Kim Jee-woon has only directed six feature length films, some of which are considered  nothing short of masterpieces by films experts and fans alike, the rest still being excellent bodies of work.  A tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life are two that stand out the most among his short but memorable pallet. One a dark and violent tale of a broken man out for revenge, the other a creepy dip into the horror genre, but more so a deep character study, and some superb story telling.  You might call I Saw the Devil a combination of the two. Though it lacks the “horror” elements of Tale of Two Sisters, it still embodies Kim’s ability to carefully craft some truly memorable characters, and tell a rich story in the process. And like A Bittersweet Life, you can expect some truly brutal violence. I Saw the Devil is violent, very very violent, and it doesn’t hold back one bit. It makes sure you as the viewer are squirming in your seat and almost feeling the pain being shown on the screen, and believe me there are times you will be doing just that.

The film stars two familiar faces who have worked with Kim Jee-woon previously. Lee Byung Hun (if you’re not familiar with Korean films you may know him as Storm Shadow from the G.I Joe movie) and Choi Min-sik, (a very prolific actor, but is best known worldwide for his work in Park Chan-wooks Oldboy). Lee plays a Kim Soo-hyeon, a political bodyguard whose life suddenly falls apart when his wife is sadistically butchered by a School Bus driving serial killer who is played by, of course, Choi Min-sik. Suddenly his mind can only focus one thing, revenge. He not only hunts down her killer, he starts to play a sick game with him, a kind of catch and release game that gets increasingly brutal at each turn. He is determined to do more then get revenge for his wife, he wants her killer to be the victim, and suffer as much as she did, and he will stake anything to do so, including the risk of losing himself to the vengeful darkness that has all but consumed him.

Choi Min Sik is disturbingly brilliant as the down-right revolting psychopathic antagonist; his very presence on screen is utterly creepy and can at times really make your skin crawl. It’s one of the best performances of its kind in a long time. That said what really makes his performance so memorable isn’t just how dark and intimidating he can be, but also how vulnerable he suddenly appears as his hunter strikes. As a viewer you might even catch yourself slipping into sympathy territory. Luckily his smug attitude and disgusting presentation does a good job of removing any sorrow you might start to feel.

On the other side of the token we get to see Lee Byung-hun at his absolute best! He does play a similar role that he did in “A Bittersweet Life”, but takes this character many steps further. He is the ultimate bad-ass in this film through and through, and there are times that I can guarantee you will catch yourself getting the urge to smile and cheer as though you just witnessed Superman swooping in a saving a damsel in distress.  However it’s not long before his character really does start to slip slowly and slowly into darker territory, and you begin to suspect that he may end up slipping up for the worse, and you just want to tell him to quit while he’s ahead.

As I said before, this film is very violent. However unlike the recent craze of awful “gore porn” that prides itself on nothing but displaying 120 minutes of blood, guts and boobs. The violence in I Saw the Devil is simply a means of enforcing the characters and their motivations. By the simple act of showing our hero’s wife’s brutal demise in graphic detail, we are given instant reinforcement as to how we should be feeling for the main characters. Your sympathy for Lee Byung-hun becomes immediate, and so does your disgust in Choi Min-siks serial killer character. Same can be said for later in the film when you see the brutality that comes out of the many confrontations that happen between the our main players, these evoke feelings that could simply never be felt the same if the violence was kept to a minimum or left entirely off screen. Sometimes, even when it’s pretend, visual representation can speak a thousand words.

-Jeff Wildman

After A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) exploded onto the American market there was a mad dash for cash with various other Spaghetti Westerns making the jump across the ocean, trying to steal some of that iconic fire stoked so masterfully by its director and star Clint Eastwood.  But for every valiant effort like The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968) or Death Rides A Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967) there is a horrendous train wreck of mystifying dreck.  While on hiatus from Star Trek (1966-1969), William Shatner saw a great opportunity to grasp onto the coattails of the Man With No Name and strike out on his own rampaging tale of Western revenge.  White Comanche (Gilbert Lee Kay, 1968) offered him not one but two vicious cutthroats to inhabit, and it may be a foul mess of a movie, but as far as curiosities go, it’s a must-see.

Shatner plays both the denim cowboy Johnny Moon and the Comanche savage Notah.  Moon has spent most of his life hiding from the treacherous crimes committed by his brother, and after narrowly escaping a lynching of mistaken identity, he vows to free himself of this burden by killing the bad seed.  The film opens with the twins confronting one another and agreeing to meet in the streets of Rio Hondo for the typical noon showdown.  Joseph Cotton, during that era where he practically lived & breathed only the sauciest of Italian productions (seriously, you need to see The Hellbenders, a film much much much better than White Comanche), does time here as Rio Hondo’s dutiful sheriff.  He reads his lines well, but he appears to only exist as a means to stretch the running time.

White Comanche looks and feels incredibly cheap.  Granted, the only versions of the film available to us are of the crummiest of quality, but even if we had the option to experience the Shat in full 1080p high definition glory I’m pretty sure it would only help in highlighting the shantiest of balsa wood sets.  It doesn’t help that television director Gilbert Kay appeared to have no idea as to where to place the camera, simply planting the frame where actors wander back and forth fruitlessly.  When you’re granted a low or high angle it’s a shocking breath of fresh air.  But possibly the most revealing sign of low economy comes from Jean Ledrut’s snoozy jazz score that drapes the entire film with a blanket of BORING.  There might be a spike or two of excitement when a knife is drawn or a pistol fired, but watching men on horseback traipse the endless landscape while this ear torture drones on is criminally painful and seemingly transforms the 93 minute film into a three hour plus epic pile of compost.

But dammit, Captain Kirk era Shatner makes the film totally worth it.  His good guy Johnny Moon is fun enough with his Eastwoodian cigar chomping and “You Talkin’ To Me” mirror smashing, but fans of bad cinema will crave the insanity on display with his psychopathic biracial warrior.  His Notah is one of the most vile and offensive portrayals of a Native American that I’ve ever encountered.  He’s a monster.  He’s introduced on screen leading a raid of hooting and hollering Indians (mostly Italian actors smothered in face paint) against a defenseless stagecoach.  As his comrades shoot white men in the back and hurl tomahawks across the screen, Shatner’s Notah laughs with bellowing cheer.  Shirtless and streaked with thin lines of war paint, Shatner than proceeds to brutalize Rosanna Yanni with an ease often found in the grimiest of Spaghetti Westerns.  And on top of all his savagery, he’s also addicted to peyote!  The cactus may grant him audience with the spirit world, but it also drives him into rages against his squaw and calls him into question with his people.

The film does climax with a fairly brutal shoot out between a couple of rival gangs hunting for the heads of Johnny Moon and Notah.  No need to go into the blah, blah, blah specifics of why, all that’s important is that it provides for a half dozen foreheads to get shot and one innocent kid to take it in the gut.  The miniscule production budget and Gilbert Kay’s lackluster vision gives the film a made-for-tv quality, but the sudden bursts of over-the-top violence reminds you that this is the land of Sergio Leone.  And the final confrontation between the two Shatners is incredibly epic and naturally shirtless—their screaming charge towards each other is shockingly bonkers and downright essential for grindhouse connoisseurs.

Look, I am a great defender of Shatner.  He shows tremendous emotional depth as Denny Crane in Boston Legal (2004-2008) and he’s the quintessential heroic lead in at least four of the eleven Star Trek films.  At the point of White Comanche, he was on his way to iconic status but he’d already done some serious time in the realms of theater, live television, and B-Movies.  With it’s gut wrenching racial intensity, The Intruder (1962) is still one of Roger Corman’s best efforts behind the camera and right here on this site I’ve already blathered on about the under seen Rashomon remake, The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964).  But one of the greatest aspects of Shatner is the ham side to his nature.  This is where you would stick Big Bad Mama(Steve Carver, 1974)), Impulse(William Grefe, 1974), Kingdom of the Spiders(John Cardos, 1977), TJ Hooker(1982-1986), and White Comanche.  The man goes all in with his performances, even when the scripts are laughable and the direction a joke.  It’s do or die with Shatner and that’s what makes these goofier efforts so dang entertaining.

Remember O Goddess from Yoon Jung Lee on Vimeo.

Remember O Goddess is the first time a backer from a Kickstarter campaign has actively approached cineAWESOME! about writing about a project. Not to say director Yoon Jung Lee hasn’t talked to me rather convincingly about her plans to turn the wonderful 25 minute short film I’ve embedded above into a feature film, but the level of passion and dedication that I see in the backers surrounding this project make this one to watch as they count down the last 5 days of their campaign. I regret not blogging about this film directly sooner, but the last month I have been finishing my graduate school thesis and was fairly sick for a week somewhere in there. So let me atone o goddess for my transgression and lay out why I think that this is an interesting campaign and one that has a potential impact on the Korean independent market.

I see many Kickstarter campaigns, and, when I can, I have been known to back projects that I find particularly important or interesting. Remember O Goddess is one that I would fund, if graduate school hadn’t wiped my account clean.

The quality of the short film is one of the reasons for this. It has an interesting noir aesthetic, a great acting turn by Kim Jungtae, and a good script. Even the model Choi A-ra is great as the store clerk. Unfortunately I have not had the time to sit and really write how I feel about this short, and how excited I was to see something that actually made me sit up and say “This is why I started writing about Korean film”, but Paul Quinn has been covering the film since the beginning of the campaign. His review over at Hangul Celluloid is not only a great review, but also matches how I felt when watching this.

The synopsis of the film from the Kickstarter campaign page:

In the middle of the night, a man reports the disappearance of himself to the police office. He has lost his memory. He can only remember from the moment he found himself left alone in an apartment. He tries to find any clue as to who he might be, but nothing comes out. When he plucks up the courage to go out, he meets a girl at a convenience store, who he thinks might know him. Instantly she becomes his only hope and joy, but when he returns, she has disappeared. Then his quest to find someone who remembers him becomes greater than his need for his own memories. Will he be able to reconnect with a lost love?

Kickstarter has gained a lot of headlines recently for recent wild successes (Google Double Fine, Amanda Palmer, or Order of the Stick along with Kickstarter to see what I mean). What attracts me to Remember O Goddess isn’t just the idea behind the film, or that it is a Korean independent film (something I believe strongly in), but that Yoon Jung Lee and her team have built a community of support around this project. Sure Jung Woo-sung (The Good, The Bad and The Weird) giving support to the project is impressive, but what strikes me are the passionate videos made by the backers.

This is an interesting project and if it succeeds (right now they are more than 88% of the way there and only need to raise another $3275 dollars so it is seeming like it will) I hope that it instigates more directors from Korea to take note and engage with a community that is there (even if it is international) to support them.

Yoon Jung Lee has done a remarkable job at running this campaign. She and her backers have created a sense of community that is imperative for a successful Kickstarter campaign. She regularly updates the Kickstarter page and has worked hard to get her idea out there to the community. This is a film that has a fully formed idea, has already proven its worth as a short, and has a cast and crew with impressive film work already behind them.

Again I will link to Hangul Celluloid (because really everyone should have that site bookmarked) and Paul’s interview with the director. This is a woman who has a vision, is willing to work hard to get it done, and most importantly has the confidence to get it done. Supporting this film not only supports Korean independent film, but Korean women directors, a voice that is sadly marginalized in a male dominated industry.

So go to this Kickstarter page and check out the information. Consider backing this film. I for one would like to see it made so we can all discuss it at next year’s Korean Blogathon.

Alua over at Otherwhere posts about Remember O Goddess.

Julyssa Diaz interviews Yoon Jung Lee over at Yam Magazine.

HanCinema interview.

Remember O Goddess Official Site.

Remember O Goddess Facebook Page.

Remember O Goddess Twitter.

When the film came out back in 1999, when Rob Schneider was already 5 years removed from his makin’ copies days at Saturday Night Live, 4 years from when he joined forces with Sylvester Stallone again in Judge Dredd, 2 years from his remake sitcom of Men Behaving Badly and a year from his ‘You Can Do It!’ cameos in The Waterboy and Big Daddy…

I’m sorry, where was I going? I actually had to sit back and stop the demonic images of Schneder in little undies taking hold of my mind once more. What I was trying to get at was he was a fresh faced comedic actor, who was finally being given the chance by his good pal Adam Sandler to take the lead role in a comedy made just for him. Directed by Mike Mitchell, who went on to direct the underrated Sky High and then direct tired and poor sequels Shrek Forever After and Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (get it?) and written by Schneider and Harris Goldberg (who wrote another film I’ll be sadly covering down the line, Master of Disguise), Deuce Bigalow is a simple tale of a pool cleaner/ plumber/ whatever water visual gags they can throw in to not make you laugh who happens to befriend a gigolo (played by Oded Fehr of The Mummy films fame). When Antoine Laconte (Fehr) needs to leave for business, somehow he trusts Bigalow just enough to watch his place, but if anything happens to his beloved fish tank, he’ll do nasty things to Deuce’s butt with his medieval weapons.

Don’t get me wrong, I like stupid comedies. But when something is so painful to watch and where I recorded how many times I laughed out loud (zero), giggled (zero) and had a little chuckle (twice), it goes into another plane of existence. But when you look at the box office receipts and see that while the film cost $17 million, it made back close to $100 million. Which means at the time, audiences were desperate for any movie to possibly make them laugh. Looking back at what was out its opening week, Toy Story 2 (a family movie) and The Green Mile (a drama) were on top and the only other comedic films in the top 10 were Dogma and the now classic Being John Malkovich, people seemed to gravitate more toward the film where constant dick, gay, fart and deformity jokes were wanted.

That’s not fair, because maybe people went into the film thinking they would get a very intellectual comedy, a sweet story with a man who just wanted to be accepted, to be loved and finally to have a career he could call his very own. Instead, they got Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. It was the first film in awhile, while re-watching it, I was shaking my head, checking my watch every 3 to 5 minutes to see how much more time was left and having stomach cramps from wanting to laugh but nothing on screen giving me that chance. One giggle I had came from William Forsythe’s usual chewing of the scenery, but even his constant ‘my dick is small’ jokes shriveled up like what he was supposedly packing in his pants. The other one, which almost resembled an actual laugh, was from Norm McDonald’s brief role as a bartender. I’d rather the film be about his character, stabbing patrons who can’t pay him in the eye with a swizzle stick. I would have paid to see that movie.

The movie relies on too many flat gags that border on making fun of people with disabilities or might be considered a ‘freak’ in some circles. One woman is giant, another woman (played by the wonderful Amy Poehler) has Tourette’s, while his own love interest has one leg. Oh my! Perish the thought! The funny thing is, this is the only thing in the film that Schneider shows some heart with. Yes, there’s stupid gags throughout, but he tries to actually give it some weight but then it becomes a cliche romantic comedy trope of a misunderstanding and non-hilarity ensues. The film is just desperate to make people laugh with the cheapest jokes possible, so when Deuce comes out in lederhosen, you should be laughing! Right?

I was never a fan of Rob Schneider in the first place. I tended to loathe his sketches on SNL, and in films like Demolition Man and Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, they had the right idea because less Schneider meant a more enjoyable experience. I know I won’t be getting a huge ad in Variety for writing this retrospective of Schneider’s work because I’m not as big as Roger Ebert. Which is perfectly fine, because I doubt this will change the minds of everyone who bought a copy of this film (twice for some) on DVD, to watch endlessly. There has to be fans of this film because 6 years later, a sequel came out, which I’ll be covering later on in this series (if I survive). Eddie Griffin is in the film as a pimp. It’s as funny as it sounds.

Maybe my funny bone has chipped away as the years have gone by, but looking back at 1999 when I was a stupid 19 year old in college, I didn’t like this movie much. 13 years later, my luck ran out when I decided to watch it again and actually dislike the film so much, I had to sit on the idea for a month before being able to write again. That’s a powerful film right there. I will never go back to watching this film, even when I check out the sequel. That will be enough time spent with this character and this universe, which is just a lazy stereotype. I think I’ll end this with a quote from the wise and handsome gigolo Antoine.

“Excuse me for a second, huh? Must make pee-pee.”

Rufus and James visit the Big Easy to hunt the most dangerous game of all. This double feature of Sam Firstenberg’s 1986 Avenging Force and John Woo’s 1993 Hard Target is filled with Wilfred Brimley, cajun love, and great mullets.

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“I hope you can chew what you just bit off.” – Vance Jeffords

The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950) is one of those special brand of films where all the players are vile beasts to one another, and as each back is stabbed (or face scissored) there is great delight to be had in their wretched and ultimately deadly antics.  If you’re a cheer for Gordon Gekko kinda filmgoer than you’ll relish the hate fueled battleground of Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston’s father/daughter routine.  Imagine that venom spit back and forth at your dinner table and you’ll want to spend your meals cowering on the floor with the family dog.  Of course, much of the film’s familial sadism stems from Mann’s desire to shoehorn Niven Busch’s novel into a King Lear adaptation (an obsession detailed in Robin Wood’s “Mann of the Western” essay found within the Criterion DVD; check it out, it’s fantastic).  This hotbed Western cares little for gunplay; focusing on psychological scar tissue as much as the revenge shed violence.

Fancying himself the Napoleon of the West, Walter Huston’s TC Jefford is a self-made cattle baron who rules his homestead, The Furies as a King would his kingdom.  He pays his workers in printed IOUs called “TCs” and nobody has the nerve to question his authority as long as business is booming.  But when the banks catch word of this monopoly money and as squatters begin to pick cattle from his herd, the widowed Huston goes digging for gold in the pockets of new bride Judith Anderson.

Barbara Stanwyck’s Vance Jefford has enjoyed a lifetime of being TC’s daughter.  When she’s not glittering with new jewelry, she’s flaunting her baroness power over her brother and cracking the whip twice as hard as her father.  As pa takes pride in his Napoleonic ego, she takes just as equal an amount of pride in her own “she fox” status.  And there is no room in her worldview for another women let alone a new mom.  Out come the scissors, and in a reflex of speeding rage, Stanwyck ignites an unstoppable war.

As opposed to Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the other Niven Busch adaptation, The Furies meanders less with its melodrama.  That’s not to say it doesn’t pack in the narrative with A plots and B plots and C plots, but it keeps its characters on track and does not wander off into an unnecessary two hour + running time.  There are at least two blows of cold blooded heartbreak for Stanwyck; one involving a Montague/Capulet-like romance with Gilbert Roland’s Mexican squatter and another with the calculating gambler tycoon Wendell Corey. Stanwyck wears the pants in both relationships and it’s refreshing to see her dominate both men even when the resulting devastation occurs.

But all that lovey dovey stuff is secondary to The Hate.  And it’s a long boil before Stanwyck swings with the scissors.  The first half of the film establishes a creepy, wonderfully grody Elektra complex between father & daughter, and the scenes where she unvexes him by scratching his sixth lumbar vertebrae while Huston’s face contorts to a shaggy dog grimace…just ick.  But what’s even ickier is the look of contempt on Stanwyck’s face when Judith Anderson takes over the back scratching.  That’s when the switch is flipped, that’s the moment when the audience first sees the potential for blood.

The flashier performances are certainly those of Huston & Stanwyck, but you have to give credit to Judith Anderson for excelling in such a shrill role.  Her Flo Burnett is no dummy, and she uses Huston as much as he uses her.  She’s a queen looking for a king, and TC Jefford’s broken ego is simple enough to manipulate.  She certainly miscalculates in turning father against daughter, but who could predict that backhanded compliments and sneaky book reading would lead to such an explosion?  Well, she probably did, but she probably also thought that she could chew what she bit off.  And she gets off easy.

In fact, everyone in the film gets off too easy.  And that’s the one fatal failing of The Furies.  As the war between father and daughter comes to a close and bodies have piled in its wake, Walter Huston and Barbara Stanwyck are too damn understanding of each other.  The script lets all these horrible people off the hook.  If we are to truly love to hate them, they gotta reach the end of the credits as much the monsters as they were at the start.  Don’t tell me there’s a lesson to be learned by these animals.  Just leave me with the S&M horror of Stanwyck addressing Wendell Corey, “You’d like to hit me…*SMACK* Now you’d like to kiss me.”  If only the Western genre of 1950 could have sustained this film’s midway point perversion.  Still, as is, The Furies is a twisted gem of hateful cinema.

Rufus, James and Billy find out that all work and no play make us go something…something… Crazy Sam Neill? Don’t mind if we do! Covering Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997) and John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1995) this episode is filled with our love of Sam Neill.

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After producer Roger Corman dismissed an abortion drama script from Jack Nicholson, the actor and director Montel Hellman travelled into the Utah desert to film a pair of supposedly less daring but absolutely cheap (i.e. profitable) Westerns.  Shot back-to-back in 1965, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind would see a theatrical release in France, but only reached an audience in the States via the rare television showing.  The year 2000 saw a DVD release of The Shooting, but despite a brief streaming run on Netflix, 40 plus years after its release Ride in the Whirlwind is still waiting for some distribution love.  However, those lucky enough to live near the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland were treated to a couple of big screen presentations as part of their current Jack Nicholson retrospective.  The three month event was kicked off with The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) and As Good As It Gets (James L Brooks, 1997) but the more bent and groovy locals should be more excited at the prospect of these oddball oaters than the other half dozen screenings of obvious classics.  Come on, Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Foreman, 1975) will always play the retro circuit, but how often are you going to see the furious eye rage of Warren Oates burning down Millie Perkins’ shrill vengeance seeker?  Not bloody often.

Of the two films, The Shooting is definitely the preferred experience.  Often cited as an existential Western and compared to the Kafkan nightmare philosophy of The Trial, The Shooting does seem to have its head in the clouds of a pulsing counter culture.  But it’s just as likely that Nicholson, Hellman, and Carole Eastman (the Five Easy Pieces screenwriter credited here as Adrien Joyce) were reaching for deeper meaning as a way to distract from the budgetary restraints.  There are only 11 names cited to the cast, and the film spends most of its running time confined to just four faces and a desert set.  When you don’t have the tomahawks to throw or the saloons to parlay inside you gotta get trippy with the metaphor.

When former bounty hunter Warren Oates returns to his mining camp to discover that his brother has fled and his partner Leland has been shot dead, he must piece the puzzle of the murder together with the aid of dullard Will Hutchins.  There are whispers of a possible retaliation killing as a result of a midget or child being trampled in the streets of a neighboring community, but before he can even really begin to wrap his head around that mystery, Millie Perkins stumbles into their base with a profitable proposition.  She offers the men a thousand dollars to lead her through the desert and into the town of Kensington.  Despite her grating rudeness and the perfectly healthy horse she left rotting in the canyon, Oates agrees to take her money and the three march into the sun.

Soon it becomes obvious that Perkins is not simply traveling, but participating in a manhunt.  For whom, we’re not told.  But it’s simple to guess.  Perkins is a vile creature.  She spits contempt at Oates with ease, and her manipulation of Hutchins’ pathetic pining is downright painful to watch.  She made her screen debut in The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959) but the hateful unnamed woman here seems light years apart from that tragically doomed girl.  Some have dismissed her performance as frankly irritating, but her anger feels incredibly real; she has a cruel, piercing manner of speech that may be deemed annoying but is definitely assaulting.  Her motives remain mysterious and that makes her a little easier to despise…at least when it’s so easy to root for the man’s man of Warren Oates.

Oates performs his Bounty Hunter turned miner as a put upon Man of the West.  There are brief glimpses into his nefarious past, but he’s now attempting the honest if foolhardy profession of prospecting.  It’s easy for fans of the genre to root for the man.  It’s all in his mug.  He’s lived that life, beaten down by it all, but he keeps going.  That’s Warren Oates in cinema.  He’s the Cockfighter.  He’s the Headhunter.  You don’t mess with him, you should just let him be…but that’s never how it works out.  There’s always someone to get in his way.  For The Shooting, he simply can’t siphon a thousand dollars from Millie Perkins, he also has to tangle with the snake Jack Nicholson.

As the manhunt trails further from civilization and deeper into the barren wastes, Nicholson creeps from the horizon line background and into the inevitable gunsmoked climax.  His Billy Spear is dressed all in shiny black leather, a hired gun with gloved hands that have never cracked a nail let alone done an honest day’s labor.  And he’s got that cheeky evil Jack Nicholson smile and that nasally biting voice that’s scary in that schoolyard bully kinda way.  He’s got it all figured out and his confidence is as much a weapon as his quickdraw.  Joining the manhunt late in the game, he’s the main threat to Warren Oates’ might-as-well-forget-about-it quick dollar.

There is a definite slow pace to The Shooting and it’s the type of film that would quickly be labeled a “slow burn” these days.  Besides the actors and their performances, what works so well in the film is the oxymoronic open claustrophobia of the desert.  The audience is stuck with four actors.  They keep going.  But the destination feels impossible.  There’s a futility to their action; no matter how hard they fight for them, their goals will not be met.  The barebones, cheapskate plot might skate by on atmosphere, but looking towards those pretentious, trippy possible metaphors, The Shooting is an excellent exploration of anger.  It keeps the motives and backstory close to its chest, and relishes in not spoon feeding the audience answers.  You might scratch your head, or shrug your shoulders by the conclusion but you’ll acknowledge a unique film amongst a normally cinematic landscape of A to B to C genre narratives.

Rufus, Billy and James brave the post-apocalyptic wasteland of germs and viruses with this double feature of Breck Eisner’s The Crazies (2010) and Alex and David Pastor’s Carriers (2009).

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1999 was kind of an amazing year for movies.  Sure, it’s the same year that knocked George Lucas off his geek pedestal as The Phantom Menace raped the childhood of millions of basement geeks (and the internet has never quite recovered)—BUT! after a decade of fairly bland and safe filmmaking, it climaxed with a barrage of New Classics.  American Beauty (Sam Mendes), Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze), Election (Alexander Payne), Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick), Fight Club (David Fincher), Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch), The Iron Giant (Brad Bird), The Limey (Steven Soderbergh), Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson), The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers), The Sixth Sense (M Night Shyamalan), Three Kings (David O Russell). Those are 12 movies I would have a tough time witling into a Top 10, and that’s a problem I haven’t experienced in the following 13 years.  Now, being the weirdo contrarian that I am, the film that crowned my personal Best List that year was a movie that barely made a whimper in the genre zeitgeist, let alone a dent at the box office.

It’s always hard to say what chances a film has with the public before it’s release.   Hindsight being 20/20 it’s incredibly easy to look back at a marketing campaign and scoff at a studio’s bonehead collection of trailers and TV spots (i.e. this year’s John Carter).  But, would the cannibal western Ravenous (Antonia Bird) found its audience if 20^th Century Fox had marketed it around the brilliant, experimental score of Michael Nyman & Damon Albarn instead of Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe?  Would the masses have rushed the theater if they had been given hints of the Wendigo terror instead of quippy, quirky one-liners regarding the consumption of Jesus Christ or Jeremy Davies’ “HE WAS LICKING ME!” screaming?  No.  I think not.  Ravenous was always going to be a small movie.  And that’s how we contrarians like it.  You tell me your favorite film of ’99 was the masculinity obsessed Fight Club, I counter with the equally machismo, but excitedly more demented Ravenous.  Fanboy win.

The film opens in the middle of a disastrous skirmish during the Mexican-American War.  As his men fall around him, Lieutenant Boyd (Guy Pearce) plays dead amongst their corpses.  Their bodies hauled and stacked behind enemy lines, Boyd crawls out from the pile of the dead and captures the Mexican Command.  He’s honored a hero, but his officers brand him a coward due to the nature of his sneak attack and banish him to the wilderness of northern California.  But Fort Spencer’s life of tedium is interrupted when a not-at-all emaciated Robert Carlyle stumbles down from the mountains with gory tales of murder and cannibalism.  With a pioneer woman’s life in danger, these Army outcasts form a rescue party in an effort to break up their day as much as reclaim their manhood.

Of course, the audience knows that Robert Carlyle can never be trusted and while the Fort Spencer miscreants make note of this supposed starving man’s exceptional physique, they probably should have left one more man covering his crazybrain ramblings on top of Jeremy Davies’ skittish man of god.  When the Donner Party cave of skeletons is breached and the real revulsion of the plot is revealed, Ravenous crosses the threshold of oddball Western and into the bowels of supernatural horror.

At the start of the film we have a snooty Nietzche quote, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster” followed quickly by an utterly contemporary zinger from Anonymous, “Eat Me.”  Yes, there is a definite humor to the proceedings, but this one/two jokey punch might tip its hat too much into the air of black comedy.  Sure, there is a lot of playful banter surrounding the philosophy of cannibalism but it never gets as broad as that “Eat Me” joke.  Ted Griffin’s (Ocean’s 11, Matchstick Men) script acknowledges the absurdity of the situation, but it’s never lazy enough to dismiss the violence or its effects in which the plot thrusts its characters.  The Life & Death elements are treated as such, and the physical and emotional pain that Guy Pearce experiences is shockingly genuine.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that Ravenous is the career highlight from Guy Pearce.  For a man who has been relegated into the land of Supporting Players (The King’s Speech, Animal Kingdom, The Hurt Locker) it’s nice to remember that pre-Time Machine (Simon Wells, 2002) flop moment just after the LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) explosion when Pearce had the potential to become “The Next Big Thing.”  Here, in 1999, Pearce spends the first 25 minutes of screen time in near silence, portraying a life filled with shame and self-disgust.  At first, to the Fort Spencer outcasts, he comes off as another arrogant officer, but it’s just his inward hatred stifling his ability to communicate.  It’s not until he encounters the Wendigo myth and how it connects to that battlefield corpse pile that Pearce can recognize his inward monster and eventually attack Carlyle’s overflowing Cannibal God.  And by the film’s climax you have two brutes bashing at each other with every available implement, be it cleaver, pitchfork, bear trap, or tree branch.  Robert Carlyle as monster is to be expected, but Guy Pearce’s transformation from weakling to beast is tremendous.

Ravenous might have started its production in turmoil with director Milco Mancevski (Before the Rain) separating for those infamous “Creative Differences” and replacement director Raja Gosnell (Home Alone 3) making way for the Robert Carlyle supported Antonia Bird (Priest), but thanks to striking performances from its two leads, and a smart and genre reverent script from Ted Griffin, Ravenous deserves more than a little love from Western enthusiasts.  It might not ever hit those Fight Club or Matrix numbers, but it’s time for it to claim some serious cult status.