Hollywood is Insulting You (but would still love your cash)

Our culture is lightning paced and global connectivity is at a historic high.  It makes sense that film studios would want to capitalize on excellent filmmaking in other countries by introducing it to citizens of the USA, yet how they go about this process has all the grace and finesse of dentistry with a chainsaw.  From re-making a film mere months after it is released internationally, to recording audio overlays that literally scrub a facet of an actors performance, let us enter the world of appropriation for cash.

Allow me to clarify by saying this: Not All Remakes are Bad.  Some Are Awesome.
I am specifically referring to the constant barrage of remade foreign films that are released as soon as the studios are able to crank them out; the Americanization of great stories that can stand on their own.

This current process of remaking foreign films results in (most often) a low quality product that is neither fine art nor decent storytelling.  There ARE some success stories, these must be noted, but they don't get a free pass either (we'll explore that later on).

Let's kick off the quality angle by examining some truly wretched remakes of wonderful films.

The Eye
Original
Summery:
"A supernatural thriller, which has redefined fear for Western audiences by offering a glimpse into Eastern rituals and attitudes surrounding death."  -Metacritic

Release Year: 2002
Region: Hong Kong

Metacritic: 66/100
IMDB: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 64%

Positive Review:
"With its spooky first-person rendering of Mun's experience...blurred, tentative, disoriented...The Eye creates a world of constant and imminent upheaval."
 - Geoff Pevere (Toronto Star)

Negative Review:
"It's a definite display of talent, but without enough thematic richness to get deeply under our skins."
- Robert Denerstein (Denver Rocky Mountain News)




Remake
Summery: 
"A woman receives an eye transplant that allows her to see into the supernatural world. Remake of the Hong Kong film."  - IMDB
Release Year: 2008
Region: USA

Metacritic: 36/100
IMDB: 5.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 21%

Positive Review:
"An effective if redundant fright flick."
- Tirdad Derakhshani (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Negative Review:
"With every twist of the second-hand plot telegraphed far in advance, you don't need to be clairvoyant to see where this is going."

- Neil Smith (BBC)

[*REC]

Original 

Summery:

"REC turns on a young TV reporter and her cameraman who cover the night shift at the local fire station. Receiving a call from an old lady trapped in her house, they reach her building to hear horrifying screams, which begin a long nightmare and a uniquely dramatic TV report."  -IMDB

Release Year: 2007 
Region: Spain

Metacritic: Not Available
IMDB: 7.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%

Positive Review:
"A demonic, barnstorming, cinema verite horror experience that pulls few punches, fears no genre taboo, and reaches for the throat with delightful intimidation."

- Brian Orndorf  (BrianOrndorf.com)

Negative Review:
"Even though it's the third such effort to employ handheld camera in a zombie flick, this has more than enough shocks to hold its own."

- Kim Newman (Empire Magazine)

Quarantine
Remake of [*REC]
Summery: 
"A television reporter and her cameraman are trapped inside a building quarantined by the CDC after the outbreak of a mysterious virus." -IMDB

Release Year: 2008
Region: USA

Metacritic: 53/100
IMDB: 6/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 59%

Positive Review:

"A respectable, if uninspired, adaptation of... [REC], a Blair Witch-style variation on zombie movie cliches that might seem fresher had it not opened after veteran George Romero's grimly pared-down Diary of the Dead."

- Maitland McDonagh (Miss FlickChick)

Negative Review:
"Quarantine fails to correct some of the problems evident in its predecessor while also incorporating a few defects of its own."
- James Berardinelli (ReelViews)

A Tale of Two Sisters

Original

Summery:

"Based on a famous Korean folktale, this grim fairy tale is one of the most heart-breaking and unexpected movies about loss, guilt, and grief ever made." - Metacritic

Release Year: 2003
Region: South Korea

Metacritic: 65/100
IMDB: 7.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 86%

Positive Review:

"Ji-woon Kim may be the Korean David Lynch and his juxtaposition of seemingly innocent and suddenly searing situations is marvelously unnerving, as are the constantly shifting personalities of most of his characters."
- Tom Long (Detroit News)
Negative Review:
"We aren't meant to understand the story fully until the film's closing minutes, so the shocks and suggestions come in a muddled context."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)

The Uninvited

Remake of A Tale of Two Sisters

Summery:

"Anna Rydell returns home to her sister (and best friend) Alex after a stint in a mental hospital, though her recovery is jeopardized thanks to her cruel stepmother, aloof father, and the presence of a ghost in their home."  - IMDB

Release Year: 2009
Region: USA

Metacritic: 43/100
IMDB: 6.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 31%

Positive Review:

"As far as PG-13 Americanizations of Asian shockers go, it's about 70 percent passable."
- Fernando F. Croce (CinePassion)

Negative Review:
"Take a concept, strip it bare of all layers of meaning, remake it with added genre cliches and scantily clad American teens in order to pander to a wider audience. Voila."

- Mike Edwards (What Culture)

These three films that show a disturbing dip in quality when remade with American audiences in mind.
  

Do the studios responsible have a deep level of contempt for their audience or are these terrible remakes simply the product of rushing to cash in on the hit of another culture?
The truth probably lies closer to the latter, yet the taste left in this connoisseur's mouth is that of the former.

This begs the question, if time has (in general) shown the quick, shoddy remakes to be inferior products, why even bother?  Why can't these studios, instead of buying the rights to remake, buy the distribution rights and market the high quality original film?  Between many Americans being perceived as too lazy to read subtitles and rampant xenophobia within our culture, it is possible that many large studios just don't feel as though the risk is worth taking.

For more solid films that have had less-than-flattering remakes, here is a short list to research (these are just films that I have seen, there are many more):

Ju-On/The Grudge

Ringu/The Ring

Dark Water Original/Remake

Pulse Original/Remake

They Are Around Us/Shutter

But wait, the knowledgeable movie lover responds, there exist remakes of foreign films that are actually quite good!  In order to discuss the next issue, filmmaking integrity and morality, let us first take a comparative look at two remakes that were very well received upon domestic release. 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Original

Summery:

"A journalist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by a young female hacker." - IMDB

Release Year: 2009
Region: Denmark

Metacritic: 76/100
IMDB: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 85%

Positive Review:

"Appreciation of the film relies more on the performances than the problem-solving, and Rapace delivers a complicated and deliciously contrary performance that tattoos Lisbeth Salander straight onto the brain."
- Peter Howell (Toronto Star)

Negative Review:
"[W]hile the film offers silly fun for a while, its ultimate schizophrenia and self-seriousness become its undoing."

- Jeremy Heilman (MovieMartyr.com)

Remake

Summery:

"Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker." - IMDB

Release Year: 2010
Region: USA

Metacritic: 71/100
IMDB: 8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

Positive Review:

"It's certainly worth seeing if you missed the original. If you saw it, however, there's no way of unseeing it, and nothing in the new one to top it."

- Joe Morgenstern (Wall Street Journal)

Negative Review:
"Seeing Fincher's version is like getting a Christmas gift of a book you already have."

- Richard Corliss (TIME Magazine)

Let The Right One In
Original
Summery:
"Oscar, an overlooked and bullied boy, finds love and revenge through Eli, a beautiful but peculiar girl."
-IMDB  

Release Year: 2008
Region: Norway

Metacritic: 82/100
IMDB: 8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%

Positive Review:

"The film is a bevy of contradictions - beauty and horror, young love and violence, innocence and guilt. The fact that it works at all is impressive. The fact that it's a mind-blowing sensory experience is inexplicable."

- Simon Miraudo (Quickflix)

Negative Review:
"A limited how-to on efficiently cracking necks after biting and draining them. But whether this frosty Nordic couch potato vampire gore is your cup of bodily fluid, will depend on your preference for bloodsucker cinema as a dish best served cold."
- Prairie Miller (NewsBlaze)

Let Me In
Remake of Let The Right One In
Summery:
"A bullied young boy befriends a young female vampire who lives in secrecy with her guardian."
-IMDB  

Release Year: 2010
Region: USA

Metacritic: 79/100
IMDB: 7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 89%

Positive Review:

"There was no good reason for this movie to exist beyond a lazy American disinterest in subtitles. But having said that, it's pretty great on its own."

- Dave White (Movies.com)

Negative Review:
"A striking picture to study, but a blunt, condensed take on the source material, sacrificing an unsettling sense of macabre harmony to keep elements blocky enough so they might be appreciated by a wide, profitable audience."

- Brian Orndorf  (BrianOrndorf.com)

Both remakes listed above are good, solid examples of filmmaking, and they both garnered (mostly) positive reviews while under-preforming at the box office.

What is the issue then with these films?

The facade of quality starts to unravel when the viewer simply stops to ask why the films were re-made in the first place.  Like the most of the terrible remakes shown, as soon as the original started gaining ground as a self-contained work of cinematic art, screenplays were penned to profit from the success of another.

Money is a huge motivator and the only difference between the quality of the Americanization of, say, REC and Let The Right One In would have to fall upon the shoulders of the people involved.

Why do these stories NEED the Hollywood rework when the global community has largely accepted the original already?  Do we view ourselves as being above the rest of the world, that our films are so much better than anything other countries produce (South Korea has already shot that notion the hell down)?

In essence, what we are dealing with here are the same money-grubbing, spotlight-stealing tactics...yet somehow many people find it acceptable in the case of Let Me In and Dragon Tattoo simply because the final product was one of high quality.  Is quality really the threshold of morality or decency?  What if you wrote/directed a film, then your studio sold the rights just as people started recognizing your work?  

It is reasonable for every crew member and fan of foreign films to be angry beyond belief when an English language remake is in the works before the theatrical run of the original version has even completed.

There is another aspect to consider, despite the intended ethnicity or sexuality of the original story, characters are often white-washed and women become sexual objects in many Americanized renditions.  These aspects alone are reason enough to stand up against such films, despicable corporate motivations aside.

The low level of literacy in the USA probably has a huge factor in the decision making process of the number-fueled accountants who run the companies that determine our media consumption.  If Hollywood is simply remaking due to the literacy issue, then they are directly insulting your intelligence by assuming that you cannot read fast enough to keep up.

I've heard people defend "good" remakes of foreign films by asserting that they are quite different than their counterpart; I would argue that if they are different to a degree that justifies their existence immediately after the original was released, then change the name of the film and make it original.

This will never happen.
Remakes exist because there is a market for the original film that a studio wishes to leech off of and expand.

It would appear as though artistic merit and storytelling genius have a greater amount of sway overseas than they do here.

The film-going public should not be considered cows to be blindfolded then milked.
Think globally and benefit from it.

With this in mind, vote with your wallet. 

Buy foreign films and speak out against their cringe-inducing remakes. 

Happy viewing,

Josh Evans  

DoubleTap Review: Funny Games and God Bless America

As of late, I have been lucky enough to view a film that really blew me away.  The film I refer to is God Bless America and has a 4th wall breaking narrative that reminded me of one of my favorite films, Funny Games.

Funny Games was initially released in Germany in 1998 and was remade by the same director in 2007 in order to connect with a wider audience.  This is one of the few times that I am fully on board with a remake as the second iteration of the story was facilitated by the creator of the first.

Both films (Funny Games and God Bless America) have my full support and will affect the viewer deeply in different ways.

Since I believe that no film can be properly reviewed using a "star" or "thumbs" scale, I have broken film-making down into its base components.  Not everyone watches a film for the same reasons so it can be nice to review the segments for what they are.

There are no spoilers in this review that are immediately visible.  If you see this {[SPOILERS]} then select the invisible/white text under it to reveal the information.  This will allow everyone to safely read the page without fear of ruining the film for anyone!

Film: God Bless America

Year: 2011

Country: USA

Premise: Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing to lose, he decides to off the stupidest, cruelest, and most repellent members of modern society.

IMDB Site

Rotten Tomatoes Site

Film: Funny Games

Year: 2011

Country: USA/Germany

Premise: A family settles into their vacation home, which happens to be the next stop for a trio of young, articulate, white-gloved serial killers on an excursion through the neighborhood.  You are one of those killers.

IMDB Site

Rotten Tomatoes Site







Story Evolution
God Bless America:
A charming, angry, and wry narrator draws the audience into caring about the situation long before the characters work their way into our hearts.  The story takes very few narrative turns but makes up for it by having such a strong and well fleshed out concept, that nary a second is spent looking at the clock during this film.

Funny Games:
The beginning credits are, in my mind, one of the most effecting/hilarious openings in film history.  The audience starts off thinking they know exactly where the story is going as the threat is introduced early in the story.  As the tale unfurls, the story manages to make the audience feel both interested in what will happen next and guilty that the events taking place are directly their fault simultaneously.  Funny Games is a great experiment in psychologically, interactive filmmaking.

Intellect
God Bless America:
This is a film that constantly asks big questions.  It occasionally insults the viewer and questions their validity as functional members of society.  This movie never stops taking on big societal issues and taking aim at everyone and everything in its path, expect to think and laugh a lot.

Funny Games:
For the most part, this nail-biter starts off pretty straight-forward in the intelligence department.  Every so often the directer subtly throws a question, statement, or acknowledgement toward the viewers until the film builds to a near conversation with the viewer as a participant in a blood-soaked discussion about the role of cruelty in entertainment.  The narrative ends, but builds to a large query in the mind of the audience, {[SPOILERS]} does horror, terror, and evil exist in life simply because we are, on some level, entertained by it? {[END SPOILERS]}

Character 
God Bless America:
Many of these characters are people you already know.  From entertainers to politicians to the couple next door who are eerily similar to the ones in the movie, God Bless America nails our current culture in terms of characters and how they affect society in general.  The two central characters represent two different, yet equally disturbed, points of view on the current situation in the United States.  Frank, our protagonist, is developed extremely well and his character arc alone is fascinating to watch.

Funny Games:
While the characters are not entirely fleshed out, they are given enough subtlety that makes the audience wish to know more about them.  The family and the two strangers represent two different sides of the viewers...this concept is tied very deeply to the central themes of the film.

God Bless America

Visual Tone
Both movie share a similar realistic yet slightly over-saturated visual tone.  God Bless America occasionally becomes very stylized in terms of color and execution, but both stay within an enhanced visual reality.

 Funny games

VSFX
God Bless America:
Some light blood fx.  An, offscreen, exploding baby was probably the hardest things to swallow, everything else was pretty light.

Funny Games:
I do not recall there being any discernible visual effects.

God Bless America

Audio
God Bless America:
Some great classic rock that enhances the overall anti-establishment feel.  There is a long and educational rant about Alice Cooper.

Funny Games:
Classical music and screams.  Really.  The opening scene has the best use of juxtaposition in audio to set up a thematic tone I have ever seen/heard.  Most of this soundtrack is forgettable, but you'll walk away laughing about the excellence of the opening credits.

Scare Level 
God Bless America:
There is no real terror (or even gore) to speak of.  This is a film that uses the violence as a counterpoint to the main theme.  The film has very little tension and very big ideas.

Funny Games:
You might feel played.  Funny Games is not funny but razor sharp in concept and tension level.  The audience often begins to feel guilty when viewing this film {[SPOILERS]} as it is made increasingly clear that the two antagonists are torturing this family simply for our viewing "pleasure". {[END SPOILERS]}  There is little relief and many who view this film (especially critics) leave feeling assaulted and insulted.  In my opinion, that's what makes this a gem.  It lures the audience in, then berates them for it.

Morality 
God Bless America:
When did we as a people become so narcissistic?  Why is it acceptable for television and internet culture to make people "famous" only to make fun of them in the process?  Do we care about the strangers around us or are they merely threats?
This movie presents a paradox {[SPOILERS]} in that the protagonist appears to have snapped due to a general lack of kindness; in order to promote this viewpoint, Frank sets out to kill those who "deserve it"...{[END SPOILERS]} This raises excellent questions to think over and goes into great detail about issues that need to be discussed, yet cuts it's own feet out from under the main argument in the process.  If the writing were less developed, this would be a negative thing but in the case of God Bless America, the central moral paradox only adds to the intelligent moral complexity.

Funny Games:
Violence.  Sexual humiliation.  Slow torture.  "We must never underestimate the value of entertainment" -an antagonist calmly explains.  This is a film that makes excellent points about the ethics of entertainment, but at the cost of being sometimes painful to experience...once again, this only enhances the message.

Final Thoughts

God Bless America:

"I would defend their freedom of speech if I thought it was in jeopardy. I would defend their freedom of speech to tell uninspired, bigoted, blowjob, gay-bashing, racist and rape jokes all under the guise of being edgy, but that's not the edge. That's what sells. They couldn't possibly pander any harder or be more commercially mainstream, because this is the 'Oh no, you didn't say that!' generation, where a shocking comment has more weight than the truth. No one has any shame anymore, and we're supposed to celebrate it. I saw a woman throw a used tampon at another woman last night on network television, a network that bills itself as 'Today's Woman's Channel'. Kids beat each other blind and post it on Youtube. I mean, do you remember when eating rats and maggots on Survivor was shocking? It all seems so quaint now. I'm sure the girls from '2 Girls 1 Cup' are gonna have their own dating show on VH-1 any day now. I mean, why have a civilization anymore if we no longer are interested in being civilized?"  -Frank

This quote occurs at the beginning of the film.  This movie is one intelligent and angry breakdown of society after another, you need to watch this as soon as possible.  God Bless America has a message that needs to be spread.

Funny Games:

I always recommend this film with reservations.  Some people, when quite frightened, resort to making jokes to break their own tension.  Films like Funny Games, I refuse to recommend or view with such people, as they will spend the entire time scared and loud, desperately attempting to be amusing at the expense of an excellent movie.  Oddly enough, that very attitude forms the groundwork for the thesis of this film, the concept of the place of fright and brutality in an entertainment context.
Who is to blame?
Why does it exist?
Funny Games has an wonderful title in that it is not even slightly funny (opening aside), yet the grim escapades bring great amusement to several characters who treat the ordeal as if it were a game.
How often do we do the same thing?

Happy Viewing!
Josh Evans

DoubleTap Review: Penumbra and Livide

I have recently had the good fortune to view several films that, to American audiences, are still on the fringe.

Since I believe that no film can be properly reviewed using a "star" or "thumbs" scale, I have broken film-making down into its base components.  Not everyone watches a film for the same reasons so it can be nice to review the segments for what they are.

There are no spoilers in this review that are immediately visible.  If you see this {[SPOILERS]} then select the invisible/white text under it to reveal the information.  This will allow everyone to safely read the page without fear of ruining the film for anyone!

Film: Penumbra

Year: 2011

Country: Argentina

Premise: A woman rents an apartment to an eerie man who she soon realizes has a strange link to the solar eclipse that is about to take place.

IMDB Site

Rotten Tomatoes Site

Film: Livide (Livid)

Year: 2011

Country: France

Premise: It is Lucy's first day as a trainee in-house caregiver. She visits Mrs Jessel, an old woman who lies in cerebral coma. Mrs Jessel supposedly possesses a treasure somewhere in the house.

IMDB Site

Rotten Tomatoes Site



Story Evolution

Penumbra:
The story evolves at a slow methodical pace.  The first act does an excellent job of setting up the characters and situation and the second works effectively at ratcheting up the tension without jumping the shark.  Act three comes and goes in a matter of minutes, leaving this viewer bewildered and disappointed.  There is a lot of great set-up in this film, but no real payoff.

Livide:
Act one is essential and gives all the needed information to connect the dots in act three.  Act two is short, sweet, and raises the stakes significantly, yet still refuses to show off the big twist.  The third and final portion of this film hits hard and lasts long.  Expect your heart rate to raise and stay raised during the entire last half of this film!  Every question will be answered and the ending is utterly satisfying.

Livide

Intellect
Penumbra:
Aside from gaping plot holes and frustration, this film left me with very little to think about.  Characters, especially near the end, begin acting out of character and start to do things that make no sense given the context of the situation.  At very best, the only intelligent thought I can extract from this film would be to respect the homeless...but that is a huge stretch.

Penumbra

Livide:
For the most part, everything in this film makes sense.  Aside from tying into mythology, there is not much to take away from this dark fairy tale other than a well-crafted sense of terror, horror, and satisfaction.

Character 
Penumbra:
As a film, Penumbra falls flat, but as a character study it mostly succeeds.  The lead character, Marga, is well developed (in several ways) and entirely dispicable.  She is a strong, independent, and rude woman who scorns those around her.  As Marga is the only character in the entire film who is given any depth and she is a horrible human being, it is hard to connect or even care about anything that happens in the film.  The audience is put into an uncomfortable position as the villains are only sinister until the plot twist (then they become very boring, very quickly), so there is really nothing to look forward to for the duration of the film.  Any dread that may build up dissipates every time Marga does something like {[SPOILER]} offer to sleep with co-workers to get ahead in her job or taser homeless men {[END SPOILER]} for example.

Livide

Livide:
None of the characters are extremely well developed, but all are given realistic and understandable motivations.  The movie holds much back about four of its six central characters and much is learned about them during the turmoil near the end.  My sympathy and connectivity to each character fluctuated as I learned more about each of them...this film plays the audience well.

Visual Tone
Penumbra:
Not much apparent post-processing was done to affect the final feel of this movie.  The look of the image is as straight forward as the plot (at least until it jumps the shark hard).

Livide:
The look and feel of the film at the beginning is quite different than the look of the images on screen at the end.  {[SPOILER]} During the first act the tone is very neutral, realistic, and straight-forward.  When we enter the second act, exploring the mansion, things get very dark and blue...still within movie realism but subtle pushing toward the abstract.  Act three has a bright, vivid fantasy look that is intercut with the dark, gritty blue from act two. {[END SPOILER]}

Penumbra

VSFX
Penumbra:
A single, poorly done, physical effect at the end.  Supposedly the shock moment, there is nothing terribly shocking about it.

Livide:
Clever blends of low budget physical and make-up effects with digital artistry.  From the sharp scares provided by {[SPOILER]} the physically moving tea-party dead animals to the perfectly integrated digital soul-moths {[END SPOILER]}, the effects in Livide are not particularly flashy, but that is why they work so well.   

Livide

Audio
Penumbra:
A delightfully jazzy soundtrack struggles for attention over the drama.  At times it was so out of touch with what was going on that I literally paused the film to make sure my computer was not playing music.  Would have been a great soundtrack for a romantic drama/crime movie from the 1920's.

Livide:
I have no recollection of this soundtrack.  An excellent score often only exists to heighten the events taking place rather than to be remembered, so this might be a positive thing.

Livide

Scare Level 
Penumbra:
Low to nonexistent.  There is some nice tension in the end of act one and during most of act two, but this is undercut constantly by poor performances, a lead character that deserves every bad thing that happens to her, and a silly soundtrack.  {[SPOILER]} There is a beheading and people shoot themselves in the face...although the effects for this are mostly just blood spatter. {[END SPOILER]} Minor gore at the end.

Livide:
Medium to high levels of tension in the entire back two-thirds of the movie.
{[SPOILER]} A moth flies from a hole in a girl's cheek, a girl's eyes are sewn shut on screen and a cocoon is implanted into her stomach.  Throats are slit using knives, fingernails, and a throat is ripped out with a character's bare hands.  A head is ripped from the lower jaw somewhat slowly as two characters pry with their bare hands.  Flesh is eaten and blood drunk.  {[END SPOILER]}  There are many very sharp scares, punctuated by occasional, yet fierce, gore-moment.  Parts were near the peak of my threshold, and I had to look away several times.

Morality 
Penumbra:
Female exploitation.  Marga wears a very revealing outfit, which would be fine given her character traits, yet at one point oil is rubbed onto her for literally no reason whatsoever.  The film never bothers to explain why, it only takes advantage of the fact that now she is quite oily.  {[SPOILER]} A female character is naked for a ceremony in which she is beheaded.  As the ceremony is never explained and there are a ton of plot holes, this detail feel quite unnessisary as well. {[END SPOILER]}  Everyone in the film is rude to one another and it appears as though everyone, except two characters, get exactly what they deserve.  The movie is written as though it is meant to mean something morally, yet never makes any statements.

Livide:
A character is rewarded for having good intentions despite not always acting on them.  Revenge is taken and we are meant to agree with it.

Final Thoughts
Penumbra:
Cleavage and attitude.  A single well-written character does not justify sitting through an entire film without any interesting ideas or concepts.  Everything here is trite and, for a horror film, the "horror" sure is rushed, unscary and unexplained.  It is not necessary to have everything in a movie be explained (I'm a huge anti-fan of narrative handholding), but it sure is nice to feel as though the events taking place have had at least some clues hinted at in the film preceding the big "twist".

Livide:
I cannot recommend this film enough.  The composition of the frames is beautiful and the pacing is spot-on.  Nothing is over-explained and there are many clues and tidbits scattered throughout the film, thus justifying a second or third viewing.  The scares are mostly genuine and the gore borders on being slightly too much (in other words, perfect).  I'm a fan of classic-style horror, fairy-tales (a la The Orphanage or A Tale of Two Sisters) so this movie was a treat for me.

Happy Viewing!
Josh Evans

Coming Soon to a Theater Nowhere Near You

Every year hundreds of films are made that will never be seen by the general public. Through this blog, I hope to not only give foreign and independent films/games good exposure, but to tackle controversial entertainment conversations that are currently changing the shape of the industries in general.

To kick things off, here are some films making the rounds already this year that not many people will ever hear about.


Baikonur

A Russian astronaut lands in Kazakhstan and is instantly claimed by a local dreamer.
Absurd?
Yes.
Interesting?
Absolutely!


Despicable Dick and Righteous Richard 

This documentary follows a crass and uncouth man on his road to reconciliation with all who he wronged in the past.  Is Richard still a dick or has he actually turned his life around?


DREILEBEN - One Minute of Darkness

Is Molesch the crazed killer the police pursuing him think he is?
Who is this young companion he has been sighted with?

The Girls In The Band

This thought-provoking documentary takes an in depth look at the history of female musicians over the years.  Their struggles, accomplishments, and sheer lack of exposure before now make this film a must see in my opinion.

Happy New Year, Grandma!

A horror comedy about a mute 88 year old grandmother who escapes her nursing home, seeking vengeance!

Hard Labor

Starting your own business can be a terrifying ordeal.  Helena's dreams of running her own store are complicated when her husband loses his job...and what is that black ooze that keeps bubbling up from the floor?  Who is this disturbing stranger with the sledgehammer?  Hard Labor is part sociological study in economical role reversal and part high-tension psycho-drama, sprinkle some horror on top and you have this little gem!

The Heineken Kidnapping

Based on a true story comes the tale of a wealthy man searching for the men who kidnapped and tortured him.  The actual kidnappers from the real life incident took legal action to keep this film from being released, but their efforts were in vain.  

Michael

You need to watch this trailer.  Now.  Terror and visual restraint go hand in hand.  Beautiful.

[*REC 3] Genesis

If you have not seen the first two [*REC] films, you need to immediately.  They are, to date, two of my favorite films of all time.  This new entry looks mega-camp, but still fun enough to warrant a view!

Sacrifice

A near-genocide is averted by a compassionate doctor who will, in the long run, have to pay a very steep price for his kindness.

The Sandman

Having nothing to do with the popular super-villain, The Sandman tells the tall tale of a man who finds himself leaking sand.  When those around him smell the sand, they fall into a deep sleep thus complicating our hero's life a great deal.  The film is both quirky (that's popular nowadays right?) and funny.

Sense of Humor

Two comedians use the wrong audience member to make fun of during a comedy tour of Canada.  The infuriated member of the crowd turns out to be a serial killer who traps the duo with the intention of slowly killing them for humiliating him.  Can these bumbling smooth-talkers save themselves with the power of speech?  Despite the dark subject matter, this film looks hilarious!

Any little known films being released soon or running the independent circuit that you are interested in? 

Josh Evans

www.JoshREvans.com