Smash Cut

The new English-language film by Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz, entitled Vinyan, has been leaving audiences sharply and passionately divided in their opinions about it, and to me that tends to be a promising situation for a viewer. I think it’s always good to leave a movie with things to talk or even argue about.

People are getting all twisted over it not only because it has the gall to kind of “recreate” the carnage of the 2004 tsunami that devastated much of Southeast Asia, but also because it locates, to a certain extent, an inscrutable atmosphere of pure evil in that region as viewed through the eyes of a “first world” culture.

Vinyan (which is a term referring to troubled spirits of the dead who lost their lives in a horrifying manner) tells the story of a European couple — played by international stars Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart — who initially thought their young son was tragically lost in that historic tsunami devastation. However, during a fundraiser to provide aid for needy third-world regions, they spot a child in a video clip that is a dead ringer for their own. Thus begins a harrowing Heart of Darkness-style journey into war-torn Burma to find him, and the couple soon learns the gut-churning “reality” behind cultures and nations that they once believed they understood and empathized with.

This type of unremittingly brutal trip into soulless horror isn’t anything new to Fabrice Du Welz. His previous film, 2004’s Calvaire (a.k.a. The Ordeal), did much of the same thing for backwoods Belgium. But I wasn’t too bowled over by Calvaire — it struck me as being a bit too derivative of the original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre — and admittedly even my relative openness to outré material gets a bit rankled by the apparent demonization of Southeast Asian cultures that may be going on in this pic (something that can only be confirmed or denied once I see it, I guess).

But there’s no doubt in my mind that Du Welz can crank out some haunting images, as Vinyan’s trailer and this opening clip reveal. The movie’s been picked up for distribution in the U.S., but no date has been set as of yet (it’s still in festival-touring mode).

Hong Kong cinema fan-fave director Gordon Chan is back! He’s probably best known for the 1994 Jet Li-starrer, Fist of Legend, a remake of the Bruce Lee classic Fist of Fury.

This time he’s tackling a classic literary horror-fantasy by author Liao Zhai, and trading chop-socky for a ghostly atmosphere. Entitled Painted Skin, this new release focuses on a long-ago general who rescues a stunning beauty from the clutches of some evil barbarians, only to find that her glamorous looks are maintained by some unusual appetite demands. The damsel with the dark secret is played by gorgeous Chinese actress Zhou Xun, but the real reason to get pumped to see this movie, in my opinion, is co-star Donnie Yen, who traded blows with Jet Li in the amazing classic Once Upon a Time in China II. Word on the street is that this pic is more romance that actioner, but that’s okay by me. I like Hong Kong fantasy romances with a touch of martial arts, a la 1993’s ravishing Bride With White Hair, so if Painted Skin even comes close to that genre fave, I’ll be happy.

You can check out an English-subtitled trailer for Painted Skin here. No word on possible U.S. distribution as of yet, so if you want to see this in the States, you’ll probably have to wait for a Chinese DVD release.

Red Cliff is Part One of action maestro John Woo’s sprawling historical epic that I’ve blogged about before.

It’s turned into one of the biggest hit movies in Asia this year, and hey, it’s just come out on a 2-disc, English-subtitled DVD set from Hong Kong! Even better, the release isn’t region-encoded and it’s NTSC, so you don’t have to have any special fancy-schmancy players to watch it.

The reason why this is good news for any of us fans who’ve been waiting for this film is that no U.S. distributor has been finalized as of yet, and even when that happens there are reports that Western audiences won’t even get to see it until Part Two is released so that the filmmakers can edit a shortened, single-release version for a tentative January 2009 unveiling. Now, perhaps this truncating and streamlining will make a better movie — I’m not one to say that a longer running time equals superior storytelling — but this DVD release does give one the opportunity to at least watch the first part and compare later. Or watch Part One and decide you don’t want to bother anymore!

If you’re interested in getting the Red Cliff DVD, and don’t have a nearby Chinatown hawking it, you can go here to purchase it. For hi-def hounds, there’s a Blu-Ray edition as well.

…if you live in the U.S. or Canada, anyway.

In a statement on the official website for his new doc Slacker Uprising, Michael Moore writes that “This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans.”

The reason for making this doc available in such a novel manner (Moore claims this is the “first time ever that a major feature-length film is debuting as a free download on the internet” in a legal manner, but I figure there has to be an exception to that blowhard statement) is that the filmmaker/provocateur thinks its essential to motivate everyone — especially the disenfranchised/disaffected “youth market” — into voting this year. As with all of his work, Slacker Uprising follows Moore around as the focus of our attention, but this time the setting is after the 2004 release of Fahrenheit 9/11, as he travels for 42 days across America, visiting 62 cities in a (failed) attempt to remove George W. Bush from office. His goal for the tour was to help turn out a record number of young voters and others who had never voted before, and he claims to have succeeded.

Will Moore’s muckraking tactics work for this year’s presidential race? Only you can decide that for yourself, I guess.

You can watch the trailer here, or go ahead and download the entire documentary here after you sign up with your e-mail account.

Why the exclamation point at the end of that headline? Well, Hammer Films is a British studio that was founded in 1934, and ended up being responsible for a ton of classic blood-red scarefests from the ’50s through the ’70s. Stars like Christopher Lee and the late Peter Cushing became genre favorites through international hits such as 1958’s Horror of Dracula and the 1959 version of The Mummy. Hammer movies were not only distinguished by their quality performances, inventive art direction and slick photography while done on-the-cheap, but also by the prodigious amounts of shockingly red blood. In fact, there’s a 1987 documentary about the studio that’s well worth seeing called Hammer: The Studio That Dripped Blood!.

But it’s been quite some time — over 30 years — since the last Hammer Films release (that being 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter, starring Lee and a young Nastassja Kinski). So it’s with great excitement that I report that shooting has begun on the first official Hammer production of the 21st century, The Wake Wood. Keeping up with the quality casting of the past, this feature stars Aiden Gillen of the acclaimed TV series The Wire, and the terrific British thesp Timothy Spall. (I love the fact that Spall can go from arthouse auteurs like Mike Leigh, to Hollywood via Harry Potter, and back to the indie U.K. scene with Hammer.)

The Wake Wood, which focuses on a young couple who face overwhelming grief after a tragic loss, is being shot in Ireland by director David Keating, thus promising some evocative locales and atmosphere. The title refers to the creepy town that the pair decides to move into in order to deal with their sadness.

You can visit the official website for the film here and read some comments by its key cast and crew. In addition, Hammer Films has an official website.

In a Sept. 21 blog posting, revered “Thumbs up/Thumbs down” Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert delivered some seemingly out-of-left-field notes on creationism.

Fans and readers are now wondering if the fella’s gone off his rocker (in the sense that nothing he’s written/said in the past would’ve led anyone to believe he was a follower of that school of thought) or if his site was hacked. I’m guessing the latter.

You can read the posting here.

Here’s some terrific footage from an upcoming Thai no-holds-barred hoop-shooting flick called Fireball. Survival-style basketball? Sounds good to me!

If that cover art doesn’t blind you, then this music video by macho Japanese superstar Riki Takeuchi is bound to make your eyeballs burst in a spasm of whacked-out joy.

Who’s Riki Takeuchi, you ask? He’s one of Japan’s top actors in its wildly popular direct-to-video (or “V-cinema”) market. He might be most familiar to Western viewers from films that actually crossed over into theaters and DVDs out here, like Takashi Miike’s deliriously excessive yakuza flick Dead or Alive, or Kenta Fukasaku’s Battle Royale II, the forgettable sequel to the smash hit from 2000 directed by Fukasaku’s father.

Like a lot of Asian movie stars, Riki T. also pimps it up as a pop singer, and his new album, Ma-Tsu-Ri, is tailor-made for a late night of shōchū-fueled mayhem and raising hell in Ginza. Even Amazon Japan declares that with Ma-Tsu-Ri, “Riki has started a rampage through the city!”

Don’t believe me? Well, feast your eyes below as the tough guy’s tough guy hammers a taiko, hoofs it as his name blazes overhead in lights, and kicks a bear’s ass! (And if you wanna visit his official website, “Riki Project,” it’s here.)

Ah, bless you, Steven Seagal, not only for your bone-cracking action, tasty energy drink, soulful music, and trend-defying ponytail, but also for your astute political aptitude.

Check out Mr. Seagal at — of all places — Best Buy, as he pontificates about the current Republican party candidates and various other meaningful topics here.

Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, those are scribe Alan Moore’s very own words describing his feelings about Zack Snyder’s forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen, the groundbreaking, decades-spanning superhero epic that originally appeared in comics form courtesy of Moore and artist Dave Gibbons in 1986.

Moore has famously loathed Hollywood for quite a period of time and has never seen a single cinematic version of any of his work (which includes the Victorian era fantasy The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Johnny Depp-starring Jack the Ripper exposé From Hell). The much-ballyhooed, long-awaited Watchmen film is already smarting from the studio-related legal wrangling that’s been going on and which threatens its scheduled March 2009 release date, and I imagine that Moore’s remarks, which appear in the L.A. Times blog, won’t help in any way.

Still, don’t let Moore’s Tinseltown-directed vitriol make you think that he hates movies in general. One pic that he does encourage you to see, and which features him in it, is The Mindscape of Alan Moore, an experimental documentary that probes into the life and mystical/magical beliefs of the author. You can see the trailer for it here.

The full interview with Moore can be read on the L.A. Times blog.