There Will be No Leave Today

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Gordon

1959

****

There Will be No Leave Today is a student film by the directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Gordon who both attended the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in 1959. Based on a real postwar incident, the film is about an army unit trying to dispose unexploded bombs to save a small town. It was Tarkovsky's and Gordon's second film after The Killers and was produced while being students at the State Institute of Cinematography. It was commissioned by Soviet Television for VGIK students to make a film to be aired on Victory Day, the anniversary of the Capitulation of Nazi Germany in WWII, May 9, 1959. It was aired each year on this day for at least 4 years beginning with the initial 1959 broadcast. For a long time it was thought to be lost after it stopped being broadcast in the 1960s, but the camera negatives were discovered in the mid-1990s. It’s far more professional than any student film I ever made or any that my class-mates produced. The level of suspense captured is quite incredible, when it also feels like an ordinary day in many respects.  The short begins where we find a group of Construction workers as they find an old cache of bombs from World War II in an unnamed Russian town. An army unit is charged with solving this problem and we follow them as they get to work. The municipal committee decides that exploding the bombs would inflict too much damage on the town and so the army unit must transport the bombs manually to a safe site. After the entire town is evacuated, the soldiers carry the bombs one by one to the armored transport truck. The danger of explosion looms. As the army unit concludes its mission the population returns to the town as the bombs are simultaneously destroyed at the safe site. A rather simple tale but also very striking. If you cross The Hurt Locker and the last scene in 1974’s Juggernaut but take away all of the melodrama, then There Will be No Leave Today is sort of what you’re left with. The idea was suggested by the State Institute of Cinematography to Tarkovsky and Gordon as a practical exercise for the two film students. The main objective for Tarkovsky and Gordon was not to produce a masterpiece, but to learn the basics of filmmaking through making an uncomplicated and easy-to-consume film. The project was based on a real postwar incident. To prepare Tarkovsky and Gordon interviewed witnesses of the incident and visited army barracks to study the military. The script was written jointly by Tarkovsky, Gordon and a third scriptwriter who was later replaced by a group of scriptwriters. The main storyline of the film was created in the beginning of writing the script, and survived with the exception of some minor changes. According to Gordon, Tarkovsky finished and contributed the majority of the script, with the hospital scenes and the civilian/soldier who volunteers to detonate one bomb being Tarkovsky's ideas. Contrary to Tarkovsky's other student film The Killers, this film had a relatively high budget. The VGIK film school provided the equipment and a small part of the budget. The major part of the budget was provided by Soviet Central Television. The higher budget allowed for professional actors in the main roles, such as Oleg Borisov who was quite famous at the time. Other actors were Tarkvosky's and Gordon's classmates such as Leonid Kuravlyov and Stanislav Lyubshin. Other actors in non-lead roles were people from the province where the film was shot, working without receiving any compensation except the chance to appear in a film. The army also provided some support in the form of military equipment and troops as extras. The film was shot in Kursk over a period of three months, while editing took a further three months to complete. There Will Be No Leave Today isn’t a typical Tarkovsky film and it more resembles a Soviet propaganda film or docu-drama, with heroic soldiers and the grateful population of the town. The Killers was Tarkovsky experimenting and also imitating the gangster genre, while There Will Be No Leave Today was all about the skill of film making. It was two years later, with The Steamroller and the Violin where we saw a glimpse of his visionary genius. It’s a well constructed film with suspense and drama, but it’s for Tarkovsky compleatists and film students only.

The Killers

Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky

1956

****

Film students, Andrei Tarkovsky fans, cinephiles and film lovers in general are all so lucky that The Killers, Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Gordon’s first student film, has survived and is available to watch all these years later. Tarkovsky and Gordon were students in Russia’s State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) together and worked together on their first assignment. Students were required to work on films in groups of two or threes due to a lack of equipment at the film school. Tarkovsky and Gordon asked Marika Beiku to work with them. The Killers is an adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The story is divided into three scenes. The first and third scenes were directed by Beiku and Tarkovsky, the second by Gordon. The first scene shows Nick Adams (Yuli Fait) observing two gangsters (Valentin Vinogradov and Boris Novikov) in black coats and black hats entering a small-town diner where Adams is eating. They tell the owner, George (Aleksandr Gordon), that they are searching for the boxer Ole Andreson and that they want to kill him. They tie up Nick Adams and the cook, and wait for Ole Andreson to appear. Three customers enter the restaurant and are sent away by George. One of the customers is played by Tarkovsky, who whistles Lullaby of Birdland. The second scene shows Nick Adams visiting Ole Andreson (Vasiliy Shukshin) in his hide-out, a small room. He warns Andreson about the two gangsters, but Andreson is resigned to his fate and unwilling to flee. The third scene shows Adams returning to the diner and informing the owner of Andreson's decision. Apart from the fact that the gangsters are all very young, the film is slick and authentic looking with some beautiful compositions. The idea for adapting Ernest Hemingway's short story was Tarkovsky's. All roles were played by students of the VGIK, and the camera and lighting was handled by fellow students Alfredo Álvarez and Aleksandr Rybin. Beiku, Gordon and Tarkovsky set up an American bar in the studio of the film school, at this time a symbol of depravity and becoming a minor attraction among students. Props were brought by students from their homes, and from relatives and friends. The film was praised by Mikhail Romm, the professor and teacher of the three students and even now, with bigger budgets and advances technology, it’s pretty hard to beat for a student film. While it’s nothing like what you’d expect from a later Tarkovsky film, it is fascinating to see how competent and creative he was so early on in his career. Certain themes can be seen here that would be seen throughout Tarkovsky’s body of work, including the unmistakable emphasis on the simplicity of suspense, of human action in desperate circumstances and his dependence on figures in curiously exciting compositions. It’s a remarkable black and white noir that is just as good as Robert Siodmak’s 1946 freature-length adaptation. Ernest Hemingway would never have seen the film, and I’d love to have seen his expression upon knowing that a work of his had been adapted into Russian, but even he would have admitted that Tarkovsky’s version felt authentic. I do wonder whether Tarkovsky, Gordon and Beiku rocked a few boats by adapting Hemingway, seeing as the author’s work had only just been allowed by the government to be published in 1956. Various tricks used in the short still seem beyond the reach of many contemporary directors. Part of the skill, and curiosity, in how tense the long first scene at the diner is that music is completely absent, with the only tone coming from Tarkovsky himself as a whistling customer. Meanwhile, Tarkovsky uses Hemingway's dialogue in a very realistic manner. While the film ends on a screeching halt, the sense of ambiguity as to the fate of the characters is worthwhile for the material, as it's perfectly anti-climactic. It’s a student film that shows off the technical skills of the students but it also captures Hemingway’s idea and builds on it with the student’s own take on the situation. It’s unlike anything else Tarkovsky made but you can still see comparisons to his later work. I also see so many contemporary films within the short, I do wonder just how much of an influence The Killers has been on many of the big-time directors we know today?

Tokyo!

Dir: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho

2008

****

If I was asked to pick any three directors to join together and form an anthology film (in 2008), then I reckon Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho and Michel Gondry would have been high up on the list. Interesting how none of them are actually Japanese, but then I think the idea was to gather three directors who weren’t from Japan, to see the city through their eyes, rather than from the eyes of someone who lives there. That sort of thing doesn’t always work but here it works exceptionally. That said, I wouldn’t say that the short films are about Tokyo as such, rather they are just set there. Michel Gondry begins the film with his short titled ‘Interior design’. It follows young couple Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryō Kase) who have come to Tokyo from the provinces and are staying with a friend Akemi (Ayumi Ito) in her tiny one-room apartment until they can find a place of their own. They have no money and no work but they have a solid and mutually supportive relationship that will seemingly carry each other through any challenge. Akira is an aspiring filmmaker whose debut feature will soon screen in the city and will hopefully lead to a more solid career; in the interim, he lands work wrapping gifts at a local department store. Unfortunately Akemi's demanding boyfriend grows weary of Akemi's house guests leading Hiroko to hit the streets of Tokyo in search of another suitable apartment. Hiroko only managed to find a series of rat-infested hovels that neither she nor Akira can afford on their limited salaries. After Akira's film screens to dubious acclaim, one spectator informs Hiroko of the inherent struggles in relationships between creative types: often, one half of the couple would feel invisible, useless, or unappreciated. Hiroko relates to these feelings wholeheartedly in the wake of her numerous trials and tribulations in the unfamiliar city of Tokyo, and starts to question her role in the relationship. Hiroko wakes up one morning and sees a small hole where light is going through her. When she goes to the bathroom and unbuttons her shirt, she's shocked to see a hand sized hole in her chest with a wooden pole down the middle. As she walks down the street, the hole gets bigger and stumbling as both her feet turn to wooden poles. Eventually Hiroko is turned into a chair, only her jacket is left hanging on the back. People walking past are unaware of the chair's presence until a man picks it up and takes it home. There, she feels ignored as usual but also useful and needed, so she decides to stay. Our protagonist is happy and yet we are sad for her. It’s quite a melancholy tale and visuals are unmistakably the work of Gondry. The second story is by Léos Carax and your enjoyment of it will depend on whether you think Carax is a genius or a nut. The film is called Merde (French for shit) and the main character of the story is an unkempt, gibberish-spewing subterranean creature of the Tokyo sewers called Mr Shit. Denis Lavant plays the titular character who rises from the underground lair where he dwells to attack unsuspecting locals in increasingly brazen and terrifying ways. He steals cash and cigarettes from passersby, frightens old women and salaciously licks schoolgirls, resulting in a televised media frenzy that creates mounting hysteria among the Tokyo populace. After discovering an arsenal of hand grenades in his underground lair, Merde slips into full-on assault mode, hurling the munitions at random citizens and creating an atmosphere of urban terror, which the media promptly laps up and reflects back to its equally voracious television audience. This is Carax’s version of Godzilla. Enter pompous French magistrate Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer), a dead ringer for the sewer creature's gnarled and twisted demeanor, who arrives in Tokyo to represent Merde's inevitable televised trial, claiming to be one of only three in the world able to speak his client's unintelligible language. The media circus mounts as lawyer defends client in a surreal court of law hungry for a satisfying resolution. Merde is tried, convicted and sentenced to death until justice takes an unexpected turn in his final moments. The final story is called Shaking Tokyo by Bong Joon-ho. Teruyuki Kagawa stars as a Tokyo shut-in, or hikikomori as they are known, who has not left his apartment in a decade. His only link to the outside world is through his telephone, which he uses to command every necessity from a series of random and anonymous delivery people, including the pizza that he orders every Saturday. The Saturday night pizza is his only treat, every other meal being the same. Over the years he has collected his rubbish including hundreds of discarded pizza cartons, jars and toilet roll tubes that he meticulously stacks in and around his cramped apartment. One Saturday things change. His pizza arrives thanks to a lovely young woman (Yū Aoi) who succeeds in catching his eye. Suddenly an earthquake strikes Tokyo, prompting the beautiful young delivery woman to faint in her client's apartment, causing the hikikimori to fall hopelessly in love. Time passes and the shut-in discovers through another pizza delivery person that the improbable object of his affections has become a hikikimori in her own right. Taking a bold leap into the unknown, our hero crosses the threshold of his apartment and takes to the streets in search of his mystery girl, at last discovering his kindred spirit at the very moment another earthquake strikes. Unlike the first film, suddenly someone’s sadness becomes a happy ending. I thought the three films worked well as a collection but because they were so different from each other. While none of the films seem to explore Tokyo directly, they do address the alienation of living in a large and cramped city while exploring the little fairy tales that came happen among the concrete office blocks. There is a surreal magic to all three films that range from melancholic to down-right odd. Carax loved Denis Lavant’s performance as Mr Shit so much he brought him back a few years later for his equally bizarre feature Holy Motors. A tiny but tasty box of assorted chocolates for peckish cinephiles to enjoy between meals.

Tales of Halloween

Dir: Neil Marshall, Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, Lucky McKee, Andrew Kasch, Paul Solet, John Skipp, Adam Gierasch, Jace Anderson, Mike Mendez, Ryan Schifrin, Dave Parker

2015

**

Tales of Halloween is an anthology of ten interlocking short stories that revolve around the night of Halloween. The directors range from well known to inexperienced and the cast are a mix of horror icons (all directors) and some of the worst actors working today. I expected fun, no masterpieces, just short, sharp and scary shorts that offered something new and punchy. Sadly, this wasn’t the case. Some of the films are good but most of them are poor copies of well established classic horror films – this is the Halloween equivalent of the dreadful Christmas films Hallmark churn out every year. I’m actually starting to prefer Christmas nuts over Halloween enthusiasts. The horror greats that are involved should hand their heads in shame. The ten stories take place in the same unnamed suburban American town and is pointlessly narrated by a radio DJ (Adrienne Barbeau) – an idea borrowed from A Christmas Horror Story but obviously a tribute to John Carpenter’s The Fog. The first film, Sweet Tooth, is Written and directed by Dave Parker. Mikey (Daniel DiMaggio) has just finished trick-or-treating around his neighborhood and come home with a bag full of candy. His parents (Greg Grunberg and Clare Kramer – the same characters both played in 2013’s Big Ass Spider) have left him in the care of his babysitter Lizzy (Madison Iseman), who has invited her boyfriend Kyle over to watch the film Night of the Living Dead. As Mikey begins to enjoy the candy he's collected, Lizzy and Kyle share the urban legend of "Sweet Tooth"; long ago, a boy of Mikey's age named Timothy was denied his trick-or-treat candy by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Blake, but a curious Timothy discovered that the parents kept and ate all his candy themselves. Enraged, Timothy killed both of his parents and ate all the candy, including the ones already in their stomach, and thus became Sweet Tooth, a demon who appears each Halloween looking everywhere for candy. Mikey is rattled by this story and decides to go to sleep early, much to Lizzy and Kyle's amusement. They decide to make out and eat the candy, before being attacked by Sweet Tooth himself, which Mikey overhears. The ghostly being heads toward Mikey's bedroom but Mikey has left a bar of chocolate for Sweet Tooth on the floor to take. That, combined with the fact that Mikey hasn't eaten any candy, spares him from death. Later, Mikey's parents come home to find Lizzy and Kyle's grotesque corpses, with Mikey standing nearby exclaiming that they ate all his Halloween candy. It is part Candyman and part Halloween, it’s one of the better shorts but it will probably be best remembered for featuring fan favourites Madison Iseman and Greg Grunberg. The Night Billy Raised Hell was written by Clint Sears and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III & IV). Billy Thompson (Marcus Eckert) absurdly tries to start trick-or-treating really early in the afternoon, prompting his big sister Britney (Natalis Castillo) and her boyfriend Todd (Ben Stillwell) to trick him into playing a prank, that, according to both teenagers, had been going on for years. They prepared an egg for Billy to throw at Mr. Abbadon's (Barry Bostwick) house, who's notoriously stingy and never gives out candy for the children across the years, but Billy was caught red-handed by the man of the hour, while his sister and her boyfriend fled. Billy was ushered into Mr. Abbadon's house, where he says he's going to teach Billy a lesson, and takes Mordecai, a little boy of Billy's age who has the same Halloween costume (red devil) as him. Mr. Abbadon then lets Mordecai, in a costume and mask similar to Billy, to wreck around the neighborhood, from doing harmless pranks like spray-painting the walls into the more bloody terrors, like stabbing a rude neighbor who gave him toothbrush instead of candy, and then later on tricking the same neighbor into stepping to a bear trap, severing his foot. The duo even hijacked Adrianne Curry's car along the way. After all the ruckus, Mr. Abbadon returns to his house to a tied Billy and releases him, and reveals that he is the Devil himself and under the mask Mordecai is also the Little Devil. He lets Billy go, only for Billy to be arrested outside by a swarm of waiting police from the previous terror caused by Mordecai in his Halloween costume. It’s a neat idea but is poorly executed. I was excited to see Barry Bostwick and expected an over the top performance from him but it just didn’t work for me. It was daft, just not quite daft enough and I expected a lot more from Bousman. The third film, Trick, has a lot more going for it. Written by Greg Commons and directed by Adam Gierasch, the story starts on a seemingly peaceful Halloween night, with friends Nelson (Trent Haaga), Maria (Tiffany Shepis), James (John F. Beach) and Caitlyn (Casey Ruggieri) who are lounging around Nelson's house, smoking pot. As Nelson goes to greet a girl trick-or-treating, the group is alarmed when the girl stabs Nelson multiple times in the abdomen, gravely injuring him. Panicked, Maria goes to her car to drive Nelson to the hospital, only to be attacked by four kids in costumes. Maria flees, but the injury causes her to drop dead on the house's pool. By this time, Nelson has succumbed to his injury and dies as well. James tries to find help, only to have his face burned by yet another trick-or-treater, and she completes her attack by stuffing his mouth with rat poison, killing him. Caitlyn, the only adult left, flees to the backyard, where she hides in a shack. It is then revealed that Caitlyn, Nelson, Maria and James are all psychopaths and have been kidnapping kids and gouging their eyes out for their amusement. The group of kids finds the shack, which turns out to be the place they tortured the previous kids, and cornered Caitlyn. A girl, whose one eye has been gouged by the adults, executes Caitlyn with an axe on her head. It’s a great twist ending and the initial attack comes from nowhere. It’s a great idea, but it is totally wasted by the fact that none of the actors can actually act. It is rushed and cheap when it could have been something pretty unique – dare I say it, it could have led to its own feature length film but as it is here its such a wasted opportunity. The middle stories are all a little odd. The Weak and the Wicked doesn’t fit with any of the other films at all. Written by Molly Millions and directed by Paul Solet, it sees three bullies, Alice (Grace Phipps), Isaac (Booboo Stewart) and Bart (Noah Segan) as they proceed to torture a kid after trick-or-treating (Jack Dylan Grazer), but are interrupted by a teenager of their age in a devil costume (Keir Gilchrist). The teenager hands Alice a drawing of the Devil and utters that the Devil will come to aid the weak if they're wearing his costume. Alice dismisses the picture and begins to chase the teenager away with the other bullies to the other side of the city, where the teenager stops by a burnt-down caravan. In a flashback when Alice, Bart and Isaac were kids, they had set the caravan on fire, which belonged to the teenager, with his parents inside it at the time. As the bullies beat the teenager up and prepares to light him on fire, Bart and Isaac are attacked by an unseen force. When Alice turns around, the devil himself has showed up, looking exactly like the teenager’s costume. As Alice is killed by the devil, blood violently splashes to the teenager's face, who smiles in satisfaction. The blood hits the young actor hard, it must have really hurt. It’s a little too serious and doesn’t quite fit with the other stories. The caravan looks dirty in the present scene, even though it is shown burning up in the flash-back scene. It tries and fails at being clever and the devil looks rubbish. Axelle Carolyn’s Gim Grinning Ghost is about as amateur as it gets. As Lynn (Alex Essoe) prepares to leave her mother's (Lin Shaye) Halloween party after hearing her mother recount a ghost story, she encounters strange occurrences on her way home. First her car uncharacteristically breaks down in the middle of the road, forcing her to finish her trip by foot. While walking, she senses that a shadowy figure, the one from her mother's story, is following her. Terrified, she runs into the safety of her house, and believes the figure has not followed her to her house. As Lynn settles to a couch to watch a film, her dog suddenly gets nervous and leaves the room. Lynn smiles and leans back to the couch, only to find out that the ghost is sitting beside her. It is boring, predictable and the opposite of scary. The fact that it features a cameo from Stuart Gordon – one of my all time favourite horror directors - is heartbreaking. Lucky McKee’s Ding Dong confused me. Rewinding to the previous year, we see Jack (Marc Senter) and his wife Bobbie (Pollyanna McIntosh) watch as children trick or treat on Halloween night. Bobbie is distraught by the fact she has no children of her own, to which Jack tries to cheer her up by dressing their dog as Gretel. This leads things to get heated and ends up with Bobbie suddenly turning into a red demon and clawing Jack's face with her long, devilish nails. In the present time, Jack and Bobbie have prepared to greet trick-or-treaters, dressed as Hansel and a witch respectively, to Jack’s worry. Even though everything goes normally, with Bobbie excitedly performing a skit to the delight of the children, something feels uneasy between the couple every time there's children on their front porch. Finally, when a boy also dressed as Hansel is visiting the couple's house alone, Bobbie prepares to lead him inside, but Jack, aware of his wife's intent, alert the boy's mother, who's looking for him. A disheartened Bobbie goes back inside, and Jack persuades her to stop what they're doing, telling her that it wouldn’t be right to have children of their own with the abusive way she treats him. It is then revealed that Bobbie is a witch and enjoys eating children, and when Jack reveals he's secretly had a vasectomy to prevent a pregnancy, she becomes distraught and furious. She drags Jack into the house's oven, which resembles hell, and ends up melting herself. It’s badly written and badly performed, although I do quite like Pollyanna McIntosh. Andrew Kasch and John Skipp’s This Means War is basically a Halloween version of Deck the Halls. Boris (Dana Gould) has proudly finished his Halloween-decorated house. But when children are about to greet his house, they are lured away because of his neighbor, Dante (James Duval) has set-up a rock and gore-oriented Halloween decorations on his house, complete with loud rock music blasting from the speakers. Boris walks up to Dante's yard to ask him to turn the volume lower, but Dante and his colleagues just laugh at him and mock his decorations. Enraged, Boris wrecks the sound system and halts the music, but Dante exacts revenge by planning to throw a huge bucket of blood to Boris' slick Halloween decorations. As Boris runs up to stop Dante, the latter splashes the blood on the former instead, and declares a war. Spectators begin to crowd as the two fight, placing bets and egging them on until the police come. Boris charges Dante towards a sharp piece of standing wood, killing both of them instantly. Deck the Halls is a pretty bad film, it was copied by Hallmark a few years later who took the premise, hired cheaper actors and renamed it Battle of the Bulbs. It is an awful film, one of the worst ever made in fact. This means war is considerably worse. Friday the 31st was a bit of light relief, written by Mike Mendez and Dave Parker and directed by Mendez, the film is a return to silly – something the anthology was in dire need of at this point. A deformed serial killer (Nick Principe) who resembles Jason Voorhees hunts a girl dressed as Dorothy for Halloween (Amanda Moyer). The girl runs to a barn where she discovers several of the killer's victims, among them her friend, Casey. The killer hunts her down to the barn, and when she manages to escape and flee, he kills her by throwing a spear through her chest. As the killer celebrates the slaying, a UFO beams down a small alien that tries to trick-or-treat. The killer proceeds to stomp over the tiny alien, seemingly crushing him, but the alien instead turns into goo and possesses the victim's body, chasing the panicked killer into his barn. The possessed girl and the killer then proceed to attack each other with sharp objects, which eventually concludes with both of them decapitating each other. The alien then leaves the girl's decapitated head to teleport back to his spaceship, taking the killer's head with him. It is stupid, gory and fun and a million times better than the rest. Ryan Schifrin’s The Ransom of Rusty Rex is probably the most intelligent of the stories. When they spot millionaire Jebediah Rex (horror legend John Landis) letting his son Rusty (Ben Woolf) out for trick-or-treating, former bank robbers Hank (Sam Witwer) and Dutch (Jose Pablo Cantillo) set out their plan to kidnap the millionaire's son. After succeeding doing so, the kidnappers tie up a still-masked Rusty into a chair and call his father for a ransom. However, the father seems overjoyed that his son has been kidnapped and promptly hangs up the phone. Hank calls him one more time to discuss about ransom, but the father coldly tells them they can have his son. Exasperated, the kidnappers find out that the son is actually a deformed monster that clings to the people near him. They tried to sink him down the river, but he came back to their lair. Hank calls Jebediah once more, only to be told that Rusty has been holding Jebediah and his wife hostage for five years as he would not leave them, and thanked the kidnappers for taking him away from them. Hank and Dutch once again tied Rusty and sets him on fire, but as Hank comes back from buying food, Rusty, who has gotten hungry, has eaten Dutch up to his head. Hank screams, the film ends. It is half an idea, the first half being good and the second half poorly written. The final story, Bad Seed, is written and directed by Neil Marshall, the film’s headlining horror director. After a man has his head bitten off by a massive pumpkin he has just carved, Detective McNally (Kristina Klebe) investigates the crime scene. At first she refuses to believe the description of the victim's wife, but after the forensics team member, Bob, confirms the killer was indeed a carved pumpkin, she works to put a stop to it. The pumpkin proceeds to eat a trick-or-treating child and terrorizes the neighborhood, which has already suffered from the events portrayed earlier in the film. McNally manages to track the killer pumpkin down to a backyard, where it attacks her; though she initially runs out of bullets, Bob appears with a shotgun, and she is able to destroy it. Among the broken pieces of pumpkin, she finds a sticker from a company called Clover Corp, headed by a Professor Milo Gottleib (played by legend Joe Dante), advertising the pumpkin as a 100% organic super-pumpkin. McNally and Bob visit the Clover Corp. headquarters and discover thousands of genetically-modified pumpkins, all potentially dangerous, waiting to be sold. The initial pumpkin attack was fun but by this point the film was really starting to drag. This was no the pay-off I had been hoping for. If the pumpkins would have gone around town killing every character we’d seen throughout the movie then it would have been great but as it was it was fairly rubbish, especially from talent such as Marshall. They achieved a lot on a small budget but nothing here is of a high quality. What the film makers would describe as ‘tribute’ I would describe as theft. It is a horrible am-dram style mess of horror clichés and half ideas. It would have been far better if the stories had been linked in some way but that would have required creativity and time and it didn’t seem that the people responsible had either. Watch a real horror film this Halloween instead of this nonsense.

Oktapodi

Dir: Emud Mokhberi, Julien Bocabeille, Quentin Marmier, François Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand

2007

****

Oktapodi is a simple but sweet idea, brilliantly animated and impossible to fault. The film is about a pair of love struck octopuses who through a series of comical events are separated and find each other. The pair end up fighting for their lives with a stubborn restaurant cook in a comical escape through the streets of a seaside town in Greece. I can’t help but think it was inspired by the scene from The Little Mermaid where Sebastian the Grab is chased by the ship’s chief who is looking to add him to the dinner menu. It also has a lot in common with Finding Nemo. The animation is nice and simple but hasn’t dated well. However, it was well received, winning a number of awards, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film (Animated) at the 81st Academy Awards. The short animation’s real strength however is in its short and snappy action sequences and the depiction of the classical seaside Greek town. The film was made by Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image - an Art School, so for a student film to be nominated for an Oscar, and for winning the Sigraph 08 audience and best of show award, is a fantastic achievement and something of an inspiration. Simplicity is key and a good simple story will always win over anything else, as is the case with the lovely Oktapodi. I’m afraid though, as much as I enjoyed it, I still love eating Calamari more so.

Swimmer
Dir: Lynne Ramsay
2012
****

The year after Lynne Ramsay directed the critically acclaimed We Need To Talk About Kevin, she was co-commissioned by BBC Films, Film4 and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was one of four unique short film co-commissions for the event and it ended up being nominated for the British Independent Film Awards in the category for Best Short Film. It won a BAFTA Award for Best Short Film at the 66th British Academy Film Awards in 2013. It is unlike any of her previous features or short films and maybe closer to the music video she made for the band Doves called Black and White Town. While the visuals of the film were more in keeping with the rest of Doves album artwork, Lynne Ramsay’s video was very much focused on people and behaviour. All her work is focused on people and behaviour to some degree but the difference here was the silence (apart from the music of course). Swimmer is filmed in glorious contrasting black and white and is without script. Audio is heard but it is all from archived recordings. The Swimmer (Tom Litten) is literally swimming and also ‘swimming’ through his thoughts and memories. It’s a personal journey that I believe reflects the personal journeys those competing at the Olympic and Paralympic Games were going through but also the journey it took for the games to be held in London. I interpret with confirmation as little is written about the film. There is a fantasy element to the film also which is interesting (and a little confusing) and, once again, I would hazard a guess that this reflects on the fact that competing in the games may feel as a fantasy to many. I think Ramsay is expressing the importance of dreams when it comes to fulfilling ambition. The rough and the smooth make us who we are and mold our character, the swimmer in the film is reliving the moments, dreams and memories that got him where he is and that keep him going forward. He is at times submerged but he always manages to swim on, eventually propelling forward at speed in calm waters. It’s incredibly symbolic. I believe it is as much for the Olympians as it is reflective of Ramsay’s own feelings. I might be completely wrong on all counts but it is a beautiful and thought-provoking short that deserved the praise it received. It’s a rather expressionist piece compared to her previous short films but it is every bit as brilliant – just with a fancier camera.

Gasman

Dir: Lynne Ramsay

1998

****

Filmed two years after her debut short (Small Deaths) and it’s follow up (Kill the Day), and the year before her first feature (Ratcatcher), Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman marks an important chapter in her film career. Much like her first films, Gasman doesn’t have much context to it – we know only as much as our protagonist knows, our protagonist being a young girl. The film examines the emotional state of this young girl through circumstances that are never spoken or fully explained. The girl attends a Christmas party with her father where she encounters two other children that are familiar with her dad. We see each character in lingering close up well before we even see their faces. Not much is said so we don’t have much to go on, all we know is that a mystery has been raised and a young girl is emotionally effected by the lack of answer. It’s another social piece, visually compelling and open to interpretation but more than that, there is the suggestion of an untold darkness about it. It is something Ramsay has masterfully developed throughout her career ever since. Even in her adaptations, Ramsay adds her own subtle mysteries that always create tension and an often unbearable feeling that something else untoward has happened or is happening while our focus is elsewhere. Ramsay is a student of film making but her talents come from beyond film school. She is a story teller. Her visuals do most of the talking but she manages to direct the audiences attention effortlessly while also leaving so much open to interpretation. Her films are contemporary and expressionist while also being a perfect example of gritty realism.

Small Deaths
Dir: Lynne Ramsay
1996
****

Small Deaths is Lynne Ramsay's debut short film that she completed as her graduating film at the UK's National Film and Television School. Small Deaths is a series of three vignettes of children grappling with familial realities and the repercussions of their actions. It’s a deeply personal film to Ramsay, although not necessarily auto-biographical. Ramsay is the Writer, Director and cinematographer for the entire film and it is an impressive piece. The first vignette features a young girl as she watches her mother cutting her father’s hair. While the composition is controlled the audio is more fly-on-the-wall and unscripted. The mother cuts the father’s hair before he goes out for the evening – the mother and daughter empty and dejected when he says he doesn’t know when he’ll be back. The second vignette features two young girls enjoying the freedom of the countryside. They chase each other through meadows and across streams until they encounter a gang of boys throwing rocks at a heard of cows. One cow is badly hurt, and once the boys leave the two girls run to its side, trying to understand the pointless brutality they have just witnessed. The third and final vignette sees a older girl in her late teens putting on make-up at the bottom of the stairs of a block of flats. Once finished, she climbs the stair to a flat where we assume she is to meet friends she wants to impress. As she approaches the front door she is met by panic. A female friend is slumped in a chair with a needle in her arm as the rest of the group stand around shouting in wild mania for her do something about it. It is a prank and the girl in the chair moves and they all laugh at her as she goes back down the stairs. The vignettes are each small death of life that may – or may not be autobiographical. The context of each film is never clear, Ramsay trained as a photographer and cinematographer, so she lets the images do the talking. There is magic in her gritty realism. Her characters are all reflecting on something, the subjects are open to interpretations and the viewer is welcome to come up with their own background stories – that aspect really isn’t important. The films are of the here and now (or the there and then), the stark and sombre poetry of meagre circumstances and bruised memory. She’s one of the best directors working today and has been since 1996.

The Big Swallow (AKA A Photographic Contortion)

Dir: James Williamson

1901

*****

When you think of the great pioneers of film and cinema you generally think of The Lumière Brothers Robert W. Paul and Georges Méliès – and rightly so, as they were geniuses – but more often, some of the real technical masters such as Cecil Hepworth and James Williamson are overlooked. In 1898, James Williamson moved his chemist's and photographic business to 55 Western Road, Hove, where he and his family took up residence, and issued his first catalog, which was expanded that year to include, among others, the trick film The Clown Barber and comedy Washing the Sweep. Williamson's Popular Entertainments, a Saturday night showing of his films, ran for five weeks from January to February 1900 and for a further four weeks from November to December at the Hove Town Hall. The latter series featured the premiere of Williamson's innovative Attack on a China Mission, which included four shots that developed the narrative and a reverse-angle cut giving the audience an alternate perspective. The 1901 census has Williamson as a chemist & druggist only but the truth was that by this point he had entered a period of dedicated film-making during which he produced trick film The Big Swallow. What is so striking about The Big Swallow – more so than many films of the era that were all in experimental and development mode – was that it was one of the first to deliberately exploit the contrast between the eye of the camera and of the audience watching the final film. The premise is simple - a man, irritated by the presence of a photographer, solves his dilemma by swallowing him and his camera whole. It’s funny because one of the first thing people do when they are first filmed seems to be to approach the camera and put the lens in their mouths, at least that’s what I always did. Despite being less bitten by the trick-film bug than his contemporaries, Williamson made one of the most striking genre entries of all with his simple three-shot trick surreal comedy. George Albert Smith pioneered close-up photography in 1900 with Grandma's Reading Glass and Spiders on a Web but Williamson took it a stage further by featuring a man advancing towards the camera, remaining in more or less perfect focus, until his mouth appears to swallow the lens. Williamson’s intention was primarily comic and was inspired by unwanted attention from increasingly savvy passers-by while filming his actuality shorts (described in his own catalog with the words: "I won't! I won't! I'll eat the camera first."), but he ended up making one of the most striking genre entries and his imaginative use of an extreme close-up became one of the seminal images of early British (and world) cinema. His film had great appeal also to the Surrealist movement. A simple film that helped write the rule book but also told other film makers to re-write the rule book and most importantly, to have fun. He soon followed The Big Swallow with the dramas Fire! and Stop Thief!. Their use of action continuity across multiple shots established the basic grammar of film and remain to this day. The following year these films became available in the US where they are said to have influenced Edwin Porter's Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery – one of the greatest silent films of all time.

Bao

Dir: Domee Shi

2018

*****

A Pixar film is generally a treat in itself but before each feature the great animation studio give animators and directors from around the world an opportunity to release something different that still manages to fit into their core style. Before watching the long-awaited Incredibles sequel, we were treated to Domee Shi’s Bao. Half way through the short I really wondered what the hell Pixar were thinking. The film begins with a woman making Baozi (a type of filled bun or bread-like dumpling). We get the impression that she is a bit lonely and her husband seems busy at work and a bit distant when at home. After her husband leaves for work one morning, a Baozi she makes suddenly comes alive (Baozi is often called Bao in Chinese and small children or the youngest in a Chinese family are affectionately called 'Bao Bao’ – Bao roughly translating as ‘baby’). The woman raises the bun as a child and the pair have wonderful days out together and a wonderful relationship. The woman is very protective of her Bao however, due to his limitations, size and the fact that he is essentially made of food. The pair regularly bond with each other over a box of doughnuts. Eventually the little Bao wishes to play with the other kids, despite his mother's over-protection. As her Bao ages into a teenager and eventually a young adult, he increasingly wants independence, while his mother wishes for more attention from him. When the dumpling introduces his new fiancée and announces his intentions to move out of his mother's house, his mother feels dejected. Bao’s seems to have grown up so fast and now she feels left behind, and in a moment of selfish panic she picks him up and swallows him whole. There was a loud gasp in the cinema and I noticed quite a few tearful young faces look up at their parents with a ‘What the hell just happened?’ expression on their faces. This was of course met with a ‘I have no f**king clue – but I think I’m outraged’ look from the adults. I nearly dropped my popcorn. How the hell are they going to end this one, I thought. However,we see the mother as she lies in bed, and her real son enters the room, revealing that the whole sequence was allegorical. Phew. The son, resembling the dumpling, is told by his father to comfort his mother, as she ignores him. He enters the room, offering a box of doughnuts to share as they both did when he was little. They then tuck in to their treat and both break down in tears – as did the whole cinema.  Afterwards, the whole family, including the son's fiancée, make dumplings, as they sit at the table watching television. It is only a eight-minute long film but I felt the same way I did after I finished War & Peace. It was a journey, I was an emotional wreck, I was almost too exhausted to watch Incredibles 2, I wanted to go home, cry and lie down. You can trust Pixar but I can see why this was a risk. Bao was written and directed by Domee Shi (the first woman to direct a Pixar short) but when pitching the film to the studio, she was concerned that they would find it too dark or culturally specific to be well received. She drew from personal experiences growing up with an overprotective mother, with whom she regularly made dumplings, and wanted to make a modern-day fairy tale and that is exactly what she achieved. It was confusing at first but I wouldn’t say Bao was a hard film to follow – far from it. I found the message to be remarkably universal and incredibly touching, even now, it’s hard to remember that the characters aren’t actually real. An absolute gem of a short film.

Father and Daughter

Dir: Michaël Dudok de Wit

2000

****

Hayao Miyazaki, head of Studio Ghibli in Japan, was so moved by Michael Dudok de Wit’s short animated film Father and Daughter, that he sent for the director, asked if he could distribute the film and if he would like to collaborate on a feature length movie. de Wit admitted years later, that he understood Miyazaki’s question regarding distribution but thought that maybe there was a breakdown in translation when it came to working together on a feature length film. He wasn’t joking and de Wit was honoured to work with one of his animation heroes. After many years of development, The RedTurtle was released in 2016, all thanks to 2000’s stunning Father and Daughter. Miyazaki wasn't the film’s only fan however, as Father and Daughter won the Academy Award for Best Short Animation at the 2001 Oscars. The film itself is a watercolour come to life. It’s largely produced in two colours, switching from black and white, brown and white and blue and white. It is occasionally detailed but is, by and large, expressionist in its styling. A Father and young Daughter cycle together to a tree beside a huge body of water. They park their bicycles and embrace before the father, unexpectedly, boards a boat and sails off into the distance, leaving his shocked and distraught Daughter behind. The young girl continues to visit the place where she last saw her father, eagerly anticipating his return, although less and less so over the years. Eventually, the girl is an old women and she visits the spot once more, only to find the water has dried up. She sets out on foot, following the route her father would have taken and eventually finds his boat half buried in the ground. Tired, she decides to lay down in the half submerged boat and falls asleep. When she awakes her father is standing before her, with open arms. If you don’t cry then there is something wrong with you or your eyes. The symbolism is clear and the film is pure poetry. My only gripe is the clichéd French organ music.

The Monk and the Fish

Dir: Michaël Dudok de Wit

1994

****

Michael Dudok de Wit’s Le Moine et le poisson (The Monk and the Fish), is a wonderfully playful short animation, one of the last of its kind to use classic cel animation techniques using simply a brush, Indian Ink and watercolours and no computer involvement whatsoever. Standing next to a water reservoir in a monastery enclave, our titular monk sees a fish and races off to get his net to catch it. However, the fish eludes him and the monk gets more and more agitated as he tries increasingly extreme ways of catching it. He soon gets into the pond himself and also enlists the help of other monks from the monastery. He tries candles and a bow and arrow and chases it night and day to no avail. The more the fish manages to evade him, the more obsessed the monk becomes. He follows the fish out of the pond into a canal, through different landscapes and out of the confines of the monastery. Eventually the chase gets less frantic and the monk and the fish begin to move in harmony. In the wonderfully zen finale, both monk and fish float through a symbolic doorway into a vast open space and drift off into the sky together. It’s hard to decide who comes of best in the end, the monk, the fish or the audience. It’s simple, universal and beautifully unpredictable. It’s also remarkably rewarding, for a story that doesn’t really develop until the last few seconds of the film. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best Animated Short at the 67th Oscars and set Michael Dudok de Wit on his way (he would eventually win for his 2000 short animation Father and Daughter). There is wonderfully playful edge to de Wit’s largely symbolic, serious and zen-like stories, so it is no wonder that years later Studio Ghibli came calling.

How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck
Dir: Werner Herzog
1976
***
It's hard to call many of Werner Herzog's films 'documentaries' but it is hard to find another word for them. Herzog is a genre unto himself, 1976's How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck is more of a musing than a factual exploration and once again Herzog invites us to look at something hard and long enough to see that there is far more to it than first thought. In this short film he examines the World Livestock Auctioneer Championship held each year in New Holland, Pennsylvania. We observe several auctioneers until their unique style of language almost takes on different meaning. The auctioneers speak in a rapid manner that sounds as if they are rolling their words. As Herzog puts it "It is an extreme language, frightening but quite beautiful at the same time."
He goes on to explain that it is "the last poetry possible, he poetry of capitalism." It is hard to tell if this is meant as an optimistic light, that there is beauty in everything or if this is it, the last bastion of creativity, and even then it isn't particularly pleasant. Herzog observes like an alien might, indeed, this sort of thing is alien to most people, but he analyses it quite differently than most and his interest in small town America continues. I love it, it's a subject I have very little interest in and I dislike the sound of the auctioneers language and yet I'm transfixed by the possibilities that Herzog suggests. Only Herzog makes these types of films and I love them - however, this didn't do it for me as much as his other early short films. As a Herzog fan though I like it as this where we see the first collaboration between the director and Cinematographer Edward Lachman which is a great point of reference. Herzog can interject his magic to just about any subject, this is the proof and as repetitive as it is, there is a certain music to it. He touches on the lives of the Amish people who live near the auctions and comperes their lives to that of the auctioneers which is fine but I can't help but think that a full on Herzog documentary on the Amish people might have been a little more entertaining, albeit a little too obvious.