Sunday, July 09, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 3: 6 freakin' films

Not much to say about the day - started seeing movies at 12:30pm, knocked off at 2am. The highlight is Citizen Dog, which plays again today and tomorrow, and The Maid, which has another show this afternoon, is also pretty good.

Today's plan: My Scary Girl, A Chinese Tall Story, Funky Forest, and The Woods.

Monarch of the Moon

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Monarch of the Moon shoots fish in a barrel, parodying World War II-era superhero serials as if they didn't do that just fine themselves. It's easier to spoof what makes such films ridiculous today than to do what, say, Sky Captain or the Indiana Jones films did and recapture the elements that make them fun without resorting to mockery. Monarch of the Moon does better than most, in that it doesn't completely exhaust its joke in the first half hour.

Meet Cal Crawford (Blane Wheatley), the Yellow Jacket, an American who gained the ability to call forth a swarm of his namesake insects as the result of Nazi experiments. Not the world's coolest superpower, but you take what you can get. Now he and his team - office girl Susan (Monica Himmelheber), Colonel Slate (Will MacMillan), heavy-drinking pilot Randy (Kyle Kaplan), Professor Montgomery Wright (Phil Van Tee), and young Bear Scout Benny (Brent Moss) attempt to foil the Axis's most depraved plans. Currently, beautiful but deadly Japanese agent Dragonfly (Kimberly Page) is working with Nazi scientists and the technologically advanced Moon People to pave the way for a lunar invasion.


Read the rest at HBS.

Tales from the Enchanted Kingdom: Exodus

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

At its start, Exodus may set a new standard in sponsorship and product placement, but by the end, I'm not really inclined to hold that against it too much. If a vanity card, being mentioned in the film's full title ("Tales from...") and a prologue where the Enchanted Kingdom amusement park's Dumbledore-like mascot urges kids to turn off their cell phones and introduces the story means that they shell out the money for the completely different sort of fantasy that follows, then that's just how big-budget family adventure movies get made in the Philippines, and those of us in the rest of the world should just be amused that a place several thousand miles away is advertising at us.

Once the movie proper starts, we're introduced to Exodus, a mighty mercenary warrior hired by the last surviving enclave of humanity to defend them from Bangulbol and his "dark men" before they snuff our species out and literally cover the land in darkness. The leadership recognizes that this isn't much of a long term strategy, though, and sends Exodus to gather the last four Fire, Water, Earth, and Air Elementals (or is it five; is there still a Spirit Elemental left?) and take the fight to Bangulbol before it's too late.

The elements of the story should be fairly familiar - the dark lord who is actually a sort of fallen angel, the four basic elements of the world, the son sent away at birth to be spared a massacre becoming a hero. A jaded audience member can sit back and spot where a bit was taken from Lord of the Rings, a bit from the story of Moses, etc., and declare that nothing new or interesting is going on. And we may be right, from our perspective; the story gets a lot of their parts second-hand, and though they are parts that frequently speak to something basic or primal, they're also familiar. The same may not be true for a Filipino kid, though, and it's possible that no-one there has seen something quite this grand or polished be home-grown rather than imported.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Maid

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Every once in a while, a successful movie ruins things for everybody else. I won't say which other movie has a plot twist that is so famous that it makes a similar twist in The Maid seem a little uninspired, but you've probably guessed it, or will as soon as ghosts are mentioned. It'd be unfair to judge The Maid by that similarity, since it's got more going on after that revelation and the different context makes for an interesting story.

That context is Singapore, where Rosa Dimaano (Alessandra de Rossi) has arrived to begin working as a maid for the Teo family, who stage Chinese operas and care for their developmentally disabled son, Ah Soon (Benny Soh). She has arrived at the beginning of China's seventh lunar month, during which time many Chinese burn paper offerings to the spirits of their ancestors, leave food out for wandering spirits, or leave the front row of chairs open for ghosts at performances. This is all pretty weird for Rosa, an eighteen-year-old Filipino who had seldom left her village before coming to Singapore; she's Christian, herself, and doesn't know these customs. When she sweeps away some ashes in the sidewalk, Mrs. Teo (Huifang Hong) scolds her, saying it's bad luck. It certainly seems to be - after doing so, Rosa can see ghosts, including one that is uncomfortably close at hand. She's already a little on edge, since her brother needs money for a kidney transplant and the maid across the street freaks out at the sight of her. But it's only thirty days, after which the gates of hell close and she'll be bothered by ghosts no more, right? She can handle that.

Read the rest at HBS.

Citizen Dog (Mah Nakorn)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

From the very first frames of Citizen Dog, the audience should know they're in for something special. Commercial director Wisit Sasanatieng, cinematographer Rewat Prelert, and production designer Suras Kardeeroj make it clear early on that they're making a film of exceptional visual beauty, with the only question being whether or not it can keep up emotionally. Happily, it does, winding up as sweet as it is eccentric.

The film mainly follows Pod (Mahasamut Boonyaruk), whom the narrator describes as a simple country bumpkin come to Bangkok to make his fortune. Working at a sardine factory, he meets best friend Yod (Sawatwong Palakawong Na Autthaya) after each cuts off their index finger (in this film's world, though, this doesn't cause any bleeding and they easily reattach). Not wanting to go through that again, they quit their jobs, and it's at Pod's next job as a security guard that he meets Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong) and falls madly in love. Jin is pretty, but weird - she works as a maid and is obsessed not only with cleaning and keeping things orderly, but with the characters in serialized romance magazines an a mysterious book with an all white cover that fell from the sky when she was living in the country; deciphering its contents is her mission in life. She likes Pod, as he's the only person who talks to her (everyone else thinks she's crazy), but is far from head-over-heels for him.

Read the rest at HBS.

Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

So let's say slasher movies were real. Spree killers targeted high-school students and then apparently came back from the dead to do it again. And again. If this was a common theme in American life as opposed to just in American movies, I imagine somebody would try to study the phenomenon, even if it meant going to unsafe lengths to do it.

Meet Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals). This graduate student and aspiring documentary filmmaker has been contacted by Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel), who also has a dream - to be to Glen Echo, MD, what Jason Vorhees was to Crystal Lake, what Freddy Krueger was to Elm Street, what Michael Myers was to Haddonfield... You get the idea. It takes lots of preparation - choosing your "survivor girl", preparing the old scary house (nailing windows shut, ridding trees of limbs that can support a person's weight, sabotaging potential weapons), doing a lot of cardio (those kids are ten years younger than you and probably run track, and aren't trying to look slow), etc. As the anniversary of Leslie's supposed death approaches, though, Taylor starts getting cold feet. After all, this is standing back and watching while Leslie kills innocent people.

Read the rest at HBS.

Die You Zombie Bastards!

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Look at that title. Doesn't it promise excitement? It's phrased as a command, it's got a curse word in it, and it's so important that those zombie bastards die that not only does it have an exclamation point, but it omits a comma. Sure, the implication is that it'll be tongue-in-cheek, but it'll be exciting tongue-in-cheek, right? This should, one way or another, be a movie that gets the audience going.

It is not. It may, in fact, be the most boring movie ever to feature zombies, serial killing cannibals, robots, mad scientists, ninjas, vampires, and gratuitous nudity. One of the characters within the movie even makes the point that she's not scared, because after a while repetition makes something that had been scary little more than boring, and you can only get away with that sort of self-deprecating meta-comment if what you're doing is, in fact, not a crashing bore. That's trying to be sly with the audience, and only really works when it reveals something non-obvious, that the movie is actually more clever than it appears. Here, it just goes to show that the film really has nothing beyond a bunch of half-baked ideas that co-writer/director Caleb Emerson can't stitch together.

The first, and most enjoyable, idea is a group of hot blonde scientists talking about their findings on Hell Island while getting naked and skinny-dipping. Alas, soon they are captured by Dr. Nefarious (Geoff Mosher) and his insta-zombie ray, but three smart, sexy blondes aren't enough (well, after the zombification, they're not so smart and not really sexy unless you're into green, but you get the idea). He wants his ideal woman to share in the triumph of his global zombification plan, and he's decided that that's Violet (Pippi Zornoza), the flesh-eating serial-killer wife of flesh-eating serial-killer Red (Tim Gerstmar). She's just made him a superhero costume complete with a cape made of human flesh when she's taken (he's evidently always wanted to be a superhero), and he sets out on a quest to find her.

Read the rest at HBS.

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