Japanese Film Festival 2008
When you think Japanese cinema, you probably think about anime, right? Or samurai flicks. Or mind-fuck horror. Or a lurid blend of bizarre sex and graphic violence. For 12 years now, the Japan Foundation has been bringing discerning cinemagoers all this... and much, much more!
Like wasabi hitting your sinuses, the festival kicks off with plot-twisting crime comedy After School.
Hunger
Word association: when I say "hunger strike", do you think "brimming with cinematic possibilities"? Maybe not. Turner Prize-winning artist and first-time feature director Steve McQueen thought otherwise, and it just won him the Camera d'Or prize at Cannes. (Shows what you know, huh?)
It's easy to see why.
Celebrity: Dominick Dunne
Why does Dominick Dunne hate Frank Sinatra? Because Ol' Blue Eyes once instructed a flunky to punch Dominick in the head as a lark. Yes, Dunne's career trajectory - from social climber to movie producer to "the defining voice of Vanity Fair" - is weighed down by a torrential downpour of Old Hollywood name-dropping.
David Lynch DVD Collection
Has David Lynch just become a friendly caricature of American oddness? I mean, once you turn sixty, start evangelising about meditation and release your own brand of coffee - how strange can you really be?
A new five-disc DVD collection gives a before-and-after glimpse of Lynch's career. You can start with the industrial nightmare of fatherhood that is Eraserhead, and then wash your mind clean afterwards with his early short films like the adorable The Frenchman and The Cowboy.
Waltz With Bashir
War might be hell, but it's also totally awesome, right? That's the message embedded in most war movies. François Truffaut even claimed it's impossible to make an anti-war film, as the big screen automatically turns bodies and bullets into fodder for spectacular cinematic ka-boom.
Ari Folman's animated kinda-documentary Waltz With Bashir makes a convincing case that Truffaut was wrong.
The Square
The Square follows in the well-worn footsteps of classic noir, and, like its predecessors Blood Simple and Shallow Grave, it knows the giddy thrill of throwing forbidden love and easy money at men until they destroy themselves.
Even though it's a first feature, The Square is an assured enough debut to avoid beating the audience silly with explanations.
MIFF Trash Horror
Film festivals occasionally throw a few obscure horror gems into their programs to up their cool quotient, but MIFF takes it a step further this year by gleefully embracing the long, trashy and often bizarre history that spawned the contemporary genre.
1968's Spider Baby is one of the most hilarious and fundamentally doomed cult film productions of all time, thus a hands-down festival highlight.
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