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Descending Into the Depths: Neil Maskell (left) and Michael Smiley get in over their heads in KILL LIST.

What starts out as common, garden-variety crime thriller turns… bizarre, and then frightening, in director Ben Wheatley’s twisty new film, KILL LIST. The tale of middle class hit-man Jay (Neil Maskell), who with colleague Gal (Michael Smiley) goes out for one more job and discovers blood oaths, strange rites, and disturbingly grateful targets have been thrown into the bargain, the film allows Wheatley to hook the rough-edged shooting style he explored in his debut effort, DOWN TERRACE, to a world that has room for both examinations of a tempestuous home life and the graphic shocks of classic horror. Think IN BRUGES meets THE WICKER MAN, then forget about all that and prepare to get righteously freaked-out.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Wheatley.

UNFORTUNATE TECHNICAL NOTE: Our usual podcast host has started giving us agita, apparently because we are just that popular, so we’ve temporarily switched to another service and had to downgrade our audio quality as a result. We’ll get this snag patched up and be back to the rich, beautiful sound you expect from MMP as soon as possible.

KILL LIST
Trailer

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Facebook Page
www.facebook.com/KillList

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You Can't Go Home Again - Worst-Case Scenario: Patton Oswalt and Charlize Theron in YOUNG ADULT.

Bless screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman their twisted, little hearts. In a season rife with people bettering themselves through moody introspection, they introduce us to Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), author of young adult novels and a woman who looks within and comes away with all the wrong lessons.

YOUNG ADULT, isn’t season-specific, but it does serve as a healthy counterbalance to all that holiday growth and belonging. In it, Mavis — who generally lives on a diet of Diet Coke breakfasts and hard-liquor suppers — decides on a whim to go back to her hometown, to the bemusement of former high school nerd Matt (Patton Oswalt) and the befuddlement of her one-time sweetheart (Patrick Wilson), for whom she has returned to rekindle their romance, despite the fact that he’s now happily married and recently become a father. It’s going to take more than an Andy Williams holiday marathon to smooth out this homecoming.

Click on the player to hear the Jason Reitman press conference.

YOUNG ADULT
Trailer

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Official Website:
www.youngadultmovie.com

Continue reading »]]> I know the past can come back to haunt you, but who knew that my childhood icons would be making guest appearances at this late date? Hanna-Barbera’s classic cartoon character, Yogi Bear, had his debut some fifty-three years ago, yet when my sponsor, Müller, built an epic commercial around a whole host of pop culture personages, there was Yogi — along with another, somewhat more junior HB creation, Muttley — holding front-and-center in the crowd, clearly the leader of the gang. (You can check out the ad itself and a neat making-of video below.)

That piqued my interest: How does an affable, animated rapscallion born pre-Camelot manage to be beloved by generations who weren’t even glimmers in their parents’ eyes when he was created? I decided the only way to find out was to reach out to the man who knows: Jerry Beck, animation historian and operator of the respected news and history site, cartoonbrew.com.

We had a good, wide-ranging conversation — hear it by clicking the player above.

“Müller Wünderful Stuff”

“The Making of Müller Wünderful Stuff”

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Continue reading »]]> 2011: Definitely a good year for aliens. They waylaid a couple of fanboys, staged a showdown with cowboys, wrecked a tween’s film project, invaded LA, twice (must be the universal lure of In-N-Out Burger) — yessir, if you had more than four limbs and a palate for human flesh, you had a home in theaters over the past twelve months.

But the extraterrestrial infestation wasn’t really the big news in genre film for 2011. With an open couple of weeks before the final onslaught of major science-fiction, fantasy, and horror releases, Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons decided to look back over the year and pick out their favorites in ten categories*, including Best Performance, Best Use of 3D, and Best Film, among others. The selection they’ve come up with may well surprise you. (Hint: A certain film featuring big-ass robots does better than expected.)

Click on the player to hear the show.

*And yes, we acknowledge that this is a provisional list, given that such titles as TINTIN, THE DARKEST HOUR, AND MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL have yet to screen.

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Dream Come True: Emily Browning enters a strange world of erotic desire in SLEEPING BEAUTY.

Award-winning novelist Julia Leigh makes a hell of a directorial debut with her quiet fantasia, SLEEPING BEAUTY, the story of a young college student (Emily Browning) who becomes immersed in a strange world of desire when she signs on as employee of a service that drugs women and allows men — frequently much older — to do whatever they wish with the inert bodies (with the strict proviso that there be no penetration or damage).

Dark, provocative, erotic, the film inspires a multitude of responses, frequently within the same second of footage. And once you get past the tale’s elegant mise en scene and sensuous atmosphere, don’t be surprised to discover Leigh has posed some intriguing questions on love, death, and all the impulses that drive our species. Sex is 99% brain, after all.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Leigh.

SLEEPING BEAUTY
Trailer

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Official Website:
www.ifcfilms.com/films/sleeping-beauty

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A double agent was pivotal in the success of D-Day in GARBO THE SPY

Of all the film clips director Edmon Roch uses to compose his WW II documentary, GARBO THE SPY — and they include such eclectic sources as documentaries, dramas, both Allied and Nazi propaganda, and cartoons — the ones that he seems to rely on most come from Carol Reed’s OUR MAN IN HAVANA, the film where Alec Guinness snookers the British Secret Service by fabricating a network of Cuban-based spies under his control. Turns out that the story’s original author, Graham Greene, didn’t come up with that idea from whole cloth — during the war, a mysterious Spaniard operating in Great Britain was able to convince the Nazis that the D-day landing at Normandy was just a diversion for the actual invasion, all thanks to information provided by his own network of equally fictional informants.

GARBO THE SPY explores both the history of that spy, Juan Pujol Garcia — known to the Germans as Alaric, “Man of Trust,” and to the British as Garbo for his skill at assuming a convincing role — and how the story of his pivotal role in the war was uncovered by a group of journalists, writers, and scholars. Roch brings a wry outlook to the story — fitting, given Pujol’s rather unusual background — that turns this into an entertaining tale of high-stakes deception.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Roch.

GARBO THE SPY
Trailer

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OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
firstrunfeatures.com/garbothespy

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Strike a Pose Before Striking Your Enemy: Henry Cavill (right) wages decorous war in IMMORTALS.

It’s a good week for lush, exquisite cinematography and vividly stylized worlds; maybe not so good a week for compelling narratives. In IMMORTALS, director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar uses Greek mythology as the raw material upon which to invest his skill with staging beautiful, beautiful actors in elaborate tableaux, all in the service of the tale of a lowly peasant (Henry Cavil) who, with the blessings of the gods (including former Apollo Luke Evans), rallies the bedraggled forces of Greece against a sadistic warlord (Mickey Rourke, and are you surprised?). Come join Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they admire the scenery and debate whether anything exists past the pretty facade.

Then, Larry and Dan briefly discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Lars von Trier’s elegant science fiction drama, MELANCHOLIA, in which a despondent Kirsten Dunst must cope with her own sense of inertia and the threat of a rogue planet on a collision course with Earth. Plus: What’s coming in theaters.

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Untitled (Slide) (2011)

I’m a lucky guy. I’ve wanted a reason to break out of my cramped, unkempt studio and check out Carsten Höller: Experience, the new exhibit at the New Museum that provides a comprehensive survey of the German-born artist known for his immersive, sensory-confounding — and sometimes adrenaline-pumping — installations, and along comes Air France to sponsor my coverage.

And why not? Not only is Air France the gateway to Paris, New York’s only equal as a cultural capital (I’m not saying which city is actually better, but only one of them has original Picassos and Shake Shack), but the airline tends to express the romantic thrill of travelling to their home turf (yeah, there may be grungy areas in France, but I can’t think of any, offhand) by coming up with imagery like this:

Which is just a lovely way of expressing the feeling through pure kinetics.

Giant Triple Mushrooms (2010)

Interestingly, Carsten Höller is himself no stranger to employing kinetics as part of his toolset for provoking intense, and frequently visceral, responses from his viewers. Having left a career in science in the early 90′s, Höller has translated his clinical background into works that range from the grandly whimsical — the lobby of the New Museum boasts a garden of oversized mushrooms that Lewis Carroll would have felt right at home in — to the powerfully immersive. “Viewers” rarely remain passive observers in the artist’s efforts: Included in the exhibit are such works as Experience Corridor, a series of rooms containing strange, sensory experiments (most curious: The Pinocchio Effect, in which strategic application of a medical vibrator convinces one that one’s nose is growing); Giant Psycho Tank, a sensory deprivation pool; Mirror Carousel, in which the glistening replication of a stock, amusement park thrill-ride is paradoxically trimmed to a serene pace; and — the big draw for this exhibition — Untitled (Slide), a corkscrewing tube that briskly transports daring visitors from the museum’s fourth floor down to the second, landing them into the visual bombardment of a pulsing, Höller light installation.

The works have a singularly unique way of cutting through intellectual concerns to provoke pure, emotional responses — interesting for pieces that frequently present themselves as the products of an especially fanciful laboratory. I wanted to find out more about Höller’s motivations, so in addition to getting some interesting pics of the exhibit, I also spoke with associate curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. Click on the player to hear the discussion, and check out the link to the slide show below that

CHECK OUT FULL SLIDE & VIDEO SHOW
AT THE HUFFINGTON POST

BTW: I’m not likely to be shaken from my conviction that New York was, is, and forever will be the center of the cultural universe, but if anyone wants to check out what’s doing in Paris, hit up Air France, get yourself over there, and compile the evidence that’ll make me eat my words.

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The Blank Generation Gets Filled In: NOFX's Fat Mike confronts the responsibilities of fatherhood in THE OTHER F WORD.

It’s a curious path that takes one from rock outcast to full fatherhood, yet many of the practitioners of that most confrontational of  musical forms, punk, find themselves following it. In THE OTHER F WORD, filmmakers Andrea Blaugrund Nevins and Cristan Reilly have tracked down the men who built lives upon artistic rebellion — prime amongst them their main subject, Pennywise’s Jim Lindberg, but also Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath, Blink-182′s Mark Hoppus, Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea, Everclear’s Art Alexakis, and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, among others — and explored the effort that goes into reconciling one’s creative soul with shopping for school supplies.

The final result is a fascinating and occasionally moving exploration of men who confront not only careers that demand increasing amounts of time away from home just when it’s least advantageous, but who also have to face how their own rebellious and sometimes tortured youths might affect how they approach their responsibilities as fathers.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Nevins and Reilly.

THE OTHER F WORD
Trailer

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OFFICIAL WEBSITE
theotherfwordmovie.com

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Street Tougher: Adult Swim's BLACK DYNAMITE.

Come 2012, Adult Swim is going to get bad-ass. In honor of the grand and sometimes delirious world of blaxploitation, they’ve latched onto the 2009 feature satire, BLACK DYNAMITE, and are bringing it to the video screen as half-hour, animated series.

With the film’s Michael Jai White and Byron Minns continuing their roles as producers, writers, and stars — White as ex-CIA agent Black Dynamite; Minns as compatriot Bull Horn — plus the feature’s director Scott Sanders helming the episodes and THE BOONDOCKS’ Carl Jones backing them up as exec producer, the show promises to carry forward with the movie’s vision of a world where the hair is big, the lapels are wide and the action is nonstop.

Adult Swim brought in White, Minns, Jones, and Sanders — plus Kim Whitley, who plays Honey Bee — for their roundtables, and we got to speak with all of them. Click on the player to hear the show.