Film
Rough Cuts
Film news and giveaways for beautiful cineaste types
I Book now for the CCA’s fantastic season of 403, 508 and 608 Mexican sci-fl films, showing from Thursday 14 July. These fantastically kitsch, rarely seen gems need to be seen to be believed. Highlights include the wrestler sci-fl horror flick Santo vs the Martian Invasion and Planet of the Female Invaders. Go to www.cca-glasgow.com and www.inboxmexico.org for more info.
I God bless the Scottish Executive, whose £265,000 bail- out package is saving the EIFF after sponsors pulled out. MD Ginnie Atkinson said: ‘Without it we would have been in a very difficult position.“
W I N MONDOVINO DVDs
I The List has five copies of the excellent wine industry documentary film Mondovino to give away. It’s out now to buy on DVD from UGC Films UK and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. To be in with the chance, send an email marked ‘MONDOVINO’ to promotions©list.co.uk by no later than 22 June 2005. Usual List rules apply.
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W I N KINSEY ON DVD
I The List has five DVD copies of Kinsey to give away. This fascinating, funny and controversial film, starring Liam Neeson, is about a man driven to uncover a nation's most private sex secrets. It's released to buy on DVD and to rent on DVD and Video on 4 July from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. To be in with the chance of winning a copy. just send us an email marked ‘KINSEY' to promotions@list.co.uk by no later than 22 June 2005. Usual List rules apply.
48 THE LIST 9-23 Jun 2005
DOCUMENTARY INSIDE DEEP THROAT
. (18) 92min coo
The story of the most profitable film of all time (Deep Throat cost $25,000 and has to date grossed over 8600m) is, in the hands of documentary filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster, The Eyes of Tammy Faye), a candid pOrtrait of an America reasserting its conservatism in the 19708 and attempting to crush the SOs-Spawned counterculture. When Deep Throat was released in 1972 it became the first porn film to cross over into the mainstream. But (Or the moral right Linda Lovelace swallowing nine inches was too much. and so Nixon and his cronies did their level and not strictly legal best to suppress the movie. In the end they Just created a lot of free publicity, and Deep
DRAMA/THRILLER UNDERTOW (15) 107min I...
Throat eventually settled into cult- classic semi-oblivion, never fulfilling its promise to unit porn and mainstream cinema as the two industries went their own crude. commercial ways.
Along with a mouthful of celeb commentators plus narrator Dennis Hopper, Bailey and Barbato get the inside skinny from director Gerard Damiano (who was ousted from the profits by the mob) and star Harry Reems (who was tried in court for acting in the film). Lovelace herself, who died in a car crash in 2002, appears in archive footage. Her assertion after retiring from porn that she was forced to make Deep Throat is touched upon. but Inside. . . sticks to the bigger picture. (Miles Fielder)
I Cameo. Edinburgh from Fri 70 Jun.
DRAMA
TWIN SISTERS (15) 135min 000 Based on the best-seller by Tessa de Loo. Twin Sisters is an involving but ultimately shallow ponrait of two girls growing up in 19308 Europe. separated at the age of six to be
(armed off to two very different families.
While Anna finds herself mucking out pigs and being beaten regularly by her uncle. the sickly Lotte is spirited off to a Dutch sanatorium for piano lessons
and a pampered existence of sailboats and afternoon tea. As the shadow of the Third Reich falls on them both. Lotte falls for an SS officer. while Anna's boyfriend is marched off to Auschwitz. The girls' differing experiences of histOry are intercut by a fraught reunion in the present, with Anna finding it hard to reconcile herself to her sister's actions. Ben Sombogaart‘s lush film has plenty of personal angst. lightly skirting around historical detail to tell a deliberately small scale story. But while the heart- wrenching tone is firmly set from the opening scene, as the girls are prised apart over their mother's grave, only in a clumsy final scene are notions of reconciliation explored with any depth. The six actresses who play Lotte and Anna are all engaging. but any impact Twin Sisters might have is watered down by a cod-Schindler's List score
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and anachronistic incongruities Green hooks the viewer into a weird tale of rural redemption and the struggle for the souls of young children.
Its 19703 Georgia, and widower John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two kids - tearaway teen Chris (Jamie Bell) and sickly child Tim (Devon Alan) - live on a shit heep farm on the edge of an unruly forest. Daddy seems to be having a nervous breakdown following the death of his wife and has dropped out from society, taking his kids along for the ride. But when surly, chain smoking jailbird Uncle Deel (Josh Lucas) turns up in search of hidden treasure their dispossessed, bucolic existence begins to fall apart.
This third feature from young director David Gordon Greene - whose previous two films George Washington and All the Pretty Girls hinted at a huge talent whose influences laid not only out of his time but also out of this world - is his most ambitious to date. Working with his regular cinematographer Tim Orr (Raising Victor Vargas) he’s made a fascinatingly weird slow burn nightmare pastorale that’s alive with ghosts from the work of Charles Burnett (Killer of Sleep), Robert Altman (Thieves Like Us in particular) and Don Siegel (The Beguiled is a clear reference point here). With the film's slow, odd zooms, its freeze frames, mumbled dialogue
But like his previous films, Undertow is not without its faults. Joe Conway’s script (Conway, an English teacher in Texas, brought Green to the school's campus for a screening of George Washington and soon found himself writing the script for this film) is pleasingly sparse but riddled with the kind of biblical pretension you find in sixth form essays, while stars Lucas and Bell have been given way too much freedom. Although neither of the performances is bad, both actors have a tendency to ham things up at the least appropriate moments. Also, Greene’s propensity for good old- fashioned set piece violence (a la Peckinpah) is commendable but so half arsed that it ultimately unbalances the film’s denouement.
0n the whole, though, this richly enjoyable oddity is something akin to Laughton’s Night of the Hunter as shot by Martin Parr. Plus Philip Glass’ soundtrack is one of his most sustained. Co-produced by the great Terrence Malick, this white trash fairytale is no masterpiece but its sinister otherworldliness deserves to be applauded. (Paul Dale)
I Selected release from Fri 77 Jun. See preview, page 46.