Before you get a chance to do a Beat Takeshi kick to the back of someones head, ReelAnime will slap you around with its Anime goodness, so if you are a cartoon kid, why not check it out.

Showcasing Japan’s freshest anime! Four brand new films in the strongest lineup for Reel Anime ever.
At cinema locations in Australia and New Zealand in September 2010 for a limited time – do not miss the chance to see these incredible films on the big screen.

www.madman.com.au/reelanime

A young girl encounters hostile territory when she enters a guitar shop for the first time, colliding with the store owner, a self-obsessed aging rocker.

‘Lucille’ is my graduation film from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. It’s a peek into the dingy day-to-day of the guitar store, and the stereotypes that inhabit it.

Lucille has had a successful festival run, gaining official selection at Sydney Film Festival – where it was nominated for best animation, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Perth International Film Festival, Adelaide Film Festival, and more.

The Sydney Underground Film Festival has today announced a brazen new program for the festival, which runs 9^th-11^th September this year. Covering the political, the perverse and the simply bizarre, the festival boldly goes where no other festival dares tread, screening a number of films never before seen in Australia.

Screening 89 films over one huge weekend, the 2010 Sydney Underground Film Festival includes:

• Films from ten countries internationally
• 10 full length feature films and 79 shorts
• 7 feature film Australian premieres

Just weeks after the federal election, the festival will kick off with a truly political flavour Thursday 9^th September with the Australian premiere of Oliver Stone’s SOUTH OF THE BORDER, a controversial documentary following the filmmaker’s trip through South America and interviews with past presidents.

Festival highlights are also set to include ENTER THE VOID from famed French filmmaker Gaspar Noé, a screening of THE TAINT, Australian film EL MONSTRO DEL MAR!, LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG, and Harmony Korine’s TRASH HUMPERS.

Sydney Underground Film Festival director Stefan Popescu said ‘we are excited to present our program for 2010, The Sydney Underground Film Festival aims to push the boundaries of the conventional, and we feel that this year’s program achieves this perfectly, offering Sydney filmgoers the opportunity to see these films from all over the world.’

DATE: 9^th – 11^th September, 2010
LOCATION: Factory Theatre, Marrickville
TICKETS: www.suff.com.au

FEATURE FILM SYNOPSES:

SOUTH OF THE BORDER (dir: Oliver Stone, USA)
www.southoftheborderdoc.com

There’s a revolution underway in South America, but most of the world doesn’t know it. Oliver Stone sets out on a road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media’s misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents. In casual conversations with Presidents Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), as well as her husband and ex-President Néstor Kirchner, Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Raúl Castro (Cuba), Stone gains unprecedented access and sheds new light upon the exciting transformations in the region. 

ENTER THE VOID (dir: Gaspar Noé, France)
www.enterthevoid.com

Oscar and his sister Linda are recent arrivals in Tokyo. Oscar’s a small time drug dealer, and Linda works as a nightclub stripper. One night, Oscar is caught up in a police bust and shot. As he lies dying, his spirit, faithful to the promise he made his sister – that he would never abandon her – refuses to abandon the world of the living. It wanders through the city, his visions growing evermore distorted, evermore nightmarish. Past, present and future merge in a hallucinatory maelstrom.

RED, WHITE AND BLUE (dir: Simon Rumley, USA)
http://www.redwhitebluemovie.com/

In Austin Texas, the lives of three young people – Erica, Franki and Nate – intertwine in a fateful, tragic way and head down a rocky and violent road to heart-rending oblivion.

Erica (Amanda Fuller) lives rent-free in the local co-op, but spends her nights trawling the bars and beds of Austin.  Damaged, emotionally withdrawn, never really connecting with anyone, and sleeping with multiple men is just what she does… until she meets the older and mysterious Nate (Noah Taylor), working in a hardware store, but with an “honorable discharge” from Iraq. 

Despite his quiet air of danger, Nate’s the only guy who doesn’t seem to want to get her into bed at the first opportunity, and the two form a hesitant bond.   But one of Erica’s casual sexual encounters is about to bite back.  

Franki (Marc Senter) is a young, hot-headed wannabe rock star trying to make it big. Looking after a sick mother and estranged from his long term girlfriend, he “shared” Erica with his buddies one drunken evening.  A shocking twist of fate is all it takes throws his already crazy world into a spin, and in Franki’s eyes there is only one person to blame…

MEAT (dir: Victor Nieuwenhuijs & Maartie Seyferth, Netherlands)

A butcher operates what appears to be an ordinary meat market and Roxy is a pretty girl who helps out in the shop. She videos everything as part of her search for answers, her limits, her life. As the butcher gets into her head, they’re lives start to become involved. After hours, there isn’t the ordinary employer/employee relationship as they take part in bizarre sexual game playing, with Roxy capturing the action on her video camera. Yet to Roxy’s horror, she discovers their kinky after-hours activities are not the only thing at the shop that would shock their customers. When the miserable inspector comes to investigate the mysterious demise of the butcher, it seems that there is only one solution for the puzzle: recreate the death of the butcher.

THE TAINT (dir: Drew Buldoc & Dan Nelson, USA)
www.taintmovie.com

The water is tainted. The Taint poisons the minds of men. It turns them into raging misogynists: monsters who want nothing more than to crush women’s heads with rocks(or other objects). When society is transformed into a land of sadistic violence and horrible brutality, it is up to Phil O’Ginny and his hot friend, Misandra, to combat the horrible evil that is The Taint. Can they survive a world brimming with castration and endless head crushing?! The Taint is an independent low-budget horror-comedy feature film created by Drew Bolduc and Dan Nelson. It is a satirical horror-comedy that seeks to expose the misogynistic nature of many Hollywood and Independent films, by being one of the most misogynistic films of all time.  It was made for roughly $5,000 dollars and quite a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears.

AMERICAN: THE BILL HICKS STORY (dir: Matt Harlock & Paul Thomas, USA)
www.americanthemovie.com

15 years after his death Bill Hicks (16/12/61 – 26/2/94), is now more popular than ever, and is widely seen as one of the best comedian of the modern era. However, in America, where he challenged institutions and accepted ways of thinking, he suffered censorship and was never truly recognised by a wide audience. In the country which enshrines freedom of speech in its constitution his story is truly about what it means to be an American. 

Now Bill’s remarkable story is brought to life in AMERICAN: THE BILL HICKS STORY, a feature-length documentary which combines live action with a stunning new animation technique manipulating 1,000s of photographs to uniquely immerse the audiences in his world, which is re-told from the point-of-view of the people who shared it with him.

LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG (dir: Mladen Djordjevic, Serbia)
http://bascelik.net/films-gang.php

This razor-sharp and often perversely comic metaphor about the social pathologies of Serbian life in the 1990s was a major hit at the Rotterdam Film Festival. A travelling “porno cabaret” journeys from village to village across rural Serbia, performing live sex acts in radical framings as a means of sexual confrontation, often provoking violent responses from the locals. Situations take a turn for the darker when the troupe are approached by a shady foreign war correspondent who makes them an offer they struggle against refusing—a ton of money in exchange for shooting actual murders, theatrically “performed” on willing, consensual victims who no longer care about living.

BIKER FOX (dir: Jeremy Lamberton, USA)
www.bikerfoxmovie.com

Biker Fox is the story of Frank P. DeLarzelere III aka Biker Fox, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s misunderstood motivational bicyclist, nature conservationist and muscle car guru. Part-documentary and part-self-help testimonial, the film navigates the uneasy relationships DeLarzelere has with both the city of Tulsa and himself, as his Biker Fox character’s intentions of spirited goodwill sometimes neglect certain boundaries.

EL MONSTRO DEL MAR! (dir: Stuart Simpson, Australia)
www.monstromovie.com

After breaking down in their car in the middle of nowhere the three girls lure a car down to help them. But instead of waiting for the two men to get them back on the road, they pull out their switch blades and slit both their throats and steal their car. They set out towards their destination, a beach shack in a small isolated town to lay low for a while. But it doesn’t take them long to totally disrupt this tiny fishing community with their loud, brash and don’t take any shit attitudes. After swimming in the water and after being warned not to go in there (by a furious Joseph) they awaken the ancient evil that has plagued the town for as long as they can remember. That night the girls try to corrupt the innocent Hannah by getting her drunk while the local fishermen are ripped apart by the massive sea creature. The next morning, after discovering the bloody mess left behind, including one of their own, the girls go back to interrogate Joseph about what the hell is out there. Before long the answer is on their door step and the four of them (two Vixens, Hannah and Joseph) must fight for their lives in the confines of a small wooden shack.

Influences for the film range from the characters in Russ Myer’s Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Ernest Hemingway’s classic book The Old Man and the Sea to the epic atmosphere of John Huston’s Moby Dick and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.  It also draws reference from the stylistic violence of George Miller’s Mad Max and the playful Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead.

TRASH HUMPERS (dir: Harmony Korine, USA)
www.trashhumpers.com

A film unearthed from the buried landscape of the American nightmare, TRASH HUMPERS follows a small group of elderly ‘Peeping Toms’ through the shadows and margins of an unfamiliar world. Crudely documented by the participants themselves, we follow the debased and shocking actions of a group of true sociopaths the likes of which have never been seen before. Inhabiting a world of broken dreams and beyond the limits of morality, they crash against a torn and frayed America. Bordering on an ode to vandalism, it is a new type of horror – palpable and raw.

Depicting the impact of the recently enacted anti-graffiti laws, Kaos in King Street draws attention to the potential consequences.

Kaos in King Street is the second claymation stop animation film created by Lc Beats. In production for 12 months; and 20 minutes in length, the film utilises dialogue for the first time. Kaos in King Street features caricatures of pioneering Sydney graffiti artists’ Teazer, Pnash, Phibs and Mistery.

“I wanted the small scale sets to mirror the actual streets of Newtown”, Lc Beats said, “so I invited the artists to create their signature work on a small scale.”
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” Phibs Said. “The whole process and the way it is put together is incredible. Seeing the finished result is very satisfying.”

Kaos in King Street received sponsorship from 567 King Graffiti Art supply store in Newtown and Australian aerosol paint company Ironlak.
As well as being a film maker, Lc Beats is also a talented aerosol artist and beatboxer who has performed with the likes of Morganics, Charlie McMahon, Thom Thumb, Rivals and Thundamentals.

Kaos in King Street is availabe online at 567 King @ www.567king.com

Kaos in King Street Trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Mayhem in May Lane (2008)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mayhem in May Lane was the first claymation stop animation film produced by LC Beats which was his High School visual arts major work.

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Lc Beats Bio:

Lc Beats is a Sydney beatboxer and claymation stop motion film maker. He has performed with the likes of Charlie McMahon, Morganics, Tom Thumb, One Mouth Band, Mal Web, Mr Percival, Rivals and Thundamentals. He has performed at events such as Sydney Festival 2010, Secret Wars, Platform 3 Hip Hop Festival, Re-Up 2 Hip Hop Festival, Imagine Festival, Youth Harmony Festival 2010, SmART Arts Festival 2009, Sydney Opera House 2006.

He was a semi-finalist at the NSW Beatbox championships in 2010 and Highly Commended by established Australian beatbox artists, Hopey and Joel Turner.

For the past 5 years Lc Beats has been developing his own personal style. He incorporates the didjeridoo as well as a loop pedal with his beatboxing during his live performances.

After attending a short animation course in 2008, he used the medium of claymation for his high school visual arts major work creating his first claymation film called Mayhem in May Lane. It showcases three young Urban Hip hop artists showcasing their art in the well-known Sydney legal walls in May Lane in St Peters. They challenge the tradition of contemporary art by bringing their graffiti art and installing it in an elegant gallery. It features well known Sydney graffiti artist Syan.

The film was well received and earned him a place on the front cover of his local newspaper ‘The Glebe’ and accepted in the Marrickville Film Festival.
In 2009 he was accepted into AFTRS (Australian Film Television & Radio School) where he completed his second claymation film called Kaos in King Street.

Another brilliant election animation, this time from Small Poppy TV.

Small Poppy TV is the cartoons of Julian Ellis and Adam Brodie-McKenzie. Julian whips up all the animation and artwork himself. Adam watches.
www.smallpoppy.tv

The Australian Workers’ Union has just launched a new television advertisement, and put the ad out on YouTube, explaining that Tony Abbott and his family of political mates belong in a museum – they are throw backs to the weird world of the early 60s.

Here is a sneak peak at the ‘One Fine Day Photoshoot’ – Special Thanks to Monique Arnold for the filming

Melbourne International Film Festival 2010 (MIFF) hosts a feast of cinematic delicacies from over 50 countries for 17 days each winter, with a range of parties and special events. In addition to screening films from around fifty countries, MIFF showcases new Australian cinema and emerging and established local filmmaking talent.

The 57th Sydney Film Festival brings new films to Sydney from around the world. As well as brand new features from over forty countries, the festival screens short films, Australian films, documentaries and archive titles, many of which are recently restored. The festival hosts a number of awards to recognise excellence in filmmaking, including the Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films and the Official Competition, which celebrates ‘courageous and audacious filmmaking’.

Set in tiny Dungog, this four-day annual event presents Australian film content and is a launch pad for filmmakers. The festival includes seminars, master classes, treasures from the past, special events and live script performances.