Turin review

Chris Tilly gets his fill of horror and war at the 24th Torino Film Festival.

Nov 16 2006

It's been a busy few weeks here at Time Out Towers – no sooner has The TOMB attended the San Sebastian and London film festivals than we're jetting out to Turin for the 24th Torino Film Festival. Not that we're complaining though – the standard of film has remained encouragingly high throughout, and the Italian leg of our tour was no different.

The opening night gala screening was Clint Eastwood's 'Flags of Our Fathers', a powerful, thoughtful war film that is bound to receive a slew of nominations come Oscar season.

It tells the tale of the five Marines and one Navy corpsman who raised the Stars and Stripes at Mount Suribachi and became the subject of one of the most famous photographs in history. But more than that, it's a powerful examination of heroism – of why we need heroes and the lengths those in power will go to create them.

It's by no means a perfect film – the battle scenes owe an obvious debt to 'Saving Private Ryan', there's gratuitous use of the flashback and the script (co-written by Paul Haggis) has a tendency to slip into sentiment. In spite of that, 'Flags of our Fathers' is still one of the best films I've seen this year, and it's a testament to Eastwood's talents that he's found something new to say on the subject of war.

The audience then decamped to the Museum of Film, Television and Radio, a hugely impressive shrine to cinema that puts London's lack of such a building to shame. Floor upon spiralling floor pays homage to films from all over the world, surrounding a Willy Wonka-esque glass lift that carries passengers to a high platform with magnificent panoramic views of the city.

Following that hugely impressive opening night, my next foray into film was distinctly underwhelming. 'The Guatemalan Handshake' is America's sole competition entry ('Flags' was playing out of comp), and a testament to the distressing effect the success of 'Napoleon Dynamite' has had on US cinema.

Dull, derivative stuff, it revolves around a bunch of quirky characters spouting highly stylised dialogue as they wander round some strange small town. A bore from start to finish, it suffers from both a lack of originality and, ironically, the lack of a 'Vote for Pedro' disco dance.

Next up was an equally poor French-Lebanese co-production called 'Le Dernier Homme' ('The Last Men') about a doctor who may or may not be a vampire. With very little dialogue or action and lots of bizarre imagery and strange sound design, the film is desperately trying to be an 'arthouse' genre flick, but fails to be anything other than pointless.

Much better was 'Directed By', Peter Bogdanovich's updated version of his critically acclaimed documentary about John Ford. Retaining interviews with John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart, Bogdanovich has added insights from the likes of Eastwood, Spielberg and Scorsese as well as offering his own two cents worth on one of the all-time greats.

What emerges is a spellbinding portrait of a remarkable man. Every story seems to revolve around his cantankerous, confrontational and at times vindictive personality, yet no one actually seems to have a bad word to say about him.

Highlights include a hilarious one-on-one between Bogdanovich and Ford during which the latter could not be more difficult, and an audio recording of a touching conversation with Katherine Hepburn that was taped just before his death.

A true cinematic poet, Ford 'did it first and did it better', and 'Directed By' is a fitting tribute to his talents.

With my time in Turin coming to a close, I thought I'd take a little time to indulge my greatest guilty pleasure – namely horror. First up was William Friedkin's 'Bug', a fantastic flick whose trailer suggests a violent creature feature. In reality however, that couldn't be further from the truth.

I won't say too much more on the subject, suffice to say it's a deeply disturbing psychological chiller that's as tense and claustrophobic as any film I've seen this year, and Ashley Judd gives a revelatory central performance that's worth the price of admission alone.

I then caught a couple of films from the new series of 'Masters of Horror'. First up was Dario Argento's 'Pelts', a frankly hopeless feature about animal fur and a bewitched coat. Full of sex and blood (always a plus point), it's let down by weak plotting and a laughable central performance from Meat Loaf.

Much better was John Landis's 'Family', a blackly comic spin on the 'Psycho' premise that stars George Wendt (Norm from 'Cheers') as a seemingly average joe whose perfect 'family' is made of the skeletons of people he has murdered and skinned. No one does laughs and frights quite like Landis, and this is probably the best of the 'Masters' series I have seen thus far.

I was then granted an audience with the director himself, in which he discussed everything from monkey pic 'Schlock' to zombie vid 'Thriller' to the amazing script he penned for a belated sequel to 'An American Werewolf in London'. Sadly, it won't ever see the light of day, but Landis talked me through the film in its entirety, and I'll be posting full details on The TOMB very soon.

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