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Slamdance 2013: All Wrapped Up

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Slamdance 2013: All Wrapped Up

Slamdance 2013: All Wrapped Up

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 05:00 PM PST

The 2013 Slamdance Film Festival has been over for 12 days now and I just don't want it to end, hence no wrap up of the festival... until now. Better late than never then. So without much fuss let's dive into my final thoughts on what turned out to be the best festival experience of my professional writing life thus far -- and that's a statement made nowhere near hyperbole.Since I went into Slamdance all by my lonesome, I'll be presenting this wrap up a little differently than what my colleagues did for Sundance. Below you'll find links to all of my coverage from the fest, and then closing comments on the narrative, documentary and shorts programs, including thoughts on films I did not have...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

The Stack: DIE HARD Blu-ray Box, DEADLY BLESSING, THE NEST, THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION, THE IMPOSTER, SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN, and TALES OF THE NIGHT

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 04:00 PM PST

Welcome Back to The Stack. I'm your host Dave Canfield here with a bunch of fun! In all seriousness, I am mucho grateful for all the folks who fired off the following releases for review. I'd barely seen ANY of these films before. Fox sent the Die Hard 25th Anniversary Collection. Shout Factory sent Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing, the awesome eighties monster schlock The Nest and th awesome bit of Sherlockania (yes that IS a real word) The Seven-Per-Cent Solution that teams Sherlock and Watson up with none other than Sigmund Freud. Other titles include a pair of the best docs I've seen recently, The Imposter and Searching For Sugarman, and lastly the incredible new animated film from master Michel Ocelet, Tales of the NightI. You can watch the entire episode...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

COLD WAR and THE BULLET VANISHES Top HK Film Award Nominations

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 04:00 PM PST

The nominations for this year's Hong Kong Film Awards were announced earlier today, and predictably, star-studded cop drama Cold War scored 12 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director nods for its first-time helmers Longman Leung and Sunny Luk. More suprising was that Law Chi Leung's The Bullet Vanishes scored the exact same number of nominations, and goes head-to-head with Cold War in nine of those categories. In third place, with 8 nominations, is Felix Chong and Alan Mak's The Silent War, although it failed to secure a Best Picture nod. That category is filled out by Dante Lam's The Viral Factor, Soi Cheang's Motorway and Pang Ho Cheung's Vulgaria. The Best Director nominees follow suit, with the notable exception of Pang, who receives a nomination...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Anime Review: KOTOURA-SAN, Episodes 1-4

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 03:00 PM PST

Best. Opening. Ever. Well, maybe that's a little hyperbolic, but not nearly as much as you're probably thinking. I queued up Kotoura-San because hey, why not: a light anime comedy about a girl who can read minds, and the way her psychic powers invariably get her into trouble? Might be good for a few laughs until I get tired of the fanservice, I thought, and then suddenly I was flat on the floor, crushed under the weight of some seriously dark, weapons-grade melodrama as the heroine's ability to overhear what people would rather she didn't know ripped her life apart over the course of a single ten-minute montage. Obviously it's not as if this was the first show I'd ever watched to speculate about how...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Singapore's First Police Action Thriller re:solve Gears Up

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 01:30 PM PST

For a city-state with a relatively low crime rate, police thrillers, or an action film in that sense, are somewhat conspicuously absent from the recent film scene in Singapore. At best there would be the sporadic police drama serials on television, but that's about it.Now there's something brewing over the horizon...re:solve, a police action thriller from Red Action Entertainment, Bettermen Asia, and mm2 Entertainment, is set to kick into production over the next few weeks. To be directed by Randy Ang, we finally get Singapore's action hero Sunny Pang returning home in a starring role, after plying his action craft up north in Malaysia with director James Lee in a couple of shorts and feature films. Word has it that Sunny's role is likely a...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Anime Review: AMNESIA, Episodes 1-4

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 01:00 PM PST

You've all come across something, a TV show, a film, a book, that left you silently mouthing "What the hell", right? Unable to figure out what on earth was going on? Now this is okay as ideas go, as the catalyst to start building a basic framework for your story and get an audience involved, but you need some meat on them bones, son! Much as I eventually grew to hate Lost - indeed, gave up on it some way into the third season - it's not as if I couldn't see its appeal was based around more than the question of what the island was.Amnesia (the Japanese animated show, not the psychological condition) is what happens when your story offers nothing of any interest...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Calvin Lee Reeder's Mindfuck, THE OREGONIAN, Now On Limited Edition DVD/7"!!

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 12:30 PM PST

It's been a long time coming, and I'm actually kinda late to announce it, but Calvin Lee Reeder's colossal mindfuck nightmare, The Oregonian, has finally hit DVD, and how!The Oregonian is out now in a very limited edition of 300 from Factory 25. The edition includes not only the DVD, but also a 7" of the soundtrack, a newsprint poster of the awesome green furry monster poster, and exclusive new art. The disc itself includes a short from the director titled Little Farm, as well.  The Oregonian was in my Top Ten Feel Bad Films of 2011 list, and it definitely deserves that spot. It is an atonal drone of a film designed to unsettle and disturb, and that job it accomplishes in spades. With...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

First Look at BELLFLOWER Team's Upcoming CHUCK HANK AND THE SAN DIEGO TWINS

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 12:00 PM PST

No one saw Evan Glodell and his Coatwolf team coming when their debut film Bellflower took Sundance by storm a few years back. That ain't gonna happen a second time. The rumbling sound you're hearing right now is the groundswell of support brewing for the crowdfunding campaign that Coatwolf just launched for their second feature, Chuck Hank and the San Diego Twins. Produced by Glodell and directed by Bellflower producer/composer/editor Jonathan Keevil, the film is described by Coatwolf as a "surrealist action/drama influenced heavily by '80s action films and side-scrolling fighting games like Streets of Rage and Double Dragon." Sounds like a riot. Both Glodell and Tyler Dawson return in front of the camera as well. Here's the official synopsis: A turf war has...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Sundance 2013 Review: WE ARE WHAT WE ARE Is Tastefully Macabre

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 11:30 AM PST

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: We Are What We Are is not a remake. Differing greatly from the original Jorge Michel Grau Spanish language version, the creative team of Jim Mickle (writer/director) and Nick Damici (writer/co-star) have taken the original concept of ritual cannibalism and inverted it, switching almost every trope in the initial version, and spinning it into something completely their own.In this Americanized take, Iris and Rose Parker (Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner) are two young girls living in a rural community who have recently lost their mother, and are now left to tend to the needs of their little brother Rory, and ailing father Frank (Jack Gore and Bill Sage). Stand-offish and a mystery to the...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Berlin Film Festival 2013: Twitch Previews the Competition

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 11:00 AM PST

Moving right along from Sundance and Rotterdam, here comes Berlinale! Starting Thursday, we'll be bringing you updates from the festival, but before the cold-weather movie marathon begins, lets take a look at some films that stood out in the lineup. Narrowing down these preview pieces was quite an undertaking, since the lineup is massive, but I have indeed gone through every film and made judgements based on talent involved, the synopses and even the stills. We'll begin with competition films. Within this category are several films which have already screened to considerable buzz elsewhere, including Prince Avalanche, Promised Land, the unfinished River Phoenix/George Sluizer collaboration Dark Blood, and the much-anticipated opening selection, Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster. But, while I may chime in on the...

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Books To Be Scene: Chris Adrian's THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 10:00 AM PST

"Paul?"Emma listened for her husband - sometimes he fell very silent and she could barely hear him breathing - and she thought the line was dead until a lady's voice spoke out of the phone."He is gone, my love. Gone forever, not to be seen again in this world. He is already drowned, but not you. You I will protect and preserve and love for all your allotted time.""Who is this?" Emma demanded. "Is this the fucking operator?"She only got silence for an answer, and then she got the terrible sensation that comes of being thrust up so impossibly high, so impossibly fast. Not even an angel wielding the sheltering grace of God could cushion her fully.Who's this latest rambling missive aimed at, then?Let's see....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

IFFR 2013 Review: F*CK FOR FOREST Tries To Spread Love And Peace!

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 06:00 AM PST

(It's a documentary about f*cking hippies... No, I'm not being reactionary! They're really hippies and they're really f*cking!) This year there were several feature documentaries at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, but few had a subject (or a title) as eye-catching as F*ck For Forest. This Polish documentary follows the exploits of a group of hippies in Berlin, who have a website where you can watch them be naked or even have sex with each other. Not for free though, unless you're a contributor: it's a pay-site and the money spent by viewers is collected to save the South American rain forests. I'll skip my regular story-versus-movie breakdown, as it does not really serve a purpose when describing a documentary like this. What happens IS...

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Review: A Solid Cast Saves the Schmaltzy MIRACLE IN CELL NO. 7

Posted: 05 Feb 2013 04:30 AM PST

The Korean film industry has many great supporting players but perhaps none more so than the versatile Ryoo Seung-ryong. The dependable, chameleon-like performer has been active for many years, but 2012 was by far and away his biggest. He was excellent as the King's right-hand man in Masquerade and he shined as the Cassanova-esque next door neighbor in All About My Wife. His performance as the middle-aged Lothario was so popular that he has reprised the character for a number of local advertisements (like this one), which I must say I have enjoyed quite a lot. With all the attention he's been getting, it's about time he got his own vehicle. And that's just what's happened. Almost. Ryoo takes center stage for the first...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

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