Najočekivaniji NE-HOROR filmovi 2013. (2. deo)

            Prvi deo mog izbora najočekivanijih filmova ove godine izvan horor žanra sadržao je manje-više poznate naslove – pretežno zato što većinu njih potpisuju poznata i višestruko dokazana rediteljska imena (Jodorovski, fon Trir, Refn...). Taj izbor i dalje je OVDE.

            A sada, evo nastavka, gde sam sabrao filmove debitanata, malo znanih ili neznanih autora, ne naročito izvikanih, pa bi zato mogli da promaknu – onima koji ne prate Kult Gula! Evo ih dole, po redosledu visine očekivanja.

 UPCUMMING NONHORROR FLIX (2. deo)

            The Major
 

The ambitious and accomplished Russian multihyphenate Yuri Bykov adds acting and editing to his skill set with his electric sophomore feature, “The Major.” Tracing how things go from bad to much, much worse when some corrupt cops try to cover up a hit-and-run by one of their own, this crime drama puts a distinctive, cynical Russian spin on genre material. However, the situation escalates via a string of bad decisions involving excessive use of violence, ineptitude and, most provocatively of all, slivers of humanity, which make certain characters spare the lives of others when it would have been more expedient to kill them. At times, the pic feels like the pilot for a TV procedural but with dingier sets, more swearing and a very Slavic sense of miserabilism. No one here harbors any illusions that the police are there to uphold justice and the law; mostly they’re just thugs in uniform.

Vanishing Waves 

Vanishing Waves is an exquisite sci-fi head trip in the vein of Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey, one which takes pleasure in ideas and exploration rather than cheap thrills. As a bonus, it's also sexier than either of those movies. Rather than taking viewers to the outer limits, Lithuanian writer/director Kristina Buožytė is concerned solely with the depths of the human mind, and all the confusion, joy, sex and pain competing for space within.

The plot involves a neuron-informatics scientist named Lukas who is chosen to take part in an experiment that involves actually transferring neuron information from a comatose girl to him. In layman's terms, Lukas is more or less entering the mind of a girl in a coma. Besides some very trippy initial interference, the experiment works better than anyone could have hoped and Lukas finds himself in a surreal world inhabited by a beautiful woman -- no prizes for guessing she's the anonymous comatose patient -- with whom he immediately becomes obsessed. Rather than actually sharing the real results with the team of scientists though, Lukas keeps most of the experience a secret, instead giving the research team just enough vague visual details so that they'll plug him in again. And again.

The film then takes a number of turns as it explores the effect of the project on Lukas' consciousness, his subconsciousness and of course, that of the woman. Soon, Lukas is completely ignoring his girlfriend and sneaking into the hospital to administer drugs that will affect the comatose woman's subconscious experience. This effort, naturally, creates some problematic and unintended side effects.

Hwayi 

It has been a full decade now since Korean director Jang Joon-hwan made his feature debut with cult favorite Save The Green Planet. Jang has been quiet in the years since, turning out one notable short amidst a string of false starts on other feature projects but despite the intensely loyal cult around Green Planet the film's financial failure at the Korean box office has stymied his chances of making a second feature until now. Jang has just begun principal photography on Hwayi, the story of a teenaged boy raised by five criminals to become the perfect killer.

**** Ja sam veliki fan filma Save The Green Planet i beskrajno me veseli što taj reditelj, posle 10 godina pauze (!!!) snima novi film, pa još sa tako zabavnom premisom.

Dirty Blood

Presents what looks to be an entirely unique spin on the Korean rape-revenge subgenre of thrillers, one where the revenge comes not from the victim of the assault but from the child who is the result. The story revolves around Im Sun, a high school girl about to travel to Spain on a student exchange when she learns that her mother was raped and she is the result. And so she decides to find her father instead

Pluto  

A Korean high school student has been murdered by one of his classmates. Suspicion quickly falls on one of his classmates, who is brought in for questioning by the police. The victim was the top student in his school, a prestigious and intense institution that sends many of it students to the country's top-ranked university. He was part of a select group of the school's best students, a circle that his classmate, with his poor grades, was desperate to be a part of. Within this cutthroat society, students will do anything to get ahead

 

Tip Top 

The sadomasochistic musician Isabelle Huppert played in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” seems positively parochial compared to her very physical cop in “Tip Top,” director Serge Bozon’s wildly off-kilter tale of two female detectives investigating murder and police corruption in a sleepy French town. An utterly brazen mix of screwball comedy, film noir and sharp social commentary that hits its own strange bullseye more often than not, Bozon’s third full-length feature benefits immeasurably from actors willing to go as far out on a limb as their intrepid director.

Our Kind of Traitor (2014)

A young Oxford academic and his attorney girlfriend holiday on Antigua. They bump into a Russian millionaire who owns a peninsula and a diamond watch. He wants a game of tennis. What else he wants propels the lovers on a tortuous journey to the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's intelligence establishment, to Paris and the Alps. With Mads Mikkelsen, Ewan McGregor, Ralph Fiennes...

Found

Scrappy, twisted indie film, Found is one part earnest coming-of-age melodrama, one part blood-soaked video-nasty. While director Scott Shcirmer's (adapting a novel by Todd Rigney) isn't completely successful navigating this tonal tightrope, there are enough memorable, and even brilliant parts of the uneven whole to make the film well-worth watching. That goes triple for those who grew up watching horror movies in the 80's and 90's... In the end, the parts the film gets right linger longer than those it doesn't, making Found a compelling, unique and, yes, totally sick portrait of a serial killer.

Bad Seeds (Comme un homme)

Based on the novel "L'age bete" by Boileau-Narcejac. An intriguing matrimony of bildungsfilm and neo-noir, "Bad Seeds" credibly transposes a Boileau-Narcejac novel to present-day Gaul. Starring real-life father and son Charles and Emile Berling, as a widowed provincial high-school principal and his ingenuous teen offspring who nonetheless goes astray, this atmospherically shot, strongly acted feature reps another solid addition to the impressive filmography of helmer Safy Nebbou ("Dumas," "Mark of an Angel"). Given that the work of writing duo Boileau-Narcejac has spawned adaptations as accomplished as "Les Diaboliques" and "Vertigo," it's odd that their work isn't filmed more often. Except for a 1980 French TV movie, this is the first time their 1970s novel "L'age bete" has been brought to the screen. The untranslatable pun in the title suggests an age of foolishness (both as an era and adolescence in general) as well as the savagery and violence of this dark story, with another possible interpretation being "The Beastly Age."

Borgman

If Michael Haneke had a slightly less ironic appreciation of the term “funny games,” he might have cooked up something a little like “Borgman,” a sly, insidious and intermittently hilarious domestic thriller that is likely to remain one of the most daring selections of this year’s Cannes competish. More disquieting than explicit, this eighth feature from Dutch writer-helmer Alex van Warmerdam, who also features memorably in the ensemble, strikes a familiar note in its allegorical punishment of the entitled upper classes, but the execution is sufficiently inventive to mark the pic as a challenge worth accepting for adventurous arthouse distribs.

Blue Ruin

The backwoods-gothic terrain may be familiar, but the jolts are doled out with an expert hand in “Blue Ruin,” a lean and suspenseful genre piece that follows a bloody trail of vengeance to its cruel, absurd and logical conclusion. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier shows impressive progress from his funny-scary 2007 debut, “Murder Party,” with this tense, stripped-down tale of a Virginia drifter who finds himself in way over his head when he tries to exact payback for his parents’ deaths.

The Stolen

Charlotte Lockton, a wealthy, upper class, English immigrant, chooses to forgo all of her home luxuries to find her kidnapped baby son. She navigates her way through the unruly and wild world of the gold rush in 1860's New Zealand, finding unlikely friendship amongst the hustlers, whores, Maori Warriors and Chinese Miners. But in the end, she must face the man who took the boy - and become the woman she never thought she'd be. With Mads Mikkelsen, Graham McTavish, Richard O'Brien.

Trap for Cinderella

Iain Softley's Trap For Cinderella harks back to elegant, suspenseful mysteries like Vertigo and Diabolique. In the shadow of those films, it's not particularly groundbreaking, but it's so stylish, intriguing and well-made that innovation hardly seems necessary. After all, the old adage warns us not to fix things that aren't broken, and Softley complies admirably. Were it not for a couple scenes involving cell phones, some pop songs, and the film's fairly copious amount of nudity, it'd be easy to mistake the movie for a lost, sleeper gem from the 60's. Alex Barber's excellent, desaturated 35 mm photography only adds to the retro feel. It's a deft, remarkably assured work, and certainly not the type of film I expected from the director of K-Pax.

One Eyed Girl

While majestic might not be the best way to describe a doomsday cult thriller which, in part, seems to feature some shocking bloodshed, it's a great word to illustrate the first teaser for One Eyed Girl, the debut feature from cinematographer Nick Matthews. Featuring what looks to be another tense, fraught performance by Mark Leonard Winter - who is finally making his much-deserved debut here as leading man - One Eyed Girl is the story of a psychiatrist (Winter) who follows a mysterious teenage girl named Grace into a Doomsday cult.

The Human Race

Seventy-nine random people who happened to be on the same city block, disappear in a flash of white light, and wake up in mysterious surroundings. They are told that they've been forrcibly entered into a marathon, where they're forced to race through extensive terrain. If they leave the path they've been given- they die. If they're lapped twice- they die.

We're in Battle Royale territory here, and while the movie is never as biting or hilarious as that survival-of-the-fittest fable, Paul Hough orchestrates his own film with a sure hand and brutal conviction to the demented premise. The Human Race is not a film where a character's fate is predetermined based on their "type," whether they are young or old or whether they are good or bad. In fact, probably one of the most effective aspects of the film is Hough's insistence that we do not live in a benevolent universe where the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad punished, or that anything actually happens for some lofty, higher purpose. Sometimes life is just shitty for no good reason.

Helter Skelter

Quite possibly the year’s best looking and most hysterical film, “Helter Skelter” marked the return of Japanese director and photographer Ninagawa Mika some 5 years after her colourful debut “Sakuran”. Based on a manga, the film also sees the return of controversial and gorgeous actress Sawajiri Erika in an over the top and frequently insane look at the Japanese entertainment industry, packing in madness, sex and black market plastic surgery. Visually arresting and mind-bending throughout, though open to accusations of style over substance, it’s a film which sears itself into the mind and eyeballs.

Dreams for Sale

Directed by Nishikawa Miwa, “Dreams for Sale” is a hard-hitting and highly original drama, charting the odd scheme by a husband and wife who decide to try and make the money needed to fix their burned down restaurant by marrying him off to desperately lonely women and ripping them off. Equal parts dark humour and emotional bleakness, the film never plays out even remotely as expected, with some of the best written and developed characters of the year, not to mention cerebral and insightful takes on modern gender roles and politics. Nishikawa keeps things firmly grounded and painfully believable throughout, and though increasingly tense and eventful, the film retains a raw, quietly confrontational humanism through to its harrowing conclusion.

Nothing Bad Can Happen

In a Cannes flush with onscreen unpleasantries including multiple rapes, severed limbs and genital mutilations, no film was more deserving of a special Palme d’Horreur than the ironically titled “Nothing Bad Can Happen,” whose Jesus-loving protag takes such a beating to body and soul as to make crucifixion seem like the easy way out. Skillfully made first feature by writer-director Katrin Gebbe has some undeniably striking passages and performances, but ultimately spirals toward a gruesome third act that is no less monotonous for supposedly being based on true events. It ultimately leads “Nothing Bad Can Happen” into full-blown “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”/“Last House on the Left” territory. By then, the pic’s initially intriguing ideological clash between a true believer and a heretic becomes little more than a catalogue of human behavior at its most depraved. If Gebbe is trying to say something about the opiate of religion or the social conditions that lead homeless teens into bad situations, it’s muddled — rather than sharpened — by the ultimately numbing graphic violence.

Maruyama, The Middle Schooler

 

About a fourteen-year-old boy who's primary ambition throughout the film is to, as the omniscient narrator puts it, "to touch his own weeny with his tongue." However, rather than focusing exclusively on Maruyama, the film plays as more of an ensemble comedy set in the community housing project where the boy lives. Its consistently hilarious and oddly touching subplots involve everyone from an old man with dementia to Maruyama's soap-opera obsessed mom, to a new, clumsy neighbor who may or may not be a mass murderer. Just like the central plot, each one of these could have played like episodic sketch comedy, but Hokudo invests everything with wit, humanity and charmingly off-kilter comic timing.

Michael Kohlhaas

 

Set in 16th century France, a well-to-do horse merchant raises an army and ransacks towns after suffering an injustice. With Mads Mikkelsen, Bruno Ganz, Paul Bartel

Lasting  (Nieulotne)

Two Polish students fall in love with each other during a holiday in Spain. But a horrible accident ruins their relationship and their plans. A thrilling existential drama in which fate seems to overcome the best-laid plans of men.

Life is sunny and carefree for young Michal and Karina. The two Polish students meet in Valencia, Spain, where they have holiday jobs, and fall in love on the spot. But then Michal becomes involved in a fight in which someone dies and suddenly everything is different. The world that only a few moments earlier seemed so available falls apart, slowly yet inevitably. The mountainous landscape that was at first idyllic now becomes a threat. The tender holiday love turns into a nightmare. The protagonists - Jakub Gierszal, who is already known as the Polish James Dean and who drives round in this film on a big motorbike, and the former model Magdalena Berus - balance between hysteria, despair and emotional sincerity. Their mutual chemistry and intense acting makes this film more than a fateful love story. Lasting is close-up investigation into the humain condition.