Secret Messages: "Enemy"

Can you guess the movie? Who is the Scrabble player? And who is being warned about whom?

Doc Corner: Guns, Nuts, and Celluloid at MIFF

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we are looking at three films from the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Nuts!

We will be looking at Keith Maitland’s Tower in the coming weeks, but the current boom of animated documentaries – we also saw Oscar nominated doc short Last Day of Freedom – reaches its most absurd and gleefully entertaining point with Nuts! A ridiculous story that finds a storytelling home in director Penny Lane’s fabulous criss-cross of animation, archival footage, and talking heads.

Like her last film, Our Nixon of which I had some issues, Nuts! highlights Lane’s canny ability to fish fascinating stories out of the archives and is her latest is a significant step forward creatively. Here, she is wise to use the animation technique to recreate the strange life story of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley and use it as a leaping off point for some wonderfully inventive renderings of the myths and the true stories about this very weird man who built an empire in the 1920s by conning a swath of men across America that surgically grafting goat’s testicles inside an impotent or infertile man’s scrotum would somehow improve their sexual prowess and to use his ahead-of-his-time knowledge of radio to expand his brand.

More on Nuts!, Oscar possibility Newtown, and A Flickering Truth after the jump...

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Trailers: 'The Handmaiden', 'Split' & 'The Great Wall'

Chris here, with some creepy trailers from auteurs for better (Chan-Wook Park and Zhang Yimou) or worse (M. Night Shyamalan). Let's take a look at the coming chills, from the kinky to the twisty to the digitally enhanced:

The Handmaiden

• We've been getting fall festival lineup announcements and hopefully this will pop up somewhere. After a well-reviewed debut in Cannes, we're betting at least on NYFF.
• "... And Stoker" is the most "And Peggy" response to director Chan-Wook Park's filmography.
• Too bad that Oscar is often afraid to get naughty - the design elements look immaculate, especially the cinematography from Park's frequent collaborator Chung-hoon Chung.
• The Handmaiden reenvisions Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith across the globe and time periods. If only other literary adaptations could be so bold in their interpretations.

Check out what creepiness Shyamalan and Yimou have coming with their more famous stars after the jump...

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Ask Nathaniel

Questions for the next Q&A column please. You know what to do...

Podcast/Smackdown Pt 2: Richard Dreyfuss Double Feature of '77 and Films Oscar Ignored

As a companion piece to yesterday's Smackdown, a two-part podcast. If you missed Part One it's right here. Now we conclude our '77 festivities (did you enjoy or did we go to overboard?) with our panel, which includes Mark Harris, Guy Lodge, Nick Davis, Sara Black McCulloch, and Nathaniel R, discussing Tuesday Weld, Richard Dreyfuss, Diane Keaton, Looking for Mr Goodbar, The Turning Point and a few '77 extras.

Part Two Finale. Index (40 minutes)
00:01 One more anecdote on The Goodbye Girl 
04:45 Richard Dreyfuss' big year and Steven Spielberg's interest/disinterest in actors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
15:30 Tuesday Weld's career and the divisive Looking for Mr Goodbar
24:00 The Turning Point and a female-heavy Best Picture lineup
32:15 Performances that weren't nominated from: Saturday Night Fever, Opening Night, Handle With Care, Roseland, and Three Women
39:00 Thank yous! 

You can listen to the podcast here or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?  

Smackdown 77. Part Two. Close Encounters