Randall Lotowycz
Evolution
Not every movie we managed to see this year’s Fantastic Fest could get a full review or discussion. There’s just too many and not enough time. However, we wanted to share as much as we could, so here are some quick thoughts and first impressions on films screened.
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If Cloud Atlas and Adaptation had a lovechild who grew up to be the coolest kid in school, it would be named Zoom. This feature directed by Pedro Morelli and written by Matt Hansen dazzles with kinetic style, effectively weaving three narratives together into a singular study of the standards of beauty and the creation of artist works.
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“God exists. He lives in Brussels.”
With those lines, The Brand New Testament begins.
Fueled by a playful exuberance reminiscent of Jeunet’s Amélie, this new film by Jaco Van Dormael explores the writing of a “Brand New Testament” by the 10-year-old Ea after she leaves behind her curmudgeon of a father, who is in fact God (the Old Testament one through and through, delighting in creating the annoyances that plague mankind from his relic of a desktop PC) and her quiet mother who sputters around their drab apartment embroidering, vacuuming, and admiring her baseball card collection. Ea wasn’t the first child to leave the household. Her brother JC (i.e., Jesus Christ) left and never returned, though a statue of him comes to life in Ea’s bedroom, offering himself as a sounding board for his younger sister.
Read MoreIn 2011, DC Comics made the surprising and controversial decision to reboot their entire line of comics, erasing years of continuity and starting fresh. In promotional images for the reboot, all their main characters had new costumes designs that reflected this new era. No longer were DC’s heroes clad in spandex. The red trunks Superman famously wore for decades were gone. His costume (and the costumes of his peers) more resembled battle-ready armor. But unlike the rest of the Justice League, Superman was featured in a second promotional image with a completely different and even more surprising outfit—a t-shirt and jeans.
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Few recent films series have successfully infiltrated the collective pop culture consciousness as The Human Centipede series has. Even if you’ve never seen one of the films, you’ve certainly heard of them. More often than not, when bringing up the series, I hear, “I’ll never watch it,” or “That’s disgusting.” Of course, my favorite response is, “They made more than one?” Because after one film in which a depraved lunatic sews his live victims together ass-to-mouth to create the titular human-arthropod hybrid with a single digestive system, is there really more to be said? Writer-Director Tom Six certainly thought so. After unleashing The Human Centipede (First Sequence) in 2009, he upped the ante from a three-person centipede to a twelve-person one in 2011’s The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). Instead of a traditional sequel where the evil Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) strikes again, the follow-up went the meta route, taking place in a world like ours, where The Human Centipede is just a film and a deranged fan of the film named Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) set out to make his own horrible, “100% medically accurate” creation. Now Tom Six is back with The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence), making good on his promise (i.e., threat) of a trilogy.
Read MoreOver the weekend, David Ayer, director of the upcoming Suicide Squad film, debuted the first image of Jared Leto as the Joker. The look garnered a great deal of response – both passionate hatred and accepting optimism. But the vocal and emotional reaction is unsurprising. The Joker has been around for 75 years, and he means a lot of things to a lot of people. With this new Joker in our midst, it has inspired me to reminisce about some of my favorite looks of the Clown Prince of Crime.
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Art by Mahmud A. Asrar
For those who haven’t been keeping up on the 52-year long soap opera that is the X-Men, the founding members of the team—as they were in the 1960s—have traveled to the present and got stuck there, potentially damaging the whole of space-time continuum if they remain. And in the latest issue of All-New X-Men (#40 to be exact), Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, is outed by Jean Grey, his mind-reading teammate. He’s gay… and crushing on teammate Angel to boot!
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Furious 7 opened over the weekend with the largest box office debut in the 14-year-old series. The upward trajectory of the franchise has been astonishing especially when it seemed all but exhausted after The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006. The appeal of this big, loud, and silly series is undeniable. Wesley Morris, film critic for the Boston Globe, summed it up perfectly when he called the franchise “the most progressive force in Hollywood.” Short of a LGBTQ character or two, the series reflects today’s world better than most.
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One of the highlights of last year’s Fantastic Fest was Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about a film that never got made. It’s fitting that a stand out from this year’s festival is a documentary on a studio that perhaps made too many movies. The studio was Cannon, and the crowd-pleasing documentary is Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.
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Danny Peary’s Cult Movies series has been loved for decades. Before the dawn of the internet, his books were many film lover’s gateway into the odd corners of cinema. Recently I was given the opportunity to edit a series of ebooks culling the material from these books, repackaging them in genre-specific collections, starting with Cult Horror Movies. The strength of his writing left little room for revision, though the new releases afforded Peary the opportunity for minor updates and tweaks (think of it as an Author’s Cut), as well as adding HUGE checklists for additional cult movies in each genre. These lists bring so much joy to my geek heart.
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