The tentative plan for tonight is Dirty Ho and Princess Aurora in the J.A. de Sève theater, followed by A Bittersweet Life and Art of the Devil 2 in the main hall. The timing between the two is tight, though, so I may either knock off early and write the first two up or find some food and give Forest of the Dead a shot.
The Descent
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The Descent doesn't mess around on its way to being the best action-horror movie to come down the pipe in a while. It tosses out a couple of nasty deaths early, gives us danger enough for two thrillers, never lets up, and never takes a break for arguments that can really wait until the characters have survived the next five seconds.
What you need to know: Six women - mostly from the U.K. - are using their vacation to explore a cave system that their American friend recently found in North Carolina. Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) lost her husband and daughter a year before; Beth (Alex Reid) is her best friend. Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) is a maternal-type English teacher taking the trip with her less-experienced sister Sam (MyAnna Buring), a med student. Organizing the trip is Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who hasn't told the group that the cave system is not the well-explored one she implied but in fact one that's not on any map, and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), her daredevil protégé with an even more acute tendency to leap before she looks. So, things are bad enough when a cave-in seals off their entrance; when they realize that they may not be alone...
Read the rest at HBS.


* * ¾ (out of four) (incomplete)
Seen 6 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Tsui Hark's new martial arts epic is beautiful and action-packed, but also exhausting. It likely doesn't help that I was already drained from the bus ride and the hike from the hotel and all that, but you know how people will hear a thick book is being adapted for film and say "this should really be a TV mini-series; a two-hour film won't do it justice"? Seven Swords will be the test of that; the same sets and (I think) much of the same crew to make a mini-series (Seven Swordsmen) which will have much more room to breathe than the 2.5-hour feature.
And, don't get me wrong, if I could see the feature version again without bumping something else off my festival to-do list, I'd be happy to do so. It's got a pretty nice cast, a lot of action, and it really looks like no expense was spared in the making. It also seems to have a big fight scene roughly every ten minutes, too many characters for me to keep track of while regularly conking out, and perhaps over-stylized action.
There's a couple TBA slots still left on the Fantasia schedule; maybe Seven Swords will get one of them, in which case I'll give a more useful report.
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