Fantasia 2024.04: The Avenging Eagle, International Science-Fiction Short Films, Not Friends, The Old Man and the Demon Sword, and Mash Ville

Falling a day behind here, because Sunday was a full day and Monday an early start, and the breathing room I'd hoped for didn't materialize. There's also no desk in this hotel room, so it's a little slow going.

Apologies for the terrible panorama from the Sci-Fi Shorts; some weird fisheye stuff going on. Anyway, my notes also stink, but from the left, there three folks from "Headache", with director Björn Schagerström in the center; two from "ZZZ", with director Philipe Vargas on the left; director Connor Kujawinski of "A Little Longer"; directors Daniel Shapiro & Alex Topaller of "Escape Attempt"; and Eddy Martin & Elena Rojas, two of the cast members of "ZZZ".

It was, as usual, an enjoyable Q&A, with the "Headache" folks talking about how it's kind of easy to find brutalist architecture that give you massive concrete slabs for exteriors, it's not so easy when you want that inside, and they wound up shooting in an art museum space that was between expositions, and seemed to be relatively welcoming of folks making a short film. They also talked about how using that space was tricky at times, since they didn't want visible light sources, in one case creating a weird spot where light was coming out of a shute that illuminated the head of a bed. They mentioned that it was a proof of concept for a feature, and that unlike a lot of shorts, they actually found themselves adding stuff into the initial cut, because the timing just wasn't right.

The "Escape Attempt" team had the opposite problem; their initial cut was almost an hour, too long for the shorts section of most festivals (the Oscars define one as 40 minutes or less and most festivals are similar). They initially cut it down to half that, but at times wondered if they should try to boost it to a feature. I'm not sure there's really enough in the story for that, and I imagine that at that length they'd be spending a lot on the FX budget. That said, they did mention that a lot more was practical than you might think, especially with the spaceship interiors; the production design team was eager to build rather than just send things along to the effects house.

I'd hoped to head across the street for Ghost Cat Anzu after that, but it would have been a tight fit and a shorts package with a lot of filmmakers to wrangle and have Q&A with always runs long, so I stayed in De Sève for Not Friends, which turned out fine schedule-wise, chipping away at Tuesday so I'd be able to see Customs Frontline outside the festival but part of it in spirit.

I stayed in De Sève for The Old Man and the Demon Sword, with the festival's Jusine Smith hosting writer/director Fábio Powers, producer Christiano Guerreiro, and visual effects artist Jules Spaniard. It's the sort of Q&A where, even if you didn't love the movie, makes one say "good for you!", as Powers talked about his love for B movies, having the idea for the movie in his head for a long time, and wanting to make something with António da Luz, a non-professional actor and the uncle of a cousin who had a distinctive vibe and energy, and how he started from the going-meta finale because he figured he'd need to explain a lot of slip-ups only to find the movie mostly went fine. He also brought in a couple of folks he remembered from television when he was a child, one of whom had surprisingly retired to his town, and contacting Spaniard on Facebook to get some pointers on how to do effects and winding up with a collaborator.

It's also apparently very specifically Portuguese in a lot of ways, including how the village where they filmed has a population of 14: Apparently a lot of those mountain towns are hollowed out in that way, which gives you a lot of freedom to make a movie but has its issues, like how there is obviously no coffee shop or grocery store in a place of that size.

So, very much an "Underground" entry, though not exactly full-on Outsider Art. I'm glad there's a place for that, beyond just "folks not interested in the wrestling horror movie on the bigger screen".

The day ended across the street in Hall with the World Premiere of Mash Ville, with host/programmer Steven Lee, director Hwang Wook, the translator whose name I missed, producer Lim Dong-min, and actors Kim Hee-sang & Chun Sin-hwan. They talked about wanting to do genres you don't see very often in Korean movies, specifically name-checking westerns and John Ford, and it's kind of funny, because if this is a Western, it feels more Sam Peckinpah than Ford to me. I don't really know that it's actually a Western; it feels more like the Coen Brothers doing small-town crime with a heart of pitch-black darkness.

Anyway, I was kind of wiped out at that point, maybe not properly appreciating it and retaining it well. I'll probably give it a look if it pops up somewhere else.

Long day! And a couple more since; if you're reading this on Saturday the 27th (Day 10), the plan is trying for Killer Constable, crossing the street for Capsules 2024 if I'm not far enough up the pass-holder line, HEAVENS: The Boy and His Robot, Kizumonogatari, and Infinite Summer.


Leng xue shi san ying (The Avenging Eagle)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)

I haven't seen nearly enough Shaw Brothers material to know where this stands in the pantheon - they made so much and I've mostly watched it hit-and-miss as it plays various repo programs! I'm guessing this is close to top-tier, with a hook that makes it stick out enough to be worthy of the spiffy new restoration and forthcoming release on disc.

It opens with a man who calls himself "Vagrant" (Ti Lung) falling from his horse as he desperately rides across the desert; a passing rider who calls himself "Homeless" (Alexander Fu Sheng) stops to assist him, only to have Vagrant run off with his horse. Homeless eventually catches up to Vagrant, who reveals that he is a former member of the Boat Clan, a group of vicious marauders commanded by Yoh Xi-hung (Ku Feng), and Vagrant was one of the notorious Eagle Warriors. He has attempted to turn over a new leaf, for reasons he chooses not to share, but Yoh has sent his comrades to bring him in dead or alive, and ultimately it appears that the only chance at survival is to go on the offensive. Homeless chooses to help his new friend, although he remains cagey about his own past.

The restoration/scan of The Avenging Eagle that played Fantasia's Retro series is good enough that you can see the glue holding the wigs on, one of those things that makes you wonder if maybe movies were made with the expectation that a little projector motion and the like was expected to smooth such things out. Honestly, it can be shocking how good movies you associate with beat-up grindhouse prints and bargain-bin VHS look given a chance. And this one looks fantastic, full of bright colors and garish costumes and a world created on soundstages that feels both mythic and squalid, terrifically and clearly shot.

It's just generally a very fun movie, as well. A lot of Shaw Brothers martial-arts flicks have tended to feel like arcane and arbitrary reasons to fight, and this has a stretch like that, but eventually it has things click into place and push forward for the rest of the movie. Ti Lung and Fu Sheng nail the sort of reluctant brotherhood that is in many ways the mainstay of Hong Kong action cinema, with Fu especially giving a performance that initially feels fake but is revealed as fake with a purpose, eventually becoming something unexpected, while Ti Lung makes his Black Eagle someone with a heavy emotional burden who is nevertheless a man of action even when confronting it. Ku Feng, meanwhile, is the sort of larger-than-life monster who convinces audiences that the other two will have to fight together even before they throw the first punches.

The fighting itself is terrific in a way that's not necessarily a given, sometimes a little heavy on slow motion that becomes freeze frames but giving the feel of something spontaneous rather than overly choreographed. Director Sun Chung, writer Ni Kuang, and fight choreographers Tong Kai & Huang Pei-Chih have an excuse to throw waves of enemies at Ti Lung and Fu Sheng, all with distinctive weapons and styles which have the heroes having to adapt their own tools. It's never just "more", and the filmmakers make the mind games that are part of the finale just effective enough to make things nicely wobbly.

Also, I chose to believe that several scenes with sleeve knives were meant to look like the guy was flipping his enemies the bird. It's that kind of movie, straightforward in its serious, deadly intentions but well aware that the object is to have fun<.BR />

"ZZZ"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

A woman (Julieta Ortiz) comes to what appears to be a closed-down mattress store, but the inside is revealed as a place where one can enter and choose their dreams. She chooses to see her husband Sebastian (Eddy Martin), a truck driver who died in an accident twenty years ago, but even a dream of being your younger self (Elena Rojas) and reuniting with the love of one's life will be tinged with the memories of the real world.

Writer/director Felipe Vargas leans hard on some familiar tropes here, but combines them in interesting ways. The flophouse explicitly recalls images of opium dens but the actual injection is laced with Sandman imagery that carries through to a desert landscape that helps make it clear that Marcella is less injecting herself into a memory as building a desired environment; it's also kind of amusing that this is all located in a storefront that used to be a mattress shop, things that were briefly and unsustainably ubiquitous in recent years. It's occasionally somewhat short of brilliant; the finale with a police raid and "will she choose to extricate herself" feels kind of old-hat, and the film could maybe use one or two more explicit reminders that, ultimately, Marcella is talking to herself.

Vargas and Eddy Martin do seem to get that, though; even if they don't say it out loud, Martin has Sebas vacillate being Marcella's idealized memory and also her own guilt and need to be forgiven. Julieta Ortiz and Elena Rojas do very nice work of making Marcella and "Ella" the same person, even if they aren't entirely cast for being dead ringers for one another; they capture a lot of the same body language and way of speaking, and Vargas often shows that the older Marcella is not a solid block of guilt, but someone who still has a lot of what made Ella vivacious.


"Headache"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

"Headache" opens with the appearance of taking place in a prison, but that's maybe not quite it - at least, there's no mention of there being an outside world that put the people in there with their flatly colored jumpsuits and rigid hierarchy. Frank (Torkel Petersson) starts out wearing blue and in Production, moving pills from one bin to another, but he is told that he has been one of the least efficient workers there and is moved to Consumption, where he is given a gray uniform and tasked with popping the pills Production is creating. To make sure, they are regularly given regular bonks on the head. It finally strikes him as so absurd that he tries to escape.

Director Björn Schagerström and co-writer Agnes Jeppsson have a number of satirical targets, with a bit of Stanford Prison Experiment thrown in as well. The sharpest barbs seem to be aimed at late capitalism, where businesses are completely focused on growth at the expense of what people actually want and need; the broadest ones which maybe get the biggest laughs target bureaucracy and a sort of algorithmic obedience that cannot handle unexpected actions. They are all, by and large, good jokes, but kind of at right angles to each other, so that what's going on at the end had kind of drifted from what was really working at the start.

I do like how Torkel Petersson sells it all. He's got the job of being the audience surrogate who sees this society as nuts but also being of it, and he really nails that deadpan alarm. There's a nice cast around him; I believe Jenny Elisabeth Gustavsson plays the member of management who is either cheerfully evil herself or an effective enough mouthpiece that she might as well be, and really nails that quietly predatory vibe to stand out. Even folks who show up late for a gag or two really fit into this odd situation without issue.


"The Move"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

I really like the structure Eric Kissack does with this short film: Establish things in relatable, entertaining fashion, throw some fantastic wrench into it, and then double down in a way that hits a nerve and pushes to a dramatic climax without sacrificing what's been making the whole thing work. Eliminate "fantastic", and that's probably the way most comedies are supposed to work, especially at this length, but a lot of people forget that or get the proportions off.

Here, we meet Kate (Amanda Crew) and Todd (Dustin Milligan), a young couple whose relationship had recently hit a few bumps but are now moving into a new apartment, getting ready before the movers show up. Initially, Todd is complaining that the previous tenants left an armoire behind, but they soon find it's not the weirdest feature: There's an itty-bitty invisible wormhole that zips things over to the other side of the living room, and it probably says something about their relationship that Todd is terrified and panicky while Kate sees it as the coolest thing that she's ever seen.

It's really fun to watch Dustin Milligan and Amanda Crew work here. They give Todd and Kate great opposites-attract energy, trading rapid-fire barbs in a way that's genuinely funny but also shows the strain relationships built around such different temperaments can have, and kick it up a notch when the portal makes things weird. They are both genuinely funny and go big in a way that complements each other: Milligan's whiny neuroticism might be a lot except that Crew's rapid acceptance and excitement creates a middle they can orbit around without ever getting too far apart. And when things get weirder, the energy level is such that it's not even really a pivot to making a choice that may be entirely against one's nature for the one one loves.

Pretty darn good in under ten minutes.


"Escape Attempt"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

During the Q&A, the filmmakers mentioned problems with the runtime, in that the initial cut was almost feature-length but they probably couldn't stretch it further without killing the pacing, so they cut it down to something which qualified as a short. The pacing is good now but the storytelling has some big gaps. It's listed on IMDB as a TV series, but I kind of can't see it working better in that configuration. It kind of feels like the crew made something they couldn't complete but the material was too good to waste, so they put it together as best they could - which isn't bad.

It opens introducing us to Saul (Andrzej Chyra), who describes himself as a professor with particular knowledge of Twentieth Century conflicts, and who is looking to leave the Earth and get away from humanity. Most jaunts are to Pandora, but that planet is nearly as crowded. Emma (Anna Burnett), the pilot of a private spacecraft also on her way to that planet, offers to drop him off at one of many uninhabited worlds, a detour her linguist husband Vadim (Ieuan Coombs) is less excited for. They warn somewhat over the trip, but when they make landing on this supposedly empty world, they find that people are already there, villains Saul recognizes all too well working a slave labor population to death.

There's backstory or lore here, more than a half-hour short winds up having time to explore and which might have been slated for future episodes if this did indeed start life as a TV series. You can probably do without to a certain extent - you don't really need to explain Nazis - but there are some very odd jumps in its story, especially as Emma and Vadim never seem to be more than wealthy vacationers before encountering this huge and horrifying mystery, and while they seem a little too well-equipped to handle it. It is really stopped down to just Saul reckoning with a long-ago decision to run.

Looks really nice, though, if very much in the Apple Store vibe with white jumpsuits seemingly the only fashion in the future. There's a stark contrast between the 2020s Star Trek look and what they find on the planet, and even though the effects are likely mostly CGI, there's a satisfyingly model-like feel to how the ships move.


"Sincopat"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

Another short with a devilishly simple idea played out well, "Sincopat" introduces Ona (Núria Florensa), an executive and designer who has taken her company's newest device out for a spin: The "Narval", a fashionable smartwatch which synchronizes with injectable nanotechnology that takes up residence in the audio processing center of one's brain, beaming music directly into your head. It will make the company a fortune, and Ona loves it. At least until a malfunction has the nanos stop receiving and just repeating what's in the buffer, meaning the same two seconds of music are playing in her brain on a loop, and there's no way to stop it.

I've kind of got my doubts about the whole "no way to stop it" thing - it initially seems like a problem that can be solved with a hammer if you don't want to wait for the transmitter's battery to die - but the basic idea is good enough to let it slide for ten minutes of jokes about how having this in your head on a loop will drive you absolutely mad and how, obviously, a big tech company is going to consider this a one-time fluke or an acceptable risk with the launch so close. Co-writer/director Pol Diggler gives the short a "stages of grief" structure, which proves a good fit and allows the film to jump forward to the next gag rather than feel trapped by the implications of any one idea. The punchlines for the short as a whole are a bit obvious, but they work.

Núria Florensa sells the whole thing well, too - there's a likable sort of fecklessness to Ona at the start, capturing the intersection of "this is so cool" and "this is going to make us so rich" tech executives, while later projecting the horror that comes with each stage of this torment. This could have just been a fable about a tech person hoisted on her own petard, but it plays more darkly comic when you realize the company will treat this all as collateral damage.


"Katele (Mudskipper)"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, laser DCP)

I must admit, I was more often interested in "Katele" as an idea than drawn into its particular story. "Modern fantasy rooted in Australian aboriginal culture" is something I hadn't seen, and it feels like you could do a lot more with that than what we see here. Which isn't much of an outline: Martha (Elmi Kris), an indigenous woman working the late shift in a laundrette, sees one of the machines go haywire and pulls a man (Waangenga Blanco) out. She hides him, argues with the white guy making deliveries to various institutional clients (Tony Nixon), and when the man vanishes, ruminates on what her life should be like.

It may just be that this short is a bit miscast as part of a science-fiction block, especially for someone like myself who tends to gravitate toward the nuts-and-bolts end of the genre; in that context, one may tend to fill in a fantastical narrative that's not exactly there. I, for example, read the ending as Martha following Katele back through the portal to a world where Australia had never been colonized, but there's not exactly anything in the text that says so. Indeed, not a lot really happens.

Still, Elmi Kris has a face, and she projects the frustration and sadness of her current situation well, and even for those not in her particular circumstances, the feeling that one's life shouldn't be like this and maybe there is someplace where it isn't is powerful. She's terrific at communicating this mood.


Phuean (mai) sanit (Not Friends)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

My first reaction to seeing the description for Not Friends was "Dear Evan Hansen, but Thai", which is probably unfair, in that I haven't seen that film or the play that spawned it and they could be completely different in their details (though Not Friends at least has a cast full of folks believable as teenagers). It's not a bad take on the basic theme, but doesn't quite have the confidence to remain darkly comic or the agility to pivot to something heartwarming.

The film centers on Pae (Anthony Buisseret), who has transferred to a new school for his senior year after an incident at his previous one, where he was often treated as an outcast because the smell of the family flour-mill business seemed to stick to him, and which his father (Pramote Sangsorn) expects him to join because he's on his own for university. He's assigned to sit next to the gregarious Joe (Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit), who says Pae is his 150th friend and a person only has that many in his life. That will be true for Joe, who is hit by a truck and killed crossing the street. It's an opportunity for Pae, though, as a fine-arts school is having a short-film contest which can deliver a full-ride scholarship without having to worry about entrance exams, looking for tearjerkers, so Pae opts to make a film about his best friend Joe, using the story that won Joe a writing contest. The snag is Bokeh (Thitiya Jirapornsilp), who was Joe's actual best friend in junior high, but winds up reluctantly offering her services as cinematographer despite her initial plan being to expose Pae as a fraud.

It feels like this was the most fun version of the story for about five or ten minutes, right around the school assembly, when Pae shifts into full huckster mode, the other students falling for it and Bokeh joining up to make sure he doesn't screw it up. The cynicism of the premise is on full display, but writer/director Atta Hemwadee can't really sustain it; the movie shifts into "let's put on a show!" mode and a later twist just never sits right. It also doesn't help that Joe's award-winning story, while being useful in offering a lot of ways for Pae, Bokeh, and the AV club to shoot wacky things, feels mawkish and simplistic, something that may win an elementary school contest but not one for high-school seniors and not something that will make adults cry. People in the film keep saying it's great but it doesn't hold up when the audience hears it.

The heck of it is, the film clearly has the right folks in the leads. Anthony Buisseret is genuinely funny when playing Pae as a dumbass with an instinct for scheming and faking it until he makes it, giving the impression of someone less a monster than desperate enough to grab onto anything and figure out how to make it work later. Thitiya Jirapornsilp is a good foil for him as Bokeh, making her smart enough to realize her own faults as well as Pae's and both relishing the chance to sabotage him and to make a movie about her friend. Pisitpol Ekaphongpisit pops in and out of flashbacks as Joe, and does a good job of riding the line between being the pest Pae often saw him as an the earnest good friend of Bokeh.

Gags about amateur filmmaking dominate the middle section, and there's a fun sense of absurdity on the one hand and fondness for the scrappy improvisation. There's a certain stabbing at us older folks when Bokeh suggests doing an homage to the most famous scene in the first Mission: Impossible film and her classmate points out that the movie is old, from before they were born, but I guess it's fair (and I wouldn't exactly mind if Tenet becomes the zoomer equivalent). There's a stab at the characters of similar quality when it's revealed that they didn't know everything about Joe, but Hemwadee kind of gets into a mire playing it out.

Eventually, he's seemingly working hard to make everything retroactively a lot nicer, and while maybe that's the emotions he wanted to evoke, it's less entertaining to be assured that folks weren't that bad than to see them work to overcome their worst impulses. As a result, Not Friends has its moments, but can't quite lean into how it's often at its best when the characters are at their worst.


"Space Dumbs: The Fly"

* * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

Man, we're going on 60 years of people making the same jokes about Star Trek and 40 making the same jokes about The Next Generation, aren't we? It's kind of amazing that some folks are still howling when they get the reference.

But, hey, more power to the fact that people are still having fun with Star Trek decades later in Kazakhstan. We've seen these jokes before, but everybody's got to start making movies somewhere, and writer/director/co-star Alan Talkenov is a disconcertingly good match for Brent Spiner as Data.


O Velho e a Espada (The Old Man and the Demon Sword)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

There's kind of a weird tension to watching something like The Old Man and the Demon Sword because half its charm and reason for existence are the way it is a DIY labor of love, while in the other, some of the material is good enough that one might want to see it a bit more refined. If this were a professional production, you'd call it a bad movie, but if it had to make money, it would not exist, and the world might be a bit poorer for that.

It opens with a warrior monk wandering central Portugal with a sword in which a loquacious demon is trapped, discovering a town shielded by a force field that is overrun with demons, which apparently only the town drunk António (António da Luz) can see. The sword, of course, will end up in the hands of "Tohno", and there's a seemingly never-ending supply of monsters which only he can see that need to be dispatched before the sword is recharged enough to cut their way to the outside.

A lot of this is actually kind of cool if you like the stuff filmmaker Fabio Powers is drawing from. The monsters are often rendered with effects straight out of the video games of some prior decade, but some of the designs aren't bad at all; I particularly like the guys who are like a vantablack hole in the image but still give off an impression of unkempt furriness. The design of the sword is straight out of a baller anime, and there's some fun in how the filmmakers have clearly figured out how to get the eyeball in it to turn and blink and are going to do this in every damn shot, and voice actor Paulo Espirito Santo is great even if you don't speak a word of Portuguese. They love and own the cheese.

On what you may consider to be the other hand, though, António da Luz was not an actor, but a guy the director liked and wanted to put in a movie, more or less telling him to be himself and maybe improvise a little. This sometimes works, especially at the start - he's got this sensation of sadness and whimsy filtered through what seems to be a genuine bone tiredness that professionals don't always capture - he often feels undirected and like he's got the same few ideas to spew, and Powers never manages to turn conversations between his alcoholic screwup and the demon sword into something one can really build a film around.

Perhaps anticipating this, the film also ends on something that is weirdly meta and maybe too clever by half, winking so hard at the audience as to sprain something but doing it in such a way that it's not particularly satisfying no matter how you look at it. It can be seen as throwing away some of the fun fantasy, or raising the question about whether this sort of DIY film can be exploitative but not actually engaging with it. It doesn't quite play as cynical, but it also feels like walking away, not actually doing anything with what got the audience's interest.

It's a handmade underground thing, so it's going to be kind of rough. I'm glad I've seen it, and I'm glad Powers has this odd artifact that he made with a friend. It's a pure curiosity, but there's room for that.


Mash Ville

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

The listings for Mash Ville describe it as a Korean Western, but I don't really know if it scans as part of that genre, aside from there being a sense of rural isolation; it's too frantic and the themes don't exactly line up. It feels more like some of the meaner Coen Brothers movies, full of small-town nastiness and weird nihilistic violence, but only sporadically managing that sort of compulsive watchability.

It starts with two people in traditional dress murdering some farmers in what one would initially assume to be some sort of gangland assassination; the only survivor in the town, it seems, is Kong Hyun-man, and him quite by accident. In a nearby city, movie propmaster Jeong Yo-ji is drinking her breakfast, arguing with a producer about delivering a corpse dummy, unaware that another drunk woman, Moon Seo-in, has selected her trunk for a nice comfy place to lie down. Yo-ji rebuffs a waiter's attempts to sell her on a local moonshine, which liquor executive Park Won-jeon is seeking out to explain why his company's sales are so low in this specific area. He happens upon Joo Seo-jeong (Jeon Sin-hwan), not realizing that he's the distiller in question, working with his perpetually out-of-it half, impressively bearded-brothers (Park Jong-hwan & Park Sung-il). The bad news from them is that someone just died after drinking the latest batch, so they start heading to the next town over before the local law enforcement finds out. Because the brother accidentally buried his car keys with the body, they wind up carjacking Yo-ji, and those cult killers from the start are heading in the same direction.

This seems like it should be a lot of violent fun, and it often is: There's an art to the punctuation headfirst that filmmaker Hwang Wook seems to have mastered, the film by and large looks great, and there's a fun soundtrack. Each of the three main threads is a good candidate to be part of a movie like this, off-kilter enough to feel new but also not quite big enough to be the sole support for a feature on its own.

The trick is how you play the threads out and, more crucially, crash them together, and that's often just not very good. For every inspired idea like the screw-up brothers winding up in the middle of a weird death cult, there's two cases of really not having any idea of what to do with Seo-in after her unique introduction, or even Yo-ji. There should be some sort of surprising alchemy in play, but too often, these elements pass our bounce off each other. Even within a thread, there's seldom the sense that a couple characters bouncing of each other is particularly interesting or something you'd like to see more of. The best moment is probably Won-jeon waxing rhapsodic about his knowledge of spirits to Seo-jeong, who claims he just likes a bourbon with a cigar. It's good "we're in a movie and here to entertain you while increasing tension" talk that the film otherwise lacks.

Much of the cast is underused like that, but they handle their assignments well. Jeon Sin-hwan is the closest the ensemble has to a lead, giving the sense of someone with potential beyond small-time moonshining but never quite able to push himself in that direction. Park Jong-hwan anf Park Sung-il make a fun comic team. The folks playing Yo-ji, Won-jeon, and Hyun-man squeeze what they can from their scenes, and the killers feel both deeply weird and dangerous.

(If anybody wants to hook me up with a press kit or update some websites so I can credit people peppery, it would be appreciated!)

On top of never feeling like a Western, Mash Ville too often feels like a lesser version of the genres it's closer to: There's a good Coen-inspired movie or Pulp Fiction knockoff to be made with this material, but this all too often isn't it.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 26 July 2024 - 1 August 2024

Still in MTL, but whatever; the Marvel thing will still be playing when I get home.

• The big release is obviously Deadpool & Wolverine, with Ryan Reynolds welcoming Special Guest Star Hugh Jackman as a Wolverine from somewhere in the multiverse whom he tries to recruit to fight Cassandra Nova. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, The Embassy, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax 2D/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D/Spanish subs/Mandarin subs), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), Kendall Square, the Seaport (including RealD 3D/Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Imax 2D & 3D/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Imax 2D & 3D/Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Counterprogramming is The Fabulous Four, the latest comedy with a group of older women pulled back together after some time apart; this time it is Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph as bridesmaids for Bette Midler, their college friend. It's at Boston Common and Causeway Street.
  
  The Beast Within arrives at Boston Common for limited shows fresh from Fantasia; it stars Kit Harrington as a father whose lycanthropy is not the only thing straining his family.
  
  If you get up early - it is scheduled for 10:10am matinees, just least-effort four-walling - you can catch The Girl in the Pool at Fresh Pond; it stars Freddie Prinze Jr. as a family man who has to hide his mistress's corpse right before a surprise birthday party. Also in the credits: Monica Potter and Kevin Pollak.
  
  The Olympic Opening Ceremonies will be presented on-screen at Boston Common (Imax Xenon), South Bay (Imax Xenon), Assembly Row (Imax Laser) on Friday, with South Bay, Assembly Row presenting other events on regular screens there throughout the week. Fantasy comedy Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps (starring Greg Steinbruner & Tami Stronach but with a noteworthy set of guest stars/voice actors) plays Sunday and Tuesday at Boston Common. Migration is the matinee show at Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay Monday & Wednesday. Blackpink World Tour: Born Pink plays Boston Common, Assembly Row on Wednesday. There's a "Premiere Event" for The Duel at Boston Common, Assembly Row on Wednesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre gets maybe the best film from this year's Independent Film Festival Boston, Agnieszka Holland's absurd and tragic film about refugees pushed between Belarus and Poland Green Border.
  
  They also bring back Free LSD, which had a special screening last week, for midnight shows on Friday & Saturday; regular midnights are a 35mm print of Bride of Chucky on Friday and Jennifer's Body on Saturday. Monday's Big Screen Classic is Total Recall, the final "Godzilla vs the Coolidge" battle is Terror of Mechagodzilla on Tuesday - well, sort of, in that they will also be hauling a 35mm projector to the Greenway for an outdoor Science on Screen presentation of Godzilla 2000 - and Sean Wang will be present for Thursday night's screenings of IFFBoston alum Didi before it opens wide next Friday.
  
  Boston Jewish Film will be screening The World Is Not My Own at the Coolidge on Wednesday, with a post-screening conversation, but you have to go to BJF's site for ticketing, as opposed to the Coolidge's.
• The Brattle Theatre opens Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger for a limited run from Friday to Monday; the documentary has Martin Scorsese showing the audience what made the pair some of the most important directors in cinema. You can also see it illustrated with The Red Shoes, playing Friday & Sunday afternoons and Black Narcissus on Saturday. They also have I Saw the TV Glow for late-ish shows Friday to Sunday.
  
  The Columbia Musicals this week are big ones, with Funny Girl on Monday and Oliver! on Tuesday. Summer of Sofia continues with a 35mm print of Coppola's remake of The Beguiled on Wednesday while Cruel Summer offers a double feature of Sorcerer & Wake in Fright on Thursday.
• Tamil action movie Raayan opens at Apple Fresh Pond and Boston Common this weekend. Bad Newz is held over at both locations.
• Midnight Special at the The Somerville Theatre this Saturday is a 35mm print of They Live; Attack of the B-Movies on Sunday is a twin bill of Bride of the Gorilla & The Killer Shrews.
  
  The Capitol picks up Kinds of Kindness and Janet Planet as they give way to Deadpool at the Somerville. The summer vacation matinee this week is Shrek 2.
• The Seaport Selects show at The Seaport Alamo this weekend is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse. There's a preview of Kneecap with a livestreamed Q&A after on Monday, with '84 time capsule screenings of Blood Simple Monday and Beverly Hills Cop on Wednesday.
• Landmark Kendall Square is starting to do the surprise previews branded as "Landmark First Look", with the first Boston-area one on Monday. They also wrap the summer music series on Tuesday with Abba: The Movie
• The Boston French Film Festival continues at The Museum of Fine Arts with Little Girl Blue.(Friday), The Goldman Case (Friday), The Nature of Love (Saturday), The Taste of Things (Saturday), and All to Play For (Sunday).
• The Regent Theatre has a Music Movies & More show on Wednesday with documentary Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande.
• The Museum of Science has Twisters Friday and Saturday evenings into August.
• The Lexington Venue has Widow Clicquot, Touch, and Thelma and is open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens Dead Pool & Wolverine, holding over Widow Clicquot, Despicable Me 4, Thelma, and Inside Out 2.
  
  The Luna Theater has Robot Dreams (Friday/Saturday), Tuesday (Saturday), Janet Planet (Saturday), Suburbia (Sunday), and a Weirdo Wednesday Show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Deadpool & Wolverine, Twisters, Despicable Me 4, and Longlegs from Friday through Monday. The Friday Night Light show is Long Weekend, The Iron Giant plays Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and there's a Whodunnit Watch Party on Wednesday evening.
• Outdoor films on the Joe's Free Films calendar this week are Wonka (Friday at Boynton Yards), Elemental (Saturday at the Prudential Center), The Little Mermaid (Wednesday at Greene-Rose Heritage Park in Cambridge), The Goonies (Wednesday at the Charleston Navy Yard), Godzilla 2000 (Wednesday at the Greenway), Finding Dory (Thursday at Seven Hills Park), Frozen (Thursday at The LOT in Dorchester), and Home Alone (Thursday at Boston Landing).

I'm pretty sure that if a hole somehow develops in my Fantasia schedule this week, I'll do something else, but we're talking 25 or so movies here!

Customs Frontline

As happens at least once during the festival, I'm using an afternoon where I don't have anything to watch at Fantasia for... more Hong Kong action, in this case a movie which would have been at the festival 10 years ago, when Well Go was still dipping their toes into rapid North American releases (and convincing Chinese studios to let them) but now just jumps to North American theaters a couple weeks after playing China. Which I like! It's just unavoidably funny when it happens.

Also, compared to most places I go in Boston, the large soda wasn't quite as large and the nachos were enormous.

I would have liked to have seen and written this up Friday, but for a while Cineplex's site was only showing it playing one show late Wednesday, though they either corrected that or put more shows on. With Deadpool & Wolverine set to swallow every available screen, it probably won't last past Thursday in Montreal and I believe today is the last day to see it back home in Boston.


Hoi Gwaan Zin Sin (Customs Fromtline)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Cineplex Forum #21 (first-run, DCP)

I try not to be a person who splits hairs between "good" and "fun" movies; a movie which is fun has undoubtedly been executed well. Customs Frontline occasionally makes me reconsider that stance; it is, on balance, pretty darn fun, but it is also the sort of thing that leads to one shaking one's head, because what you can't recommend about it is pretty darn rough.

It opens with an incident on the high seas off the coast of Africa that sets two nations at war, with the mysterious Dr. Raw (Amanda Strang) appearing to sell arms to both sides. Soon, in Hong Kong, a Customs Service boat crewed by senior officer Cheung Wan-Nam (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau), Chow Ching-Lai (Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung), Ben (Argus Yeung), and Katie (Michelle Wai) will come upon a derelict vessel full of weapons, its captain leaving a dead crew behind. Suspicion that the weapons are Thai in origin brings a team from their intelligence service, Ying (Cya Liu Yase) and Mark (James Kazama). It's highly fraught behind the scenes, as well - Lai used to date Katie, who is now engaged to another man; Cheung has lagged behind his classmates in promotions, likely due in part to dealing with clinical depression and bipolar syndrome, although he has found a loving partner in Athena Siu (Karena Lam Ka-Yan), the head of the agency's Intelligence & Investigations division; Siu and Cheung's boss Kwok Chi-Kung (Francis Ng Chun-Yu) are up for the same promotion. When Lai and Ying discover that the arms moving through Hong Kong are likely being abetted by someone in the agency, that information winds up taking circuitous routes.

With all this going on, the movie is pretty darn good in the way that matters most, in that there are three or four action sequences good enough to get your attention, from Nicolas Tse sparring with a guy who insists on shooting holes in the the inflatable boat they're standing in to Nicolas Tse fighting a small army inside a cargo shop like Jet Li did in Once Upon a Time in China, except that it's under power and destroying piers in Hong Kong Harbor. Tse is credited with fight choreography right alongside "starring" in the opening titles (Alan Ng Wing-Lun, somewhat later), and he's definitely showing off a bit, working on a number of unstable surfaces and the like. Even in the car chases and to a lesser extent the shootouts, it's the sort of action you admire for its invention rather than the sheer amount of firepower (which is substantial).

As for the rest, well, it sort of feels like director Herman Yau and writer Erica Li are too committed to wrecking stuff and melodrama to do the sort of pure propaganda of Dante Lee's "Operation" movies, which this easily could have become. On the other hand, the narrative around its cops with mental health problems is not great, to put it mildly, maybe even bordering on dangerously misinformed for all I know. Jacky Cheung, especially, is chewing all the scenery the the filmmakers serve him at times, kind of putting the lie to lines about how sometimes mental illness is hard to see, and Nicholas Tse's vacillations between being all-business and uncontrollably emotional are more than a bit weird.

The plot, with the smugglers and their abetters, gets kind of messy as well, with a side trip to Africa and new characters introduced to be quickly killed off. It feels a bit like killing time and taking the longest route from Raw's men stealing something in Hong Kong to trying to smuggle it out. It's hardly fatal, but it's the sort of thing viewers notice rather than rolle with, making them impatient to get back to the good stuff rather than also drawing them into this part of the movie.

Good punches are thrown and vehicles are wrecked in a satisfying enough manner to be worth the price of a ticket. It's not quite old-school-worthy HK action, but it's closer than I expected.

Fantasia 2024.03: Anime no Bento 2024, "The Future Is Now", Brave Citizen, and Mononoke the Movie

First guest of the day is Naoki Arata (center), whose "The True Shape of a Daisy" is part of the Anime no bento" program. It's a nifty looking film that programmer Rupert Bottenberg found interesting because it was ripped in European folk tales rather than Japanese mythology, to which she replied that a lot of the finding for the film came from a UK-based program, so…

Also on hand were the team from "The Future Is Now" (with programmer Steven Lee on the left): Writer/director/producer Jung Jong-min, actor Koo Jaho, and producer/cinematographer Park Wonjo. They had been at Fantasia last year with a horror short and were eager to come back. They've got some slick chops, so maybe they'll eventually come back with a feature.

After Mononoke the Movie - which has nothing to do with Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, which threw me when programmer Rupert Bottenberg showed a teaser last year (he aims to end the animation section of each festival by showing something he hopes to program at the next, which I suppose is kind of feasible considering that these things gestate long enough that festivals can be in contact early) - I had intended to catch Shelby Oaks, but it was a case where I walked out of the theater and there was already a sizable line, and there's no guarantee with a badge, especially when everyone wants to see it with the director and executive producer and a bunch of other folks on hand.

Ah, well. Neon has picked it up so it will probably play Boston later this year. I hadn't really eaten all day anyway, so it was kind of a relief to go across the street to a burger shop that just happened to be have the Red Sox game on.

Today's plan: The Avenging Eagle, International Science-Fiction Short Films, Ghost Cat Anzu, The Old Man and the Demon Sword, and Mash Ville.


"First Line"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Wrote what you know, they say, so this short's creator Tina gives the audience a story of a young animator who is running late with the segment he's been assigned but is nevertheless given a crucial final sequence on a tight deadline by the project's mercurial director.

It's a bit of a love letter to the medium, of course, with careful attention paid to how the work gets done, the flights of fancy possible, and the modest pencil-on-paper origins of what the audience is seeing. What's more intriguing, though, is the way she examines the push and pull of it. People like Mito get hired because they've got talent and creativity and are then pushed into a system that subordinates this to someone else's vision. How do you work as a member of the team but still stand out?

I'm not sure the film really answers this, but it at least makes me think of the question, and certainly feels genuine enough around that.


"Maidens of the Ripples"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

I feel like this is far from the first time that I've watched an animated short from Japan where two girls draw closer because nobody else understood that they were "different" and had it not be about being gay but (I guess) depressed, to the extent that I wonder if the one is a euphemism for the other in Japan.

At any rate, this one has a teacher giving the class president, Haruka Arima, printouts for frequently-absent Rin Takitani, and while Haruka is initially shocked at how beautiful Rin is with her dyed-blonde hair, she soon finds these times meeting her the best part of her day. They've got more in common than they think, especially as Haruka talks about how she wasn't always a focused, organized student, and in fact that may be a facade that is wearing down.

The story here is the sort I often have trouble relating to, with its teens so cognizant of how heavy everything is and how much emotion they are investing in small things, but I love the art here: Watercolor backgrounds for what appears to be a harbor town and human figures with a pleasing sketchiness, not invested with much in the way of excess movement but not unnaturally still. Creator Michiko Soma knows we're going to be looking at the hair right away and does good storytelling with it: Rin initially appears ethereal and fragile despite calling it her "golden armor" and it feels like an early warning for Haruka about to break down as it gets a bit out of control.


"Yoruwohiraite" ("The True Shape of a Daisy")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

This is the first film in the package that feels kind of like a proof-of-concept, with director Naoki Arata introducing some characters and hinting at world-building but stopping short of its characters actually having an adventure. It's one that looks like it could lead to something, though, with "Child of the Night" Nycteris following a firefly through a mysterious door to find a bright, colorful valley and making friends with the boy there, before being pulled back home where her mother (I believe; the relationship is never specified) scolds her.

The story could use a bit more detail - maybe Arata will have the chance to expand it sometime - but mood is nailed very well, while keeping things somewhat mysterious. The nighttime and daylight worlds look very different but Nycteris doesn't look like something pasted onto the wrong background when brought into the daylight, even though the halo around her new friend becomes overpowering to her as the sun fully rises, the world seeming to become a van Gogh-like riot of color. There's a sort of nervy uncertainty in the scenes with her mother, even as she radiates authority; is she a giantess or is Nycteris small, or is Arata exaggerating for effect?

It's a nifty start; I hope we can see more adventures with them.


"Kamigoroshi: Prologue"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Another movie about animators, although rather than the nervous fellow working on one small sequence of "First Line", "Kamigoroshi" gives us a capricious god: A wolf-man who takes the figure of a generic girl, then refines her into the figure of a black-clad teenager, breathing memories into her and placing her in a model city. The only trouble is, this city is meant to be the setting for a sci-fi/horror epic, with something above pulling the souls from the other figures, while elsewhere, freedom fighters are breaking out of the model and into the workshop.

Creation and destruction go hand-in-hand with this sort of tactile animation, and really any form of storytelling, as the things you make will eventually be undone, or have violence done to them, even if you like them and would wish them well in real life, and at least in this prologue, Niho Tomoyuki seems enjoyably unrepentant, having his fox-god scoop up his attackers and use their clay to seal the holes they've made, and there's something kind of interesting about how, while he apparently struggles with rebellious characters, other parts of the story go on, which is certainly what the writing process feels like at times.

He does it in snappy, fast-paced fashion, too; while there's a little time given up front to him crafting the heroine, once the camera moves inside the city, there are several things happening at once without dialogue to explain it. He's great at using visual shorthand like the breathing life into his doll segment, and the escape from the model city is nifty for how it uses images often played for laughs as an adventure that quickly veers into horror. I don't know if this pace can be kept up for a full feature, but I'm certainly intrigued.


"Okuninushi and Sukunabikona"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Is there a more exciting logo to pop up before a film, whether a feature or, in this case, a sort of micro-short, than that of Science Saru? There's a gleefully cartoony chaos to their work even when they are tackling heavier themes, and "Okuninushi and Sukunabikona" is not them doing that, as it features the two title characters, gods in some local pantheon, making a goofy bet while on a walk. It's silly, sure, but it's also really good character work, sketching these two quickly enough to sell a gag beyond just what's universal. Quality cartooning.


"String Dance" ("Roots") from the film Taisu

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Made for another anthology (TAISU) which is apparently not far off, "String Dance" introduces us first to an elfin girl, seemingly alone in a world where trees connect in a wild tangle, north, south, up, and down, living a carefree life flying with her giant bird Mau, before shifting the scene to a castle, where Princess Tesin laments how her father the king has shrunken from the world since the death of the queen. Somehow, a pair of flowers in their respective homes serves as a telephone, and the two become confidantes. Her new friend encourages Tesin to take a stronger leadership position herself, but her city-state is at war, and the attackers…

Of the shorts in the package, this is the one most obviously done with digital tools, and it's got what seems like it must be a deliberately plastic realism at this late date; it reminds me a bit of French comic artist Fred Beltran when he started using those tools later in his career: Uncannily smooth yet nevertheless solid, somehow heightening the sense of depth and the inhumanity of war. For all that it helps to create impressive imagery, it doesn't harm the character work at all; both protagonists are given heightened personality and voice work, but it works, even as their friendship leads to tragedy because they don't know the full story.

That full story is somewhat elided, not just in terms of the audience not getting the full background but in how there's a bit of a fast forward that one might not realize until after the fact (this style is maybe not ideal for showing aging). There's also a reincarnation angle that isn't necessarily extraneous - I can see where filmmaker Shuhei Morita is maybe trying to demonstrate the bond between these two despite everything - but it's maybe one thing too much in a short that doesn't have a lot of time to explain.


Mecha-Ude (Mechanical Arms) Episode 1

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Watching something like Mecha-Ude, I kind of wish I had more time for anime and manga, or that the likes of this had been more available in my small town when I was a kid. It's a delightfully dotty sort of premise - there are apparently alien robots that take the form of mechanical arms that can fuse with humans, although it's kept pretty hush-hush, and when young ARMS agent Aki Murasame (voice of Yu Shimamura) tries to liberate one from a lab, it winds up lost, only to be found my mostly-good-hearted teenager Hikaru Amatsuga (voice Toshiyuki Toyonaga). They connect, but it turns out his new hand (voice of Tomokazu Sugita) is amnesiac and pacifistic, which does not necessarily help with two secret agencies after them, culminating in Aki being placed undercover in Hikaru's school.

That's close to the plot of the whole first episode screened, but it's the cheeky attitude that feels like it will be the real fun here, with Hikaru's general decency tending to include a bunch of hand-wringing about whether something is a good idea or if he's being selfish, contrasted with Aki's jaded pragmatism. There's room for a sort of whimsical cartooniness to "Alma", the big ol' hand Hikaru gets saddled with, compared to the "cooler" snakelike arms others are wearing. We get hints of fun supporting casts and various subplots and conflicts, enough to see that things will probably get more serious, eventually. The animation is slick and the fights nicely kinetic.

Nine-year-old me would have absolutely eaten this up; fifty-year-old me is not going to look to see what streaming service this is on because once you start following one show, there's a million others and I've already got more pop culture on my shelves and Roku than I can get to. I'm sure the audience it's meant for will have a blast, though.


"The Future Is Now"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

At some point, between writing "The Future Is Now' and it premiering at Fantasia, the idea of a big cryptocurrency heist as a motivator in this sort of action/adventure flick went from feeling coolly futuristic to an instant anachronism, and it does something to this short's vibe that I can't quite put my finger on. It's already sort of pushing through on excitement and enthusiasm, only now it's slightly misdirected. The story has Jaho finally being given a tip that will allow him to track down former friend Paul after he stole a fortune in crypto from him a year ago, but the other partner he had expected to help has moved on while the underworld figure that loaned Jaho the money needed for this crypto play back then is ready to move in on both men. I suppose you could substitute any Macguffin, but we're at a spot right now where anything techy enough to make this seem futuristic seems to have an expiration date.

That doesn't really matter, I suppose; the point of the film is the vibe. There's some pretty slick camerawork and well-communicated speed as Jaho drives through the city, with the neon colors popping and most of the story being told in phone calls. It's not hard to see Jaho as a guy with a lot of online contacts but maybe in over his head trying to actually accomplish something on the street. It's rough at spots - there's enough talk to make you aware that the slick veneer is covering a relative dearth of action - and it doesn't quite make up for the could-be-worse-but-could-be-better acting in a way that makes Jaho and Paul reconnecting work.

For a semi-homemade film - the on-screen and behind-the-camera talent appear to be the same folks - "The Future Is Now" is polished and energetic. It could probably be better with a cast that's not also trying to set light levels and handle blocking.


Yonggamhan simin (Brave Citizen)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I can't really argue that Brave Citizen doesn't commit to the bit, but I can't help but wish it had gone further. Maybe the filmmakers couldn't because they had to thread a certain needle - there have been enough stories and films out of Korea about teachers lashing out at students or using corporal punishment that the filmmakers don't want to be accused of Being In Favor Of That - or maybe I'm just imagining that, but this is a film that does okay for itself being moderately weird when it actually needs to be crazy.

Mooyoung High, we are told, has been recognized as an Exemplary Anti-Bullying School for two years running, but that's a facade - those two years line up with rich kid Han Su-Kang (Lee Jun-young) being suspended, and he's a terror, not just making other kids' lives miserable but avoiding accountability because his parents are rich, connected with the police and prosecutors, and on the school board. His current favorite target is Go Jin-hyung (Park Jung-woo), a good kid being raised by his street-vendor granny. Han is obviously not in the ethics class taught by So Si-min (Shin Hye-sun), a new teacher on a three-month contract hoping to latch on permanently and advised not to make waves. And she tries, but she's also a former rising star in boxing who has also trained in taekwondo and hopkaido, and probably isn't as different from her father and coach who once won a "Brave Citizen" award for standing up to street crime as she'd like to think, and the masks her father keeps in his gym for his young students does offer some anonymity.

I appreciate the filmmakers pointing out that the Su-kang was suspended for two years and this isn't a minor, because it means one can watch the film without being uneasy about his teacher eventually beating the shit out of him, as must happen because otherwise why are you paying for a ticket. On the other hand, it also means getting very impatient to see Si-min beat the shit out of him. It also kind of messed with the structure of the movie; this feels like the sort of film (or comic, as it's based on a webtoon) where the heroine climbs a ladder to get to the final boss, but what's she going to do, beat up a bunch of kids? So you get a kind of static situation until things jump from masked vigilante to pro wrestling tropes (as they kind of have to, because the resolution can't happen somewhere off in the background). It never quite feels right, and the movie is a bit long to have relatively little happening to move things forward.

Maybe if it had been zanier for longer? The filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of Si-min looking the part of a sunny, idealistic young teacher who is actually a skilled martial artist with anger issues in the start, but ease back on that contrast later. It's hilarious, though, and every time the filmmakers go big with introducing a character or showing student reaction, they hit on something that at least kind of works. It's tough to sustain that when you also want to have major stakes and treat a real-life issue with respect, I suppose, but you're already having a teacher pummel a student; might as well stay in that sort of obviously exaggerated zone.

The fun of it is that Shin Hye-sun has a good enough handle that SI-min never seems to be putting on a facade - she genuinely seems cheerful and like someone who has the right attitude to be a teacher with obvious enthusiasm and empathy, just apparently not squeamish about using violence to deal with people who are making things worse for everyone. She's kind of interesting even as the other actors are mostly playing types, although I suspect that the way they jump from terror to poorly-contained glee when Su-kang starts getting a little of what's coming to them helps make Shin's performance work, because it feels like human nature and she's just able to express it more actively.

That active expression (by which I mean fighting) is okay, although as mentioned, one wishes there was a bit more of it, because it's almost all quick encounters between Si-min and Su-kang which can't really have a definitive ending. The final match is a little more pro-wrestling than MMA, which might be a bit of a disappointment, but there's some good storytelling in it as Si-min can't exactly take Su-kang apart because he is bigger and more muscular but she and everybody watching realize that he's probably never been up against someone who knows what they're doing and isn't afraid of upsetting him or his family before.

It works well enough, and when it leans into how the audience knows they shouldn't be in favor of something but enjoys it anyway, it's great fun. It could just use a bit more of that.


Gekijouban Mononoke Karakasa (Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain aka Mononoke the Movie: Paper Umbrella)

Stars? I dunno
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

I'm not entirely certain what it is that I just watched but I'm glad that I got to see it on the big screen with good sound. It is some amazing animation outside the usual mold and, hey, I knew coming in that this was a spin-off from a cult show and if I didn't get caught up beforehand, that's on me.

Near as I can tell, the Medicine Seller (voice of Hiroshi Kamiya) wanders around feudal Japan looking to slay demons ("mononoke"), but his Exorcism Sword will only unsheathe if he knows the Form, Truth, and Reason that connect them. His latest target is Ooku, a palace that only women are allowed to enter, which has some strange omens about it: A parade normally scheduled to occur before a princess gives birth has been mysteriously delayed, and there are rumors that someone has left the palace unrecognizable. As he arrives, two young women arrive for their first day as servant girls there: Asa (voice of Tomoyo Kurosawa), a serious girl who wishes to be a scribe, and Kame (Aoi Yuki), bubblier and taken with the glamor of Ooku, which she has obsessively studied as a true fan, and immediately find themselves involved in things far more sinister than they anticipated.

I'm going to have to assume that phantom in the Rain has the basic shape of an episode from the Mononoke series, just writ larger and with fancier effects work, because while there's a sort of token effort to say "I've got to do A, B, and C", it feels more like a reminder for folks who haven't watched it since it premiered in 2007 than exposition for newcomers. Maybe there's material from the larger world that informs what's going on; there certainly seem to be a few characters on the outskirts of the narrative. Otherwise, though, it is throwing a lot at the audience and presuming we know how it fits together.

Even without that knowledge, though, a viewer can get caught up. The design of everything is great, very reminiscent of traditional woodcut illustrations, and indeed, you can see grain behind the image, which sometimes ironically makes everything look even less solid, like a floor is actually a pool until someone steps on it. There are wisps that maintain shape and sparks that indicate constant and momentary smells and tastes, and an unnerving tendency to draw eyes as unblinking pupils. This all stands beside psychedelic imagery that mixes better than one might think - the evils being committed are ancient and incomprehensible.

Writer/director Kenji Nakamura does neat things with the pacing, too, sometimes lingering just long enough to make one wonder about something, other times making things eerie with a bunch of quick cuts or ending sequences by slamming closet doors shut on them. Action is fast and almost overwhelming as the traditional imagery is enhanced by digital 3-D renderings and anachronistic electric guitars show up on the soundtrack.

The folks around me who were familiar with the property seemed to love it. It's probably a bit of an acquired taste and a bit of work if you haven't previously done that acquisition, but unlike a lot of anime films picked up from something that ended a while back (such as Rebuild of Evangelion), it never gave me the sensation of being something only for a niche audience that doesn't include me.

Fantasia 2024.02: Confession '24 and The Count of Monte Cristo '24

I'm not going to reference Fantasia vs Fantasia here every time I hit one of its bits other than to say that, at a certain point, I was considering catching The A-Frame. Glad for what I got, but I hope the other one comes across my path sometime.

Anyway… No guests today, and I did not think to take a photo of the peri-peri poutine I wolfed down as local color. So on to the films, which make an interesting double feature because they somehow have similar pacing issues despite one being very short (76 minutes) and the other being fairly long (178 minutes).

Today's plan: Anime no Benton 2024, Brave Citizen, Mononoke the Movie, and Shelby Oaks


Kokuhaku Confession (Confession '24)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

The film takes a solid tight-space thriller premise as you can get and wrings everything it can out of it and then - maybe because it's so pared down that it needs to be stretched out - doesn't quite know when to stop. There was an "oh come on!" from the audience and the guy wasn't wrong, but it's hardly the first horror movie that has tried to get a couple different endings in, and by the time it gets there, it's done pretty well.

It opens pretty much in media res: Mountaineers Asai Keisuke (Toma Ikuta) and Ryu Ji-yong (Yang Ik-joon) are on their annual trek up the mountain where their friend Nishida Sayuri (Nao Honda) disappeared during their senior year of college 16 years ago, but a storm has swept in and Ji-Yong 's leg is injured. As he urges Asai to save himself, he confesses that he killed Sayuri. It turns out that a cabin offering shelter is very near, and Asai is able to save Ji-Yong, but it's one thing to get something off your chest when you think there are no more consequences, and quite another when it looks like you now have a life to spend in prison.

The set-up is good enough that a filmmaker doesn't necessarily have to get too fancy here. Director/co-writer Nobuhiro Yamashita points out that the pair have left their packs behind, lets the audience get know the cabin where they will spend the rest of the movie, then exploits how familiar the space is afterward. He hurts the pair enough to wince, and to keep things from resolving too quickly - Ji-Yong is hobbled and Asai is somewhat snow-blinded - but not so much that they're seeming to survive fatal injuries so often that the fight doesn't mean anything. It's kind of fun seeing this the day after another film the director has in the festival, since Swimming in a Sand Pool is as far as can be from this, genre-wise, and he's clearly having fun doing all the horror things: There are a few good jump scares, axes coming through walls, and nasty-looking tumbles. It's urgent enough that one isn't necessarily worried about much beyond the present moment, although there is something simmering.

It gives the small cast something to do beyond the physical, at least, with Yang Ik-joon getting to go wild, ping-ponging between sorrow, paranoia, and crazed violence, getting to chew scenery both as he attempts to manipulate his way to safety and eliminate the one person who can now rat on him. Toma Ikuta turns in solid work as Asai, handling the running and climbing and having his eyes bug as an axe nearly splits his head with aplomb, and adding in just enough twitchy nervousness to make later revelations about the relationship between Asai and Sayuri not come out of nowhere.

It's a bit surprising that Nao Honda has what amounts to an extended, almost wordless cameo, enough to make me wonder if there were more flashback scenes or appearances of Sayuri as a ghost or hallucination at some point, but decided that the core of the film was the two men in the cabin with everything else a distraction. That knocked it down to 76 minutes, including some very slow-walked credits, and while I appreciate that there's not padding throughout, the finale does feel less like cool twists than "how we get to feature length". You risk deflating everything that the audience enjoyed this way, but it never really falls apart.

Get past the one groaner moment, which they at least use a bit better than most, and you're left with a pretty darn good duel movie (maybe the best since 2LDK) that doesn't water itself down to hit a certain runtime.


Le comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo '24)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

This adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo likely doesn't set a record for the use of "X Years Later" intertitles, even among movies where it's not a gag, but it does lead to some thoughts about how such things are deployed, and how maybe an adaptation like this - grand enough that it can streamline Alexandre Dumas's novel less than others - highlights just what a tricky thing "X Years Later" is in a movie.

It starts in 1815, with merchant sailor Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney) rescuing a woman who will only give him the name of Angèle (Adèle Simphal) from a sinking ship. It angers the ship's captain, Danglars (Patrick Mille) but impresses the owner Morrel (Bruno Raffaelli), who fires Danglars and installs Edmond as the ship's new captain. His future set, Edmond proposes to his love Mercédès Herrera (Anaïs Demoustier), a cousin of the family that his father serves and which sponsored him at the Naval Academy, unaware that its scion and his friend, Fernand de Morcef (Bastien Bouillon) also loves her. He is also unaware that Angèle was loyal to the exiled Napoleon, and Danglars intercepted a letter, which he uses to frame Edmond as the same, and Fernand sees the chance to be rid of a rival by refusing to vouch for him to prosecutor Gérard de Villefort (Laurent Lafitte). Edmond is imprisoned for four years before he encounters Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), who has been patiently digging an escape tunnel for six, and who gives him the secret location of the treasure of the Knights Templar on the isle of Monte Cristo, a treasure that will allow him to pose as the fabulously wealthy Count. Recruiting Angèle's hidden son Andre (Julien De Saint Jean) and Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), the daughter of one of Fernand's foes, he arrives in Paris, intent on destroying the three men who betrayed him, although his thirst for vengeance may blind him to how Albert (Vassili Schneider), the son of Fernand & Mercédès he has Haydée seduce, is an innocent she may find herself not hating.

It's a grand story spanning twenty years adapted into a movie just a hair under three hours, and the first half especially is an absolutely fantastic presentation of the basic premise which everyone knows: It opens with a terrific scene of swashbuckling maritime adventure, builds Edmond up as a tremendously likable hero even as it makes him blind to the developing resentments in a way that doesn't scan as foolish hubris, then knocks it all over and presents the Chateau d'Ilf prison as a specially dehumanizing sort of hell to escape. It's terrific right up to the point where Edmond discovers the treasure.

And then, after 4 years/6 years/1 year later, it starts to feel like filmmakers Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte (who also wrote last year's two-part The Three Musketeers adaptation) are not just jumping past the repetitive parts, but things of real import. In particular, so much of the second half of the movie rests on Haydée that her just appearing in the story, alternately fully-formed and enigmatic, makes the film wobbly in a way that the first half was too singularly focused to be. de La Patellière & Delaporte have to give exposition rather than show Edmond discovering what has happened to his former friends and adversaries while he was imprisoned and/or creating his new persona, and there are missed opportunities to make him more tragic.

It picks up as Edmond's plans reach their climaxes, at least, in large part because Pierre Niney is a pretty great Count. He sells the young and earnest Edmond and lets the audience see what remains of him as time turns him hard and vengeful, the seed of a sort of self-delusion that allows him to think he is delivering justice rather than revenge. There's something similar going on with Anaïs Demoustier, who makes the audience believe in how the carefree girl of the start grows into a woman wise enough to never lose track of who she was before. And while the way the story is built demands Anamaria Vartolomei fill in a fair amount vai her portrayal of Haydée, she up for it, making her a young woman who has maybe not completely settled into her final form despite events that forge her similar to those of Edmond, intelligent and observant enough to be his conscience if he'd let her, with enough charisma on top of her beauty to pull every scene she's in in her direction. It's a well-cast film from top to bottom, but those three are the ones that make the whole thing work.

The film also looks and sounds amazing, with a bombastic score by Jérôme Rebotier which keeps the energy up rather than exhausting the audience over 178 minutes. There's a great sense of location, especially in the first half, as the ship, Marseilles, the manor, and the prison all feel like they represent something formative for Edmond, and there's grandeur and scale throughout. The two best action pieces are on either end - the underwater rescue feels like the middle of dangerous seas despite likely being a lot of digital effects, and the final swordfight between Edmond and Fernand is a great balance between elegant fencing technique and how people actually trying to kill each other with swords will make it something ugly.

I wonder, a bit, if this might have worked better as a television or streaming series, where every break is an opportunity to pause and reset rather than worry about what one has been missing. There's a whole movie's worth of entertainment here, though, and it may be a bit greedy to ask for more.

Fantasia 2024.01: Swimming in a Sand Pool, "98%", and 4pm

So here's the thing, or at least a thing, about coming up to Montreal for the full length of the Fantasia International Film Festival: Booking a stay for that long might mean you wind up in a got-a-bed-and-shower-and-that's-good-enough hotel in a neighborhood with a lot of empty storefronts (which is every neighborhood these days), when you look out the window, there's art.

Anyway, I got here in plenty of time and picked up a badge, but probably should have bought a ticket for opening night film Bookworm earlier, but that's on me. It's okay; writer/director Ant Timpson has a lot of friends and fans at the festival and I'm sure the seat went to someone who was really psyched to see it. It gave me a little time to eat, lay in a few supplies, and then catch Swimming in a Sand Pool. That'll leave a hole in the schedule later, but okay.

Then it was across the street for 4pm.

Not the stars of 4pm, but programmer Steven Lee with "98%" director Byun Changwoo and star Park Yun. I might have liked to hear them talk about their film a bit more - I think a little bit might get lost in translation - but it's kind of rare for shorts to get that sort of post-film focus, even if it weren't a long short before a long-ish film that started late because, as mentioned, Ant Timpson has a lot of friends and fans and the previous film in the theater ran long.

Today's plan is to see if there's any place around here playing Customs Frontline and then live in Hall for the short feature Confession and the long feature The Count of Monte Cristo.


Swimming in a Sand Pool

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Swimming in a Sand Pool has Interesting pedigree, with the director of Linda Linda Linda taking on a script adapted from a teenage girl's school play, which feels like it should probably hit with more impact than it does for me. Obviously, teenage girls might feel differently. Japanese teen girls, doubly so.

It has four teenage girls arriving at their school swimming pool, drained with sand on the bottom. Arriving first, Miku (Reina Nakayoshi) puts earbuds in and practices and Awa dance on one of the lane markers; she's soon joined by Chizuru (Mikuri Kiyota), star of the girls' swim team and choosing to lay on her stomach and practice her strokes rather than go cheer the boys' team on at Nationals. Neither wants the other to watch what they're doing. They're joined by Kokoro (Saki Hamao), focused on beauty and boys, and Yui (Sumire Hanaoka), the outgoing senior captain of the swim team. PE teacher Ms. Yamamoto has brought Chizuru and Kokoro here during summer vacation to have them sweep the dirt out of it as a way to make up the swimming class they skipped, retreating to a classroom as the girls get more talking that sweeping done.

The "kids hanging out" genre is a venerable one, and this one is certainly interesting for how (original?) writer Nakata Yumeka was a student when writing it, which likely cuts down any "40-year-old man trying to capture how 15-year-old girls talk" complaints. Still, it's mostly a film that seems content to bounce these young women off each other, hinting a bit at connections to one another and an offscreen boy, but eventually building to a really good line and a pretty good speech, such that it eventually gives the impression of the rest of the movie being reverse-engineered to get to those specific lines as much as feeling like where these characters go. It ends up being about the idea of girlhood but not so much about these girls.

I like the performances, and how the casting and the body language captures what these girls represent and what we know about them; for all this is still very much a play with more people talking rather than doing, there's palpable physicality to it. Reina Nakayoshi's Miku has a dancer's grace and the sort of body insecurity that goes with it, there's physical strength but social awkwardness to Mikuri Kiyota's jock, and a confidence tinged with hostility to Saki Hamao's Kokoro. These girls are all dealing with powerful emotions but very seldom become clichés of teenagers who are just constantly overpowered by their hormones, a sense that they've started figuring out who they are but are also just starting to figure out how being women affects that.

The story may have started life as a high-school play - you can see the convention of the individual entrances in the first act once you know what to look for, and a kind of clunky bit of explanation or two toward the end - but that likely gives Yamashita a fair amount of room to create it as a movie, playing around with what's going on above the pool and within it, occasionally going afield to see what the other girls are doing as they leave others to have one-on-ones. One thing I'm curious about is the sound design, where you hear the baseball team practicing in the adjacent athletic field more or less constantly throughout (the dust they kick up is why the pool needs to be swept) and it's a nifty sort of metaphor for how boys are becoming this insistent background noise in a teenage girl's head even before the film makes it explicit.

There's enough going on that I wonder if the film might have been stronger with a different translation; it's got some abrupt transitions and "now we're going to talk about gender" bits that don't quite play well in subtitles, enough to make one wonder if underlining those points is giving others short shrift. Oh, and I kid, but minus a couple points for how it looks like none of them have ever swept a floor in their lives, though. I feel like even the surliest teen is going to accidentally clear more dirt just leaning on their brooms.


"98%"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

"98%" is the type of short film you get when a horror fan with strong passions gets behind the camera: Earnest, passionate, and happy to use some nasty violence to make its point, but maybe needing a little filling out. Like the idea, like the enthusiasm, not entirely sure this is the best way to put them together.

It opens with the uncomfortable, to say the least, end of some sort of video shoot, with ringleader Jung-min (Joo Young Woo) taunting one of the disabled participants the she's just made him able to do more, before cutting to him about to shoot another one, expecting to pick one person up but instead seeing Eunhye (Park Yun), who isn't visible handicapped - she's a knockout, actually - but who does have some pretty severe hearing loss. So he shifts the sort of exploitation he's planning, but soon finds that it's not wise to try and get Eunhye to do something she doesn't want.

When you start to break "98%" down and parse it, it's easy to come out with "well, that's problematic" as a take-away, but that's not really it's issue - horror is supposed to be problematic, pushing into extreme cases where, yes, the disabled often have to debase themselves and sacrifice their dignity to survive and their revenge is awful but viscerally satisfying. I don't know that what is done to Jung-min feels right, even emotionally, but it doesn't have to. It probably also doesn't matter that the tone and structure of it has issues - maybe it does better without a priming bit of violence in the beginning? - or that it's the most conventionally attractive that gets to fight back. It hangs together well enough, but it's maybe messy in enough ways to nudge past "horror is allowed to be messy".


4PM

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There's an early temptation to look for something that will make 4pm more complicated or twistedly rational than it is, but the filmmakers are often able to resist it so that what twists are there remain simple, enough that I suspect a second viewing would not actually change its weird, darkly comic pleasures as it usually does. The movie is what it means to be, and that's plenty in this case.

Professor Jeong-in (Oh Dal-soo) and his wife Hyeon-sook (Jang Young-nam) are not quite ready to retire, but they're maybe trying it on for size with Jeong-in's one-year sabbatical, having bought a house in the country on the water and found the place suits them. Intending to be neighborly, they attempt to introduce themselves to the doctor who lives next door, Yook-nam (Kim Hong-pa), a cardiologist who mostly does house calls rather than working out of an office. He's not home when they call, so they leave a note asking him to visit any time, which he does at 4pm the next day. It's weird and uncomfortable for the newcomers, though, as he tersely answers questions, imposes on their hospitality, and occasionally just stares ahead saying nothing until he leaves abruptly at 6pm. Then, the next day, he does it again. And again. What game could he possibly be playing?

And while the source material for this Korean movie comes from Belgium - a novel by Amélie Nothomb adapted for the screen by Kim Hae-gon - it's hard not to think of Poe when watching it as Jeong-in's narration, ready to embrace the protagonist's worst impulses, certainly makes it feel like a cousin to "The Tell-Tale Heart", a man talking himself into murder. There's something more to it, though: It's hard not to get the sense that this Kim and director "Jay" Song Jeong-woo are examining the fragility of the social contract: Yook-man breaks it by being singularly, deliberately unreasonable, and Jeong-in, an intelligent and urbane person, doesn't exactly know what to do with that. He can't bring himself to break social norms in response, so he tries to outsmart Yook-nam, politely laying verbal trap that should either get Yook-nam to respond like a reasonable person or disengage in defeat, immediately considering escalation to violence. Yook-nam, meanwhile, knows that Jeong-in intends to be reasonable, and his ability to not be bound by that lets him keep pushing. It's a tight little microcosm of a lot of confrontations today, where bullies exploit that most people do not want to be bullies.

Not that Jeong-in is entirely or even primarily a victim here; the filmmakers aren't exactly being subtle by showing him reading a book titled "The Infinitely Evil Nature of Man" (or maybe they are, given that the title is in English). Perhaps there's something inherent and inevitable about where Jeong winds up trying to go; he's got the inner monologue of someone quite willing to treat this sort of thing as inevitable in the sort of way that doesn't necessarily include himself until he must. He constructs the narrative that makes him the least guilty, with the sort of sophistry that half-convinces.

It works in part because what's going on is so absurd; the film is constructed to let one laugh at the audacity of Yook-nam's bad behavior and the stumbling awkwardness of Jeong-in and Hyeon-sook responding to it, and the filmmakers and cast tend to sell it as flummoxing rather than cringe. Kim Hong-pa gives Yook-nam a wily boundary-pushing energy that feels like it could be innocent fun until it veers hard in the other direction, and Oh Dal-soo does nice work in alternating between smug and put-upon manners. Jang Young-man maybe doesn't get to participate quite as actively in the part of Hyeon-sook, but she does kind of nail how the person who just wants to stay out of it can feel simultaneously sensible and cowardly. Song is also canny in how he takes great care to not make this feel like a loop where the gag is repetition, finding different ways to shoot scenes (I love an overhead shot that rotates like the hand of a clock jumping to the next tick). It feels more like an escalation than a slow burn even though it's mostly passive-aggressive.

It may be too much; by the end: There is a bit of a sense that someone didn't know how all this would keep evolving and took the quickest path. There are laughs from the film's final absurdity, but also a sense that the movie needed to end somehow and this is as good a way as any.