Heartless Trailer

The trailer for Philip Ridley’s Faustian thriller Heartless has hit the web. The film stars Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe, 21) as Jamie, a young man with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face. The East London neighbourhood Jamie calls home has been plagued by violence. Most people believe that the seemingly random violence is gang related, but Jamie soon discovers that there is a much more sinister cause behind attacks.

Heartless also stars the gorgeous Clémence Poésy and the awesome Eddie Marsan.
No North American release date has been set, but keep your eye on the official site for any news regarding a local screening.

Be sure to check out Shelagh’s review of Heartless from last year’s Sitges Film Festival.

Sitges ‘09 Reviews Part Two: Doghouse, Macabre, Heartless

To see Shelagh’s first batch of  reviews from the 2009 Sitges Film Festival, including Splice, Amer, Cargo and TiMER be sure to click here.

Probably the best night I had at Sitges was not at a film, but at a party (like all good festivals, the parties are great). This one was set up by the Film Festival Mafia, a group of film festival hounds of which I am now a proud member. But this was no ordinary party – it was karaoke. You have not lived until you’ve seen the guys from Fantastic Fest in Austin tear their shirts off and rock some Guns ‘n Roses. Oh, such memories. But back to the movies.

Doghouse – Directed by Jake West. Starring Danny Dyer, Noel Clarke

The British have a knack for combining horror and comedy. And while this zom-rom-com is not in the same league as Shaun of the Dead, it certainly adds a fun new twist to the becoming-tired-at-lightning-speed zombie subgenre. A group of male friends, in an effort to cheer up one of their lot as he heads for a painful divorce, go to a small town in rural England where the population is 75% female. But as they arrive, it turns out that that 75% have turned into zombie-like creature who will attack anyone with an excess of testosterone.  Politically correct, this film is not; but that’s a good thing. Indeed, it makes as much fun of the way men stereotype and generalize female behavior as much as exposing some of that behavior, which I can say as a woman, is accurate and embarrassing. While the film strays into certain cliches (all the men represent a type, and you couldn’t see these varying types actually hanging out together for example), there are enough laughs and originality to sustain the 90 minutes.  Apparently there’s a “cathouse” script in the works. Now that I will see.

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Sitges ‘09 Reviews Part One: Splice, Amer, Cargo, TiMER

Last February when on holiday in Spain, I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hostench, co-director of Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya, the largest fantastic film festival of Europe and one of the largest and most important in the world. His enthusiasm convinced me to attend the festival last month. Believe me, when you’re sitting on a resort restaurant patio surrounded by some of the biggest names in genre cinema it can be hard to motivate yourself to go to a movie; but it was not hard at Sitges considering the plethora of offerings.

Europeans have a very different attitude towards genre film (by genre I mean science fiction, horror and fantasy). Rather than being a niche market that caters to a certain type of individual, genre film is welcomed and watched by a hefty portion of the population. It is not cult; it is (almost) mainstream. This also leaves the field of what is considered genre very wide open. This can be detrimental, but in Sitges case it works very well. Here is a sampling of some of the strange and wonderful (though not always both) films I saw.

Splice – Directed by Vincenzo Natali. Starring Adrian Brody, Sarah Polley

One of the most anticipated films of the year, Splice definitely does not disappoint. In fact, it dares to go places no American film would – but of course, it’s written and directed by a Canadian, filmed in Canada with a Canadian star. And it’s about genetic manipulation. Brody and Polley are a husband and wife scientific mastermind team who specialize in mixing up the DNA of various animals in order to create new pharmaceutical products to cure humanity’s ailments. In order to maintain funding, they secretly combine the DNA of several animals with human DNA; low and behold their experiment works and an artificial womb gives birth to Dren, a human-bird-horse-I don’t know what else hybrid. The scientists hide her, educate her and ultimately imprison her.  They bond with her as parents, but in the end they are not her parents, but her creators – and there is a world of difference between these two roles. The former is nurturing in order to allow the offspring to survive on its own; the latter is controlling, wanting their own vision to supercede any independence of the creation. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche said that God is dead; creations are more trouble than they are worth (creators too). How can you separate your emotions from your work when the thing you create is alive and sentient? How can you hope to control it? Are there things that science simply should not do? While Polley is her usual boring self (sorry, her acting has never impressed me), Brody gives a fantastic performance as a man caught between his work and his heart (and occasionally his libido). This is Natali’s best film since Cube.

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