PATRICK Q&A with Mark Hartley

Sydneysiders, Popcorn Taxi is hosting a screening of Mark Hartley's Patrick remake on October 9. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Hartley and producer Antony Ginnane. 

Mark is of course the local hero behind the awesome documentaries Not Quite Hollywood, Machete Maidens Unleashed! and the upcoming Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, and I'm really pulling for him to kill it on his first horror feature (It's been getting some positive reviews out of Fantastic Fest this week!).

For anyone familiar with Aussie exploitation, Antony Ginnane's name should sound familiar too, having produced a ton of movies including Richard Franklin's original Patrick back in 1978. He also produced one of my favourite '90's movies, the Peter Weller starring SF/horror hybrid Screamers, which was adapted from a Phillip K. Dick story by the late, great Dan O'Bannon. 

Just like Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and Alex Aja's superior redux, I think Patrick is prime material for a remake. Although I'm fond of Franklin's '78 film, there's definitely plenty of room to expand and improve on the original's ideas and execution.

Patrick 2013's talent in front of the camera is looking good too. It's nice to see Sharni Vinson in another horror flick so soon after impressing in You're Next, and Charles Dance, so good in Game Of Thrones, will surely make a satisfyingly menacing mad doctor. Yeah, Patrick's gonna fuck him up.

I wish I was going to this myself, but I'll be at the VAARALLINEN show that night instead. For those inclined, details of the Patrick screening can be found here.

A Dangerous Method

Here's one for the locals. Popcorn Taxi is starting off the year in style with a screening of David Cronenberg's latest, his take on psychoanalysis and sex in pre-World War I Vienna - A Dangerous Method. The film marks his third consecutive collaboration with Viggo Mortensen, his second with Vincent Cassel and his first with Michael Fassbender (so incredibly good in Steve McQueen's Hunger).

As with all of Cronenberg's recent films, it may seem like a radical departure from his early body of work, but a closer examination reveals that it's very much in line with his ongoing thematic concerns.

The screening features a Q&A with producer Jeremy Thomas, who previously worked with Cronenberg on Naked Lunch and Crash, as well as producing a number of other films that I'm very fond of, among them Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky & The Dreamers as well as Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins.

The screening is on January 30 at the usual Bondi Junction venue. Tickets and further info HERE.

Attack

A quick heads up to my fellow Sydneysiders to start watching the skies. Chris Murray and the other fine folks at Popcorn Taxi have put together a Q&A screening of Joe Cornish's SF debut Attack The Block a few weeks ahead of it's local theatrical run.

The film has enjoyed wild popularity this year with North American audiences at festivals and screenings there. The resultant hype preceding it now seems pretty over the top, and I'm not sure that audiences in it's native UK ate it up as readily. Perhaps people over there would rather see obnoxious little hoodies get destroyed by Michael Caine instead of portrayed as charming anti-heroes. Having seen the movie, my advice to others would be to temper your expectations. It's a rewarding little slice of SF horror, perhaps even a minor genre classic, but the second coming it most certainly isn't.

However I'm just grumbling, and Attack The Block really is worthy of your time and attention. Monster freaks will love the original and very effective creature design and FX, and for fans of Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and Don't it's cool to see the emergence of yet another talent from the same camp as Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

The screening and Q&A with director Joe Cornish is on November 21. Details and tickets HERE. Seeya there!

Kicked!

Just an update to this post to say that the Popcorn Taxi screening of Kick-Ass was a lot of fun last night. The capacity crowd was probably the geekiest I've seen since going to Kraftwerk a few years ago, and the excitement in the lobby was palpable. It couldn't even be dampened by the overzealous security measures that saw everyone's phones confiscated at the door for the duration of the screening. Was that really necessary?

The movie mostly lived up to my expectations and the crowd ate it up, cheering raucously at the lethal bad-assery of Hit Girl and Big Daddy. Chloe Moretz really does steal the show, but Nic Cage is seriously back in "Sailor Ripley" form here and has by far the funniest moments in an already hilarious movie. It's good to have him back after 15 years of non-stop dreck, and I can't wait to see him devour scenery in Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. My one minor gripe was that it wasn't as gory as I'd anticipated, nowhere near the giddy heights of splatter seen in the comic. The film is very bloody but not overly visceral.

The Q&A afterwards was lively and Matthew Vaughn was affable and funny. He's excited about the prospect of a sequel, but hesitant to talk it up lest Kick-Ass gets it's ass kicked at the box office (It was almost completely independently financed - including mortgaging Vaughn's house - so there's a lot riding on its success). He did talk a little about the follow up comic series, and said that Millar and Romita are thinking of introducing a new (not so)superhero character named either Motherfucker or The Cunt. LOL.

He also talked enthusiastically about his use of almost entirely practical action in the movie, citing his hatred of modern action techniques such as shaky-cam, ADHD editing and an over-abundance of CG. Amusingly, they did switch to CG blood after just one day of shooting, because it was taking too long to clean the set and re-costume the actors after each take. I barely noticed it though, it's an effect that they are finally getting right (I'm looking at you Land Of The Dead!).

Having just screened The Wolfman and Daybreakers, Popcorn Taxi is being very friendly to genre fans so far this year. Next stop for the Taxi in April is Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans with Werner Herzog Q&A. Bring on the iguanas!