IFFR 2013 Review: DIEGO STAR Brings Canadian/Russian Injustice To Light

IFFR 2013 Review: DIEGO STAR Brings Canadian/Russian Injustice To Light
ARGO Wins Best Picture, Men With Long Hair Also Win Big At The Oscars
Here's Your First Look At Jackson Gallagher As Mark Hartley's PATRICK!
Contest: Win One Of 5 BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: BLOOD & CHROME Blu-rays
Film Comment Selects 2013 Review: WHITE EPILEPSY is a Noble Failure
Full Disclosure: Twitch's Lists of Shame - February (Part 2)
Yubari 2013 Awards Round-Up

Posted: 25 Feb 2013 02:00 AM PST

(Of all the places to get stuck in...) One of the many world premieres this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam was the Canadian-Belgian social drama Diego Star, about a sailor from Ivory Coast who is left abandoned near a shipyard in ice-cold Canada. Diego Star was also one of 10 films nominated for a Big Screen Award, a new audience-awarded prize that grants the winner guaranteed theatrical distribution in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Other titles nominated were Odayaka and Drug War (both reviewed here at Twitch). So is Diego Star worth checking out? Read on... The Story: The Diego Star is a cargo ship, stranded with a busted engine in a Canadian harbor. The Russian owner is quick to blame the technicians...

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ARGO Wins Best Picture, Men With Long Hair Also Win Big At The Oscars

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 11:00 PM PST

I must have been a mile and a half away from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood (just a little further than the remote orchestra that played many a selection of John Williams tunes tonight) for the 85th Annual Academy Awards, but I could have been ten thousand miles away. As the evening goes it was a pretty standard affair for wins, with host Seth MacFarlane and a countless slew of divas and Broadway stars singing and dancing to get our attention. As surprises go Ang Lee winning for his direction on Life Of Pi came a bit out of left field. The film won the most awards of any tonight with 4 total: cinematography, VFX, score and the aforementioned directing. Hands down the best things...

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Here's Your First Look At Jackson Gallagher As Mark Hartley's PATRICK!

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 08:00 PM PST

Thanks to director Mark Hartley, we learned the first image of actor Jackson Gallagher in character as the titular Patrick has been released. Hartley notes:Bankside Films have released the first image of Jackson Gallagher as PATRICK. The photo features a rare instance when he's not in a coma! Hartley, known around the genre festival circuit for his documentaries Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation, Machete Maidens Unleashed! and the anticipated Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, is tackling the remake of Richard Franklin's 1978 Ozploitation film Patrick. In the original film, Patrick is a comatose hospital patient who harasses and kills through his powers of telekinesis to claim his private nurse, Kathy Jacquard, as his own. Production company Bankside Films' logline is:...

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Contest: Win One Of 5 BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: BLOOD & CHROME Blu-rays

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 07:00 PM PST

The prequel series featuring young William Adama as a fighter pilot in the first Cylon War is out this week from Universal Studios, and we have five Blu-ray copies up for grabs. From the official synopsis: An all-new chapter in the "Battlestar Galactica" saga, Blood & Chrome takes place in the midst of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, the sentient robotic Cylons, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a young, talented fighter pilot, William Adama, finds himself assigned to one of the most powerful battlestars in the Colonial fleet: the Galactica. Though Adama quickly finds himself at odds with his co-pilot, the battle weary officer Coker (Ben Cotton, "Alcatraz"), the two men must set their differences aside when...

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Film Comment Selects 2013 Review: WHITE EPILEPSY is a Noble Failure

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 02:00 PM PST

White Epilepsy is the latest from the esteemed French visual artist Philippe Grandrieux (Sombre, La Vie Nouvelle, Un Lac).It starts with a back side of an androgynous nude figure in the dark accompanied by the sound of nocturnal insects. The movement of this body mass is slowed down and as it lurches forward and back, it reveals all the nooks and crannies: every vertebrae, every flutter of muscles becomes subtly visible in an eerie muddy visualization that has become the trademark of the French auteur's haptic cinema.While watching this 67 minute film, a sort of primal Adam and Eve story with no dialog, displayed in an inverted format (acting taking place only in a vertical rectangle in the center of the screen- like an iphone...

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Full Disclosure: Twitch's Lists of Shame - February (Part 2)

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 08:00 AM PST

Continued from here...Cinderella (dir. Clyde Geronimi/Wilfred Jackson/Hamilton Luske, 1950 USA)Winner of Golden Bear for Best Musical at Berlin International Film Festival, Nominated for 3 Academy Awards, including Best Original Score Charles Webb, Contributing Writer:First, a brief bit of personal biography before I talk about why I found Cinderella to be a chore to sit through. Before she married my wonderful stepdad, as a single mother, my mom worked an almost obscene amount to keep us in a home and clothes, meaning that a VCR wasn't a luxury we could afford during my formative years. It was only after my little brother was born when I was 17 that I saw any Disney animated films made before 1985 (that would be The Aristocats). It was maybe in...

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Yubari 2013 Awards Round-Up

Posted: 24 Feb 2013 06:30 AM PST

This weekend saw Japan's hardened genre fans head north to the wintry climes of Hokkaido for the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, an always-excellent parade of established and emerging talent from the country and surrounding region. Just moments ago, the winners were announced for the Fantastic Off Theater Competition, where five shorts and five features from new filmmakers duke it out for the Grand Prize of 2 million yen (approximately US$20,000). Previous winners have included Korean director Oh Young-doo's Invasion of Alien Bikini and Ishihara Takahiro's Osaka Violence. Last year's other big winner was a personal favourite of mine, Taichi Suzuki's The Brat!This year's jury is headed by the incredibly talented Tsukamoto Shinya, director of such insane works as Tetsuo: Iron Man, Snake of June...

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