Icon and Hoyts Presentations at Australian International Movie Convention

This past week Australia’s cinema operators were given the chance to view the upcoming slate offered by the major film distributors in Australia. Two of those distributors were Hoyts and Icon who are responsible for filling your screens with the best independent films from abroad. Here’s a look at what impressed at their presentation.

Fair Game, a drama/thriller, being brought to your cinemas by Hoyts tells the true story of CIA agent Valerie Palme. Directed by Doug Liman and starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn Fair Game is something that needs to be seen to be believed. I got to see the film, in full, and the story is incredible and almost sounds made up. I’ll have a review up soon, but Fair Game came out of nowhere and really impressed as a tense political thriller with some great performances. Fair Game will be released in November 2010.

Hoyts line up featured quite a few films I didn’t even know were in production. Another such film was The Warrior’s Way a genre blending martial arts/western from director Sngmoo Lee and starring Geoffrey Rush, Danny Huston and Kate Bosworth. The extended trailer showed off some ridiculously cool visuals and fight scenes as the swordsman Yang is forced to flee to the West after being labeled an outcast by his clan. He arrives in a tormented carnival town that lives in fear of a local gang called the Hell Riders. There’s a scene in the trailer where ninja assassins and gun totting Hell Riders are duking it out in an orgy of violence and mayhem. It looked amazing. Rush and Huston also seemed to be having a lot of fun with their roles, Rush plays the town drunk and Huston the diabolical leader of the Hell Riders. The Warrior’s Way will be released in November 2010.

Two films that didn’t have any footage shown, but still sound promising from Hoyts are Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers (3D) and Chuck Russell’s Arabian Nights (3D). Both films are drawing from good source material (Arabian Nights deals with stories from 1001 Arabian Nights) and contain good casts (Anthony Hopkins for Arabian Nights and Orlando Bloom, Christoph Waltz and Matthew Mcfadyen for The Three Musketeers). Both films will be using 3D but I’m more interested in seeing how Russell’s Arabian Nights turns out as its fantasy/fable setting can allow for a more interesting visual experience.

Icon has four films coming out in the next 12-18 months that, after attending the AIMC, are now firmly on my radar. RED, based on Warren Ellis’s DC Comics series, and Matt Reeves Westernization of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In were already two films I’d been keeping my eye on. Everything I saw of RED at AIMC just made me love it even more. There was an extended trailer that highlighted both the humor and the action that will be the focus of this film, starring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman, about retired CIA operatives who are forced to confront the agency that used to employ them. There’s also just something about Helen Mirren with a machinegun that just seems oh so right. While the idea of RED has always impressed me my interest in Reeves Let Me In only came from the outrage the director of the Swedish version unleashed when he heard about the project. Icon was able to show two clips from the film that made me rethink my interest in the film. I can’t go into specifics, but to fans of the book and the original the clips showed that the relationship between the two young leads will still play an important role in the film and also that it will be as scary as hell, like I don’t want to go outside in the dark alone scary. In particular the second clip showed that Reeves has his finger firmly on the pulse when it comes to building tension and suspense, which will really help a film like this. Let Me In is released on October 14^th 2010 in Australia while RED is released October 28^th.

Going from what I was already interested in to the films I didn’t really know much about Icon had some interesting thrillers and a comedy that appear worthy of a watch. The films, The Killer Inside Me, Buried and Wild Target, have already debuted at some festival across the world in the lead up to their theatrical release. Casey Affleck looks brilliant as the psychotic deputy sheriff Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me. The film drew considerable outrage for its portrayal of harsh violence against women and looks to be a powerful, unsettling film from Michael Winterbottom a director who isn’t afraid to push the boundaries. I’m interested to see whether there will be some substance to go along with the outrage. I was lucky enough to see Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds, so I won’t go into too much detail as the review should be posted soon, but Rodrigo Cortes’s film about a man trapped in a box underground is certainly a challenging piece of cinema that will divide audiences due to the risks Cortes takes. The final film from the independents that interested me was the British comedy Wild Target. Starring Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt and Rupert Grint the film focuses of Nighy, a successful assassin, who is contracted in to kill Blunt’s character after she double-crosses a powerful businessman in a deal. Instead of killing her Nighy has a change of heart and now they are on the run from a rival assassin who is brought in to finish the job. I saw the first 12 minutes for this film and it was hilarious in that absurd way that many British comedies are. In these first minutes we are introduced to Nighy’s character a ridiculously efficient hitman who is actually continuing on the family business. There is a hilarious scene with Nighy’s mother on his birthday and we are also introduced to Blunt’s con artist character. These opening minutes set-up the lead characters and the plot very well and they definitely left me wanting to see more. The Killer Inside Me will be released August 26^th, Buried October 7^th and Wild Target November 11^th.

Hoyts and Icon look t have an impressive and varied slate of independent films set for release in the near future and their offerings were just the tip of the iceberg at the Australian International Movie Convention.