ACTIONFEST 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
What once were vices now are habits. Spreading like a brain-sucking virus, the gonzo contagion known as
le cinema fantastique has rowdied on down into a peculiar Southern variation called
ActionFest. Co-founded last year by director-producer-stunt man
Aaron Norris (brother of
Chuck), Magnolia Pictures co-founder Bill Banowsky and Magnolia/Magnet Releasing senior vice president Tom Quinn, the festival launched in Asheville, NC at Banowsky's Carolina Cinemas?a multiplex with a drafthouse heart (and myriad local craft beer taps) and a geeky video store clerk's sensibilities.
Other film fests honor great auteurs. ActionFest champions the pyrotechnics coordinators, the fight choreographers, and other unsung soldiers who make the movies go boom. This year's
guest of honor was Buddy Joe Hooker, stuntman supreme, who?s worked on movies as different as
Harold and Maude and
Hooper, in which
Burt Reynolds plays a stuntman whose name is, in part, an homage to the rugged daredevil. "The first time you do it, you don't know how bad it hurts," Hooker told a full house of fans at an afternoon Q&A. "By take two, you do."
There's something to admire in an event that aims to return Southern moviegoing to its drive-in roots. The roster of films ranged from titles that have enjoyed wide festival exposure, including Takashi Miike's masterful
13 Assassins and Evan Glodell's flamethrower-scorched romance
Bellflower, to a notable revival of
Battle Royale, and martial-arts docs
Films of Fury and
Fightville. Programmed by Colin Geddes, who runs the Midnight Madness series at the behemoth Toronto Film Festival, the lineup scored points for ferreting out a batch of overlooked foreign-market titles for US premieres.
Yet, as these kinds of things go, ActionFest is still trying to find its footing in that niche-within-the-niche of festivals devoted to genre moviemaking, which include Austin's
Fantastic Fest and Montreal's
Fantasia?firmly established cultural phenomena that are buzzing social occasions in those cities and irresistible magnets for every kind of cult-film freak. Hanging out at the Carolina Cinemas about 15 minutes south of the region's most charming downtown, it was difficult to have any sense that Asheville (at large) really gave a hoot about claiming ActionFest as its own. But maybe this left-leaning city of free spirits was beginning to cotton to monster trucks and chainsaw assassins. Attendance was up from the inaugural program, a sign that the event was finding its audience (not surprisingly: indie hipster kids, of which bohemian Asheville has a supply as boundless as its marijuana, craft-beer, and vegan biscuit gravy resources). And the movies kicked ass.
The single biggest butt-stomper was
Bangkok Knockout. A Thai mixed martial arts fight-o-rama, the production isn't as gloriously brain-damaged as, say, the weep-and-whomp
Power Kids, but its blend of sincere bad acting, comic-book heroism and non-stop pugilism makes it perfect midnight fodder. I could outline the plot, except there isn't one. OK, well, there is this: A group of young fighters is tricked into competing in a series of deadly combats staged in a jerry-rigged warehouse for the amusement of an international cabal of high-stakes gamblers. For two hours, against all imaginable odds, they fight their way to freedom.
At the opposite reach of the budget and sophistication scale,
The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch posits a hero who seems to be fighting his way
from freedom. German hunk Tomer Sisley is a free spirit with a thing for far-flung locales, mystical tattoos, kung-fu fighting, and bedding exotic strange women who push him into harm's way, but he's also the adoptive only son of self-made Serbian billionaire whose sudden death propels him into a swirl of international intrigue. J�r�me Salle's 2008 adaptation of the popular Belgian comic book plays out like a
Jason Bourne escapade cross-wired with
Wall Street and 1980s Duran Duran videos, shot through with explicating flashbacks and punctuated by a feverish chase scene about every 11.5 minutes. As long as Sisley's tracing a fingertip along the curve of a sensuous spine or diving off of a cliff, the movie's better than most pre-
Daniel Craig 007 treatments?yet at the same time, it's utterly frivolous.
Let that never be said for opening night's
Ironclad. The mere thought of
Paul Giamatti as King John, waging war against the Knights Templar and a host of rebel barons at Rochester Castle in 1215, had me chuckling. The scenery chewing! The grandiose period dialogue! The brutal savage swordplay! The buxom, and ever-fair, maidens! This had
Spamalot written all over it. By the time Rochester Castle is a smoking ruin and nearly everyone's limbs have been hacked off, I was weeping.
Ironclad is pretty goddamn magnificent. It helps, of course, to have
Brian Cox,
Charles Dance,
Derek Jacobi and the painfully stoic
James Purefoy hoisting pots of boiling tar over the castle walls to deter the King's troops while delivering lines with consummate English stagecraft. The CGI-assisted gore also patches over some budget constraints. This is the kind of movie where visceral verisimilitude is highlighted by the occasional fake-blood-drenched camera lens. Unfortunately,
Jonathan English's film won't likely be distributed in the United States due to rights issues, but you can
order it from Amazon UK.
The Australian high school kids who band together to save the kangaroos from the invading Yellow Peril in
Tomorrow, When the War Began are even more outnumbered. What begins as
The Breakfast Club meets
Walkabout becomes a low-fat Ozzie answer to
Red Dawn when the horny teens return from a weekend idyll to find their peaceful village is a ghost town. With some brave surveillance, they discover that their parents have been rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps and the streets have been occupied by some sort of pan-Asian coalition army. Despite their differences?one girl is a devout Christian, and, OMG y?all, one of the guys is a Greek
and a greaser!?the kids form a do-or-die resistance movement, like some Clearasil mujahideen. The cheesy tone of the dialogue betrays the film's source in bestselling young adult fiction, but if you're a sucker for insane chase scenes, like the one between a garbage truck and a pair of death-dealing, bazooka-armed dune buggies, it's easy to forgive. Better yet, the story telegraphs all the major character transformations. That may be a flaw in someone's book, but here it?s cause for delicious anticipation. It's not hard to guess which adolescent is most likely to go
Rambo at the climax. Sometimes a bullet is better than a prayer.
Of all the discoveries at ActionFest, the one deserving of the most unconditional love is the rock-solid UK thriller
A Lonely Place to Die. The festival jury agreed, awarding it prizes for best film and director (Julian Gilbey). A tad too spoiler-ific for detailed summary, the drama quickly kicks into gear when a group of mountain climbers discover a young girl buried, but still alive, in a forest in a remote stretch of the Scottish Highlands. They rescue the child, who speaks only Serbian, but this may have been a horrible idea. Someone hid her there for a reason. And, as the rugged location supplies a backdrop for white-knuckled peril, we slowly discover who, what and why. Plus, a whole lot of
Melissa George in snug thermal rock-climbing garb. Plus, the seedily awesome Czech actor
Karel Roden, also seen in
Largo Winch, as a gun-for-hire. Plus, a superbly executed finale involving a masked Pagan parade. Gilbey does a terrific job keeping audience expectations slightly off track, doing this when you anticipate that, and using his locations to generate maximum suspense.
Hopefully, ActionFest can pick up even more momentum next year. It's an original concept that promises unadulterated fun, a schedule packed with surprises, and parking-lot motorcycle jumping. Not even Cannes can top that.
Posted by ahillis at April 18, 2011 12:04 PM
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