Well, our spy JUNIOR MINTZ is someone to listen to for sure. How do I know... well, because I know for a FACT that if I were to reveal the identity of this tasty morsel of a spy, many of you would send high praise in his direction. How do I know? Cause lots of you have in the past. So trust me when I say, this is someone who's opinion about things that are cool... well... he knows. So sit up... take notice. It's short, it's to the point, and it's spoiler free.
Junior Mintz here checking in from the Sundance Film Festival. So far it's been the same familiar mix of predictable indy flicks with the same predictable indy characters -- dotty southern belles, wounded-eyed drifters, nihilistic punks and Winona-clone nymphettes. As of this afternoon the picture that put the biggest bone in my pants was Hiroyuki Nakano's SAMURAI FICTION, a deft and funny reinvention of the classic samurai picture.
Though the great Mifune is sadly, no more, we have a worthy successor in Tomoyasu Hotei. As Kazamatsuri, a trusted samurai gone terribly wrong, Hotei admirably assumes the role of modern cinema's king sword-wielding badass. Look for this guy to be in demand as a major movie villain a year or two down the road. I was set to name SF as my favorite of the festival but all that changed earlier tonight.
I've just seen THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
Sweet Jumpin' Jeezus! There aren't words enough for me to adequately describe the levels of emotional terror I went through in this stunning horror masterpiece. Suffice it to say I was silent and shaking when I stumbled out of the Egyptian theatre's midnight show, a condition shared by virtually everyone else in the audience. Take every good, eerie urban legend you've ever heard, mix it with your long-forgotten childhood fears of the dark, the woods and the unknown and imagine it shot through a quaking hand-held camera.
That won't begin to convey the feeling of building terror writers/directors/editors/geniuses Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick have woven into this marvelous, unsettling picture, but it's a start. I'm not going to post spoilers or go into details; that would be unfair to to all the horror fans out there who like going into a movie like this cold. I will say there are images in the film that will haunt you and leave it at that. The lights are staying on tonight and probably tomorrow night, too.
J.M.
