Cold Soldiers continues its inexorable climb to completion. In recent weeks we've filmed an exchange between the hero John Dance and a soldier named Paul Coyle. Coyle is a straight role for John Brennan, best known for comedy shows such as The Banana Monologues.

We've also introduced a character called Mr. Winter, head orderly of the institute where Cold Soldiers is set. Winter's played by Chris Gay, who gave an excellent performance in Brad Jayne's 2007 short film The Song of Pumpkin Brown.

Most recently we've shot crowd scenes outside the institute. You can read an extra's-eye-view of the shoot on Chuck Boyd's blog, Chuckography.

For more news and information about the film, you can visit its MySpace page or the official website. It's still under construction but it will give you an idea of what we're trying to achieve.

I'm enjoying the Charleston International Film Festival and I caught a charming flick yesterday called Osso Bucco. It stars Illeana Douglas and Mike Starr (who you'll instantly recognize as a heavy from countless gangster films - he's appeared in almost 100 motion pictures).



Osso Bucco is a character study-type comedy set in an Italian restaurant, with two gansgters forced to sit down to eat with two cops. If you miss it at your local movie theatre, be sure to check out the DVD.






Today I'll be back to catch more movies, including On the Road With Judas and Brad Jayne's short about the Jenkins Orphanage, Song of Pumpkin Brown. It will be accompanied by four other shorts so if you're in town, the festival's definitely worth a look.

This week The Orphanage, directed by J.A. Bayona and presented by Guillermo del Toro, arrives on Region 1 DVD. It's a creepy film that drips with atmosphere and is perfect for watching in a dark living room with no one around to reassure you that nothing lurks in the shadows of your mind.

I saw the movie at the local multiplex, on the edge of my seat like the rest of the audience. But there was one major distraction from my viewing pleasure.

It was flu season and I happened to be sitting near a guy who coughed, hacked and sneezed throughout the ENTIRE FILM. A message for sick people who want to go to the movies: DON'T. Wait for the DVD.



Here's my review, which originally appeared in a different form in the Charleston City Paper.

FILM REVIEW: The Orphanage

The Spooky Art: Mexican ghost story gets the formula just right

BY NICK SMITH

Starring Belen Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep

Directed by J.A. Bayona

Rated R (with English subtitles)

The Orphanage creeps onto DVD with an endorsement from Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but it doesn't really need one. It's an effective, desperately unsettling ghost story that shows Hollywood how a horror movie should be done.

Above all, The Orphanage proves that it doesn't take a whole load of CGI or a histrionic music score to create an atmosphere of psychological terror. Less is more.

Simon (Roger Príncep) is a cute 7-year-old boy with an even cuter mom (Laura, played by Belen Rueda). Simon, Laura, and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) move into an old dark house that used to be Laura's orphanage when she was a girl. Now it's creaky, foreboding, and beset by thunderstorms. As is customary, things go bump in the night.

Simon is adopted, and he gets lonely while he waits for his parents to reopen the orphanage and bring in some new kids with special needs. Like a lot of bored, friendless sprogs, Simon invents some imaginary chums — or are they the ghosts of past orphans?

The movie revolves around Rueda's performance as she goes from loving mother to tortured soul when her son goes missing at the orphanage's re-opening party.

Is a mysterious, hatchet-wielding old lady responsible? Is it the specter of Tomas, a deformed little boy who was shut away in the house? Or is Laura going loopy?

Rueda's excellent. She evokes the weariness of a put-upon parent and a whiff of psychosis without losing the sympathy of the audience.

Cayo is equally believable as Carlos, the family pragmatist. When Laura invites a medium into the house, Carlos refuses to acknowledge the eerie voices of the children they hear. He's the down-to-earth type whose reasoning fails to track down Simon. Laura's only choice is to take the medium's advice and go beyond reason, exploring the ethereal instead.

So far, so derivative — there are shades of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Poltergeist, and del Toro's own orphanage-set ghost tale, The Devil's Backbone. There's also a nice homage to 1963's The Haunting when something crawls into bed beside Laura ­— and it ain't her husband.

Fortunately, this film doesn't just rehash its predecessors to deliver its frights. It adds new twists, it's beautifully shot, and it's told with an obvious love for the genre that's obviously lacking in standard U.S. examples. There's only one dump-in-your-drawers shock in the movie. The rest is a subtle exercise in tension and utter creepiness.

This kind of film only works if the audience cares about the main characters. It's a credit to the actors and first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona that the distraught parents' plight is always engrossing.

One particularly effective scene takes place outside the orphanage, in a meeting for bereaved moms and dads who've glimpsed their children long after death. The supporting cast and the look of the film build a sense of realism that makes the supernatural elements easier to swallow.

By tapping into our too-real fears of losing a loved one, The Orphanage becomes more than a series of frights. It can be charming and poignant as well. Although there are subtitles, these rarely distract from the flow of a film that relies on rich visuals to propel its narrative.
Its flaws lie in its attempts to compete with Hollywood: The music is occasionally overblown, there's a clichéd underwater dream sequence, and the use of a deformed child as a way to perturb the audience isn't exactly PC.

But these minor missteps never detract from the film's scary, emotionally gripping atmosphere, making it required viewing for mainstream horror directors and discerning film fans alike.

Yul Brynner's a hero in my house. He could sing, he could bake (he wrote his own cookbook), he stood up to Moses in The Ten Commandments, refused to eb upstaged by Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and played an ultracool Terminator type in Westworld while Arnold Schwarzenegger was still in short lederhosen.

So we'll be striding purposefully towards the Main Library at 68 Calhoun St., downtown Charleston later this month for their Yul Brynner Film Festival.

Here's the full lineup, on the big screen in surround sound:

April 21 - 25

In cooperation with the Yul Brynner Head and Neck Cancer Foundation and as part of Oral, Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Week, the Charleston County Public Library's Media Services Department presents the Yul Brynner Film Fest.

April 21 at 1 p.m. - The Ten Commandments

April 22 at 1 p.m. - The King and I

April 23 at 1 p.m. - The Magnificent Seven

April 24 at 1 p.m. - Taras Bulba

April 25 (double feature) - Westworld at 1 p.m. and Catlow at 3 p.m.

"COLD SOLDIERS" CASTING CALL

I'm about halfway through filming of my second movie, Cold Soldiers. Since it's a high-octane action thriller, I'm always looking for fresh actors to blow up or throw around. So I'll be holding a casting call for actors and background artists on Sunday, April 6 from 4-8 p.m. at the Production Hall on the Old Navy Base, North Charleston.

Although most of the lead parts have been filled for this indie feature, I'm planning future projects and would like to know who's out there so that I can tailor parts for them somewhere along the line.

In the meantime, I'm looking for talent to play minor or non-speaking parts in Cold Soldiers. Shooting commenced in November 2007 and we hope to wrap the production this summer.

For more information or dirrections to the Production Hall, leave me a comment or email me with a headshot, resume and height/weight/age at nicksmithproductions@hotmail.com

The behind-the-scenes photos from Cold Solders are by Trevor Erickson.

Cutting the Mustard

The Bucket List, a new big budget confection starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, is a film about two guys dying who make a list of the things they want to do before they kick the bucket. Then they go out and do them with hilarious results.

This isn't the first film to address the subject and I'm sure it won't be the last. In the TV show Boomtown, one of the main characters had a bucket list inspired by his army buddy killed in the Middle East. And in 1996, a college friend of mine named Tim Morgan based his post grad drama on the bucket list theme. His half hour drama, Cut the Mustard (meaning "make the grade") involved two guys working through a list of adventures they wanted to have before they died. If I remember rightly, one item on the list was skydiving, as in the Freeman/Nicholson feature.

During the course of filming, Morgan asked to borrow my car. I hadn't driven for seven years after bumping into a parked car in my late teens, so my girlfriend Ros did most of the driving when we used our vehicle, a banger we'd got for a song from a kindly old man in my hometown of Bristol, England.

With our car on loan, Tim went off and did his filming. It took him some time, as the production was ambitious for a guy on a MA film course. When we got the car back, one door wouldn't close properly and the third gear wouldn't work unless you held the lever in place as you drove. We wondered how our mode of transport had got in such bad shape until we saw Tim's footage for Cut the Mustard. One of the character's wishes was to do some stunt car driving in a parking garage. Tim had torn the hell our of our jalopy, using it as a hard-worn prop.

The moral: never lend your car to a film director.

Cut the Mustard was a great experience for Tim and his actors. The film was screened in various venues, including the Edinburgh Filmhouse movie theatre, and got a great response. Although there are uncanny similarities between Cut the Mustard and The Bucket List, I'm not accusing anyone of anything - it's just an $45 million coincidence, a case of great minds thinking alike, as often happens in the film industry. Other worthy films also share similar ideas; for example, 1988's Hawks is a great low budget Brit flick with Timothy Dalton and Anthony Edwards as two dying men who, surprise surprise, decide to go have adventures before they pop their clogs.

Tim Morgan went on to win a Royal Television Society award for another film called Space (I was briefly involved in pre-production and Ros produced). Then Tim had kids. Lots of kids. He currently works in the UK and has a production company, DVPMedia. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if Warner Bros., after The Bucket List's $19.5 million-earning wide release weekend, sent him a fiver just for the hell of it. Are you listening Jack?