Clown (Klovn)

Belguim’s movie version of the country’s popular episodic show of the same name has little to offer other than its resemblance of an extended road trip version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, only this seems to be directed by an 11-year-old boy fixated on shocking potty humor and wanting to replicate the closing photo montage of The Hangover.

The movie is scene after scene of two unlikable lead characters displaying lewd punchlines.  Having unlikable characters isn’t always a turnoff, in fact, there are a lot of films that focus on the antagonist that I love, but these characters in particular, Frank and Casper, were too uninterestingly juvenile for me to ever be invested in.

Those able to block out all the Curb Your Enthusiasm similarities and are looking to see something featuring a lot of child molestation humor might have a good time with this movie.  What else can I say – it wasn’t for me.  The only reason I’m giving this film two stars instead of one is because I now know what a shnozzle is and are looking forward to giving my fellow Filmbalayans one the next time I see them. Read More…

Before I start, I just want to say that I love Indie Fest. No matter what movie you watch, good or bad, you are going to see something you have never seen before. To me, that’s the most important thing a film festival can bring to the table.

Exley

The main premise of the film is a man, Exley, trying to make a quick $1000 to catch a cross country flight and visit his dying mother.  He travels through a surreal and shady world of criminals, weirdos, and scum who are all more unusual than the last.  The one thing they all have in common is that they are so annoying they transcended the world of the film to actually annoy me, the viewer.  Any time my thought process when referring to an annoying movie character goes from “that would be so annoying” to “that is so annoying” to me the movie has made a critical error.  I suppose an experimental film could use this technique to make a point, and Exley does have a certain experimental tinge to it, but any movie that has a clear narrative should not have characters that require multiple alcohol beverages in order to tolerate.  It’s also hard to get sucked into a movie that’s so visually unpleasant that it makes you want to break the DVD into splinters and then use them to gauge your eyes out.  This is an all to common and unfortunate side effect of micro-budget filmmaking that I just can’t overlook.  Add to this mix that I didn’t care what happened to the main character one way or another, and you get a film less appetizing than a lukewarm Hot Pocket.  Exley has an interesting plot but comes up short on the execution and presentation. Read More…

Girl Walk All Day

Indiefest’s closing night film is a 71 minute dance video set to the  sounds of that mighty maestro of mash-up music, Girl Talk.  Mash-up music, for those who don’t already know, is another level of audio sampling in where the artist manipulates already existing music to form a new song entirely.  Usually rap lyrics are involved, but not always.  Think of it as an audio collage.

This particular collage, impressively shot on digital, features a talented group of dancers traversing across the city, transforming Manhattan into their own stage.  Hair salons, malls, ferry boats, museums, Yankee Stadium, bridges, bodegas, statues, subways, graveyards, parks, and much more are all turned into a dance playground.

So, what does one get out of seeing an hour-long improvisational mashed-up music video?  How about a sense of overwhelming joy and assurance in all that is good with humanity.  Yeah, I took it there.  Loved this movie so much I even found myself smiling and bobbing my head along to the featured Beatles songs.  For me, that’s a big deal, because I’m not a big fan of The Beatles.  Actually, I’m barely a little fan of them.  Come to think of it, I don’t like them at all, yet, I enjoyed them in the context of this movie – go figure. Read More…

4:44 Last Day On Earth

How would you spend your last days on Earth if you knew the world was going to be destroyed in the morning?  That’s the premise in Abel Ferrara‘s (King of New York, Bad Lieutenant) claustrophobic new movie, starring Willem Dafoe and newcomer Shanyn Leigh in where the two play a Manhattan couple coming to terms with their final moments of existence.

Ferrara’s choice to shoot the majority of the film in one setting with a minimal amount of takes made me feel as if I were watching a play – not at all a bad thing, especially when the lead actor is Dafoe.  This play setting, along with the ‘sky is falling’ scenario practically begs for fueled performances to which both Dafoe and Leigh delivered.  The actors made the most of their surroundings and turned their emoting skills on high, only occasionally finding themselves being caught in fits of overacting.  This is where the movie falters, when the attention pays too much to the acting and not the scenario.  Still, the little bursts of over-the-top moments weren’t enough to detract me from the movie as a whole.

4:44 Last Day On Earth is a depressing way to kick off a film festival, yet not as depressing as kicking it off with a bad movie.  Fans of both doomsday scenarios and movies that show close-ups of Willem Dafoe’s pubic region should walk away eerily pleased from this one.

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Thank you IndiFest for helping to kick off 2011 with some great films.  Sure, there were some stinkers amongst the 40 plus films, but for the most part this year’s lineup was an impressive one!  Opening the festival with Greg Araki‘s Kaboom and ending it with Alex de la Iglesia‘s The Last Circus made for the perfect bookends.  In between these two excellent features were a handful of stinkers and another handful of better-than-average and worthwhile films.

Follow the jump to see how we at Filmbalaya rated the festival, along with links to reviews from every film we were able to catch.  Also, feel free to let us know in the comments section if you agree or disagree as to where we rated a particular film. Read More…

So you want to go to IndieFest but have no idea what’s worth seeing?  Fear not, Filmbalaya’s here to help.

Here’s a list of things you will find after the jump:

• Reviews of our favorite films that we’ve seen so far that are playing at the festival
• A list of all other events aside from the movie portion of the festival
• Ticket info
• An strange picture of Indiana Jones, after all, this is IndieFest. Read More…

The following is an excerpt taken from Michael Hawley’s post on SF Indiefest at his blog, film-415.blogspot.com

IndieFest has always had a soft spot for exploitation films and I was thrilled to find that they’d programmed Machete Maidens Unleashed!, a movie I’ve been salivating over since learning of its existence during the Toronto Int’l Film Festival. This documentary about made-in-the-Philippines exploitation films of the 1970′s and 80′s comes courtesy of Mark Hartley, the same guy who gave us 2008′s rollicking Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! I’m a sucker for that era’s jungle-set women’s prison movies like Black Mama, White Mama and The Big Bird Cage, and judging from the trailer, it looks like I’ll be getting my fill of clips and wild production tales from the likes of Roger Corman, Jack Hill and fave character actor Sid Haig.

In a tip of the hat to neo-exploitation, IndieFest will also be showing the fabulously awful-looking Nude Nuns with Big Guns from director Joseph Guzman (Run! Bitch Run!). Asun Ortega stars a Sister Sarah, a nun who extracts bloody revenge on the motorcycle gang who kidnapped and held her in drug-addled, sex-slave captivity. It takes a stronger man than I to resist a film with the taglines “Hell hath no fury like a nude Nun with a big gun” and “This Sister is One Bad Mother.“

Check out a trailer for Machete Maidens Unleashed after the jump.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a SFW trailer for Nude Nuns with Big Guns, but do you really need a trailer for a movie with such an awesome self explanatory name such as that? Read More…