When Evil Lurks/ Cuando Acecha la Maldada(2023)

Might just be the horror of the year.

Argentinian. Cuando Acecha la Maldada. Aka When Evil Lurks. 

Written and directed by Demian Rugna, whose Aterrados (Terrified), I saw at BIFF in 2018.

Last year's best film at Sitges. 

cool atmospheric music by Pablo Fuu (some guitar droning reminscent of Apocalyptica & Rodrigo & Gabriela)

Shades of Lucio Fulci (Gates of Hell, The Beyond), as in Aterrados, the Children from Who can kill a Child? (1976), Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. 

LMA Martin Scorsese (81)

Marty is 81 today. And somehow he managed to make one of his best films this year, Killers of the Flower Moon, an grand epic piece of Americana, the closest to the westerns as he ever got. My (introductive) piece on the film here. And a great interview after a screening of the film at the DGA, where Marty is interviewed by his old pal, Steven Spielberg. Much more than a regular by the numbers on film, Scorsese talks about the human existence, the not so dark side of evil and life choices. 

And back to LMA (La multi ani as in Happy Birthday;),

Love this pic, taken on "Bobby" De Niro's 80th Birthday, August 17, this year. Coppola, Marty (with a white wine) and Lucas, three on a couch, and some guy in Lucas' ear. 

RIP Michel Ciment

communique du Festival de Cannes:

The great critic and writer Michel Ciment passed away yesterday at the age of 85, leaving cinema bereft of his words.

Michel Ciment was the Chief Editor of Positif magazine, the producer and host of the program Projection privée on France Culture until 2016, a critic for over fifty years on Le Masque et la Plume on France Inter and a lecturer at the University of Paris-VII. Additionally, he authored many reference books on cinema, notably on Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Francesco Rosi and Jane Campion. Michel Ciment had dedicated his life to passing on his knowledge and passion for the seventh art. A free spirit with an insatiable curiosity, he was the embodiment of cinephilia, embracing all types cinemas and never leaving any film aside.

He continued to explore world cinema right up to the end, particularly at the Festival de Cannes, where he never missed an edition, tirelessly going from press screenings to gala screenings, pacing the Bazin, Debussy, Buñuel and Lumière theaters... His opinions, both enlightened and strong, clear-cut and inflexible, meant a great deal and his voice resounded in the corridors of the Palais des Festivals at the end of each screening, amongst his attentive colleagues. Michel set the tone, in France and abroad. His death should remind us all of the importance of his legacy, and the need for ardent and resistant film review.

The Festival de Cannes without Michel Ciment will never be quite the same. We will miss him. And so will cinema.

I read Ciment's book on John Boorman (out in 1986) when I was in Denmark's EFC -1995/96,  (Boorman's tribute here), I met him in Berlin during Tavernier's In the Electric Mist and saw him moderate in Cannes the Quentin Tarantino Lecon du cinema and many other lectures. 

RIP. 

His historic interview/essay book on Stanley Kubrick (1980), was one that opened the doors of the SK myth to the public eye. 

The Killer (2023)

"Execution is Everything".

It can stand for the director's demo & credo and his team on this one. 

The Killer, David Fincher's new endeavor for Netflix  (after Mank and the Mindhunter series) is a longtime project of his, since 2007. Based on the French Graphic Novel (and now there's 13 of 'em), Le Tueur/The Killer, written by Alexis Nolent (Matz), drawed by Luc Jacamon, published by Casterman, starting with 1998. The whole series are available to view here.

But there's not much left from the original source as I could study a bit. The series are very cool, the film by Fincher doesn't honor them, it just takes its cue from it. The script is a deconstruction of the genre, much less elliptic and less experimental than Jarmusch's failure with The Limits of Control.

A bit of existentialism like in the old The Mechanic (1972), by Lewis John Carlino. But here you get instead of Bosch, music by The Smiths. Of course every step of Alain Delon from Le Samourai to Scorpio. The hat is odd, the product placement is odder, the rhythm is the oddest, very much off, of course on purpose. 

And more off: Half of the film is the killer himself, aka Michael Fassbender. With aliases like Felix Under, or George Jefferson, and other comedic alter-egos;), Fassbender is not to be dealt with. Or double-crossed. It's all in his stream-of-consciousness narration. Or is it? 

Brilliant sound design by Ren Klyce (& music which is also sound design, by the Usual Suspects, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross), as The Killer is more a film to listen to than to see. Or to see and don't believe what you see.....

One scene, the fight is very much like in Haywire (2011, Steven Soderbergh), which Fincher admits as an influence, and Fassbender was in it. Dirty and loud and I couldn't wait to end. Obscene, by all means. Then there's Tilda Swinton, like it or not but the scene with her drinking a sea of whiskeys is the very off , like a classic of another genre, the gentlemanish thriller with suave hitmen and femme fatales. The end of the scene ain't pretty though.