Doomed to Walk the Earth as Slaves of the Living Dead

Last Saturday I came back home by foot, on a dark night, after having seen Night of the Living Dead, the matrix from where all horror films came out. There's funny stories about this movie. For example, their distributor forgot to put a copyright indication on the movie, and it soon fell in the public domain. You can download hordes of disgusting zombies for free, and more, you can do it legally !!! Or almost all the parts are played by pals of Romero. The little girl who (which ?) eat her father and stabs her mother to death was really their daughter in real-life. Some actors also were the producers of the movie, and they also performed the "special effects" (mortician wax for the zombies, etc...) themselves. etc...



Still... When returning home, I was listening to Carpathian Forest's Morbid Fascination of Death album. You already know the title of the song, and I swear it really was a coincidence.

Stop being so humble
Stop showing remorse
Cut it off
The hands that feed the blind
Can you move?
With those holy chains

Diary of the Dead

I'm sure you already know that Diary of the Dead, George Romero's next Living Dead movie will be released in February.



Land of the Dead was very good !! I really look forward to this next movie !! Plus if you really, REALLY, REALLY wanted to shoot gory movies for a long, long time, now is your lucky day ;-) There's a contest on the myspace page for the movie for its future release on DVD (so you have time to apply !!): Shoot a short horror movie, send it to Romero, and if he appreciate it, it will maybe be on the DVD !! All this could be the beginning of an horror movie. I'm already seeing the script a la Ring ;-)

And now, in a (not) entirely new area: Metal.
Here are some interesting events in Paris in January (don't know if I will attend to ALL of them, but they all sound interesting):

• January 20: Djabah - a French local Death Metal band - at La Loco for the Smoking Kills Fest


• January 22: Obituary and Holy Moses


• February 17: Behemoth


• February 26: Polysics
  
• Sometime in April: Arkhon Infaustus

Minesweeper, The Movie

No, I did not forgot the pictures of Arnhem. Be prepared for real Metal bands, folks...

But, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy... I have important informations to give, they released the trailer for the ultimate war-splatter film: Minesweeper: The Movie.

J-Horror

No, I did not wait to go to Japan to see a LOT of Japanese movies. Do you know Kurosawa ? No, not this one, though seeing Ran was sort of a life-defining experience for me: the world was not the same after.

Did you hear about know Kiyoshi Kurosawa ? Did you saw Cure ? Were you frightened by Kairo (the Japanese J-Horror masterpiece, not the bad BAD BAD American remake Pulse) ?

OK, I saw Retribution last week. As for a lot of Kurosawa's movies, there's not a lot of action, there's no gore effects, there are some ghosts (who-or which, do few, except stating that they will always be there), and finally there's Japan as an exhausted no-man's land. Unsettling, and a bit morbid, all right, but GREAT !!! And great low-key performance from Koji Yakusho; maybe you will remember him from his role in Babel, but he is a regular of Kurosawa's movies. This time, it is about a policeman, who lives with a strangely absent beautiful young woman. He starts to think that he is maybe the one who killed the woman in red who we see strangled just at the beginning of the movie. Except that he does not remember a thing about that. Except that the ghost of the woman (or is she ?) start to haunt him all the time (doing few, but being scary, because she-or it does not really express the reason why she-or it is here). It appears that just being alive also means being guilty.



The second J-Horror movie I saw just yesterday is Reincarnation, by Takashi Shimizu, who is the one who made the horror series The Grudge. In this movie, a mad professor kills eleven people in a small hotel (including his young daughter and son), while filming all during the killings with a small camera. A lot of years later, a film director starts to make a movie about this story. Apart from its great endings (right through the very last frame, which is very disturbing, though in a purely intellectual way), apart from the beginnings in modern Tokyo (I recognized some of the places they used), this is for me a movie that deals with the power of cinema (some evil power, because it is horror, remember). Needless to say, this film is also scary !!

Not finished yet

One more post about The Fountain. And first, another picture, of course not saying too much (if you want real spoilers, go here).

What does this picture represent ? A Christian ride bathed in a fantastic pre-Christian sunset ? The path for some burning pagan revenge ? The seek for the last golden truth ?
Maybe not so far away from this last one, but still, this is so simple at the end, so simple that maybe there is no need to seek ?

But first, consider your death.

Now you're asking yourself if I've suddenly become insane, and what about this movie in the first place ? Maybe you will now avoid The Fountain for the next fifty times you'll go to the cinema.

Don't make such a mistake. I assure you, you will understand what I'm saying.

And : this movie just shows you possible directions to the story. This movie gives you the freedom to write your own ending.

Trust me, this is so rare you must take the risk.

Finish it

Last Friday, following an advice from one of my friends (thanks Milambre), I saw The Fountain, the last Darren Aronofsky movie. As usual, I managed to go to the cinema at the last moment before the beginning of the screening (I almost expected not to see the beginning, which would have been a problem, especially for this one).



I stepped in the (small) movie theater, and after a few minutes, its beginning... was utterly unexpected. My friend said that seeing this movie was like experimenting dying, then rebirth, and yes it is so true (this is a painful process). Lets say that all the movie feels like the last thoughts of someone dying (NOT A SPOILER there, I only say that it feels like it, not that this is the end of it). There are three stories entangled together, each at a different period, and seemingly not related, but it ends that they all tell the same story of love and death. This is also a story about story telling itself.

This is not a mainstream movie, but this is a movie that says a lot about its director, and well about you too as a viewer. It is risky, it is uncompromising, but trust me : it is worth seeing.