“I’m not going to eat again for twenty years”

These were fitting last words for Michael Stephenson spoken nearly twenty years ago in his role as Joshua Waits, a young boy whose hallucinatory visions of his dead grandpa Seth help him to narrowly escape the clutches of some ravenous goblins in Troll 2 (dir. Claudio Fargasso, 1990). Evidently this all but forgotten piece of ultra low-budget trash-horror film history would not be celebrated as quite the groundbreaking horror classic that, as Stephenson speaking at a midnight screening of the film at this year’s Fantasia film festival quipped, he was convinced they were making at the time of the shoot. All of that excitement “and we failed miserably,” Stephenson joked with a smile and a slight shrug. Needless to say, Troll 2 would not help the child actor put food on the table.

But recently reunited with his co-star and onscreen dad George Hardy – the real-life Alabama dentist who back in the day was paid $1500 for a role he'd all but forgotten about – to introduce and field questions at Fantasia about their oft-disavowed work, Stephenson was able all of these years later to finally celebrate Troll 2 in all its refreshing eccentricity amidst a partially drunken, partially stoned, but entirely reverent crowd assembled to celebrate the film’s recent elevation to cult classic status. As it turns out, the film that for Stephenson had been somewhat of a guilty pleasure to make, has since grown over these past twenty years or so into an unpredictable and wildly entertaining filmic event for small pockets of fans all over the world.

Troll 2 may ultimately owe its infamy to an online ranking as the all-time worst movie on the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDB) Top-100 list of worst movies, but the real story is a far more engaging and personal one. The film became somewhat of an underground internet phenomenon while Stephenson, Hardy, and the rest of the colourful cast of characters involved in the film’s production (including 80’s Italian softcore film star Laura Gemser, as a particularly astute fan pointed out during the Q&A) were busily moving on with their lives. Fan sites and music videos started popping up. Homage was even paid to the film in Sony Playstation’s immensely popular Guitar Hero 2 videogame. Committed fans organized costumed Troll 2 screening dinner parties; and, as the truly die-hard fans will invariably do, they eventually managed to track Stephenson down via his MySpace page in order to pay their proper respects.

That was four years ago and Stephenson has since hooked up with Hardy to make one of the most impressive documentaries running the festival circuit this year, Best Worst Movie. The documentary, which has drawn favourable comparisons with Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong (2007) and won the People’s Choice ‘Best Documentary’ prize at Fantasia this year, follows an intimate reunion of the film’s idiosyncratic director and cast members through an extended celebration of Troll 2’s revival by fans across the world. And the midnight screenings of the original film, which accompany the documentary’s tour through festival cities, form the better part of this ongoing celebration.

While waiting in line for the Troll 2 screening at Fantasia this year a friend and I encountered George Hardy, who Stephenson makes the central character in Best Worst Movie, as he made his way slowly through the crowd greeting fans individually and asking them, one by one, if they had seen his film yet. It took little effort to catch in this strikingly modest Alabama dentist-turned-cult-film-icon, a glimpse of what heart pumps life into the audiences that flock to Troll 2. This not only because Hardy’s character, the caring yet firm ‘Farmer Waits,’ is one of the film’s major highlights (his classic line ‘you can’t piss on hospitality – I won’t allow it!’ is hands down the most memorable line of the entire film). But also, and more importantly, because despite what might be expected, the enjoyment audiences get from such an unintentionally hilarious film as Troll 2 is, like George Hardy himself as he moves through a crowd encouraging his fans to enjoy the movie, not just being ironic. No, this is a film that audiences can get into without reservations.

Commenting in an interview on the apparently paradoxical love fans have for this allegedly all-time worst film, Stephenson remarks, “[s]ure the writing is bad and the acting is bad, based on cinematic principles. But where it doesn’t fail is that it has heart and it has sincerity. Most movies today don’t have that.”* (‘most movies’ here especially refers to such big-budget contenders in the worst film category as Paul Blart: Mall Cop; shameless promotional vehicles marred by a complete lack of charm). Experiencing Troll 2 with a live audience, it becomes clear that Stephenson does not mean by 'heart' and 'sincerity' anything abstract either, nor anything ultimately reducible to a matter of personal opinion. Troll 2's heart and sincerity are manifest in the openness with which audiences interact with the film, sometimes tossing popcorn at the screen during the unforgettable ‘popcorn’ sex scene, sometimes counting out the seconds while Joshua, having had time conveniently frozen by his Granpa Seth, circles his family trying to think up a way to keep them from eating the dinner their hosts have so hospitably laid out for them. It is a tremendously participatory film, even if, like the vast majority of trash films, it originally earned its reputation through late-night/early morning cable-television airings and video-store rentals.

Whether it be Troll 2, the classic Z-movies of the Plan 9 From Outer Space (dir. Ed Wood, 1959), Manos: The Hands of Fate (dir. H.P. Warren, 1966) variety, or John Waters films; fans of the trashier film genres are not consigned to reading these films ironically, nor do I think that irony plays any serious part in what attracts audiences to these types of films in the first place. Rather, watching a filmmaking crew not quite realize their ambitions is something that any lover of film can relate to - put simply, the cast and crew of trash films are easy to identify with. This is compounded by the fact that most everyone who works on such films has a day job, and is in the same tax bracket as his or her audience. Closely related to this, audiences can also easily relate to the desire on the part of the cast to lose themselves in their fictional roles (or alternatively, a filmmaker's desire to lose himself in his story), and the battle that this entails against forces as dull and inescapable as poverty and a simple lack of time - a battle that, like their audiences, they for the most part lose out against.

With this in mind, Troll 2 actually captures the principal themes of trash film spectatorship remarkably well. It is foremost a coming-of-age story wherein the young Joshua Waits is forced to confront the forces of reality as they twist something that began as a quaint story, a figment of his overactive imagination, into something real but initially implausible, that terrifies him and with which he must grapple if he is to survive as a person. Moreover, this is something he grapples with personally, since everyone else in his family has become so dulled to the effects of reality that they have lost the ability to imagine its dangers - their sense of what is plausible keeps them from experiencing the threats they will come to face as real. These threats, moreover, just so happen to take the form of ravenous vegetarian goblins that descend on people when their mindless consumption of food has turned them into vegetables. Predictably, escaping the wrath of the goblins will also, for Joshua, entail learning to cope with problems without the help and guidance of his family (in many cases he is the only person in a position to save them), and, moreover, it will also ultimately force him to confront the mortality of his grandfather who, for a good portion of the film, communicates to him from beyond the grave.

Of course, the goblins don't look real, the acting and dialogue are pitched at a remarkably high level of absurdity, and the plot twists involve a colorful variety of supernatural or otherwise implausible flights of the imagination. But Troll 2 does, nevertheless, directly ask us to question what we find plausible, whilst effectively demonstrating that by not entertaining fictions that may seem terribly unconvincing to us, we risk falling into mindless routines - in other words, we risk becoming vegetables. It departs from generic conventions so regularly, and turns out to be such a thoroughly strange film, that it leaves a door wide open for anyone who might want to join the party. And if that wasn't already enough, it sends a pack of goblins to chase you through that door and towards a memorable night.

* For the complete interview: http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/06/02/interview-director-michael-stephenson-on-best-worst-movie-troll-2-as-geek-phenomenon-the-alamo-drafthouse-skate-vids-and-pizza/

Korea's 'Newest' New Wave: the next generation of Korean filmmakers are tearing up the international festival circuit

There has been a lot of talk of late about Korean cinema heading into a Second Wave, comparable to the boom several years ago that witnessed the emergence of such by now internationally renowned auteurs as Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Kim Ji-woon, and that saw films such as The Host (2006) and Oldboy (2003) become not only cult classics, but also massive box office successes, not to mention international trend-setters in their respective genres. Admittedly, much of this hype focuses on a fresh outlook that the new generation of filmmaking talent in Korea is thought to collectively represent, which loosely distinguishes them from the auteurs in whose shadows they work. This outlook, while still committed to high production-value and innovative technique, is alleged to be one that is more amenable to low-budget production and less reliant on big investments from the major Korean studios. More pointedly, these new talents are emerging at a time when the Korean film industry is exploring more flexible and financially feasible means to produce films. And so the hype concerning a possible Second Wave is largely if not primarily focused on associating this new generation of filmmakers with a fresh set of filmmaking strategies – strategies that promise to bring an independent-minded sensibility into closer alignment with the prevailing interests of major Korean studios and distributors.

Nevertheless, as intriguing as the question of a new Korean cinema can be when properly flushed out, the excitement about this new generation of filmmakers reaches deeper than a strictly market-oriented view can hope to capture, and is ultimately rooted in the quality of the films that are being debuted. Simply put, these are films to get excited about. The stylistic and thematic range alone should turn heads. There is Lee Kyoung-mi’s complete overhaul of the romantic comedy, Crush and Blush (2008), and Noh Young-seok’s Daytime Drinking (2008), which weaves an ensemble comedy piece through the everyday ritual consumption of Korea’s national drink, soju. Park Dae-min’s detective story Private Eye (2009), meanwhile, moves almost entirely outside of the horizon of modern crime-thrillers, returning to the classical era of Sherlock Holmes-styled whodunit. Lee Seong-han’s Spare (2008) has, in turn, quite radically revised the gangster genre, putting it in dialogue with traditional Korean theatre. And for a meticulously stylized gangster film, there is Kim Ki-duk’s protégé Jang Hun, who has come out with Rough Cut (2008). On the other side of the spectrum entirely is Yang Ik-june’s gritty, character-driven ‘anti-hero’ gangster film Breathless (2008). And finally, leading the pack is the second highest grossing film in Korea last year, Na Hong-jin’s masterful suspense film The Chaser (2008), the rights to which have already been bought up by Warner Bros. who have hired none other than William Monahan to adapt it for the Hollywood screen (Monahan won the Academy award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2006 for his adaptation of Infernal Affairs (2002), The Departed). These are all debut films, which means that regardless of how critics decide to sketch the broader trend, South Korean cinema is currently experiencing a promising explosion of creative activity.

And while my inclination is to emphasize the consistency of Korean cinema over the past decade – each year, regardless of the numbers, Korean filmmakers have been coming out with future-classics, films with real staying power – and while, above all, I can’t easily pinpoint any definitive stylistic or thematic break between these two generations of filmmakers, I still think that the ‘Second Wave’ kind of hype that has accompanied the success of these new talents, if nothing else, does help shine a light on their actual films. Moreover, it can ultimately help take these new talents out of the shadows of their predecessors, and get their films greater exposure in the international film markets. All signs indicate that this is already happening, and in the coming days and weeks as the dust settles over this year's Fantasia film festival, it will be time to examine in greater depth what each of these debut films has yielded. In the meantime, believe the hype.




All of the debut films listed here are screening at this year's Fantasia film festival.
For screening dates & times go to: http://www.fantasiafest.com/2009/

astra taylor's examined life (re-post)

Astra Taylor is quickly establishing herself as one of today's premiere documentary filmmakers. A lecturer and author, her first film, (as producer) Persons of Interest, won a number of awards and dealt incisively with the program of 'extraordinary rendition' implemented in the wake of september 11th. Her directorial debut, Zizek! saw her patiently following the mad philosopher around his lecture circuit (and into his bedroom), helping him perform the "suicide of his public image" that he jokingly refers to near the end of the film. Her most current work is on a documentary based on none other than Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, a landmark book that follows the historically unprecedented explosion of slums around the world.

Her most recently released film, which is currently being celebrated by reviewers as it travels the festival circuit (most recently, earlier this month it was featured in the Kingston Canadian Film Festival) is called the Examined Life, and effectively takes Zizek! to another level by featuring not only Zizek (this time in a New York garbage heap explaining how, to develop a real political ecology, we must learn to embrace our trash), but also his friend (and third wave feminist hero) Judy Butler, Martha Nussbaum (who, to give balance where it is due, once took Butler and her colleagues to pieces in her much-publicized paper 'The Professor of Parody'), Jacques Derrida's spacey pupil Avital Ronell (who Zizek routinely jokes about in his lectures), ethicist Peter Singer, among others. Other than Zizek's trip to the dump, we find Cornell West flying through downtown New York traffic in a taxi cab, Michael Hardt calming paddling a lake in a rowboat, and all (as in Zizek!) philosophizing in places as far outside of their stuffy university habitat as Taylor could get them.

The titular theme is, of course, Socrates' famed 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' but beyond this both Taylor's selection of philosophers and her shooting style focus on a more specific type of intervention in public space. These philosophers, while academic celebrities in a sense (leaders of the 'radical left' - or whatever's left of it), are not simply stuffy intellectuals speculating about unresolvable questions which we will never face in daily life - their topics touch on the key issues that define today's social landscape (the ethical dimension of consumerism, the political stakes in ecology, etc.). In a sense, Taylor is simply rethinking what the public-ness of the public intellectual is supposed to entail - documenting their work is, of course, a matter of publicizing them, and the logical next step is to actually put them in public spaces and, at least at an aesthetic level, give the effect that they are thereby being made more readily accessible to us.

The massive influence of each philosopher's particular theoretical work - always intelligibly given, alters, with each segment, what we imagine a public life to consist in (they have each, in turn, radically altered various spheres of public life in their own academic work from which they draw for their skits - eg, Nussbaum's work in the field of law, Hardt's work with grassroots activists, West's with black community rights groups, etc.). This to say that, while concerned with 'big ideas,' Taylor's strategy is not finally just a gimmick used to entertain those who might have already been exposed to the work of these intellectuals. The question of public dialogue is always more or less active in the various public intellectual performances.

And of course, in a more literal sense, this is simply a kind of nostalgic guerrilla philosophizing, taking their philosophizing to the streets (lakes, dumps, etc.) these thinkers reclaim otherwise boring places and, with their theorizing, make these otherwise potentially stale settings not only more relevant and interesting to our civic lives but also more crucial staging grounds for the types of choices and behaviour we think liable to change social relations. The overall effect of the film is quite far removed from some obscure, naive 'you can make a difference' rhetoric; the message is a more practical and progressive one meant to encourage the kind of public dialogue that will be necessary if our communities are going to avert the kind of catastrophes that the news (and often other styles of documentary) throw in our faces as foregone conclusions we play no part in (there is no condescending, Michael Moore-style us vs. them hysteria going on here).

So what is likely most fitting about Taylor's admittedly very simple filmmaking strategy here, is that it leaves the movie-going public with a sense that the film, and its ideological content, is not finally set in a place that is far-removed from the theater, somewhere else entirely, but is instead more closely aligned with the kind of common spaces audiences navigate in their everyday routines, out in the world at large.

Playing at Cinema du Parc, starting April 3rd, 2k9