U. Needless to say I’m looking forward to this, and with wine on the mind I instantly thought about a film that has bothered me for a number of years, that being Sideways. Truth be told I never really gave Sideways a fare shake due to its irrational bashing of Merlot wine. Although by no means a Merlot lover I am shocked whenever I hear how much the movie effected the sale of Merlot. Due to this I have posted a video in defense of Merlot. I don’t exactly agree with all of the opinions said on the podcast, but I am also not a wine nut, I just appreciate a glass or six every now and then.

Surely you’re asking “What does this have to do with being a movie lover?” well…

Its scary to think that a movie has the kind of effect on people. In a desperate attempt to sound cool people will take whatever interested them in something as gospel. In the case of movies, thanks to Hollywood, this influence is usually a poor one. No one really wants to hear the fine details of a trend, so movie producers take the sexiest parts and throw away the rest. In the case of Sideways the plot needed a whipping boy for comedic effect. My guess is poor Merlot happened to be the closest thing in sight. This is even more apparent when at the end of the movie the wine Paul Giamatti covets so much is a Merlot (thats a bit of trivia for all you wine / movie freaks out there).

Why does this bother? Simply put I’m tired of movies being pretentious when they often have no right to be. On paper Sideways is a fantastic movie. It had a cute script, great actors, and got released at the right time. Only thing that bites me is somewhere along the line the whole thing starts to come off like its above its audience. Many movies do this, and even if they are help up by critics as the greatest film since Raging Bull I seem to walk away with a chip on my shoulder.

Recently I was recommended a film by the name of A Cock and Bull Story: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The movie in question is a British comedy and early into the film it seemed to have a lot of potential. Unfortunately as the film wore on it wallowed in its own cleverness a bit to much. Somehow it went from a rather smart piece of cinema to something that resembled a party goer that managed to get the room to laugh early in the evening, and then spent the rest of the night admiring itself for that oh so humors thing it did however many minutes ago. Unfortunately this is not even the worst offender on my list of movies that had potential but rubbed me the wrong way.

After hearing the endless buzz around Juno I was exited to see the film. Everyone and their dog were praising it for all the right reasons. Not only that but the writer of the screen play is a bit of an underdog and it just worked in terms of a feel good story of the year. Sadly upon watching the film I couldn’t help but feel as if my contemporaries were blinded by the ‘feel good’ aspect and failed to notice the whole thing tried way to hard to be hip. Everyone knows the number one rule of being cool is trying to be cool will result in an instant fail. Thus no matter how many poles Diablo Cody gyrated on prior to becoming a success it doesn’t change the fact that Juno was an average film.

In short what I am trying to say is that if you are a filmmaker, please on behalf of all the film lovers out, there stop letting your films become bigger then the audience you made them for. Get your facts straight, tone down the smugness, and most of all be prepared to make fun of yourself. Otherwise I for one am not going to be watching…

Saturday night will mark my second venture to the 20th Vancouver Queer Film Festival. That evening I will be attending the premier of the Alexis Fosse Mackintosh (Let No One Put Asunder, 2004 Vancouver Queer Film Festival People’s Choice Award winner) documentary Confessions of a Sorta Str8 Drag King. After experiencing The Coast Is Queer on Monday night I am excited to see what else this festival has to offer. So far the experience has been of the highest quality and judging by the trailer for Confessions of a Sorta Str8 Drag King that experience should hold up nicely on Saturday night. I encourage all of you to get out to the Vancouver Queer Film Festival before it ends on Sunday, August 24th, and if you speak to any filmmakers there let them know they should enter their film into the Super U Out There contest. I look forward to reporting back about Confessions of a Sorta Str8 Drag King come Monday.

As we all know Summer is the time of the huge block buster. The moving going public seems to find the best way to beat the heat is to go to an air-conditioned theater and watch whatever mass marketed studio product is being sent their way. This isn’t always the best time for an avid film fan as it seems that the large majority of us are not always fond of big budget mass marketed films, The Dark Knight not withstanding. Luckily Fall is fast approaching and with that a number of trailers have hit he web that will appeal to both the mass marked while still getting hardcore film fans mouth watering.

The first of these is W. the Oliver Stone epic about the life of soon to be former president of the Untied States George W. Bush:

Needless to say the combination of Oliver Stone and a very timely film about one of the most infamous presidents of all time has a lot of potential, especially seeing as it will be released right in the thick of the upcoming Obama vs McCain election.

Next is The Road starring Viggo Mortenson:

The Road, Starring Viggo Mortensen

Although no trailer has hit the web yet there is a perfect storm starting to form around this film and many believe it is going to be Viggo’s best chance at an Oscar to date. I for one think he is over due thanks to his performances in A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, all be it in both cases he was simply over matched in terms of competition. Look for The Road to be released in mid November.

Finally we have High School Musical 3: Senior Year…

Just kidding – The final film on my Fall cross over list is Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the continuation of Seth Rogen’s takeover of comedic Hollywood:

Directed by Kevin Smith this film is bordering on every indie comedy film nerds wet dream, no pun intended. I for one am starting to burn out on Apatow Productions, even if they have made every amazingly funny movie over the past 4 years. However seeing as Judd Apatow has nothing to do with this production (at least not officially) I’m willing to see what his protege Rogen can bring to the table when paired with a different, although equally skilled, filmmaker like Smith.

As stated in my previous blog post I attended, for the very first time, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Having only heard about the pervious years and not experienced it first hand I was curious as to what I would be seeing on the big screen.

What I ended up attending was The Coast Is Queer the Vancouver Queer Film Festival’s annual showcase of short films from local gay, lesbian, and transgender filmmakers.

Bookended by two very high quality – high production value short films, Hirsute & No Bikini, was a myriad of entries to suite the tastes of almost any film goer. Highlights included Laugh At Me, the incredibly coordinated Davie Street music production and Jane Blonde, the Butch Secret Agent putting a lesbian twist on a classic spy role.

No matter your connection to the gay and lesbian community, be it member, supporter, or curious outsider there was entertainment to be had at The Coast Is Queer. I encourage any local Vancouver resident to head on down to the 20th Vancouver Queer Film Festival before it ends on August 24th.

Earlier this week the 20th Vancouver Queer Film Festival kicked off with a bang (as discussed by our Super U Filmmakers blog). Tonight I will be venturing to the festival, specifically to Tinseltown to watch The Coast Is Queer. This will be my first time attending the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and I have heard nothing but good things about the experience. I look forward to viewing some high quality films tonight and reporting back to you tomorrow about the experience. Enjoy your evening and if you’re in the Lower Mainland make sure to check out the 20th Vancouver Queer Film Festival, it is running until the 24th of August and outside of the Vancouver International Film Festival this is as big as it gets in terms of film fests here in BC.