Posted on by chasinvictoria

The 15th Annual Victoria Film Festival – Introduction

Victoria is the historic “Little Britain” capital of the province of British Columbia, even though it’s actually located on an island off the coast – so close to the United States that Washington’s Olympic Mountains loom large across its southern skyline. Yet America has less of an influence here than the Commonwealth – the member countries of what once was the British Empire. When you notice that the Curling championship being held up-island is getting as much press as the Super Bowl, you know you really are in a different country.
Victoria lies in the shadow of the States and the metropolises (metropoli?) of the Pacific Northwest, but refuses to be defined by them; likewise, their film festival doggedly ignores its larger and more “important” cousins to the south and east – Portland, Seattle, Whistler and of course Vancouver, all of whom get more films, bigger films, more guests, more press.
Like the queen it is named for, Victoria is cowed by no-one, and its festival reflects that sort of quiet pride. For the last 15 years, the Victoria Film Festival has carried on regardless, and has evolved (under the leadership of longtime director Kathy Kay) into a popular but unpretentious champion for Canadian cinema, indie filmmakers from around the world, and “small” films looking for a big boost.
The fest is spread across four cinemas (and one lounge-cum-screening-room) in both downtown Victoria and the nearby suburb of Langford, and utilizes a host of alternative spots (the usual mix of pubs and restaurants, open stages and auditoriums) for non-screening events, mostly centred on conversations with filmmakers, support industry and officials about the state of play in local and indie cinema.
This year, the organizers added a series of adventurous oddball videos shown in oddball places – the tops of roofs, back alleys in Chinatown, inside parked cars, on the back wall of a tattoo parlour – to get patrons out of their comfort zones and focused on the shared ambience as an essential part of the magic of the movies – something you don’t get from a Blu-Ray player and a 52” plasma no matter how nice the surround sound is.
Some 160 films of various lengths will be screened between the opening gala (which features One Week, Michael McGowan’s rite-of-passage feature about a dying young man who commits a kind of life-affirming suicide by riding from Toronto to Tofino instead of getting treatment) and the final flick, the appropriately-named South Korean horrorshow Epitaph. In between are a heck of a lot of documentaries, English (and a few French, Chinese and other language) features, a smattering of shorts and a great huge helping of Canadian celluloid.
The VFF sees the promotion of indie and mainstream Canadian content as not just an obligation, but a passion: up until Juno made a splash, many markets (particularly the US) were stubbornly indifferent to the stories of the Great White North. Like the Northwest Passage, that ice has thawed a bit and the locals are scrambling to take advantage.
The festival is strongly supported by the local population, and attracts more than its fair share of filmmakers, drawn mostly by the less-competitive atmosphere and relaxed but appreciative audiences. This is a fest that likes works-in-progress, indulges in over-running interviews, remembers you from last year, isn’t afraid of a bit of outrage, and generally offers a supportive reception to those just getting started or far from perfect. As a result, the Victoria Film Festival often gets “scoops,” premieres and sneak-peeks that rival it’s better-funded brethren back east.
The caffeinated obstacle courses of the larger fests is replaced with a spot of tea and a comfy chair beside the fire in Victoria’s vision of a meaty but mild blend of business and pleasure; a cinematic Shepard’s Pie.
(this article originally appeared on Film Threat) 
Posted on by chasinvictoria

Schneer Genius – RIP Charles H. Schneer, 1920-2009

A toast to Charles H. Schneer, who died on January 21st at the approximate age of 88 (nobody seems to know his precise birthday) in Boca Raton, Florida.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Schneer seems to have always been a film producer — or at least that’s the only role listed for him in the movie business. He’s the fellow in the dark suit in the middle of the photo to your left, standing next to Dr. Werner Von Braun as they discuss the finer points of his biopic, I Aim at the Stars (1960).

“Fantastic films” (a meta-genre name covering all manner of monster, special effect, space and/or sci-fi driven movies) dominate the career of Schneer, who is best known for being the producer of most of Ray Harryhausen’s amazing body of work, and thus what merits his mention here. Among Schneer’s output are some of my favourite (as well as some of the best) films of imagination, and Schneer managed to keep himself at the forefront of such films even as they moved from cheesy low-budget shockers (like his second feature, 1955’s It Came From Beneath the Sea ) to big-budget international epics like his final movie, 1981’s Clash of the Titans.

Schneer’s first picture, the 1953  McCarthy-era thriller The 49th Man , has become strangely re-relevant in light of the paranoia about foreigners, border security and portable “dirty” nuclear bombs. It was on his second picture, the aforementioned It Came From Beneath the Sea, that Schneer entered the “monster movie” trade and met up with Harryhausen, and the two forged a career-spanning bond.

The relationship was cemented with the stunning visual impact of their work on 1957’s Earth Versus the Flying Saucers  (a nostalgic favourite of mine), and from then on it was more common to see both men’s names together than not, though it should be mentioned that Schneer did produce some non-cult pictures such as Hellcats of the Navy  with Ronald and Nancy Reagan (1957) and a bunch of other war pictures, the film version of the musical Half a Sixpence  (1967) with good ol’ Tommy Steele, the Telly Savalas-George Maharis western Land Raiders  (1969) and the unfairly overlooked George Peppard spy thriller The Executioner  (1970).

All of the rest of the years between 1958 and 1977 were pretty much filled with Harryhausen films, including my (and Schneer’s) favourite of their collaborations and one of my all-time absolute favourite movies ever, 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts . To this day a magnificent picture that still holds the imagination of those who watch it. I was lucky enough to see it on a cinema screen a few years back and the memories of that still thrill me. It’s the perfect cross between the kind of (often biblical) sword-and-sandals type epic and a special-effects driven b-movie, and even features Hercules in a minor role — which just goes to show you how interesting the picture is, that they don’t need one of the cinema’s most legendary heroes to carry the film!

Along with another of my all-time “will watch it every time it’s on” picks, 1974’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad , Schneer wisely lets Harryhausen indulge his own rich imagination, resulting in iconic visual sequences such as the fighting skeletons of Jason and the thrilling Kali sequence in Golden Voyage, ideas stolen or paid homage to by many films since.

Schneer was also the money man behind such well-regarded movies as The Three Worlds of Gulliver  (1960), Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (1961), HG Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1964) — a strangely overlooked part of Harryhausen’s canon — and 1969’s Valley of Gwangi , the best stop-motion-dinosaurs flick every made and featuring arguably Harryhausen’s highest-quality animation.

He also produced all the Sinbad movies, including the final one (and his penultimate picture), 1977’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger . Perhaps someday when the US’s image of Persia improves, another good Sinbad movie can be made (this Sinbad didn’t do any, that’s for sure!).

The same year Eye of the Tiger came out, a pair of movies called Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars ushered in the era of high-quality, high-budget effects pictures, and men like Schneer and Harryhausen must have seen the writing on the wall. It must have been a bit like being a clerk in a Dickensian money-changer’s office as the Industrial Revolution began to unfold. True to their craft, Schneer and Harryhausen decided to die with the old ways.

Schneer’s final bow was one last (and probably most successful) collaboration with Harryhausen, 1981’s Clash of the Titans . With a decent budget and big-name actors, this re-telling of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda stayed faithful to the Harryhausen style and still managed to do very respectable business. Even the owl character of Bubo (an acknowledgement of creations like R2-D2) was lovingly hand-filmed rather than lazily computer-enhanced. In retrospect, Clash of the Titans seems more like Harryhausen reminding his students that although technology had passed him by, he was still the master who had made a lot of it possible.

Following Titans, Schneer retired from the movie business after almost 40 years and a record of mostly profitable and well-remembered pictures. Apart from a couple of appearances on Harryhausen retrospective specials, little is seen or remembered about the man, and yet he was part of a team that gave the world so much. Film Moi wishes Charles Schneer safe passage on his most fantastic voyage, and reminds him to watch out for the Harpies. 🙂

Posted on by chasinvictoria

FFF 2004 Diary – Days One and Two, Part 1

For what is I believe the 10th year running, I am attending and covering the Florida Film Festival for a variety of publications. This year I am primarily doing reviews for OrlandoCityBeat.com and FilmThreat.com, though I may also be contributing to other publications. As always, I maintain that the FFF is in the first rank of great film festivals of the southeast US and one of the best indie showcases in the whole of the country.

As I did last year on my other blog, Anarchy in the AM, I’ll provide a quick rundown of the films I saw this year in not-quite-real-time (usually about 48 hours after the fact). This year I was again able to get a huge jump on the 135 films being shown at the festival by attending press screenings as well as the festival proper. As of Monday, I had seen a total of 46 films (of various lengths), and thus I’m well on my way to topping my record last year of 70 films seen in just over three weeks.

The festival kicked off Friday night with a fete for actor-director Campbell Scott and his new film Off The Map. I’d seen Scott two years ago with a likable production of Hamlet and felt then as I do now that he’s even better behind the camera than he is in front of it. The party afterwards was a smash, with good food and a chocolate fountain one could dip things in — and free wine(!). Having already gone to many films in the days leading up to it, Friday is kind of a big blur (made more so, no doubt, by the free wine), so let’s move on to Saturday.

Saturday was a good Portrait of a Typical Festival Day in the Life of a Film Critic. I arrived at the Enzian around noon (having already screened another non-festival movie earlier that morning) and left at 2am the following morning. The first program was the surprisingly-strong Family Shorts, nine short films and not a single dud in the entire bunch.

They started off playing it safe with Creature Comforts: Cats or Dogs?, an animated interview with the creatures of the title pontificating about which is better. This comes from Aardman Studios, they of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and the Angry Kid series, so of course the working-class accents of east-end London and points north make for extra hilarity (along with the occasional moment of difficult-to-understand dialect).

Seven’s Eleven was nothing more than a kid version of Ocean’s 11, with a group of kids plotting an elaborate scheme to relieve a local convenience store of its excess candy. This romp, though cheap and shot on garish video, was a hundred times better than the commercial stinker Catch That Kid, which is similar in premise.

Tim Tom was the first of two stunning pieces of animation that blew the audience away. A cunning and incredibly stylish mix of computer animation and live action, the soundtrack (by Django Rheinhart!) blended perfectly with the piece in a polished, B&W homage to the Merrie Melodies style of slapstick.

Jumping back to traditional animation but with a delicious twist on the “women behind bars” genre was Penguins Behind Bars. Fish jokes abound, and the plot is played perfectly straight, but by making the characters all penguins, you get high comedy.

I almost cried during I Want A Dog, a small animated musical about a girl who keeps fighting for her right to have a pet in increasingly imaginative ways. Beautifully done, sensitively realised and touching.

Showa Shinzan tries to slap a delicate feel on computer animation, using Renderman software that is highly reminiscent of early Pixar shorts to tell an interesting tale of the birth of a mountain and the growing up of a little girl. The deliberately slow pacing is probably too slow for the youthful audience it’s aimed at, but it’s an excellent effort.

Trust the Scots to bounce things back to modern speeds with the whimsical Inside An Uncle, in which a young man discovers that adults are actually powered by … kids! Imaginative and fun.

Colorforms is a wonderful little delight starring Dora the Explorer herself, Kristin Di Pietra, as a messy little girl who meets her match. I don’t want to say more than that about it, but it’s just a perfect piece of cinematic confectionary.

The Family Shorts finale’d with Lorenzo, the first new piece of strictly-traditional Disney animation in ages and quite possibly the best piece of cartooning they’ve done in-house in the last forty years. Yes, it’s that good — a stunning tour-de-force of music, animation and whimsy that recalls everything that used to be good and magical about Disney’s unique brand of animation. Look for Lorenzo as the opener to a future Disney feature, but don’t miss it if you’d like to see what Disney (even without Pixar) is really capable of when they try hard enough.

There’s a lot more celluloid to cover on Saturday alone, so stay tuned for Part Two!

Posted on by chasinvictoria

Welcome to Film Moi

Hi, I’m Chas, your host of American Movie Cla– wait a minute, that’s not right — anyway, I’m this guy who watches a lot of movies. I don’t get paid to do this blog, but I do get paid to watch movies. At least some of the time.

Welcome to Film Moi, my personal journal of films. What you will find here is frequently-updated reviews of films I’ve seen (very few “mainstream” films, just so you know), rants on the state of moviemaking, enthusiastic recommendations on art-house films you’re likely to miss if you don’t pay attention, and suchlike. I recently figured that I average about one film a day (about 60% things I have seen before, 40% new things). Before you judge me some horrible lunatic, let me explain why: I write reviews and articles for TimeOut magazine in London, Film Threat.com, and MovieMaker and BoxOffice magazines, as well as others for a living. So you see I have to do this. 🙂

Film Moi was inspired, as so many things are, by Ron “The God” Kane. I will resist embarking on a long biography of someone you’ve never met (I’ve never met him in person myself), but let’s just say he’s a deeply cool guy who has inspired many things from me and my circle of friends. Check out his music/video review blog, linked above.

You may recently have seen a documentary called Cinemania that’s making the rounds (notably on Trio TV of late) about a gaggle of “movie buffs” (complete with capital Ls on their foreheads) who support and terrorise New York art-house festivals.

I want to emphatically state that I am not one of those people. 🙂

I love movies the way those losers do, but the big difference is that I do actually leave the cinema and have a life outside it (or, more accurately, several other compulsions that I also attend to). I have a wife, do not live with my parents, have a modestly-successful career as a magazine writer going, socialise with people who do not share my love of movies, and I even drink occasionally. I know people like the cellu-noids portrayed in Cinemania, I can even relate to them on some levels, but I think my dorkiness is in remission (despite being an avid computer buff as well).

This blog, an offshoot of my main blog, is dedicated to Ron and to Jim Donato, another individual whose unerring good taste and singular dedication to perfection in music and video has shaped my life and personality at least as much as my parents ever did. 🙂

No promises about how often this will be updated, though I will try to publish at least weekly. I recommend you stop by once a week and catch up. I don’t have a comment system set up yet, but in the meantime I invite email (the address is to your left somewhere on this page).

Thank you for stopping by, and go see an independent art-house movie today! 🙂