Jim's Film Festival Sneak Preview for Saturday, March 28th

Films: Before the Fall, 20th Century Boys, Not Quite Hollywood

Future Screenings:
Before the Fall - Today, 4:30PM at Prince Music Theater; Sun, 3/29/09, 9:30PM at the Bridge; Sat, 4/4/09, 12:30PM at Ritz 5
20th Century Boys - Today, 9:15PM at Ritz East; Mon, 3/30/09, 9PM at the Bridge
Not Quite Hollywood - Today, 10PM at the Bridge; Sun, 3/29/09, 9:30PM at Ritz 5

Before the Fall
This Spanish film (whose original title actually translates literally to "Three Days") is a fascinating combination of two genres: the apocalyptic disaster film (a meteor will strike the Earth in three days and destroy all life on the planet) and the slasher film (a man is trying to protect himself and his family from a crazed killer). In the wake of the announcement about the meteor, the world erupts in chaos. Part of that chaos involves prisoners escaping a jail near the small town of Laguna, where Ale, a shiftless handyman, lives with his mother. One of those prisoners is a dangerous murderer who bears a grudge against the family of Ale's brother. Ale's brother and his wife are away on a trip (a trip from which they will now never return), but their four children have been left alone and vulnerable in the house; the person who was looking after them has deserted them. Ale's mother takes it upon herself to protect the children, not only from the killer, but also from knowledge of the coming meteor, which they remain ignorant of thanks to the fact that they live off the beaten path, and their television has stopped working. Ale reluctantly agrees to help his mother with both tasks.

You might very well ask, if a meteor is going to kill everybody anyway, why try so hard to escape the crazed killer? And the answer is, because it's not about escape or survival; it's about staring death in the face, finally realizing what's really important, and finally embracing it. This is a thrilling, suspenseful, moving, brutal, relentless, thought-provoking film. There's never any question that everyone in the movie will die. The only question is, how? Wes Craven is apparently going to direct an American remake of this film soon, so see the original now before it's too late!

20th Century Boys
This is the first installment in a planned trilogy of film adaptations of a popular Japanese manga. All films are directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi, who also helmed a festival favorite from a few years ago (2LDK). 20th Century Boys 2 is also screening in the festival, and the third movie is scheduled for release in the fall. Sadly, I see no reason to seek out the next two films, as I was sorely disappointed by this one. It's really a shame, because the first half or so is actually quite excellent. The story takes place in three different time periods, jumping back and forth between all of them: the past (1969), the present (1999, 2000) and the future (2015). The future time period is the frame story, where a mysterious man in prison is telling our tale to his fellow prisoner in the cell across the hall. In the present, we meet a young man named Kenji leading a rather inglorious life running a convenience store and taking care of his sister's baby. Soon Kenji stumbles upon word of a strange cult led by someone who calls himself Friend. The cult may or may not be connected to a weird plague that's sweeping the Earth, and it's definitely connected to Kenji's childhood; it seems to be using as its bible a crazy science fiction story that Kenji and his friends wrote together when they were kids, a story which predicted the end of the world on December 31, 2000. Can Kenji and his friends become the group of heroes in the book who assembled to save the world? Or is Friend already too many steps ahead of them?

The mystery at the center of the film is a fascinating, multi-layered one. Those layers are slowly peeled back in thrilling fashion, thanks to the film's complex and interesting construction. The idea of half-remembered stories and adventures from your childhood somehow being connected to deadly dangerous events in the present is very intriguing. And there are a lot of other intriguing ideas in here, and a lot of very effective scenes, of horror and humor and drama and sci-fi. As long as there was still a mystery and still questions to be answered, the movie had me in its grasp. But the movie is also very, very long (142 minutes, to be exact), and somewhere in the latter half, most of the mystery goes away, the pacing slows down, everything begins to drag, and the tone takes a horrifying turn toward cheesy, ridiculously solemn melodrama. I'm still just a little curious to see the next installment in the trilogy, because the first half of this film really was good, and because I'd like to find out what happens. But thanks to the fact that the sequel is another 139 minutes long, and could very well end up being just as silly as this one, I'm not curious enough.

Not Quite Hollywoood
This is a fascinating documentary about a genre of film that many Americans, including myself, are wholly unfamiliar with: Australian exploitation films. These films flourished in the late '60s, '70s, and '80s, and are now experiencing something of a resurgence. The only movie mentioned in this entire documentary that I had even heard of before is Mad Max. I suspect knowing and liking more of the movies might make this film more enjoyable, but as it is I found it informative, intriguing, and immensely entertaining. It consists of a trek through the history of Australian exploitation films via many, many clips of said films, augmented by a series interviews with the actors, directors, producers, and stunt men involved in making them, not to mention famous fans, like Quentin Tarantino, and famous detractors, like the film critics of the time (who are still hilariously full of bile as far as all these films and filmmakers are concerned). The film clips and the interviews are both wonderful. The movies are outrageous, imaginative, and absolutely shameless, and the stories of how they were made are hilarious, insane, and fantastic. It was a style of filmmaking known as gonzo, which means they went out with almost no money and did a bunch of crazy stuff by the seat of their pants. If they needed a car chase, they blocked the road off and drove real cars really fast and actually crashed them. They did this with no police permission, and with little to no safety precautions.

If you're offended by full frontal nudity, then you'd better skip the first half or so of the movie. And if you're offended by violence, you'd better skip the second half. As far as I can tell, all of the films produced in Australia throughout the '60s and early '70s were required to feature at least one nude scene. In fact, from what people say in the interviews, it sounds like during this time period, half the people in Australia were just wandering around naked in their day to day life. This makes for a pretty exciting documentary! But over time the focus of Australian exploitation moved away from sex, nudity, satire, and lowbrow comedy, and into genres like horror, action, and sci-fi. So after the nudity comes the gore, and lots of it.

Not Quite Hollywood is a wonderful documentary, but it'll be especially entertaining and intriguing for anyone who's a fan of weird and crazy films and filmmaking. If you're like me, it'll leave you wondering if you can somehow find and watch some of the movies it talks about. I'm sure Quentin Tarantino would be pleased.

Image Credit: Flickr user pedrosimoes7