Director’s Cut: Joshua Oppenheimer (‘The Act of Killing’)

Since 2001 Joshua Oppenheimer has been investigating the mass-killings that happened in Indonesia during 1965-66 where between 500,000 and 1 million people died and have never been fully told to the world. Through a combination of a cover up by the Indonesian government, and in effect the rest of the world ignoring this horrific moment, it inevitably became in Indonesia, Oppenheimer says, “the heroic yet mysterious chapter in their nation’s past.”

Following his film “The Globalization Tapes,” which looked at worker oppression in Indonesia, Oppenheimer gradually gained the trust of mass-killing survivors and their families and attempted to interview them for a film. The Indonesian government quickly thwarted his attempts, tracking him and arresting anyone who would talk on camera. This lead to one of the survivors giving Oppenheimer an unconventional suggestion that would soon lead to the creation of a new film, one that would showcase the atrocities that occurred through the eyes of the perpetrators, literally changing Indonesian’s perspective of their history.

“The Act of Killing” has become one of the most anticipated documentaries to hit theaters this year after wowing audiences at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals last year for its unique telling of the mass-killings: told through the killers who did it as they reenact some of their handywork through a film genre of their choosing (read our review of the film here). “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade,” says Werner Herzog, while Errol Morris writes in a piece on the film for Slate, “Oppenheimer is not offering a historical account of what happened in Indonesia, but rather an examination of the nature of memory and of history.” Both doc icons came on as executive producers after seeing the film.

Here Oppenheimer tells Film.com his journey making the film, how during shooting he and his crew almost had to flee the country after showing footage to one of the legendary killers, Anwar Congo, and why at the end of the day “The Act of Killing” is for the Indonesian people.

FILM.COM: Is it true that one of the survivors you were trying to film was the one who suggested you interview the killers?

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. 2003 the film “The Globalization Tapes” came out, then I went back and started working with the survivors and I actually stumbled across a neighbor while making “The Globalization Tapes” that killed the aunt of the woman that made the suggestion that I interview the killers. He had boasted how he had killed all of the communists in the plantation. And I said, “Who do you mean?” And he said the union members. 200 people. By beating them up until they were unconscious, drowning them in irrigation ditches and just laughingly showing me how his muscles are still pretty strong, maybe he can still do it. All in front of his 10-year-old granddaughter, who watched on and looked bored, as though she had heard it many times before.

And so I already had this sense that there was something very rotten here and then started filming, as we were getting arrested for filming with the survivors. I felt I had wondered into a situation where, like going to Germany 40 years out from the Holocaust and finding that the Third Reich was still in place. I felt this situation demands whatever time it takes of me. Starting from this little entry point I will have to film and explore and investigate whatever is needed.

Actually, the day that I premiered “The Act of Killing” at Telluride, I got a call from that village saying that the woman who you are talking about, who suggested I talk to the killers, that she died from liver damage.

So this has been a story you’ve been telling since 2001?

Yes. When I couldn’t interview the survivors we all flew to Jakarta—myself, the survivors, my core collaborators—met the human rights community there and asked if this was a bad idea, and everyone said, “No, you’re onto something. Keep going.” And their the woman said, “Why don’t you continue filming the perpetrators?” Because she knew I’d stumbled across this neighbor of mine. I filmed all of the perpetrators I could find in the region. Found they were all boastful. Found into addition to them being boastful they would take me to the places where they killed, which I wanted to do because no one knew what had happened. I felt I have to film everyone involved who was still alive, and I must film where they would do the killings because these are stories of how perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in this province were killed. No one knew. No one had investigated it. So it wasn’t like someone had researched this and then I went in and made the film. I was doing all of it.

So first I felt I was gathering evidence on behalf of survivors for a film, then I started to realize that by filming the perpetrators I can somehow expose, especially for Indonesians, I can unmask the whole regime, which will then create a space for Indonesians to challenge the official story and remember what really happened and talk about it. I’m making this film for Indonesians.

So gradually as my questions became more about how the perpetrators want to be seen, how do they see themselves, I started being very straight with everybody. I started saying, “Look, you’ve participated in one of the biggest killings in human history, your lives are shaped by it, your society is totally based on it, you want to show me what you’ve done, I want to know what it means to you and you’re society, so show me what you’ve done in any way you wish, I’ll film the reenactments.” I wasn’t expecting these dramatizations yet.

Very quickly with Anwar [the main killer highlighted in the film], he and I became pretty close and I was able to be very honest with him. So the method was not a lure to get them to open up, and they’re not making their own film, ever. The form of the film consequently is a response to their openness and my effort to understand its nature and its functioning effect.

I was asked today why did the perpetrators, knowing you were working with the survivors, still want to be filmed? And I think it’s because they being old and retired didn’t necessarily know what we were doing, the police and the military did, but because their status is so respected in society that once they were on board the military people who were moderating me and thinking about what I was doing didn’t want to make waves, they didn’t want to ask questions. I had a seal of approval from people more senior than them.

So at a point in your discussions with the killers they decide to film certain incidents in a genre of their choosing?

Yes. I think in hindsight—I don’t think I could see this at the time—what was fueling that process was actually Anwar’s conscience, his desire to run away from the meaning of what he’s done. As he says in the longer version of the film, “I want to make a beautiful family movie about mass killing.” As though if he can make it beautiful, perhaps he can make it okay for himself. There’s this little passage early in the film where Amor is on the roof and he shows how he kills, he then actually shows how the victims looked when they were killed. He says he’s a good dancer because he’s been trying to forget what he’s done—drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing.

So even as he’s offering us this outrageous metaphor for impunity, him dancing on the roof is precisely not a symptom of his lack of conscious it’s the opposite. It’s some kind of self-protective assertion. To dance on the roof where you killed a thousand people is to deny the moral meaning of what happened there. And he is insisting on that denial.

I think I felt that and I wondered if I screened this back to him would he recognize himself in the mirror of the film? So I showed it back to him, and it may have been the second or third thing I filmed with him and I’m fully expecting him to say, “That’s it. I look bad. Call the military.” So I had my production manager at the airport with all of our bags packed, with a lot of cash ready to buy tickets for all of us to leave if there was not a text message saying everything is okay. Anwar watches, he looks disturbed and I think genuinely he is disturbed and he’s disturbed by what happened on the roof, but he doesn’t say this makes me look bad because to say that would be tantamount to admitting for the first time that it was bad, which he’s never been forced to do.

So instead what does he do? He takes all that unpleasantness that he must be feeling and transposes it onto his clothes. He says, “I look like I’m dressed for a picnic. I should dye my hair.” Because he doesn’t want to acknowledge what is really disturbing him. So I followed in his process and there’s a tension there between my project—exposé—and Anwar’s project—which is running away from his pain. In a way I think that’s the tightrope the film walks. There’s an empathy with a man struggling with his pain and there’s repulsion in what he’s done.

Talk about your co-director, who you’ve credited as Anonymous to protect his identity.

He was never there as the director of “The Act of Killing.” He was there as my production manager, my assistant director, my second cameraperson, my sounding board, my best friend. I think that though the reason why in the end instead of just giving him all those credits I felt he deserved to be named as a co-director was because one of the things I’m most proud of with the film is that it’s been welcomed into Indonesia as an Indonesian film, a work of Indonesian cinema, not a foreigner coming in and saying something. It’s actually Indonesians themselves holding a dark mirror up to themselves. My big hope is that one day, with the help of the film, there’s sufficient change in Indonesia that we can take off that credit role and put on a new one with everyone’s name on it.

It seems that through showing the film numerous times in Indonesia that the way Indonesians think about this part of their history is starting to change.

The film has come to Indonesia like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Pointing at the King saying, “Look, the King is naked.” Which is what I hoped it would do. It’s said so emotionally, and by the perpetrators themselves, these men who aught to be enjoying the fruits of their victory are in fact by the end of the film have escaped justice but not punishment. Anwar is a mess by the end of the film, as he was before, I don’t think he’s doing any worse now than he was before I met him, but you see what a mess he is. And Adi, who sleeps easily at night, is this hollow shell of a human being.

The Indonesian media, as a result of the film, have produced a special double edition of Indonesia’s main news magazine about the film but also 75 pages of boasting perpetrators from around the country basically showing that this is systemic and it’s about their whole country. So the film is helping to create a sea change in how the country talks about its past. As of the first of April there have been 500 screenings there, ranging from 30 and 800 people in 95 cities. I think that yeah, the media has finally ended its 47-year silence. And perpetrators no longer boast. You couldn’t go there now and find a man like Anwar to talk that way anymore because of the film.

Did Werner Herzog or Errol Morris give you notes after seeing the film?

Werner gave notes in the very final stage of making the director’s cut of the film and he gave notes during the cutting down. Errol gave a lot of feedback on rough cut scenes but not on the actual going from rough cut to finished film. Both of them have been tireless ambassadors of the film since then.

With the way this film is told, were you able to find the story you wanted to tell while shooting or did you not know until post?

I think I never know where my films are going. I think it’s really important for me to treat the shooting as a process of exploring something that matters to me as deeply as possible, guided only by a method, a group of characters and a central metaphor, and then the editing process is not about presenting what I’ve shot but also analyzing all the layers of meaning and interconnectedness within the material that you can’t see when you’re shooting.

When Anwar plays the victim, it’s a touching scene of a victim being tortured, it’s also a double take because the victim is the killer, plus it’s stylized as film noir. So there’s all these layers which you can’t see when you’re shooting and unlike fiction you have the actor and you watch on a playback and you have someone do it again and again, the subtext in the person’s face you don’t see until you’re editing and it’s that that I’m really looking for in the editing. It’s the little turn in the corner of the mouth that shows disgust or the little squint in the eye that shows doubt or the little pause that shows fear.

How have the killers reacted to the film?

Herman, the next generation of the killers, loves the film. Adi has only said, “I didn’t get rich making the film,” his reaction of the film is in the film where he says this will make us look bad. And then the high-ranking politicians all hate the film as they should and feel angry about the film. If they didn’t I would have failed in my job. [laughs] And Anwar’s reaction is he’ll stand by the film and that it’s honest.

I don’t want to give away too much of the last scene, but I have to know, what was it like being there and filming it?

It was this terrible moment. I had been trying to get back in that office from the very first day I filmed there. Because Anwar reenacts all these horrible things that happened in the office and the only time I had been able to get him there was the first day I met him and I didn’t know what happened there then. So I was thinking it would be extremely useful for the film to get back in there and have him take me through. We could never get permission to get back in there. Never. And I don’t think it had anything to do with the killings, it was just some superstition about photography by the owner of the shop. We had gotten in the first time because the owner was away. In the final shot of the movie you see a bouquet of flowers next to Anwar when he’s leaving. That’s because a new tenant had moved into the shop two days before and she was fine with us filming there.

That was the last days of the very final shoot. It was 6 months after what I thought would be the final scene in the film, which is when Anwar watches himself play the victim with his grandkids. His hair has grown out—it was black and now it’s white again. I never thought it would be the final scene of the film, I thought it would come much earlier. He’s walking and trying to do what I asked and suddenly his body is no longer cooperating, it’s not going along with the words that he spoke. And he’s still trying to carry on, because again, to admit something is wrong is to admit everything that has happened.

So he’s trying to carry on and I could see what was happening to him and I wanted to put my arm around him and say it’s okay, but I’m realizing that he knows it’s not okay and will never be okay and just as he’s had to deny the meaning of this whole thing to get back up on that roof and to live with himself every day, I’ve had to deny the meaning of this whole thing to bring him back to the roof and expect that he could do this again. So I stood there and I don’t get close because the space between him and me is the space of the dead, of the victims that died there. I don’t want to step on the dead and trample on them the away Anwar was doing in the beginning of the film when he was dancing on this very roof. And I don’t want to zoom in on a sentimental close up showing his pain because what matters is I’m just witnessing.

Can you talk a bit about the follow up to “The Act of Killing”?

I’m in the editing, the working title is “The Look of Silence.” It’s about a family of survivors who have been living traumatized by what happened to them ever since the mass-killings and the youngest son is determined to somehow break out of that fear by seeing if the killers living all around him take responsibility for what they’ve done and feel remorse about it. He approaches everyone involved with his brother’s death and it’s unimaginable for that to happen in Indonesia. Through the breaking of these taboos you feel exactly what it feels like, all of the constraints that a survivor would live under and you feel exactly what it would be like to be a survivor in the world of the act of killing.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Documentary, Drafthouse films, Errol Morris, Interview, Jason Guerrasio, Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing, Werner herzog

VISIBLE SCARS (2012)

Tanggal Rilis : 17 November 2012 (USA)
Jenis Film : Thriller
Diperankan Oleh : Jillian Murray, Tom Sizemore, Hanna Hall

Ringkasan Cerita VISIBLE SCARS (2012) :

Seventeen years ago, MIKE GILLIS killed a new mother of twin girls and took the babies to a house in the woods, claiming them as his own to appease his wife’s desire for kids. After Mike committed multiple murders over seven years to “protect” the growing girls locked in the basement, even finally killing his wife, one day a fire in the house causes it to collapse on Mike and the twins.

In present day, STACY WALKER flees to her uncle’s old secluded cabin in those same woods to escape her abusive boyfriend. Once there, her head begins to clear and she feels free to be with her thoughts. That first night she is haunted by the ghosts of the little girls crying for their mother. Meanwhile, DETECTIVE BLACK is investigating the 17-year-old case of the twins’ disappearance and their mother’s murder. The cold trail suddenly turns warm when the case leads to the same secluded mountainous region where Stacy has escaped. As Stacy is beginning to figure out her life, as well as trying to unravel.

[IMDb rating : 5.7/10]
[Awards : - ]
[Production Co : - ]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1684567]

[Quality : BRRip 720p]
[File Size : 675 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Resolution : 1280x720]
[Source : 720p.BluRay.x264-LCHD]
[Encoder : nItRo]

BillionUploads
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 | Part4 | Part5 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Megafiles.se
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 | Part4 | Part5 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Uptobox
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 | Part4 | Part5 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Zippyshare
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 | Part4 | Part5 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
180upload
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 | Part4 | Part5 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders

Download English Subtitle (Not available yet)
Download Indonesian Subtitle (Not available yet)

Bagi Pengunjung Baru klik di sini Cara Menggabungkan File Ekstensi .001 dan .002 UP DATE TERBARU DOWNLOAD FILEM

Jump Scares Don’t Cause Nightmares: 10 Horror Films that Use Atmosphere Over Jolts

Living in Birmingham, I tend to see wide releases only after they hit theaters, so I keep an ear out for any unlikely multiplex film to earn positive buzz. Chief among recent, surprising critical darlings is a horror film released in the middle of summer. James Wan’s “The Conjuring,” out today, arrives on a wave of critical praise rare for a horror film. Michael Phillips calls it “an ‘Amityville Horror’ for a new century” before comparing Wan’s direction to Robert Altman’s, while our own William Goss says that though “we’ve seen swarms of birds, levitating furniture and chaotic third-act exorcisms before, even down to its very last shot, “The Conjuring” demonstrates a scary — and welcome — amount of care.” It all sounded too good to be true, until I noticed a recurring tidbit in the reactions. Whether negative or positive, the buzz for “The Conjuring” has made special note of its volume of jump scares.

Most eye-catching was Calum Marsh’s article for this site, in which, as the title claims, he argues that the film is simply too scary. Admitting he found the film terrifying, Marsh goes on to say that the film “makes every gesture a fatal blow, paying off each moment of suspense almost the second it is established. Its most radical quality isn’t the extremity of any of its single scares…but rather its overall guiding principle, which is that no moment should go to waste.” But that same overwhelming asset ultimately becomes “exhausting,” a horror film comprising only a string of jump-scares that gives the audience no reprieve.

For a horror film to be described, whether by Marsh of the MPAA itself, as “too scary” is certainly a dream problem for a filmmaker, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sound appealing. But even the praise for “The Conjuring” has started to make the feature sound like its own YouTube compilation of “Best Scenes from ‘The Conjuring,’” like a horror version of “The Raid.” Where at least “The Raid’s” counterproductive distillation of the action genre to a constant movement between setpieces at least had the advantage of well-choreographed fighting, “The Conjuring’s” vaunted series of expert jump scares are hobbled in one respect: jump scares suck.

Well, that’s not fair. Some jump scares are so ingeniously executed they take on a life of their own. The hand in “Carrie.” The blood test in “The Thing.” The homeless “monster” appearing behind the diner in “Mulholland Dr.” Even James Wan’s earlier “Insidious” shows a flair for setting up such payoffs and ably knocking them down, and by all accounts “The Conjuring” improves on that film’s strengths. But to excel at crafting films of nothing but scares is like being a master of cotton candy, putting great care into something that instantly dissipates. Deafening noises, bursts of music, faces materializing from nowhere can make the heart skip, send popcorn flying from tubs and reduce one to watching a screen through woven fingers, but after going home and surviving the night, all the just-a-cat moments and demon faces and gore slip from the mind.

Perhaps I should clarify that I’ve often delineated scariness, which describes an emotional reaction and is most susceptible to sudden frights, to horror, a method and focus of storytelling that, at its best, brings out one’s fears less for a quick scare than for a more sinister confirmation of the justifiability of those phobias and anxieties. To scare is not necessarily easy, but often it lacks the haunting power of great horror. In the moment, “The Conjuring” may be the most unbearably tense experience I have all year, but if it’s anything like “Insidious,” I’ll be going to Wikipedia the next time Wan makes a film to look up details just to remind myself what happened. Even Sam Raimi’s parody of this approach, “Drag Me to Hell,” worked a little too well at aping its targets’ mannerisms: nowadays, I remember only white noise and its meaningless twist ending.

For various reasons, horror is often compared to comedy: both deal in cathartic releases and are judged by the intensity of vocal responses to those releases. The volume of laughs and screams, then, becomes the yardstick for measuring a film’s success. But to equate the two is to miss how differently the genres work: comedy lives on surprise, where the outcome of an unexpected punchline is the reward. Horror, though, works through anticipation, through the unnerving setup of a person, place, even world that subtly turns against a character until hope is lost. In other words, comedy, no matter how long-winded and carefully ordered the setup, is about the end, while horror is about the means.

Atmosphere, then, gives horror its power, from Edgar Allen Poe’s stories through the Brontë sisters’ demented romances through H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic doom. The best horror films, likewise, do not treat the act of unsettling an audience as a mere primer for the eventual spooks as an ongoing process of warping not just the world within the film, but the one outside the theater. Images, and, more importantly, moods, stay in the mind for days, weeks and occasionally even a lifetime after experiencing them. These movies may not be “scary” in the sense of eliciting screams, but they live on like Poe’s beating heart, or the impenetrable moors of “Wuthering Heights.” Below are 10 such films, a sampling of features spanning from the studio system to the present day, that may not send you running from the theater in terror like “The Conjuring” but may just come back to unnerve you later. By no means the last word on great horror, these films mark a good starting point to finding horror movies that work in mysterious ways.

“Diabolique” by Henri-Jacques Clouzot (1955)

“Diabolique” is a colossal horror fake-out, an entire plot structured on the “just a cat” principle as a trio of closely linked but secretly combative teachers plot to off each other and disguise their own duplicity as death. This is a film where the absence of a corpse scares more than the sudden appearance of one, and when one “reanimates,” Clouzot’s filming of the scene in silence and slow-motion flies in the face of generic expectation and is all the more frightening for it. The reversals continue all the way until the end, in which the monsters themselves are shocked with a normal person walks out from the shadows to defeat them.

“Night of the Demon” by Jacques Tourneur (1958)

Tourneur’s three films for Val Lewton (“Cat People,” “The Leopard Man” and “I Walked with a Zombie”) pretty much throw down the gauntlet for atmospheric horror, but not to be forgotten is this lesser remarked-upon feature, in which Tourneur goes against his ambiguous early horror to clearly show the existence of a monster at the top of the film. That makes the film more outwardly jolting than the eerily absent terrors of Tourneur’s other genre work, but Dana Andrews still plays things as if the looming demon might be a feverish hallucination that he can will out of existence. And even when the demon fills the frame, Tourneur’s vast gulfs of space remain unparalleled for the sheer discomfort and foreboding: in showing huge frames with nowhere to hide, Tourneur somehow only enhances the feeling that something will pop out from nowhere.

“The Haunting” by Robert Wise (1963)

The haunted house film naturally lends itself to atmosphere, what with the “monster” being the mise-en-scène, but Robert Wise’s 1963 masterpiece sets a standard few can meet. Before unseen forces pound at doors and lost visitors pop out of trap doors, the film sets its mood with brilliantly curved frames, warping perspective and confounding one’s sense of space at all times. No monster ever materializes from the shadows, but Wise’s meticulous tension building makes what most horror films would consider spooky setups (disembodied laughter, the turn of a doorknob of its own volition) act as effective payoffs. Wise cut his teeth on Val Lewton movies, and no film made since Lewton’s death so thoroughly demonstrates the knowledge of what made the producer’s work great.

“Repulsion” by Roman Polanski (1965)

This writer’s favorite horror film of all time is something of a haunted house movie, but only in the sense that the house (well, apartment) is both the vehicle for supernaturally grim manifestations and the victim of same. Cathereine Deneuve’s shut-in anthrophobic projects cracks and decay upon the walls as she stews in paranoid energy in her sister’s absence, and the apartment retaliates by materializing the sources of her deep fears. Polanski plays out the socio-sexual undercurrents of the film’s horrors through his camera, using his mastery with unorthodox, teasing compositions and undulating focal lengths to visualize not merely paranoia but a female perspective as it navigates a world aligned against it. The shot of arms reaching out from the walls to grope Carol, violating her in what should be her private sanctuary, is one of the great horrific images for its surreal shock, and its deeper implications.

“Don’t Look Now” by Nicolas Roeg (1973)

Nicolas Roeg’s elliptically ordered chamber horror tilts off its axis so rapidly that the spill of red ink on a photograph at the top of the movie proves a scarier use of red goop than the goriest pictures. As soon becomes clear, the monster of the film is grief, the destabilizing effect of losing a child on parents whose broken spirits lend the movie its erratic structure. The most accomplished horror features provide a keen sense of place, but “Don’t Look Now” is the rare film that benefits from obliterating any foothold for the audience to orient themselves, its looping movement only clarifying place and time in retrospect, and after several viewings.

“Possession” by Andrzej Zulawski (1981)

If “Don’t Look Now” consumes itself in agony over a lost child, “Possession” puts forward a strong case for never having kids in the first place. Zulawski mines Lovecraft for an extreme take on miscarriage, postpartum depression and more, with Isabelle Adjani’s powerful performance rooted in melodrama as much as terror. Images from the film linger for years: Adjani collapsing in a puddle of spilled milk and uterine blood, a double take of her rebelling on the street against Sam Neill’s abusive husband, and the final image of a monster’s hands slowly beating on a frosted glass door as bombers circle overhead. All monsters are grotesque expressions of inner human fears, but few feel as palpably connected to internal madness as the creature Adjani births.

“Prince of Darkness” by John Carpenter (1987)

Just about any Carpenter film deserves a mention when it comes to finely constructed, precision-timed horror, but in atmospheric terms, he tops himself with “Prince of Darkness.” From the moment that Donald Pleasence (in his most fear-stricken but least panicky role for Carpenter) confesses to a long-standing Church conspiracy to conceal pure evil with a mixture of disgust, resignation, and the quiver of deep fear, a pall of gloom is cast over the proceedings that mutes even the handful of jolts into something more cosmic. Interdimensional mirrors, a mass of zombified homeless, the slow dissolve of a possessed colleague into a mound of ants never overstep the film’s limited scale, but they all suggest a much larger presence that can only be directly seen in such minor visions because the full thing would be incomprehensible to us.

“Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” by David Lynch (1992)

David Lynch is the greatest horror director of non-horror films, though if he ever did make an outright entry into the genre, it was with his maligned masterpiece “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.” With the actual mystery of Laura Palmer’s death solved, for better or worse, on the show, this quasi-prequel narratively covers trod ground. Emotionally, however, this is as harrowing and devastating and unrelenting as anything to ever be foisted on an unprepared public, in which a town so friendly to an affable male outsider turns toxic and unpitying for a girl who grew up there. The longer format and ongoing weirdness of the show put the focus on its supernatural elements, but “Fire Walk with Me” makes the likes of BOB seem more like coping mechanisms for blotting out the more sadly common horrors of rape, incest and murder. “Fire Walk with Me” forces the viewer to see the world through the eyes of someone who can find no solace in it, where even the spinning of a ceiling fan or a creepy painting contain a sense of danger.

“Pulse” by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2001)

“Pulse” could have gone so wrong (just look at the American remake). A film directly tied to an emerging technology will instantly date itself, but “Pulse,” released before the widespread adoption of high-speed internet, the rise of social media and various other developments of Internet life, only seems to get more relevant. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s chiller finds ghosts in the machines, which crawl out slowly, not suddenly, and bring with them less a sense of terror than abject melancholy. The subtext of the Internet uniting people through a false sense of presence as it isolates mankind is hardly original, but Kurosawa suffuses the film with such rich despair that the viewer’s own life force threatens to turn to ash. Even the insistent score only spikes after a ghost has appeared, or a person has reacted extremely to loneliness, turning even the one truly clichéd element on its head.

“Halloween II” by Rob Zombie (2009)

For someone who so gleefully trades in throwback schlock, Rob Zombie admirably avoids the easy reward of jump scares. (Even his most jump-ridden feature, his recent “Lords of Salem,” puts its surprises in deep background rather than the fore.) His finest outing, “Halloween II,” finds its true monster less in Michael Myers than in the PTSD triggered in survivors from his first spree of terror. In both the theatrical and especially the director’s cuts, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) rips apart bonds with friends and surrogate family as the agony of her survivor’s guilt proves too much to bear. So frightening is Laurie’s self-immolation that when her brother returns, one is tempted to see him only as a manifestation of Laurie’s fear, as well as a now-necessary agent for her release. The film asks what happens to the Final Girl after she becomes the Final Girl, finding no victory, only a mere prolonging of torture that ends only when recurring monsters, or new forces, finish the job only just started with a franchise’s first entry.

Categories: Features, Lists

Tags: Diabolique, Halloween, Horror Movies, Jake Cole, James Wan, Jump Scares, Night of the Demon, Repulsion, Rob zombie, The Conjuring

‘The Conjuring’ Star Patrick Wilson: Ineffectual DILF

In “The Conjuring,” Patrick Wilson attempts to fix a Chevy. It’s entirely tangential to the plot. He just sees a broken down car and decides to open up the hood and get busy. It’s not even haunted. This diversion into the hobbies of Wilson’s character, demonologist Ed Warren, is supposed to be character development. He’s the man of the family, drawn to machinery and the occasional folksy metaphor: demonic attachment, he explains to the Perron Family, is “like stepping on gum. It sticks with you.” He is, for lack of a better word, solid.

Most of the paranormal heavy lifting is done by his wife, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga). She’s a clairvoyant, able to see the spirits who terrorize the Perron Family in their Rhode Island home. Her gift is innate, while Ed has only studied the religious science of “demonology.” She also has better clothes. Yet, since an accident during an exorcism that Ed will only allude to, he keeps asking her to stay home and avoid the stresses of their vocation. She comes along anyway, and steamrolls over his objections with a quick reminder of how thoroughly she beats him in the charisma department.

Also Check Out: Can a Movie Be *Too* Scary?

To clarify: Ed Warren is the one without charisma, not Patrick Wilson. Yet that’s been a little hard to tell over the last couple of years. The actor has had a run of parts that call for a well-built, potentially heroic white dude, personality optional. “Insidious” is much the same, in which Wilson plays the father of a child under demonic harassment. He spends much of the film away from his haunted house, however, choosing to hide at work. When he eventually confronts the villain in the film’s impressively constructed and somewhat ridiculous final sequence, he’s somewhat less than effective. After all, if he had really saved the day there wouldn’t be a sequel coming out this September. The trailer hints pretty strongly that it’s all dad’s fault.

For Wilson, this will now be three James Wan films in a row in which he attempts to fight demons but is mostly upstaged by his wife (Rose Byrne in the “Insidious” films). It raises a question: can a character be a hero if his heroic flaw is his bland ineffectualness? “Insidious” tries to make this interesting, turning his fear into an obstacle. “The Conjuring” does less, assuming perhaps that because Ed is presented as a demon hunter we don’t need to see him do much actual hunting in order to find him compelling. Perhaps the only interesting variation for Wilson in the last few years was “Young Adult,” in which suburban husband Buddy is at least made more interesting by the blatant sexual assault of Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary.

So how did we get here? In a way, this is all the logical extension of Wilson’s two best roles (and best performances): 2003’s “Angels in America” and 2006’s “Little Children.” In the HBO mini-series adapted from Tony Kushner’s award-winning drama, he plays a young gay Mormon, unhappily married to a Valium-addicted housewife. Yet in this story he breaks away, awakening via some illicit trips through The Brambles of Central Park and running from the crushing monotony of the uncomplicated heterosexuality to which he was raised. There’s a nude awakening by the beach, a complicated relationship with a very neurotic Jew, and plenty of sexual tension.

That’s another element missing from these more recent roles: sex. “Little Children” one of Wilson’s few really leading roles, makes great use of the actor’s physical appeal. Todd Field’s adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel still positions him as the ineffectual husband/father, a former football player who somehow cannot pass the bar exam. Yet his affair with Kate Winslet is a rippling vein of activity, both sexual and emotional, and gives Wilson so much to work with. Field eroticizes the actor more than anyone else has, while simultaneously directing him into some of his most intriguing scenes. It’s effective because it breaks down his character, much like “Angels in America” did.

We can only hope there’s more of that in Wilson’s future. In the meantime, however, this turn to the supernatural is fascinating in its flatness. His collaboration with Wan has been fruitful, in the sense that the movies themselves are quite good. “Insidious,” aside from its hokeyness, was plenty effective and “The Conjuring” is terrifying (and not too terrifying). It’s almost as if these genre projects depend upon Wilson to be bland in order to flood the rest of the screen with the shock and awe of Wan’s style of horror. Yet it’s no fun to see the actor so bland all of the time. It does look like Wan may finally tear apart a Wilson character in “Insidious: Chapter 2,” which is an exciting prospect.  That deconstruction is the only way out.

There’s proof of that last assertion, actually. “A Gifted Man” was Wilson’s foray into television, a short-lived CBS series that premiered in September of 2011 and was canceled the following May. Wilson plays Dr. Michael Holt, the best neurosurgeon in New York City. He also talks to his dead wife (Jennifer Ehle), who convinces him to take a role in the free clinic she ran before being killed in a hit-and-run. The show had some major problems, not least of which being the hilarious frequency of brain tumors among minor characters. Rather than weaken or crack open Dr. Holt, “A Gifted Man” just gives him more heroic things to do. He saves more and more lives, both the rich people who frequent his regular job and the less fortunate families who go to the free clinic. The plethora of medical disasters made the episodes exciting on paper, but the total lack of intriguing character development in its leading man made it dull.

Basically: Wilson is a good-looking, physically and artistically solid actor who is perfectly believable as the upstanding, honest husband and father. But without a few cracks in his armor, he might as well be a statue. Somebody important in Hollywood figure this out, please.

Categories: Features

Tags: Daniel Walber, Heroes, Insidious, Insidious: Part 2, James Wan, Patrick Wilson, The Conjuring

Meet Micro-Budget Filmmaking’s Most Exciting Cinematographer

Broadly speaking, micro-budget indie films don’t exactly have a reputation for high-quality cinematography, and if anything the smallest films are lauded in spite of how they look, not because of it. Independent productions rarely have the luxury of hiring an experienced DP, and with the advent of affordable, passably “high-end” digital cameras, amateur directors often assume they don’t need one, even though the results usually look, at best, like hyper-glossy TV commercials for cleaning products or Sunny D. The American independent cinema, in other words, is starved for technical competence—so much so that even nominally professional-looking features ought to be applauded for clearing the low bar—and even if we’re occasionally treated to an aesthetic powerhouse like “Computer Chess”, those rarities are decidedly the exception rather than the rule.

But if you have been paying attention to the New York indie scene of late, where some of the most exciting films have been emerging in what feels like a kind of post-mumblecore new wave, you may have noticed a recurring credit: Sean Price Williams, who has quickly proven himself to be one of most exciting cinematographers working today. Williams first came to prominence with his eye-catching work on the documentary “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo”, which artfully augmented its talking head interview footage with expressive panoramas of the Japanese skyline, and Ronnie Bronstein’s comedy “Frownland”, which distinguished itself from 2007’s mumblecore glut by being one of the few films of its kind to be shot on film. His work on Alex Ross Perry’s debut feature “Impolex”, which he also shot on 16mm, cemented his reputation in certain circles as uncommonly thoughtful and skilled.

Since then, Williams has kept incredibly busy, working at so brisk a pace that he has managed to complete nearly two dozen shorts and features since 2011 alone. And as the filmmakers with whom he regularly works begin to find acclaim and more mainstream opportunities, it seems likely that he will soon find a himself attached to bigger and more widely seen productions—like perhaps the new HBO series he just wrapped up with Perry, one of his most reliable collaborators. In any case, Williams is clearly a talent to watch, and as an introduction to his style we’ve put together a short list of some of his most essential work to date.

Five Great-Looking Films Shot by Sean Price Williams

“The Color Wheel” (dir. Alex Ross Perry, 2012)

Alex Ross Perry’s “The Color Wheel” is one of the most original and important American films of the last decade, and its grainy, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography is central to its appeal. Perry had intended to shoot the film in color and expressed an interest in shooting digitally, in order to better prepare the improvisations and comic riffs he’d planned between himself and co-star Carlen Altman.

It was Williams who insisted that the film be shot in 16mm and in monochrome—the two fought over creative choices often, according to interviews—and this proved a decision which fundamentally changed not just the look of the picture, but its overall character too. The climax of the film, a staggering ten-minute long take held largely in intimate close up, owes perhaps as much to Williams’ camerawork as it does to Perry’s conviction in the strength of the idea. Whether because they gel well or because they have the tenacity to fight, Williams and Perry are clearly ideal collaborators.

“Kuichisan” (dir. Maiko Endo, 2013)

Maiko Endo’s “Kuichisan” is, by design, a difficult film to classify, but despite its apparent impenetrability as a work of (non-)narrative fiction it is nevertheless exceptionally beautiful to behold. Working again in 16mm—though this time using a combination of color and black-and-white, equally striking—Williams traveled with Endo to the small town of Koza, in Okinawa, Japan, to soak in much of the local flavor.

What results brushes only briefly against fiction, as in the gradually crystallizing stories of a young American tourist, played by Eleonore Hendricks, and a mysterious child who resembles a miniature monk. But in general the film is a delight to simply absorb for its aesthetic flair: “Kuichisan” features some of Williams’ best work, and even without guidance through the narrative the experience is plainly mesmerizing.

“Lydia Hoffman Lydia Hoffman” (dir. Dustin Guy Defa, 2013)

Dustin Guy Defa has an unusual sensibility for a director of micro-budget films: though his style tends toward the kind of ascetic naturalism for which mumblecore is best known, his scripts (or improvisations, it isn’t always clear which it is) have a writerly quality that makes them feel a bit too determined. His last feature, “Bad Fever”, veered dangerously close to sitcom territory, mostly redeemed by a stellar turn by Kentucky Audler.

“Lydia Hoffman Lydia Hoffman”, his new short film—which played to much acclaim at the recent BAMcinemaFest in New York—doesn’t so much reconfigure Defa’s approach as it does find an aesthetic better-suited to it, which Williams is happy to provide: here Defa’s almost doc-like naturalism is exchanged for a more airily impressionistic take on the same, with Williams shooting the (typically) whimsical scenario as if it were a hazy daydream. The result, as you might expect, looks sublime, and this becomes the rare case of a film so elevated by its style that it transforms a good short into a genuinely great one.

“The Black Balloon” (dir. Benny and Josh Safdie, 2012)

The Safdie brothers, on the other hand, are in need of help from nobody, having long-since established a style and sensibility inextricable from their work. All Williams can do, lending his talents to this recent twenty-minute short, is deliver the best work possible, and he is glad to oblige—indeed, “The Black Balloon” might be the best summation of Williams’s short career to date.

He captures balloons floating through the sky with as much affection and nuance as the faces of the people the balloon finds wandering the streets, staying with several fleetingly as if passing through a number of self-contained films (“The Black Balloon” somehow seems to pass by more fully realized characters and snippets of completely lived-in stories across its 20-minute running time than most features can muster in 120.) What of the most intriguing things about this film is that it isn’t actually film at all: though it looks remarkably like 16mm, this was in fact shot digitally, and it’s a credit to Williams that he is capable of emulating the look of film so effectively.

“Somebody Up There Likes Me” (dir. Bob Byington, 2013)

Bob Byington’s “Somebody Up There Likes Me” is rather abrasive for a quirky indie comedy, but Williams lends the proceedings a lushness and vigor that greatly compensates for the dryness of the humor and the severity of the tone. These are the kinds of projects on which Williams will no doubt make his name, and even if they do not afford him the same opportunities for experimentation that Japanese fiction-doc hybrids and verite shorts do, it’s heartening to know that even his most routine engagements are made to shine.

Categories: Features

Tags: Calum Marsh, Kuichisan, Microbudget movies, Safdie, Sean price williams, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The color wheel

SDCC 2013 Video Interview: Alfonso Cuarón on the Long-Takes in ‘Gravity’

[MTV & Film.com Exclusive] With “R.I.P.D.” finally screening tonight, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” is now our most-anticipated film of the year. In fact, it was was our most-anticipated film of last year as well, until it was unceremoniously bumped from the schedule due to the fact that it wasn’t going to be ready in time to make its original November 2012 release date. An incredibly ambitious film that invited the “Children of Men” director to perfect the intricate long-take strategy that he first developed with his brilliant 2006 dystopian saga, “Gravity” tells the story of a medical engineer (Sandra Bullock) whose first mission to space, a seemingly banal technical exercise, becomes a breathlessly intense fight for survival when she and her veteran co-worker (George Clooney) experience a malfunction and are separated from their ship with just a limited reserve of oxygen to keep them both alive (peep the trailer here). Reportedly opening with a nearly 17-minute shot and containing fewer cuts in its 88 minutes than most films do in their trailers, “Gravity” is a classic suspense yarn with a mind-boggling technical flourish.

Cuarón brought the film to Comic-Con today, and sat down with MTV’s Josh Horowitz to discuss the film’s remarkable shooting style, the particulars as to why it was delayed for almost a full year, and how it was inspired by an unlikely Steven Spielberg movie. Enjoy this revealing five-minute video interview, and then try your best to go into cryogenic sleep until “Gravity” opens on October 4.

Note: If you’re having trouble playing the video, click through to MTV’s embed here.

For more great exclusive coverage from Comic-Con 2013, check out MTV’s Livestream!

Categories: No Categories

Tags: Alfonso Cuaron, George clooney, Gravity, Sandra bullock, SDCC, SDCC 2013

The Out Take: A Passionate Defense of Jamie Babbit and Lesbian B-Movies

The Out Take is a bi-weekly column about queer representations in film. It runs on alternating Thursdays.

Jamie Babbit is a good filmmaker. This has always been established fact for me, since the first time I watched “But I’m a Cheerleader.” Yet apparently the critical establishment has a whole different set of opinions. Babbit’s Rotten Tomatoes page is splattered with green vegetables, an average of 31% for the three films she has directed. Her best, “Itty Bitty Titty Committee,” sits with a decidedly rotten 38%. I’d hope for better results for her newest, “Breaking the Girls” (opening July 26th), but I am not optimistic. The critics are just so consistently wrong about Babbit’s work, and it drives me crazy. And so, this week’s column is a passionate defense of her filmography, and a bit of a love letter to the Lesbian B Movie.

It isn’t worth spending a lot of time on the criticisms of her, so I’ll summarize. They boil down to three words: uninspired, adolescent, and lurid. There’s an attitude among critics that comes and goes regarding what LGBT films should be. Often that means serious dramas, usually with an emphasis on “positive representation.” Owen Gleiberman’s response to “But I’m a Cheerleader,” for example, is telling: “Any self-respecting lesbian should rear up in horror at [this movie].”

Now, Gleiberman is not a lesbian. In all fairness, neither am I. The two of us should probably stay out of deciding what self-respecting lesbians should enjoy. What I will say, however, is that self-respect is not something inherently at odds with Babbit’s movies. They are, to an extent, adolescent. The obvious response to this criticism is that they are all about teenagers, but there’s more to it than that. “But I’m a Cheerleader,” still the most famous of the four films, is a romp centered around a high school cheerleader (Natasha Lyonne) whose parents send her to an ex-gay rehabilitation center for teenagers. It is, like Babbit’s other work, made for this younger audience.

Many, if not most of Hollywood’s Grade A and Grade B product is made with teenagers in mind. They’re the most important demographic, which is why every blockbuster wants to be rated PG-13. But what about LGBT teens? There is, arguably as a direct result of discrimination by the MPAA, almost no gay content in films minors are allowed to see in the theater. Watching “It Gets Better” videos on YouTube isn’t going to cut it. The initial rating of “But I’m a Cheerleader” as NC-17 was absurd, as was its final grade of R, but that hardly prevents kids around the country from finding it online and on cable. LGBT youth need brash, obvious comedies that speak directly to them.

Equally important are the fantasies, the symbolic and sublimely ridiculous pleasures. Babbit’s best film is “Itty Bitty Titty Committee,” which chronicles the emotional and political awakenings of Anna (Melonie Diaz, “Fruitvale Station”), a comfortably out lesbian teenager who gets involved with a group of militant feminist activists in Los Angeles. There are the usual romantic entanglements, some of which do seem rote. Yet there’s an awful lot of wit in the activities of the C(i)A (which stands for Clits in Action), including a raid on a local park to erect makeshift statues of Emma Goldman and Angela Davis. There’s also a very honest introduction to the tensions within the radical community around the issue of same-sex marriage, especially for 2007 when things were still very up in the air for the state of California.

And, finally, there’s nothing wrong with a good B-movie. The problem with “The Quiet” was simply that it wasn’t good, which for our purposes is mitigated at least by the fact that it has no explicitly LGBT content. “Breaking the Girls,” on the other hand, is quite the improvement. It’s a hard-boiled crime thriller with an awful lot of racy writhing about, with none of the glacial flatness of Babbit’s earlier attempt at the genre. The clear inspiration is “Strangers on a Train,” with Agnes Bruckner (who just played Anna Nicole Smith for Lifetime) as the innocent and unwilling partner in crime, Sara. The malevolent lunatic part goes to Madeline Zima, whose tortured heiress bent on destruction is by far the most exciting part of the movie. The film’s actual plot is almost immaterial, and twists so many times that it doesn’t really merit description. Atmosphere and acting are at the heart of this bleak B noir.

By way of closing, it’s worth going back to the idea of positive representation. The villain of Babbit’s new film is also its most overtly lesbian character. If one were deeply concerned about what “self-respecting” viewers should care about, one could make the argument that “Breaking the Girls” positions its supposed heroine, Sara, as stuck between a determined murderess and the boy she has a crush on (Shawn Ashmore). Yet that would be far too simplistic an interpretation. LGBT villains are only a problem if they vilify LGBT people by extension. Alex’s hypersexual, gleefully vicious instability places her at the center of the film’s impact. Without Zima, it wouldn’t be fun to watch. Babbit celebrates the lesbian villain as an equal participant in genre movies, rather than shaming her.

Jamie Babbit makes great B-movies. And now, in the 21st century, the distinction between “A” and “B” movies no longer really makes any sense. Some of the best Bs of the past are now regarded as classics, while many prestige works look terrible in hindsight. “But I’m a Cheerleader” and “Itty Bitty Titty Committee” are exciting movies that, frankly, make the world a better place by giving LGBT teens (and adults) something to laugh about. “Breaking the Girls,” meanwhile, is an awful lot of kinda trashy fun. There’s absolutely nothing rotten about that.

“Breaking the Girls” opens in theaters and will be available on VOD on July 26th

Categories: Columns

Tags: Breaking the Girls, But I'm a Cheerleader, Daniel Walber, Jamie Babbit, Lesbian movies, LGBT, Mpaa, The Out Take

PEE MAK PHRAKANONG (2013)

Tanggal Rilis : 5 April 2013 (Indonesia)
Jenis Film : Comedy | Horror | Romance
Diperankan Oleh : Mario Maurer, Davika Hoorne, Nattapong Chartpong

Ringkasan Cerita PEE MAK PHRAKANONG (2013) :

Pee Mak Phrakanong mengangkat kisah mengenai hantu paling dikenal dari negeri gajah putih yakni Mae Nak. Namun kisahnya kali ini telah dipelintirkan (twist). Jika di film-film Mae Nak lainnya, ditampilkan dari sudut pandang sang hantu wanita Mae Nak, di film ini ditampilkan dari sudut pandang sang suami, Pee Mak.

Mak (Mario Maurer) pergi berperang, meninggalkan istrinya yang sedang hamil Nak (Davika Home) yang kemudian meninggal saat melahirkan anaknya. Saat Pee Mak kembali, ia tak mengetahui bahwa istri dan anaknya kini telah menjadi hantu dan ia tetap hidup bersama mereka selama bertahun-tahun.

Sumber: http://infofilmterlengkap.blogspot.com/2013/03/phee-mak-phra-khanong-film-horror.html

[IMDb rating : 7.8/10]
[Awards : - ]
[Production Co : GTH]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2776344]

[Quality : DVDRip]
[File Size : 450 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Resolution : 715x304]
[Source : DVDRip.Seignmole]
[Encoder : nItRo]

BillionUploads
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Megafiles.se
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Uptobox
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Zippyshare
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
180upload
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders

Download English Subtitle
Download Indonesian Subtitle

Bagi Pengunjung Baru klik di sini Cara Menggabungkan File Ekstensi .001 dan .002 UP DATE TERBARU DOWNLOAD FILEM

NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON (2013)

Tanggal Rilis : 7 March 2013 (Germany)
Jenis Film : Mystery | Romance | Thriller
Diperankan Oleh : Jeremy Irons, Mélanie Laurent, Jack Huston

Ringkasan Cerita NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON (2013) :

About an aging Swiss professor of classical languages who, after a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman, quits his job and travels to Lisbon in the hope of discovering the fate of a certain author, a doctor and poet who fought against Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

[IMDb rating : 6.6/10]
[Awards : - ]
[Production Co : Studio Hamburg Filmproduktion, C-Films AG, PalmStar Entertainment]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1654523]

[Quality : DVDRip]
[File Size : 425 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Resolution : 720x400]
[Source : DVDRip.XviD.AC3-PTpOWeR]
[Encoder : nItRo]

BillionUploads
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Megafiles.se
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Uppit
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Zippyshare
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
180upload
| Part1 | Part2 | Part3 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders

Download English Subtitle
Download Indonesian Subtitle

Bagi Pengunjung Baru klik di sini Cara Menggabungkan File Ekstensi .001 dan .002 UP DATE TERBARU DOWNLOAD FILEM

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Silent Hill: Revelation’ (2012)

The movie “Silent Hill” has been a thorn in my side ever since it was released — first because it wasn’t good, and then because people kept citing it as the one video-game-based movie that was good. WHICH IT WASN’T. It may have been the least not-good of the bunch, but to call it “good” is a high compliment, by which I mean a compliment you can only make if you’re high.

I am vindicated by the sequel, “Silent Hill: Revelation.” Everyone agrees that this one is terrible, and according to the Internet’s Law of Retroactive Criticism, that means the original is terrible, too, having been ruined by the sequel through an anomaly in the space-time continuum unfamiliar to scientists but known to fanboys as the George Lucas Principle. So I was right all along, and everyone can eat it.

“Silent Hill: Revelation” picks up the story of “Silent Hill” six years later, or five years and eleven months after we forgot every detail of it. The little girl who was missing in that film, Sharon, is now 18 and named Heather (Adelaide Clemens), and she does not remember anything about her past. One of the things she does not remember, for example, is that a cult from the town of Silent Hill is looking for her so they can sacrifice her or impregnate her or whatever, because she’s the Chosen One or the fulfillment of prophecy or something. Heather and her dad, Harry (Sean Bean), have moved around a lot, and Heather thinks it’s because he killed somebody in self-defense and is running from the law, but the real reason is the cult thing. Heather’s mom (Radha Mitchell) is still trapped in another dimension, but Harry can see her in a mirror sometimes, so that’s nice.

Oh! I forgot to tell you: there are other dimensions in these movies. You can tell you’re in the bad dimension because there’s, say, a guy with a triangle for a head who wants to kill you, or a guy with circular saw blades protruding from his skull who wants to kill you. The way that you pass from our dimension to the bad dimension is by the screenplay just deciding to put you there sometimes. That is also how you travel back.

So anyway, Heather keeps popping back and forth between dimensions. One minute her high school hallway looks normal; the next minute it’s a decrepit cavern with faceless monsters lunging at her, and then also in some ways not a normal high school hallway. (No drugs.) Heather thinks she’s going insane, losing the ability to distinguish between dreams and reality. A classmate named Vincent (Kit Harington) tells her that dreams ARE reality, just different realities from the one you’re used to. This is a super-helpful thing to say to someone who’s afraid she’s losing her mind.

Heather is also afraid she’s being followed by a mysterious man, though this fear turns out to be well founded. The man is a private investigator hired by Silent Hill’s most popular cult to find Heather and tell her the truth about her past. The cult is hoping Heather will come back to Silent Hill on her own once she knows everything, but just to sweeten the pot, they abduct her father and write “COME TO SILENT HILL” on the wall in his blood. The persuasive technique is effective.

Heather heads for Silent Hill, accompanied by Vincent, even though Heather just met him at school today and doesn’t like strangers, or even people in general. (The movie went pretty well out of its way to establish this.) As they travel, Heather combs through the Silent Hill-related notebooks her father left behind and learns the whole story, not to mention a great deal about her father’s excellent penmanship.

Here’s where it gets confusing. By “here” I mean “when you decided to watch this movie.” Years ago, the cult in Silent Hill burned a little girl named Alessa who they thought was a witch, but she didn’t die, she just got really angry and created the hell dimension with the monsters. THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD NOT BURN CHILDREN (or if you do, make sure you finish the job). But before Alessa turned completely into an evil demon, the last innocent part of her soul was transferred to a random newborn infant, who turned out to be Sharon/Heather, and they can’t destroy Alessa until she’s made whole again, which I guess means mushing her and Heather together. And they can’t just abduct Heather and drag her to Silent Hill — she has to go willingly, because the movie said so.

Then it turns out Vincent is a child of the cult who escaped from Silent Hill for the purpose of luring Heather back. But now that he’s met Heather and likes her, he feels bad. Totes sorry. Heather wanders though Silent Hill searching for the other half of a medallion she found in her dad’s stuff, encountering various monsters in the process in a way that is suspiciously similar to a video game. There is no rhyme or reason to when these monsters appear, or what tactics they use to harass Heather, which probably means the answer is “You’d know if you played teh video games!!!1!!” (This is the answer to a lot of questions lately.)

When Heather at last comes face to face with Alessa, she is able to overcome Alessa’s evilness with her own goodness. To be precise, she hugs Alessa very tight, and Alessa disintegrates. Hugging was her kryptonite! Lest you think the movie would end with such an anticlimax, however, Heather then has to face Vincent’s mother, the cult’s priestess, played by Trinity from “The Matrix” in an Edgar Winter wig. The way Heather defeats her is by standing aside and letting the Triangle Head monster destroy her. Heather’s main powers, then, are hugging and getting out of the way. Is that how it is in the video game, too? That doesn’t sound very exciting, but if it isn’t, then I guess the movie is a faithful adaptation.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Adelaide clemens, Eric d. snider, Eric's bad movies, John Snow, Kit harington, Radha Mitchell, Sean bean, Silent Hill, Silent hill: revelation

The 10 Most Beautiful Animated Films Ever Made

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Frankly, this is so true I’m inclined to not even consider it a cliché. This is why every Top Ten list is a little bit silly to begin with, and most of them aren’t even about beauty, per se. To sit down and write a list of the ten most aesthetically beautiful animated feature films of all time seems, well, impossible. Yet here at Film.com we do not believe in “impossible” (in fact, we don’t even believe in “The Impossible”), so I’m going to give this a shot anyway.

While it would be ridiculous to assert that a list like this is definitive, I have tried to make sure that it is at least representative. The greatest works of animated cinema are not all hand-drawn, nor are they all computer-generated. Animation is almost as old as the medium itself, starting (perhaps) with “Fantasmagorie” in 1908. Since then there have been a whole slew of techniques, more than a few of which I’ve made an effort to highlight here. Moreover, the international dimension of the art form shouldn’t be overlooked. Animation is more than Disney and the Hollywood studios, more than even Studio Ghibli. And with with the somewhat garish “Turbo” racing into theaters (read our rather positive review here), it’s important to remember that animation is a lot more than what most audiences are sold these days.

Finally, I’d like to stress just how fantastic animated films actually are. That, again, sounds silly. But animated features don’t show up on Sight and Sound lists, they rarely get nominated for Oscars outside of their own category, and many critics seem to assume that the art of animation is only for children. Theoretically, the absolute freedom of animators to do whatever they want with any frame should excite film nerds, rather than bore them. Consider this list a little bit of a wake-up call.

10. “Grave of the Fireflies” by Isao Tokahata (1988)

When discussing beauty in animation, we usually think of the pleasant stuff. Breathtakingly pristine landscapes, warm colors, every Disney princess’s perfectly painted hair. Yet there’s an artistic achievement in the design of tragedies as well, even the most horrific ones. Isao Tokahata’s “Grave of the Fireflies” is a stunning example, a touching portrait of two children caught in the extended bombing of Japan’s cities by the United States in the last months of World War Two. This association of fire bombs with fireflies taps into both the innocence of children in wartime and the grandiose destruction inflicted on so many Japanese cities (even before the last, nuclear assault). It has a beauty that brings tears.

9. “Waltz with Bashir” by Ari Folman (2008)

Ari Folman’s documentary about his own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War is even more gorgeously made, though in a very different way. Folman’s technique seems like rotoscoping, but is actually a unique combination of traditional and computer animation. The result is a virtual reality that filters the true-to-life horrors witnessed by its director/protagonist through the waves of the mind. Somehow the resulting images present beauty within catastrophe, portraying the vivid potential of memory without trivializing the massacre deep in Folman’s past.

8. “Coraline” by Henry Selick (2009)

Four of the films on this list were made within the last ten years, which I understand probably invalidates it to many of you. I want to stress that the most exciting time for animation wasn’t the Hollywood Golden Age of the 1930s-1950s, but rather may very well be happening right now. It isn’t just CGI, either. Laika arrived on the feature filmmaking scene in 2009 with “Coraline,” an exquisitely dark fairy tale in stop motion, adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novel. It haunts in the best way, and with the triumph of “ParaNorman” last year, Laika is well on its way.

7. “Fantastic Planet” by René Laloux (1973)

“Fantastic Planet” is deeply strange, in that wonderful 1970s science fiction sort of way. René Laloux’s film is a masterwork of cutout stop-motion, the kind that many of us associate most strongly with Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python antics. This film raises the bar, tapping into a weirdness that is cool but not cold, otherworldly but not too distant. It may not be the most intricate of allegories, but its images are exactly what I’d hope to find on any faraway planet.

6. “Paprika” by Satoshi Kon (2006)

Satoshi Kon’s layered and lunatic masterpiece makes “Inception” look dumb, or at the very least too dour. The manic procession that marches through the collective dream at the center of “Paprika” is probably more visually interesting than anything in Christopher Nolan’s filmography, but that’s a conversation for another time. The layers of consciousness in Kon’s extraordinary universe expand with gusto and a multitude of bold colors, richer than your wildest dreams.

5. “WALL-E” by Andrew Stanton (2008)

The opening scenes of “WALL-E” may very well be the culmination of all CGI animation, at least for now. So what if it takes place on and around an enormous heap of garbage? That’s a crucial part of its beauty. Its embrace of simplicity is its triumph, an intensely complex technical effort required to produce something so humble, but with great artistic ambition. This mastery of contradiction, a space epic about two robots who don’t speak, is Pixar’s magnum opus.

4. “Princess Mononoke” by Hayao Miyazaki (1997)

Now, picking a single Hayao Miyazaki film is not easy. “Spirited Away” is formidable, and has more than a few times been called the greatest animated feature ever made. Yet “Princess Mononoke” might just have the edge in purely stunning artwork. It’s a redefinition of the word lush, with the goal of making every prior depiction of a forest in cinema look like a parking lot. It comes pretty close. The Deer God in particular is a stroke of genius, but everything around it fits right in to this uncompromising insistence on total natural beauty. It also makes “Avatar” look pretty foolish, which we can all enjoy.

3. “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” by Lotte Reiniger (1922)

The third most beautiful animated feature of all time is also the earliest surviving. One is hard-pressed to find anything in this world more perfect than Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette puppetry. The color-tinted prints are so intricate, so masterfully constructed that it seems impossible this work could be so old, so rudimentary. It is, in a way, the first superhero movie, and does not slouch when it comes to the requisite visual bravado. If you have an opportunity to catch this on the big screen, with live accompaniment, pounce on it. It will be one of the defining cinematic experiences of your life.

2. “Fantasia” by Walt Disney (1940)

There are other breathtakingly beautiful Disney feature films (obviously). None of them, however, are about beauty in the way that “Fantasia” is. Walt Disney set out to bring the titanic works of classical music to the public accompanied by cartoons both clever and foreboding. The very idea is deeply in love with art itself. The Night on Bald Mountain sequence is a nightmare come to life, while the flowery Nutcracker sequence might be the best use of Tchaikovsky on screen. As for the Rite of Spring, it makes The Land Before Time look like cheap TV. Each of these sequences could stand on their own among the best cartoons ever made – together, they are unique.

1. “The Thief and the Cobbler” by Richard Williams (1964-1993)

This could probably be considered cheating. “The Thief and the Cobbler” is the great unfinished masterpiece of Richard Williams, the Oscar-winning animator behind “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” the 1971 “A Christmas Carol” and countless classic title sequences. He began working on his passion project in 1964. It was to be a chef d’oeuvre, the culmination of a whole career of experience. Yet the money wasn’t there, and production was on and off for years. In 1988 Warner Bros. decided to give him the backing he needed, but Williams went over budget. The film was eventually finished by producer Fred Calvert for a completion bond company, and the version that finally made it to theaters was less than stellar. For more, track down the new documentary on the subject, “Persistence of Vision.”

Now, what survived Calvert’s hack job is extraordinary. The mangled plot isn’t, and much of the changes ruin the film as a whole. Yet now we have another option. Artist Garrett Gilchrist has spent years working on the “Recobbled Cut,” restoring the original work print. He is now in the midst of Mark 4, and has put his works in progress on YouTube. The film’s opening zoom in to the Golden City remains breathtaking, an introduction to a setting with bombast in spades. Its inhabitants, meanwhile, lilt with an uncommon grace. Every frame is beautifully arranged, the whole film choreographed with effortless fluidity. It is the rarest of accomplishments, somehow both rigidly geometric and liberated from form, brilliant even in its unfinished state.

Categories: Features, Lists

Tags: Animated movies, Animation, Coraline, Disney, Dreamworks, Grave of the Fireflies, Henry selick, Paprika, Prince Achmed, Satoshi Kon, Turbo, Wall-e, Waltz With Bashir

Director’s Cut: Nicolas Winding Refn (‘Only God Forgives’)

While Nicolas Winding Refn was editing his first film, 1996's crime drama “Pusher,” his father Anders was cutting fellow Dane Lars Fon Trier’s “Breaking The Waves,” one possible prompt for their professed animosity: in public at least, the two tend to profanely insult each other. Though their films have little in common, in interviews they share a provocateur/prankster streak. Talking about his newest film “Only God Forgives,” Refn’s showily announced “I am a pornographer” about his draw towards super-violent imagery. When I showed up to interview him, Refn seemed possibly tired or simply uninterested in making similarly broad statements again.

Reportedly booed vociferously by the Cannes press corps and scathingly reviewed after its world premiere (read one Film.com critic’s pan of the film here), the film has Ryan Gosling wandering Bangkok in a homicidal fever dream, caught in a web of violence initiated by his prostitute-killing brother and fearsome mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). The second critical wave has contained more qualified and all-out raves responding to Refn’s red-saturated, uber-bloody hallucination of revenge and bad incestuous vibes. In a brief interview, he touched on the logistics of shooting in Thailand, the art of Muay Thai and his appreciation of “Saw” director James Wan.

Vadim Rizov: A lot of your characters seem to find violence funny. Do you think that when you push violence to an extreme it’s funny?

Nicolas Winding Refn: Not consciously. I certainly don’t find violence funny, even on-screen. I guess when I was younger I was more hardened, but now that I’ve gotten older and have children I’ve gotten much more conscious of the effect it has on a viewer. But I don’t consider violence in any way amusing. Of course the most extreme it becomes, the more your instinct in order to process it is to either react with shock or laughter. That’s the extreme case of a reaction. To me, it makes no difference how people react, one way or the other it’s equally satisfying.

VR: Thailand has a government censorship board that’s very restrictive about what their own filmmakers can shoot and show. To what extent were you aware of that when you started shooting in Thailand and did it affect your decisions of what to shoot?

NWR: No. There were certain things I knew you were not allowed to do, but those were elements I didn’t have. Like, you can’t in no way offend the king. Otherwise, besides that I didn’t feel there was anything that we were doing that had any censorship issues. The death of the girl that Julian’s brother commits at the beginning of the film, they were very worried that she be either 14 or 16, which is kind of absurd. So she has to be 16, not 14. And it was like, “OK, well, I can make that work.” It was something I’d already been told through the Film Board [Thailand Film Office], because you have to be approved by them to shoot there.

VR: Before you started shooting, did you have a lot of interest in Muay Thai or martial arts films in general?

NWR: Not really. Of course, like everyone else, I like my share of fight movies and so forth. I’m not an expert in any way on who’s who and what type of martial fight these people are experts at. If it’s well done, I certainly enjoy it. I became very fascinated by Muay Thai when I was in Thailand. I found it a very interesting fight because in a way it’s so primal and the endurance is amazing. It is probably designed as the hardest shield that Muay Thai fighters create. There is a westernized view of it, and there is a Muay Thai view of it, and I was very interested in the Muay Thai view of it.

What was interesting was that when they would show me fights from the rural areas, when there were no tourists and it was purely a Thai match, the length of the match was no more than a couple of minutes. It was all about that one impact that would settle the fight, and I found that very interesting. There was no showmanship in terms of the westernized arena of sports being masked, it was purely about how little, how fast, how efficient.

Were you editing the dailies on a daily basis at the beginning of your career, when you were shooting on film?

“Bronson” was shot on Super 16 and we were doing the edits no more than a day after. The digital revolution in terms of editing came in terms of digital editing facilities, and I never edited on film. I’ve always edited on digital. When I edited my first film, “Pusher,” Avid was really becoming the way of editing. The digital revolution had started already, so I grew up on Steenbecks — my father is an editor — but I myself have only done it on a computer. I only know that language.

VR: When shooting a film like this or “Valhalla Rising,” which is intended to disorient, do you try to disorient yourself?

NWR: No. What I do with Matt Newman who edits the films — he’s probably my consistent collaborator from beginning to end when I edit a film, we’ve done four movies together now. What we try in the editing room is to put the film together in a thousand different ways, to see what will reveal itself, and it’s not until we’ve exercised all options that we put the film into what it has to become.

My mother’s a photographer, and my father’s an editor. The image is something I was brought up with very early, and the positioning of images. That’s in a way what my first introduction probably was, and being dyslexic, and coming to America at the age of eight, not speaking a word of English and being an alien in a stranger’s land — images become your main source of communicating.

VR: When shooting in Hollywood in “Drive” or Bangkok in “Only God Forgives,” do you have a kind of mental image of where you’re shooting you’re trying to convey?

NWR: “Drive” is very much that fantasy world of Hollywood, that Hollywood is this dream factory that creates illusions. Bangkok at night becomes very magical and superstitious. You use those inspirations to make the film.

VR: Given your diverse soundtracks, do you spend a lot of time seeking out new music?

NWR: Not as much as I used to. A lot of it is people sending me a lot of experience opportunities. I’m not really a person that sits down and searches. I guess having two kids and a wife eliminates a lot of the time to have that possibility. It’s really a lot of the time a combination of discovering things in odd ways. I am an avid music listener at all times, I’ve probably done every single phase of musical enjoyment from every genre. There was a music teacher in high school who said to me that the pleasure in music is finding beauty in all types of music.

VR: When shooting ads, do you try things you can use in your own work or just stick to client needs?

NWR: I really enjoy advertising. I’ve been very lucky to work with some great projects. I find it a lot of fun. There is, of course, a specific need from the client in terms of what they’re looking for, but I’ve met with a lot of creative people through that process. It’s not something I do very often, I’ve only done it a couple of times. I very much like working in fashion, I find that very inspiring.

VR: When your camera edges towards a darkened doorway and you’re verging on horror movie jump scare territory, do you enjoy toying with audience expectations?

NWR: What’s great about the language of heightened reality and stretching the reality of horror films is that it’s purely based on visual aesthetics. That’s a great medium to work within in terms of filming, it’s all about emotional impact and you can bend and twist logic as much as you want. It goes deeper than just authenticity. It would be fun someday to do what I would call a teenage horror film. I like those kind of films, I find them very radiant.

VR: Do you mean an ’80s teen horror film or a ’90s teen horror film? Those can be very different.

NWR: I like all kinds of those kinds of films. Of course, the ’80s were more my age of youth, when I was a teenager, but I’ve certainly seen great films of these types ever since that I find very inspiring. I really like that director who made the original “Saw,” James Wan, I think he’s a terrific filmmaker. I’ve seen a couple of his other films and I really enjoyed them.

“Only God Forgives” arrives in theaters and on VOD on Friday, July 19.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Director's cut, Interview, James Wan, Nicolas Winding Refn, Only God Forgives, Ryan gosling, Vadim Rizov

GHOST IN THE SHELL ARISE – BORDER 1: GHOST PAIN (2013)

Tanggal Rilis : 22 June 2013 (Japan)
Jenis Film : Animation | Action | Sci-Fi
Diperankan Oleh : Maaya Sakamoto

Ringkasan Cerita GHOST IN THE SHELL ARISE – BORDER 1: GHOST PAIN (2013) :

GHOST IN THE SHELL ARISE ditulis oleh novelis fiksi sains Jepang dan penulis Tow Ubukata (dari Mardock Scramble fame), dan soundtrack diisi oleh musisi Jepang Cornelius (nama asli: Keigo Oyamada) yang memberi kontribusi lagu Katayanagi Twins Battle Song yang ditampilkan dalam soundtrack untuk film Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

[IMDb rating : 7.7/10]
[Awards : - ]
[Production Co : Bandai Visual Company, Kodansha, Production I.G.]
[IMDb link : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2636124]

[Quality : WEBRip]
[File Size : 250 MB]
[Format : Matroska >> mkv]
[Resolution : 720x384]
[Source : Web.DL.x264.AC-3-FooKaS]
[Encoder : nItRo]

BillionUploads
| Part1 | Part2 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Megafiles.se
| Part1 | Part2 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Uppit
| Part1 | Part2 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
Zippyshare
| Part1 | Part2 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders
======================================
180upload
| Part1 | Part2 |
Join with HJ-Split, Download HJ-Split
Credit to original uploaders

Download English Subtitle
Download Indonesian Subtitle (Not available yet)

Bagi Pengunjung Baru klik di sini Cara Menggabungkan File Ekstensi .001 dan .002 UP DATE TERBARU DOWNLOAD FILEM

10 Haunted Movie Sets

Like many haunted house movies before it, this weekend’s “The Conjuring” is based on a true story (read our review of the film here). In James Wan’s latest jump scare extravaganza, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play Ed and Lorraine Warren, two paranormal investigators (the latter a psychic) who have made a living (or a killing?) in uncovering the ghosts who live in old, creaky houses. Their case files have been the sources for various horror films, including “The Amityville Horror” and “The Haunting in Connecticut.”

Hollywood loves a good ghost story, especially when they can find a glimmer of truth among the “boos.” The importance of tangibility becomes so important, they the movies themselves have created myths of their own. Are they fabricated by the marketing team or could souls trapped in the in-between be trying to contact us using mass-consumed entertainment? You play the Warrens as we rundown the notably haunted movie sets:

“The Exorcist”

The movie that dared to cast Satan in a leading role is also the movie best known for feeling the wrath of supernatural forces. During the shooting of William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece, nine people died, a fire (cause still unknown) destroyed a set causing a 6-week delay, and Linda Blair suffered serious injuries after being tossed around for a bed shaking scene. Other stories from set add the mystique of the William Peter Blatty adaptation, even while having obvious explanations; One day the crew arrived the set to see everything covered in a layer of snow — the result of high air conditioning temperatures.

But circumstances start looking more like the work of unseen Hell gods when one realizes that Friedkin ran into devil-worshipers while shooting in Iraq. “They had heard that this crazy American was taking raw meat to the statue of the demon Pazuzu,” he explained in an interview. “And when I told them it was for a movie, and we had hoped to attract wild dogs and vultures, they were disappointed.”

“The Omen” (2006)

Richard Donner’s original Antichrist tale had its fair share of unexplainable coincidences, from lightning striking Gregory Peck’s plane on his way to the shoot, to the bizarre death of set designer John Richardson’s girlfriend. A car crash left the woman sliced in two, just like in the film.

But when it comes to on-set disturbances, it’s the remake that’s the most noticeable victim. After a pivotal day of shooting, “The Omen” production team was met with a camera error that read “Error 666.” Later, the lab where their film was processed would lose 13,500 feet of footage. Was it the work of the devil? Clearly someone, or something, didn’t want Donner’s original getting a modern makeover.

“The Ring”

Gore Verbinski’s J-Horror remake centers on a videotape that will kill its viewer seven days after he or she gazes upon its grainy, ghastly content. In a meta-twist, “The Ring” is also said to contain actual footage of ghosts. We can’t promise how long you will last after watching the above sequence.

“Introducing Dorothy Dandridge”

Some haunted sets only make themselves known after the stars have hauled off possessed goods. For her 1999 biopic of Dorothy Dandridge, Halle Berry wore an actual gown owned by the first African-American Oscar winner. It was only after the film wrapped and Berry brought the dress home that the paranormal activity began to brew. The actress told Ebony Magazine in July 1999 that one night, she was awoken by the sound of boiling water. When she went to check out the noise, she saw a doll dress floating in front of her Dandridge. She knew it was a sign.

On a tangentially-related note, there are people in the world who believe that Halle Berry isn’t haunted by the ghost of Dorothy Dandridge, but that the actress is actually the reincarnated spirit of her biopic character. “Cloud Atlas” — a very realistic film — is cited as evidence of Berry’s instinctual connection to reincarnation.

“Ghost”

There haven’t been stories that Jerry Zucker’s foray into romantic drama/sensual clay molding was plagued by actual spirits, though it was inherently a haunted production having shot on Stage 19 of Paramount Studios. The production space, that also housed “Citizen Kane” and “Happy Days,” is said to be one of the most vibrantly haunted places in Hollywood, second only to Phil Spector’s mansion.

Crew members of various movies and TV shows shot on the stage have reported hearing the sounds of running in the rafters and childlike laughter. Many believe this to be the ghost of “Poltergeist’s” O’Rourke, who appeared on several episodes of “Happy Days.” (It should be noted that the set of “Poltergiest” is often referred to has cursed in its own right. While there weren’t reports of supernatural occurrences on set, the movie saw four cast members die within six years of its release.)

“The Innkeepers”

While shooting his horror film “The House of the Devil,” Ti West and his crew experienced a parallel ghost story taking place in the hotel that housed them. The staff of the Yankee Pedlar Inn in Connecticut are convinced their lodge is haunted and, while skeptical, West couldn’t help but acknowledge the slamming doors, flickering lights, and did-I-see-what-I-think-I-just saw silhouettes that plagued his crew. The atmosphere inspired West to come back for more and shoot “The Innkeepers” in and around the Yankee Pedlar. As he puts it, “Sara Paxton would wake up in the middle of the night thinking someone was in the room with her.”

“Journey 2: The Mysterious Island”

Turns out, being abducted by Alien wasn’t the most paranormal moment in Vanessa Hudgen’s career. That title goes to the sequel to “Journey to the Center Earth,” which reportedly played host to a ghost that followed Hudgens around her hotel. She would apparently hear creaking noises in her rented home’s hallway each night. Searching for a source proved fruitless; Hudgens eventually chalked it up to beings from another plane of existence. “I look down and I hear it to the left, so I step over to the left, look up, look down, step over to the right, look up, look down… It kept moving around.” Later speculation revealed that it was likely the ghost of former “Journey” star Brendan Fraser’s career.

“Three Men and a Baby”

Nothing kills the mood of a light-hearted family comedy like the appearance of a lost soul. In the pre-Internet, grainy VHS days of “Three Men and a Baby’s” home video release, rumors swirled that a scene featuring Ted Danson’s Jack Holden mulling about house revealed a childlike figure sparked a paranormal investigation. Claims were and continue to be made that a nine-year-old boy committed suicide with a shotgun in the house where the Leonard Nimoy-depicted was filmed. Snopes has since debunked the otherworldly cameo, claiming the figure to be a cardboard standee of Ted Danson in a tuxedo (equally weird…) and that there wasn’t a house — all of the “Three Men and a Baby” interiors were shot on sound stages. Sure, likely story. Watch the video below and see if you buy it:

“Behind the Candelabra”

An unnamed source from the set of Steven Soderberhg’s Liberace biopic told the National Enquirer that while filming, Matt Damon and Michael Douglas would often feel the caress of an invisible force on their shoulder. “They swear they’ve felt cold damp air swish by, reeking of a potent men’s cologne,” the source said.

“The Heat”

Paul Feig makes it easy for us. Well aware that Boston is as haunted a city as they come, the director was happy able to record the below video, pointing out all the ghosts in the dinner scene from his most recent comedy.

Categories: Features

Tags: Haunted Movie Sets, Matt Patches, The Conjuring, The Exorcist, The Heat, The innkeepers, The Ring