Villagemonster Dreams
(Dreams, surreal moments, script ideas and film bites)
I checked out three films at Glasgow Film Festival this year, two French horrors (although one is more a thriller/ mystery) ,and a German thriller/drama.
Out of films I saw I would most recommend The Monk, thought it was awesome. I especially wanted to see it because they were filming it near Barcelona while I was in spain, and got a couple of sneaky looks at the production. It’s like a 17th century painting come to life, with extra creepiness. It’s like what a more classy, modern-made version of a Hammer Horror would be like. It’ll be getting a general release in April 27th in UK apparently so you should check it out then :P
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1mVqAZiGV4
The disappointment is French horror Livid , which I had been really excited to see :( . I thought the first hour had a fantastic, creepy build up, and is genuinly intruiging. They do a really good job of setting up interesting characters in a young trainee nurse and her jaded mentor, and they build up the Halloween/ gothic atmosphere really well. But I thought in the second half it just fell apart a bit; they somehow managed to both under-explain and provide too much in the case of the supernatural goings-on.
It also had some major plot holes :/ , like (spoiler alert) if the (non supernatural) nurse was a little girl in the 1930’s, how come she’s only around 40 in the present day?? :/
I get that Suspiria was a major influence, and that they were trying to throw in a range of random supernatural things like that movie. But with Suspiria you always have the core logic that witches were responsible for everything weird going on, whereas here it suggests several different things and never fully explores any of the options.. Are Jessel and her daughter vampires? demons? witches? angels? an improbable combination of all these things??
Overall I thought it was , like The Monk, beautifully shot and very atmospheric. The costume, production and make-up design were outstanding. And I loved some of the little touches, like the homage to Halloween 3 and the fact that Will o’ the Wisps cropped up on the moors and no-one seemed to care too much. But it’s an incredibly messy film. The biggest shame is that they do some great character work at the start and then throw it out the window, and by the end I didn’t care about anyone.
Livid
Taking the middle ground is Beats Being Dead, a German thriller/ romance. I thought I’d check it out because I saw the trailer and thought it looked interesting, being a teenage romance set against the man hunt for an escaped murderer. And it is pretty interesting, actually, although way too slow in parts, and some of the conflict between the lovers is way too drawn out. But it really captures that whole summery romance feel and just the pure hormonal craziness of being an impulsive teenager and not caring about what’s going on around you, I thought. It’s one part of a loosely connected trilogy, but I didn’t catch the other 2 films.
Beats Being Dead
So I’ve got a bit of a cold at the moment, and I’m starting to think it’s responsible for the MENTAL (more than usual) dreams I’ve been having.
First, last saturday night I had a dream in which is was running down the stairs of this really tall tower. I had this little ginger kitten in my hands, and as I was running I could hear this horrible snarling from behind me. When I go to the bottom, I was there was a big four poster bed beside the tower door, so I crawled under and hid beneath it. Looking out, I saw this vicious, mental looking black cat come running out the door to the tower, and run off. I thought I was safe from it, but then I heard a hissing behind me. I tried to look around but then I felt a sharp pain in my side, and looked to see that the cat was like clawing me and biting my ribs. Then…I woke up, gasping, covered in sweat….and realised I was gripping my rib cage really tightly in the same place the dream cat had ‘bit me’.
Wierd enough (I put it down to the fever of the cold), but then on monday night I had another animal attack dream. This one started off with me wandering through the village where I’m from when suddenly a crocodile emerged from the bushes and started chasing me down the street! I was really scared, so I ran into the local shop, locked the doors and told eveyone what happened. No-one beleived me, so I decided to look out outside. I opened the door a crack to see, and saw that the crocodile had gone…but that there was now a snake outside! The snake saw me open the door and tried to get in, but I shut the door on it…several times actually. And this just made it madder and madder. Eventually I accidentally let it get in…and then I started freaking out. i ran to the far end of the shop and climbed up on top of the counter, thinking the snake wouldn’t be able to get me…But it appeared out of nowhere and jumped up into the air, landing to sink its fangs into my thigh! I screamed, and that was the end of the dream. Then when I woke up, again I had a bit of a pain where the dream snake had bitten me, like I’d been squeezing my thigh while I was sleeping…e
At last but not least , (but I don’t know if it actually counts as an animal) I had a dream the other night whwere I was cleaning a cupborad out at home. I opened a board game box to check the contents, and the chestburster alien from Alien jumped out right at me and bit me on the shoulder!
So yeah I’d like the animal attack dreams to stop now please XD. I haven’t had a series of terrifying dreams like this since the time I had dreams of a horrible Invasion of the Bodysnatchers-type scenario, where people I thought were ‘on my side’ kept turning ‘evil’ and trying to grab me :/.
This is a random post just based on an image I can’t get out of my head. I read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas over the Christmas break , just because I wanted to read the book before the film version by the Wachowskis and Tom Twyker comes out later in the year (if you haven’t read it,do so!!). It’s a really interesting book, both in the way its written, and themes and messages it contains if you care to look for them. Thinking back to reading it, one thing really surprised me. When I started out reading it, I flicked through the different sections, and just from seeing the way that the middle section, ’ Sloosha’s Crossin’ ‘, was written, I presumed it was going to be my least favorite. It’s set in a sort of futuristic tribal society on Hawaii after there has been a big global apoacalypse and people have got primitive again, so the protagonistic writes in a thick, primitive slang. However, once I got to it and read for a while, I started to get really into it, and thinking back now I think it might be my favorite section.
Part of this has to be because of the fact the devil character that pops up to tempt the protagonist Zachary is called Ol’ Georgie….and my mum’s boyfriend is called Geordie…So I kept imagining my mum’s boyfriend popping up in the jungle and acting all devilish and sinister….and ended up actually pissing myself laughing as I read several times, just cuse I had the image in my head. XD
I loved the part about Ol’ Georgie wanting to scoop out people’s eyes with a ‘warty spoon’ XD. That, and the fact he’s often dangling from tree branches, perching on rocks etc., put this totally organic, gnarled kind of image of him in my head. The things that kept popping up were Pan from Pan’s Labyrinth, and also Baba Yaga, as illustrated in Hellboy. I really hope that if Ol’ Georgie pops up in the film adaptation of the book, he’s depicted in a similar sort of way. That would be coooool :P.
Was having a flick through Glasgow film festival programme to see if there was anything interesting, took one glance at this picture and decided I need to see this film (a French horror called Livid) :P. It just has that combination of beauty, horror and weirdness that can be found in most of my favorite films. I’ve no idea if the film will stand up to this picture…but it did a good job of selling it to me!
I also really want to see This Must be the Place, (with a glammed-up Sean Penn in a really wierd-sounding plot) but I know its getting a release generally in April…I’ll see if I can wait :P.
I may also have to go check out The Monk tho…It was filming near Barcelona while I was living there and sounds very intriguing and quite mad, being based on a old gothic novel and all .
Had two very vivid dreams last night.
The first was like a little bit of wish-fulfilment that went wrong towards the end, and continues my recent trend of having dreams in which I’m roped into being a babysitter only for it to go wrong.
So tt started off that I was wandering along a Hawaiin beach, much like the one above, with my rucksack, laptop case, etc., looking for a place to work peacefully. Then I met two little girls who asked me why I was there. It turns out that i’d been flown to Hawaii courtesey of Warners Bros. becuase I’d been hired to write the Hawaii-set section of Cloud Atlas (I wish!!) and was there for research….
But somehow these two girls managed to convince me to leave my work aside, becuase they needed a babysitter :S And it turned out they wanted to go jet sking! So we went out jet-sking on the bay, with me frantically trying to keep up with them. We got to the other side and there was a house covered with pink flowers, and the girls asked me to make up a story about the house…so I started making up a story about how the house got covered in flowers. Then I turned around and one of my cousins was there, randomly….and started asking me what I was doing in Hawaii, so I started explaining. When I was finished I turned around and the girls were gone :O. So I started freaking out, and looking for them, knowing that I should probably be working on the script and I wasn’t…. The end!
The other dream was wiiiierd.
It started out with me walking along the side of a busy road with a lot of other people, singing carols. I was wearing a really heavy rucksack, stuffed with stuff I knew to be important, like my laptop, etc. Finally we got to a huge church off to the side of the road in the trees. It was little more than a giant, quite wide spire, and the entrance door to it was like a quarter the way up the building, and the way to get up to it…was a giant christmas tree tipped on its side like a ramp right to the door. The tree was absolutely covered with hanging soft toys, and we all started clambering up these toys till we reached the door. Then inside we all started going up the narrow spiral staircase that led upwards.
Everyone went in front of me, and I followed…or at least, I tried to follow, because my rucksack was too wide for the staircase and it kept getting stuck and holding me back. So I was trying to force myself around the narrow corners, really working my shoulders, ha, when I realised it would be easier to just take the rucksack off, leave it on the steps and pick it up when I got back down. So I took it off, laid it on one of the steps…and it fell onto its side and started sliding down the steps. I started to chase it, shouting, but it was going too fast, and it got to the last step, slid out the door, down the christmas tree and straight on to the busy road! I was FREAKING OUT! I clambered down the tree fast and to the dge of the road, where I watched helplessly as cars zoomed perilously close to the bag…luckily it didn’t get run over and I saw an opportunity to run out and get it.
I eventually got up to the top of the spire, which was a supiciously large room for such a narrow tower ( dream logic, eh?). Everyone was singing carols. After the service I told the minister what had happened with my bag on the stairs and him and his wife were convinced it was a great allegory for ‘the hard but important task for shouldering a belief in God’ and said they wanted to use it in his next sermon. I was unconvinced, but let them get on with it anyways…. :P
I had such a cool dream last night in which I had a dictaphone that by pushing rewind and fast forward I could do the same to time, and pause it and stuff. I was using it to eavesdrop on this meeting in a newspaper office that looked like the attic from Sweeney Todd, for some reason. But then when i was escaping, I bumped into this annoying guy I used to know who smashed it up :( Bastard…I was having so much fun with it!
I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple of weeks, and have been a bit computerless for the past week or so, so just getting round to posting it now :P
I’m going by UK release dates here, so all the films below were officially released in UK in 2011…
10. Calvet / Project Nim
I’m tying the two best documentaries I saw this year because I couldn’t choose between them… :P
Calvet is the intense story of a French artist who started out as a rent boy in France before moving to Florida to work as a bouncer , before getting involved in drugs and all kinds of craziness, having a child and then abandoning him, and ending up a junkie somewhere in South America before art literally saved his life. Now clean, he goes looking for the son he left behind while telling his story. And it’s a fantastic story, really well told, and presented visually.
Project Nim continues my love affair with James Marsh ( whose Wisconsin Death Trip and The King I LOVE, and also Man on Wire), again blending documentary with reconstructions in really effective ways to tell a tragic story…
9. Submarine/ Tomboy
Again I couldn’t choose between these two, and since they’re both kind of quirky, small coming of age stories I thought I’d put them together. Submarine was just my kind of quirk…I fell in love with it’s sensibility, and washed out yet colourful style.
Tomboy…Well I don’t think I’ve felt happier in the cinema this year….I had a big grin on my face the whole way through the film. It’s a potentially difficult story sensitively told, and actually, despite some awkward moments, it’s just a really, really happy film, full of joy and fantastically authentic acting from the kids.
8. Blue Valentine
A lot of people are probably putting Drive on their top ten lists, but I just couldn’t really get behind that film… I thought It was undeniably stylish (great cinematography, great music, great direction) , but after I saw it I felt kind of empty. I couldn’t feel anything for the characters cuse to me they were just flat cutouts going through predictable motions. For me this was The Ryan Gosling film of the year, a beautifully acted and shot bittersweet (but more bitter) account of the rise and fall of a relationship. Michelle Williams and Gosling were both fantastic.
7. Tyrannosaur
Tough to watch at times , and I thought some of the violence was a bit gratuititous, but Paddy Considine’s first film as director otherwise really got to me. I though the way it dealt with the issues it did was really well judged, and i like that it had more of a sense of hope and redemption than the usual “misery porn” type of films… Olivia Colman was fantastic, as well as Peter Mullan (but when is he not??).
6. Melancholia
Despite a way too meandering first part set at a wedding (I got the point after like 20 minutes…where were the script editors??? haha), this film had me with my mouth hanging open most of the running time. Just the stunning shots of destruction were enough to win me over really ha, also Kirsten Dunst gave a good performance.
5. Rabbit Hole
Basically I don’t think I’ve cried more in the cinema this year… This is a FANTASTIC FILM. I think it was criminally under seen. The acting is fantastic, especially Nicole Kidman. Cameron Mitchell left behind the in-your-face sexuality of his last films behind to concentrate more on serious drama, but you can still feel his quirky sensibility in the little details, and it really helps to make the film.
4. Hugo
Martin Scorese continues his run of doing things a little differently, and after Shutter Island (which I love and was around this position of my list of last year). I thought Hugo was great, The sets , cinematography and direction were all beautiful, and the 3-D was actually really good.
3. Black Swan
Aronofsky + ballet = all kinds of fucked up awesomeness. This reminded me a little of the amazing films Cronenberg used to make (all body horror + creeping tension)before he went all mainstream with Viggo + corsets. I was impressed anyways.
2. Weekend
This kind of crept up on me (and everyone I think) but although it’s small I actually think it’s a bit of a milestone. It’s definitely the best or even just most relatable ’gay’ film I’ve ever seen, presenting a realistic look at what being gay means in modern society, with all the home truths and brutally honest dialogue that entails. Buit above all I just really liked its sweetness and the way it was played; all intimate shots, dreamy cinematography and half-heard dialogue. You can tell the director is a fan of Sofia Coppola, from the style of it and also because the climactic scene has a nice Lost in Translation nod/subversion. The actors are awesome, especially Tom Cullen whose sensitive yet gruff Russell is adorable.
1. Hanna
In a way this is a bit of a guilty pleasure choice, because I know Hanna maybe isn’t as ‘worthy’ as some of the other films on this list…But I freaking enjoyed it SOOO MUCH. It’s the only film this year i ended up going to see twice at the cinema, because I literally couldn’t wait to see it again, and I would watch it over and over, so it’s going at the top of my list. I loved the combination of fairy tale and action movie, the fantastic acting (Cate Blanchett made a GREAT villain), the whimsical visuals and great Chemical Brothers soundtrack.
Honorable Mentions: Take Shelter, We Need to Talk about Kevin, Balada Triste del trompeta, The Tree of Life, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Kill List, Super 8, Scream 4, Sherlock Holmes 2
Supposedly amazing/ half-decent films I’m yet to see: Another Earth, Rise of Planet of the Apes, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Silent House, The Awakening, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, A Separation, Las acacias, etc.
Imitation of Life by R.E.M. Had never seen it before. What a cool video…for a great song :D
Tom Cullen
