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After.life (2009)
9 November 2009 1:46 PM, PST
| Pretty/Scary
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Directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Written by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, Paul Vosloo & Jakub Korolczuk
Featuring Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, Justin Long
Review by Hal MacDermot
Do the dead live, or are the living dead? What does it mean to be dead anyway? Great questions, but I’m not sure if Agnieszka Wojtowicz really manages to answer them. After.life is her first feature, a psychological thriller, and despite some top notch talent in the persons of Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci and Justin Long, the film never lives up to potential. Liam Neeson’s performance as scary funeral-director-guy is the saving grace...
Anna (Christina Ricci) wakes up after a car accident and finds herself being prepared for burial in Eliot Deacon’s (Liam Neeson) funeral home. It seems that Eliot has a gift for conversing with the dead, and that’s why he can talk with her. He tells us that his role is
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- Superheidi
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AFI La 09: Review of After.Life
8 November 2009 3:22 PM, PST
| QuietEarth.us
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Year: 2009
Directors: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo
Writers: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo & Paul Vosloo & Jakub Korolczuk
IMDb: link
Trailer: link
Review by: Hal MacDermot
Rating: 5 out of 10
Do the dead live, or are the living dead? What does it mean to be dead anyway? Great questions, but I’m not sure if Agnieszka Wojtowicz really manages to answer them. After.life is her first feature, a psychological thriller, and despite some top notch talent in the persons of Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci and Jason Long, the film never lives up to potential. Liam Neeson’s performance as scary funeral director guy is the saving grace.
Anna (Christina Ricci) wakes up after a car accident and finds herself being prepared for burial in Eliot Deacon’s (Liam Neeson) funeral home. It seems that Eliot has a gift for conversing with the dead, and that’s why he can talk with her. He tells us that his role
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[DVD Review] Deadgirl: The Unrated Director's Cut
14 September 2009 5:00 AM, PDT
| JustPressPlay.net
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Drawing from a broad range of influences the likes of Boxing Helena, director Atom Egoyan, and the collective works of David Cronenberg, this dirty micro-budgeted little nasty comes front-loaded with a provocative squirm-inducing premise that will no doubt drive strong ancillary business. But randy adolescents open for a thinly veiled skin flick will be largely disappointed. Similarly, those sick to the back teeth of torture porn would do well not to dismiss this as just another bandwagoner, as co-directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel have far more on their minds here than simply mining a gimmick for the purposes of titillation.
Penned by bit-part-actor-turned-screenwriter Trent Haaga, a man with a long and undistinguished career acting in the realm of Dtv horror, Deadgirl sketches out an eerily plausible portrait of horny adolescent maledom taken to its grim but logical conclusion. Skipping out on class for the afternoon, high school misfit Rickie
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- Neil Pedley
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Boxing Billy Bob
20 August 2009 9:22 PM, PDT
| cinemablend.com
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Boxing Billy Bob sounds like a sequel to Boxing Helena with an all male cast. I.d give anything for that to end up being the title of Billy Bob Thornton.s next movie, which according to THR will be a boxing movie based on a novel from the author of Million Dollar Baby. The book is called Pound for Pound, so odds are that will be the title, but I.m going to keep right on rooting for Boxing Billy Bob.
The book.s author, F.X. Toole died before completing it, and was then released posthumously even though somewhat unfinished. It.s about a widowed boxer and contender named Dan Cooley, dealing with depression as his only remaining relative, his grandson, is killed in a car accident. In parallel the book tells the story of an up and coming Latino fighter whose life intersects with Cooley.s in
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Surveillance Blu-ray Review
20 August 2009 10:13 AM, PDT
| TheHDRoom
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Jennifer Lynch fell off the cinematic map after receiving a critical trouncing (well deserved in my opinion) for her first film, Boxing Helena (1993), which many suggested was only made due to her famous filmmaker father, David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Lost Highway). After an absence of fifteen years, she returns with an arguably improved follow-up in the form of a pulp inspired mystery/thriller carrying deep horror undertones. Surveillance (2008) flew under popular audience radar with a limited cinematic release (though it did make the rounds at many festivals with Lynch being the first woman to win best director at the New York City Horror Film festival) while also being available through subscriber service, HDNet. It now arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
FBI agents Elizabeth Anderson and Sam Holloway (played by David Lynch alumni Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman respectively) are tasked with untangling conflicting accounts of a serial killer
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Party Favors: Simon Hunter & The Mutant Chronicles
20 August 2009 1:30 AM, PDT
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London - The Mutant Chronicles unleashes cannibalistic humanoids into a steam punk World War I world. The movie features Thomas Jane (Hung), Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Devon Aoki (Sin City), Sean Pertwee (Doomsday) and John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich) as the only defense against these ungodly creatures in the CGI enhanced environment. Can Aoki cut them all down with her cool sword?
Director Simon Hunter took nearly two years to adapt the role playing game into a cinematic universe. You can get great sense of what he undertook for his first major motion picture on the Two-disc Collector’s Edition DVD and the Blu-ray recently released by Magnolia Home Entertainment. I had a chance to swap questions via email with Hunter. Here’s the Q&A action:
Joe Corey: Have you played the game?
Simon Hunter: Yes I have played the game and enjoyed it very much - the
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- UncaScroogeMcD
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Bill Pullman: Under Surveillance
18 August 2009 5:33 PM, PDT
| Fangoria
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Bill Pullman may not be the first person who comes to mind when you think “genre veteran.” But the actor who is perhaps best known for such populist entertainments as Independence Day and While You Were Sleeping has taken a number of cinematic trips to the dark side, most notably under the guidance of the Lynch family. Having starred in David’s 1997 mind-teaser Lost Highway, he now can be seen as the lead in daughter Jennifer’s Surveillance, out this week on DVD and Blu-ray from Magnolia Home Entertainment’s Magnet Pictures banner.
Pullman stars in the film with Julia Ormond as FBI agents Hallaway and Anderson, who arrive at a rural police station to investigate a grisly roadside massacre. A trio of badly shaken witnesses survived the bloody incident, and the particulars of what happened gradually come together through their dramatized recollections as they are separately interviewed. One, a
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- no-reply@fangoria.com (Michael Gingold)
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Surveillance (review)
18 August 2009 12:16 PM, PDT
| www.flickfilosopher.com
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Jennifer Lynch is, like her famouser filmmaker dad David, totally demented. In a good way. Her second feature -- a long time coming after 1993’s twisted Boxing Helena -- is slow-boil sinister, delivering the kind of simmering menace that few films can bother to take the time for these days, it seems. FBI agents Bill Pullman (Bottle Shock) and Julia Ormond (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) arrive in middle-of-nowhere Middle America to investigate a serial-killing spree, with three groups of witnesses to question: a couple of sociopathic cops (a terrifying and unrecognizable French Stewart, and Kent Harper, who cowrote the script with Lynch); a family on vacation, including a little girl (Ryan Simpkins) with a keenly observant eye; and a pair of romantic junkies (Pell James [Zodiac] and Mac Miller). Edging right up to a place where discomfort becomes denial -- as in, “I don’t want to be watching
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- MaryAnn Johanson
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Jennifer Lynch--The Hollywood Interview
11 July 2009 8:21 PM, PDT
| The Hollywood Interview
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Filmmaker Jennifer Lynch
Jennifer Lynch Turns Her Eye On Surveillance
By
Alex Simon
Few filmmakers have survived the professional excoriation that writer/director Jennifer Lynch had to face with her film debut Boxing Helena, in 1993. In spite of being nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the film was universally massacred by critics and tanked at the box office (it has since garnered an impressive cult following, with more than a few of its naysayers penning re-evaluations of the film and its merits). Having penned the script of Boxing Helena at the age of 19, and seeming to be washed up in show business by 25, Lynch spent the next decade and a half surviving a near-fatal car accident which left her with severe spinal damage, adjusting to life as a single parent with a young daughter, and getting sober after years of alcohol and drug abuse. F. Scott Fitzgerald said
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- The Hollywood Interview.com
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Film: Review: Surveillance
2 July 2009 12:00 PM, PDT
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David Lynch has spawned a vast army of imitators, acolytes, and wannabes, but only one can claim a genetic pedigree. On the basis of 1993’s famously botched Boxing Helena and its extremely tardy follow-up Surveillance, Jennifer Lynch feels no need to establish her own voice or emerge from her famous father’s outsized shadow. The younger Lynch’s aesthetic is borrowed entirely from dear old dad, an American-gothic pop surrealism rife with black humor, kink, and cheap transgression.
Lost Highway’s Bill Pullman stars as a shadowy FBI agent who arrives alongside partner Julia Ormond at a small town
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Q&A - Bill Pullman Is Under Surveillance
1 July 2009 8:00 AM, PDT
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It's a rare movie that lets Bill Pullman be something other than the nice guy. Leave it to Jennifer Lynch to find it. It's taken Lynch over a decade to get back in the director's chair since the controversial Boxing Helena -- spinal surgeries and single motherhood being the causes of the delay -- but with Surveillance, she's created a twisted movie that will make you look twice, at
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Director Jennifer Lynch: Grilled
29 June 2009 5:05 PM, PDT
| The Wrap
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On her 16-year post-"Boxing Helena" absence, serial killers and getting help from dad David.
By Amy Kaufman
In 1993, Jennifer Lynch debuted her first feature film -- "Boxing Helena," about a surgeon who amputates a woman's healthy arms and legs. Despite being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the movie is most remembered for poor reviews (Lynch received the title of "Worst Director" from the Golden Raspberry Awards) and the legal battle that occurred after Madonna and Kim Basinger pulled out of the title role.
Now, 16 years later, the daughter of David Lynch is back with "Surveillance," which premiered o
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- Lew Harris
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Julia Ormond: The Hollywood Interview
28 June 2009 5:54 PM, PDT
| The Hollywood Interview
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Actress Julia Ormond
Julia Ormond Is “In Her Animal”
By
Alex Simon
Julia Ormond made an auspicious debut as an actress in the landmark 1989 British miniseries Traffik, on which the Oscar-wining Steven Soderbergh film was later based, playing the drug-addicted daughter of a member of Parliament. By 1994, Ormond was being touted as the next Audrey Hepburn, with her old school glamour and classically-trained acting chops, earned at London’s prestigious Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts. High-profile turns in big studio pictures like Legends of the Fall and First Knight suddenly propelled the young, working actress into superstar status, with all the baggage that accompanies that much sought-after, and ultimately regrettable moniker.
With her turn in Sydney Pollack’s ill-fated remake of Billy Wilder’s classic Sabrina, in 1995, it all seemed to turn 180 degrees for Ormond, who suddenly found herself excoriated by the press that had built her up the year before.
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- The Hollywood Interview.com
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'Surveillance': Here Be Monsters, By Kurt Loder
26 June 2009 8:57 AM, PDT
| MTV Movie News
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Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond in a wild murder derby.
Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond in "Surveillance"
Photo: Magnolia Pictures
"Surveillance" started out as a script about witches. Director Jennifer Lynch took a whack at it and made a movie about devils — the human kind. The picture is twisted and disturbing and funny, too. Lynch has pushed the material to the wall — she has a gift for violence and perversity, and she never pulls back.
A trail of brutal serial murders has wound its way across the country and now arrived in a remote, unnamed desert community. The movie begins with a recent atrocity, a man and woman slaughtered at their home. Then there's another bloodbath, out on a lonely highway, which leaves several people dead. We don't see this massacre — yet. The story really gets underway in its aftermath.
Three survivors have been brought to the local police headquarters:
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Surveillance
26 June 2009 8:00 AM, PDT
| Pastemagazine.com
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Release Date: June 26 (limited)
Director: Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Writers: Kent Harper and Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Cinematographer: Peter Wunstorf
Starring: Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Pell James
Studio/Run Time: Magnolia, 97 mins.
A pulpy, conventional thriller
By the time Surveillance comes to its unhinged, ludicrous finale, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s just happened. Directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (who, it’s obligatory to note, is the daughter of David), the film’s setup is pure whodunit convention: Witnesses to several nasty murders recount what happened through flashbacks at a police station. More difficult to pin down are Lynch’s curious instincts as a filmmaker. Her first feature, Boxing Helena (1993), was so disastrous she hasn’t made another movie until now, but she returns with a new off-kilter playfulness. Comfortable behind the camera, Lynch riffs on noir influences with an inquisitive visual style that often drifts from the plot at hand.
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Surveillance (Film Review)
25 June 2009 2:29 PM, PDT
| Fangoria
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Calling up comparisons with her celebrated father David may be too easy a jumping-off point in addressing Jennifer Lynch’s new film Surveillance, but it’s an unavoidable one—especially given that David is credited as an executive producer. But the younger Lynch comes into her own as a filmmaker with this movie (currently available via video-on-demand and beginning limited theatrical play from Magnolia Pictures this week), which should also dispel any lingering memories of the hostile reception that greeted her debut feature Boxing Helena over 15 years ago.
Superficially, Surveillance’s setup resembles that of Twin Peaks, with the beginning of an FBI murder investigation in a rural area teeming with odd folks. But as opposed to that eponymous lush Pacific Northwest town, the movie is set in a barren part of the Midwest (actually lensed in Saskatchewan, Canada), and whereas most of the eccentrics in David’s seminal series were viewed sympathetically,
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- no-reply@fangoria.com (Michael Gingold)
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Miles of Bad Road: Jennifer Lynch’s “Surveillance”
25 June 2009 1:24 PM, PDT
| IndieWIRE
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In one of the most spectacular flameouts of recent American film, Jennifer Lynch went from hot-shit prodigy to laughingstock with one wacko, lazily maligned movie: 1993’s Razzie-approved “Boxing Helena.” It’s taken David’s daughter 16 years to revive her career, but judging from her follow-up, “Surveillance,” time has stood still. Closely following a mid-Nineties playbook of third-hand genre affectations, grab-bag Americana, serial killer chic, deserted highways at magic hour, cameos by marginal …
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Miles of Bad Road: Jennifer Lynch’s “Surveillance”
25 June 2009 1:24 PM, PDT
| IndieWIRE
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In one of the most spectacular flameouts of recent American film, Jennifer Lynch went from hot-shit prodigy to laughingstock with one wacko, lazily maligned movie: 1993’s Razzie-approved “Boxing Helena.” It’s taken David’s daughter 16 years to revive her career, but judging from her follow-up, “Surveillance,” time has stood still. Closely following a mid-Nineties playbook of third-hand genre affectations, grab-bag Americana, serial killer chic, deserted highways at magic hour, cameos by marginal …
»
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Excl: Behind Surveillance With Jennifer Lynch
25 June 2009
| shocktillyoudrop.com
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This week, filmgoers (and on demand) customers will be treated to quite an unusual thriller in Magnet Releasing's Surveillance . Directed and co-written by Jennifer Lynch, the film unfolds in a Rashomon -esque fashion as two FBI agents (portrayed by Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) investigate a killing spree by two masked killers. The narrative is told through the divergent accounts of those who encountered the killers during an incident on a remote highway. Lynch, who hasn't helmed a feature since 1993's Boxing Helena , pulls together a cast that's as eccentric as the way the film is told: Look for Pell James, Ryan Simpkins, French Stewart, Cheri O'Teri and Michael Ironside. ShockTillYouDrop.com caught up to this truly interesting creative force at the Standard in Hollywood for
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HuffPost Review: Surveillance
24 June 2009 8:21 AM, PDT
| Huffington Post
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Surveillance is a grippingly grisly little film, a police whodunnit that's also a terror-thriller of monstrous imagination from director Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David and director of the scabrously reviewed Boxing Helena.
In a small town that could be called Nowhere, N.M., a brutal multiple murder with the pattern of a team of serial killers brings the FBI swooping into town. Agents Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Anderson (Julia Ormond) gather the survivors of a second incident at the local police station.
The witnesses' stories and the truth rarely intersect, but Lynch shows what really happened in flashbacks to the actual events. Even then, there always seems to be a little more going on than the frame reveals.
Initially, the story seems to be about a pair of aggressively bad cops (French Stewart and Kent Harper), who intimidate, extort and otherwise abuse motorists they
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- Marshall Fine
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