Hello to everybody!!! I apologize for having this blog soooooo alone, without new posts in this last week; but the Sitges' Cinema International Festival of Catalonia have absorved me totally and, when I arrived at home every night, I was too much tired to, even, engage te computer... Master classes in the morning, lunching directly in sitges after university, and viewing movies till evening... oh my God!
So, in a certain way, this post will be partitioned in four volumes, because I want to talk about the experiences and movies I've seen in 9 days (27, finally... I'm sooo crazy!!!), and the post would be too much large, and obviously, tidy :P
Then, I decided to divide the post in this way:
- Thriller, horror, and gore movies.
- Noir and epic movies.
- Animation movies.
- Sci-fi and experimental movies (yes: Park Chan-Wook, Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike will be able to be found there :P).
Let's go, then.
* Chapter 1. Why USA makes always the same typical movies?
First of all, I must admit that I'm specially predilected for asiatic movies, concretely from Japan, China, Hong-Kong and South Corea. Because of that, the oriental cruelty provoques a general unenjoyment of yankee gore movies.
This is the example of Dead Silence, by James Wan; the creator of the Saw trilogy (there's a fourth chapter in preparation) decided to release a terror movie based a devil ventriloquism doll, responsible of strange murders. All the topical and typical clichés of any horror movie appear here (storms, abandoned buildings in the night, basements with no lights...); so, in conjunction with a soundtrack that announces every fear scene (that are really bad made), the result is an authentic bad movie. The only good detail in the movie is, as Wan always does in his movies, the last minute. I even think that Wan invented this last scene, and then he wanted to do a movie with this final; because the film is boring and typical and with no remarkable things. Really boring...
* Chapter 2. Different approaches to fear and suffering...
But it was the first horror movie I saw in Sitges. Three days later, two consecutives movies, WAZ, by Tom Shankland, and Black House, by Shin Terra, provoques a smile in my face and made improve my opinion about gore in Sitges Festival. I named this two movies simultaneosuly because two both have the same bad thing: the final scenes...
The first is a UK-USA coproduction, a untypical thriller mixing of Seven and Saw. I Say untypical because, although is certainly a thriller very similar to Seven (and, of course, also similar to all the thrillers born because of Seven, like the Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd co-protagonized ones), you know who is the guilty before the middle of the film!! And, yes it's true, the police main character, is typical, but Stellan Skarsgard is in state of grace with this role :) The movie works well, but only until the final scene, too much romantic and in a hated it-must-finish-well mood :( It's pitiful because to reflect how much pain you can suffer before kill a deared being is a ver interesting affair...
The second one, a south corean production, reflects the evilness of an insurance-cheating-thirsty society. The main character is an insurance agent that thinks that a man has suicided his own son for gain the insurance prince; but it's only the beginning... this agent will be evolved by a sick atmosphere of cheats and gore scenes based in cut body parts for gain more insurance money... a good movie, very direct and cruel (and cruent), although the final scene (the last 30 minutes) are too much hollywood-like; what a pity, because the movie works very very very well...
* Chapter 3. The japanese style of mixing horror and thriller...
After this, I must follow with two japanese movies between j-horror and thriller: Kaidan, by Hideo Nakata (the famous creator of Ringu film series) and the 2-movie-set of Death Note, by Shusuke Kaneko.
What can I say about Death Note? Based in self-named manga created by Tsugumi Oba with Takeshi Obata, tells about the son of a Japanese Police General that finds a notebook which kills the person who owns the name that is written in his pages. Light, this boy, decides to start a crusade to kill all the criminals and bad people, and this mission provoques an Interpol investigation, leaded by L, the misterious and rare P.D. (great interpretation of Kenichi Matsuyama). The film approaches horror scenes, thriller, moral dilemmas (is a good act to kill a bad person? what is a bad person, really? this aim deserves cruel acts for completing the mission, like killing good persons as a minor and collateral damage?), and the result is a good movie (divided in two 2-hour-films). Although the manga story is much altered, the result isn't a bad movie.The other movie, Kaidan, is a new kind of movie for Hideo Nakata. After doing horror using actual technologies, Nakata takes the rides of a historical movie, ambiented in Edo Age, treating of a woman, deeply in love with a guy (a beauty guy in the movie, but... the actor is incredibily ugly!!!! Oh my god!!!!), that dies because of a curse (born in a murder that involved some years before the parents of two both). After that, every woman that joins this boy are pursuited by the spirit of this woman (with scenes of clear reminiscence of Ringu, with the spirits appearing slowly and perfectly visibles). The movie rythm is a little slower than the ideal one, and thare are maybe too often horror scenes, but it isn't a bad movie.,although, is distant far of Ringu quality.
* Chapter 4. The French gore is arising
To finish this volume, I want to talk about the surprise of the festival (at least for me); À l'Intérieur, by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (that made act of presence in the projection I saw, and did a minor discurse :P). It's only 80 minutes of duration, but what 80 minutes!!!
Two women, one of them pregnant (the baby is intended to be born the day after of the day of the action), and the other, plenty of anger and illness, full intended to stole the baby, from his mother!! A collection of stabbings, hits, mounts and mounts of blood... an authentic war in a house between two women (and other minor characters involved in the action).Highly recommended movie, but pay attention!! If you found Saw 3 too much heavy and cruel and gore... forget this movie!!! But if you enjoy the classical Johnnie To or Takashi Miike gore scenes... this is your movie!!! So, congratulations to these two directors for this nice and cruel movie, and congratulations because of the splendid interpretations of Beatrice Dalle (the femme fatale) and the rookie Allyson Paradis (rookie but a very very very good actress!!).
No more for now. Over this week I finish the Sitges review of films (with my personal opinions, of course). Be happy and I hope this reading would have been constructive :) See you!!
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