Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 27 July 2009: Fine, Totally Fine and Antique

And now I'm back in Massachusetts, watching the Red Sox blow games on TV after taking an overnight bus back from Montreal and trying to work on that amount of sleep. Not recommended.

Speaking of being back in the Boston area and watching sports, I was kind of surprised to see a couple of guys in Bruins shirts wandering around Fantasia without any apparent ill effects. My Red Sox stuff, that should be fine - even when Les Expos were still around, the Sox were sort of the area's AL team. But the Bruins... Isn't that sort of like wearing Sox gear around New York? They say it's not really a rivalry to them, at least until you get on the ice...

Yeah, my brain's shot. Must sleep and then rewind this reviewing back to Love Exposure. Criminy, that's going to be a challenge.

Zenzen daijobu (Fine, Totally Fine)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Fine, Totally Fine has one of the highest quirk-to-story ratios ever recorded in a feature-length motion picture. It is, admittedly, though to measure, as both the plot and the digressions from it are so wispy that it's almost impossible to get much of a grasp on either. Both aspects are pleasant enough, although so lightweight that the movie threatens to float away as soon as its finished.

The film focuses on three people in their twenties: Teruo Tohyama (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) is a horror-movie otaku who delights in playing morbid pranks on those around him; when he's not constructing these elaborate gags, he's working days trimming trees the city's parks or watching the used bookstore owned by his father Eitaro (Keizo Kani'e). He still lives with his dad, who lately has been suffering from depression. His best friend and frequent partner in crime is Hisanobu Komori (Yoshinori Okada), a much more strait-laced type who works in personnel at a local hospital. He has recently hired Akari Kinoshita (Yoshino Kimura) as part of the cleaning crew, which may be a mistake because she is as clumsy as she is beautiful and shy. For all her inability to control her hands in most situations, though, she is a gifted artist.

The festival program describes Fine, Totally Fine as longtime supporting player Arakawa's first real leading role, which I suppose is technically true if you reckon such things by screen time and. Teruo certainly has the most subplots attached to him: There's his dream of building the world's greatest haunted house, the amateur he and Hisanobu are working on with some friends, his father's creeping ennui, and the crush he's developing on Akari. Arakawa gives a nice performance, although it's not terribly far removed from his scene-stealing supporting work in nature: Teruo is immature, seldom the smartest guy in the room, and even a bit mean, but still oddly admirable for his stubbornness on sticking with what makes him happy, even as the world looks down on him.

Full review at EFC.

Antique

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Part of what makes seeing foreign popular cinema fun is that the genre barriers often aren't quite in the same place, so while what you see is mostly familiar, it can quickly go to unexpected places. Seldom has that been more true than with Antique, which adds some surprisingly tart flavoring to its sweet confections and somehow makes it work.

Kim Jin-hyuk (Joo Ji-hoon) comes from a wealthy family but has never accomplished much in his life, so when he announces to his parents (at the age of 29) that he intends to open a cake shop, they think it's odd - Jin-hyuk hasn't liked sweets since he was a child - but are supportive. Insisting on having the very best, he hires patissier Min Seon-woo (Kim Jae-wook), a master baker who learned his trade in Paris but has had trouble keeping a job because he refuses to work with women but, being a "Gay of Demonic Charm", always lures the men he's attracted to, gay or straight, into his bed. Despite being exactly Seon-woo's type, Jin-hyuk seems to be immune to his charms (and has been since high school, when Seon-woo had a massive crush on him). They're eventually joined by Yang Ki-beom (Yoo Ah-in), a former boxer now discovering his passion for baking, and Nam Soo-young (Choi Ji-ho), the son of one of the Kim family servants who has come to watch over he master as it seems Jin-hyuk is having the nightmares again - although he certainly serves as a handsome distraction for Seon-woo until his old boyfriend Jean-Baptiste (Andy Gillet) shows up.

And, no, Jin-hyuk's nightmares aren't about the fact that somewhere in the back of his mind, he's obviously not nearly so immune to Seon-woo's charms as he claims. No, this is about that time twenty years ago when Jin-hyuk was kidnapped for two months and returned with only vague memories of his captivity. This is important, because lately more kids have been disappearing, only when they show back up, they're dead, and the cake in their stomach can only have come from one bakery.

Full review at EFC.


If I were around Tuesday, I'd be doing Eureka Seven, Left Bank, and Neighbor; I would have recommend Cyborg She and The Eclipse, wouldn't have been able to get behind Fireball, and still wouldn't have known what to make of The Possibility of An Island. If I'd been able to finish this on Tuesday (work sucks up the entire day!).

Super-hypothetically, Wednesday would be Genius Party Beyond, M.W., and Trick 'R Treat; I'd be missing Inglorious Basterds because it's sold out beyond media/VIP passholders getting in (although there were rumors going around about a press screening in the AM). I recommend K-20 and Private Eye whole-heartedly, Edison and Leo and The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia with reservations.

Ultra-hypothetically, I would have already seen everything playing on Thursday, the newly-added "encore day". Antique and Cyborg She recommended.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 26 July 2009: Fireball, The Eclipse, and Breathless

It's official; I've seen less of Montreal during this festival than I did of Austin in March. Fortunately, I've got the apartment through August so I'll have a chance to come back and hit the spots I usually manage but missed this year. In particular, I want to see the pirate exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History Pointe-à-Callière, as they curate fascinating exhibits and poking around the excavation is always amazing, no matter how many times I do it.

Even dragging this morning out with writing and packing, though, I've still got some time to see the city, so I believe I shall do so.

Fireball

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Before seeing this movie, I had a whole list of ideas for the review's introduction in my head, involving tournament brackets, sports injuries, athletes who get involved in crime, gambling scandals, and things that really should draw a referree's whistle. My heart's just not in it, though. The concept of martial arts basketball may not be foolproof, but it should be significantly harder to screw up than this movie does.

"Fireball", we are told, is a variation on basketball where the first team to sink a basket wins. Some may find such relatively low-scoring affairs less than exciting, but the lack of scoring is compensated for by the fact that there are no refs to call fouls, and teams are made up of skilled street fighters and martial artists. No holds are barred, which is why Tan has spent the last year in a coma. His twin brother Tai (Preeti Barameeanat), just released from jail, doesn't know about fireball until he's mistaken for Tan and recruited for junior mob boss Den's (Phutharit Prombandal) team (fireball is, understandably, an underground activity). He joins team captain Zing (9 Million Sam), young hotshot Iq (Kannut Samerjai), powerhouse Muk (Kumpanat Oungsoongnern), and K (Anuwat Saejao), who was accused of throwing a game the year before. The finals will be against Ton (Arucha Tosawat), the man who put Tan in the hospital, but winning involves just surviving long enough to get there.

Fireball is a deeply stupid movie, but let's face it - this is the sort of movie where any logic that gets in the way of the premise should be quickly and mercilessly dispensed with. Side plots that are riddled with clichés in flagrant attempts to pull at the heart strings? Bring them on. Sure, the storylines we're given are trite as they come, but they do add to the stakes of the games, and they do give us all the reason we need to root for Tai and his team.

Full review at EFC.

The Eclipse

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

If I hadn't seen the line in The Eclipse's credits about it being based on a set of short stories, I'd wonder why certain moments were in it at all. They seem so out of place, and are a few jump moments potentially inserted into a preview really going to entice horror movie fans into seeing what is, the rest of the time, a very quiet movie about middle-aged people at a literary festival?

The festival is in Cobh, a modest-sized town in Ireland's County Cork. Michael Farr (Ciaran Hinds) is a volunteer, and his job includes shuttling visiting authors around town, whether from the train station to the hotel or from a cottage to the lecture hall. Two in particular, who have a history, though they couldn't be more different, stand out: Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn), a best-selling author whose book regularly get adapted into movies, and Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), a writer of literary ghost stories. Even if Lena weren't lovely and charming, Michael might want to pick her brain on the subject of ghosts, anyway. He's seeing something, but it's not his dead wife, but her father Malachi (Jim Norton) - who is still alive, albeit in a home.

To call the scenes where Michael sees apparitions incongruous might be severely understating the matter - even though they form a basis for Michael connecting with Lena, they are spaced far enough apart that the audience can forget that they are a part of the film until the next one appears. Though the first sighting is relatively low-key and eerie because of it, later ones are loud and jarring, with things popping up out of nowhere with attendant black goop. These scenes aren't completely forgotten later, but they do tend to seem out of place - The Eclipse never becomes a horror movie, or truly about the ghosts plaguing Michael.

Full review at EFC.

Ddongpari (Breathless)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

The Fantasia audience gets lots of well-deserved love during the festival, but there are times when it seems like it needs a little time to find its feet. Such was the case during the screening of Breathless, where an audience that had been fed a steady diet of quirky or over-the-top gangster movies might not have recognized early on that the violence Yank Ik-joon's Sang-hoon releases isn't supposed to be funny, but a man with so much rage that he cannot control himself. It's not quite like the audience that completely missed that Adam Sandler was subverting his usual characters in Punch-Drunk Love, but it's not far off.

Eventually, though, the audience and the movie meet about halfway. Sang-hoon gains enough humanity to moderate his outbursts, and the audience sees that this film is about his gaining said humanity. Yang gives the movie plenty of space to breathe that way although it never becomes dull. It's a very impressive effort for a first-time filmmaker.


Today is my last day in town, and a short one - having seen the afternoon shows, I'll go with Fine, Totally Fine and Antique. Most of those shows are recommended - The Divine Weapon, My Dear Enemy, and Best Worst Movie especially. Dead Snow isn't bad, but four screenings? Really?

(If I were around Tuesday, I'd be doing Eureka Seven, Left Bank, and Neighbor; I recommend Cyborg She and The Eclipse, can't get behind Fireball, and still don't know what to make of The Possibility of An Island)

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 25 July 2009: Private Eye, Rough Cut, Embodiment of Evil, and Troll 2

If I had Twitter, sometime around 9pm last night I would have tweeted something about there apparently being "Coffin Joe" cosplay, which is something I can't un-see. The house was packed for director/star José Mojica Marins's appearance, to the extent that I almost didn't get in - for sold-out shows such as these, the number of tickets sold plus passes issued generally exceeds capacity, so they have to fit the last of the pass-holders in where they can.

Truth be told, if there was an English-language alternative across the way, I probably would have been in de Seve; I've got no particular interest in the Coffin Joe series in particular (horror in general is pretty low on my reasons for hitting this fest). If I hadn't been able to get in, it certainly wouldn't have been the end of the world. I had to be amused at some of the VIP/media types acting like it would, though. I mean, I've seen sixty movies so far, and haven't maxed out my pass as well as maybe I could. Should I really act entitled if I don't get to see #61 because some paying customer did?

The festival did put on a pretty nifty show for Marins, though - collaborator Dennison Ramalho and a number of ladies who I presume will be part of Fetish Weekend five weeks from now came out in full leather regalia to set the tone, including having him enter in full costume and a giant coffin. The award he was presented with after the screening was suitably grotesque.

Too bad I hated the movie. As in, it got me thinking about Roger Ebert's comment that he only pulls out the zero star rating for movies that are actually harmful. I thought it was just bad until they started talking about going for realism not just by shooting it in real favelas, but in how they shot some of the torture scenes. That's just messed up.

Geu-rim-ja sal-in (Private Eye)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

You know why we don't see as many private investigator stories as we used to? The rise in divorce rates. Sure, there are other reasons - it's almost impossible to do anything without leaving a data trail in the 21sst Century, for instance - but ever more people know what a PI's real bread and butter is now: Tailing unfaithful spouses to get pictures. Even in 1910 Korea. That's Hong Jin-ho's game in Private Eye, and he tends to add insult to injury by selling the pictures to the newspapers afterward.

No, the dangerous jobs are best left to cops like Oh Young-dal (Oh Dal-soo), just called to investigate the bloody murder of Min Soo-hyun, son of the Interior Minister. There's a snag, though - the body dumped in the woods was scavenged by medical student Kwang-su (Ryu Deok-hwan). When he realizes what he has, he also sees that there's no way he can report his find without suspicion falling upon himself. So, Hong Jin-ho (Hwang Jeong-min) it is - even if he likes to avoid danger, the reward money is more than enough to book him passage to America and a new start.

Despite the obvious similarities - a doctor sidekick, an early 20th Century milieu, and the use of forensic science and detection to crack cases long before they became standard police procedure - Jin-ho is not just Sherlock Holmes transplanted to Korea. He's far too cheerful and exuberant - imagine Holmes asking a confused Watson to give him a high five when they find an important clue! Hwang makes Jin-ho work not just as a genius, but as a bit of a hustler, unprepared for his first really big case but also up for the challenge.

Full review at EFC.

"No Escape"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

The eight-minute warm-up to Rough Cut is a quick, economically shot bit by Till Martinsen about a story that takes place off to the side in a hostage situation. Plenty of nifty, tense back-and-forth, although I think the end undercuts the tense situation set up earlier with a too-quick gotcha ending.

Yeong-hwa-neun Yeong-hwa-da (Rough Cut)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I've got to be honest here... I kind of wanted the Hollywood ending to this. Part of what's so much fun about Korean movies is that they don't feel obligated to take even familiar genre films in the same direction that everyone else does, but would that have been so bad here. This one sort of feels like "nyah, I've proved my point, so here we are again."

Shame, because Jang Hoon (working from a screenplay by Kim Ki-duk) has made an extremely funny movie, one which manages to lampoon the film industry with love as well as hit on familiar gangster tropes. So Ji-sub and Kang Ji-hwan are excellent as the lead characters - a gangster who loves the movies and a movie star who often acts like a thug - and Ko Chang-seok steals nearly every scene he's in as the film-within-a-film's director.

Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil)

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - José Mojica Marins)

There's a big, international cult following for this stuff? Really? I haven't seen the original "Coffin Joe" films from the sixties - nor do I have any interest in doing so - but this is not electrifying horror that has some sort of especially subversive or scary idea behind it. This is fairly grotesque bloodletting, admittedly, although there are no images that stick with me the next morning, and a central character who seems more fitting as a horror host than villain.

Just a dismal movie, really; it's at its most lively before Joe is released from prison, and the warden is yelling into the phone about what a bad idea this is.

Troll 2

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I can sort of get the cult following here - Troll 2 is sort of a cult movie perfect storm of lack of talent, lack of funds, and 1980s kitsch. I don't think I have any need to ever see it again, but as entertaining bad movies go, it does all right - especially since I was worried about it not being a fun movie so much as a thing, what with there being a documentary that exposes some of the cast as apparently being mentally ill and a roadshow. I mean, some friends in Boston had a little Troll 2 party last night and I'm half-convinced that the only reason George Hardy didn't show up was because he was already committed to Fantasia.


Sunday features Fireball, The Eclipse, and Breathless. I would have liked to make the 10am kaiju show (Mothra, a short, and the documentary Bringing Godzilla Down to Size), but it was just too early after stating up for Troll 2. K-20: Legend of the Mask is recommended, enough that I may see it again, depending how the day works out.

Monday will be my last day in town, and a short one - having seen the afternoon shows, I'll go with Fine, Totally Fine and Antique. Most of those shows are recommended - The Divine Weapon, My Dear Enemy, and Best Worst Movie especially. Dead Snow isn't bad, but four screenings? Really?

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 24 July 2009: You Might As Well Live, Cyborg She, Battle League in Kyoto, My Dear Enemy, Crawler

Asia bookended by Canada on Friday, and my first experience with Sv Bell. I think he's had a movie in at least half the Fantasias I've attended; he's a local guy who makes reasonably entertaining (if not actually good) low-budget horror. You know it's a popular local guy when the line for the film becomes like a snake that has swallowed several somethings; it may start off reasonably straight, but after a certain point, most of the people coming in know someone already in line, so clumps form.

My Dear Enemy was introduced by the people of Cine Asie, who appear to be the second distributor with roots in Fantasia - Evokative premiered here last year, I believe. Both of them are doing good work - picking up the Canadian rights to films that may not be profitable for studios targeting all of North America. The way I figure it, so long as the DVDs wind up region 1, I'm happy. I'd be happier if they showed up here theatrically

You Might as Well Live

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival - Flirting with Chaos)

A solid moron movie - the type where the lead character's quite astounding stupidity is just balanced with his innocence in such a way that we can laugh at him while still rooting for him somewhat. It's a precarious balance, because Joshua Peace's Robert Mutt has a really stunning amount of stupid that needs countering (to the point where the innocence starts resembling even more stupidity), but the movie careens from one hugely crude joke to another just well enough that it only fitfully becomes tiresome.

I'd be interested to know what kind of blackmail material director Simon Ennis has to get Michael Madsen to show up in this weird Canadian comedy, though.

Boku no kanojo wa saibôgu (Cyborg She)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm more than a bit curious how Cyborg She was marketed in Japan. The festival plugged it as the new film by Kwak Jaw-young, and of a piece with his with his other whimsical romantic comedies with a touch of the fantastic. Which it is, and although it never loses sight of being romance first and sci-fi second, it makes sure not to short-change anybody.

22 November, 2008: As the film starts, Jiro Kitamura (Keisuke Koide) is buying himself a birthday present. A college student in Tokyo, he's got no family or close friends (his home village was destroyed in an earthquake, and the new town that has been built on its remains isn't home), and celebrates his birthday the same way every year. Except last year - that year, a beautiful girl (Haruka Ayase) showed up in a bodysuit out of sci-fi anime, shoplifted herself a new outfit, and sat herself down at Jiro's table, leading him on an adventure before announcing she was from the future and disappearing. This year, she shows up again, in even more dramatic fashion, taking superhuman action when a crazed gunman shows up in the restaurant. Afterward, she explains that Jiro created her sixty years in the future and sent her back in time to prevent his crippling. She's a blank slate now, but maybe living with him will help her develop a soul.

The trick to this movie is to get us to see Haruka Ayase's character as more than a mere machine, or else what's meant to be a romantic comedy can get creepy and pathetic, very quickly. The opening flashback (or, given the time-traveling nature of the film, flash-forward) helps; strongly implying that the cyborg will develop into something more. Ayase handles her end very well, too; she's got a fine deadpan expression as the girl in her brand-new, more robotic mode, but does a nice job of developing a personality as the film goes on. She's never a simple doll taking the orders of her perverted master.

Full review at EFC.

Kamogawa Horumo (Battle League in Kyoto)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

You know, if someone had told me right after Kill Bill that the girl who played Gogo Yubari would find her niche in comedy, I don't know that I would have believed him. It's true, though - Chiaki Kuriyama is the best part of the underwhelming GS Wonderland, handled the funny bits of Hair Extensions fantastically, and is tremendously enjoyable as the nerdy girl on the oni battle team in Battle League in Kyoto.

Oddly, she appears credited first in the subtitles (probably the most famous cast member to the English-speaking crowd), although the movie focuses on Takayuki Yamada's character, who joins the bizarre "Azure Dragon Club" in order to be a different girl and winds up training an army of invisible onis for matches with other area universities. It's a ridiculously cute movie, silly as they come but fun regardless.

Meotjin Haru (My Dear Enemy)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Kim Hee-su (Jeon Do-yeon) is talking about money and investments as My Dear Enemy opens, but it's not clear whether she needs money urgently or just wants it for some opportunity. Or perhaps, she simply wants to close the book on Cho Byung-woon (Ha Jung-woo), who borrowed $3500 from her a year ago and has not called since. Each situation would caster her in a different light, but her behavior gives little in the way of a hint; her tense, pinched demeanor could fit with any of them, and she's not volunteering information.

She finds him at the track, and as might be expected, he doesn't have the money. But he intends to pay her back, even though he's in somewhat of a financial bind himself. He just needs to visit a few people. Hee-su doesn't trust him much, so she goes along. Naturally, almost all the stops along the way are women.

My Dear Enemy is a "walking movie", where two people spend the entire running time crisscrossing a city and talking, but director Lee Yoon-ki and Park Eun-yeong leave many things unrevealed all the way to the end. The audience will get some information about the characters' pasts and presents, but by no means enough to paint a complete picture. Instead, they give us just enough that the film does not seem deliberately oblique, but also plenty of room for the cast to create their own interpretations - and for the audience to fill in the gaps as they please from those performances.

Full review at EFC.

"Bonbons rouges" ("Red Candy")

* * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

A "short" film (45 minutes long!) which goes all over the place, even though it seems to start with a simple enough concept but eventually sprawls to the point where I've just completely lost track of what the red candy of the title had to do with the evil clown. Waay too long a warm-up for an 80-minute feature.

"Par en arrière"

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Three minutes of a girl in a bikini getting wet and killing another girl with a wrench. I must admit, I don't get it.

Crawler

* * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Crawler is a dumb, poorly-acted horror movie, but by gum, it's a sincere dumb, poorly-acted horror movie. If it's engaging in self-parody, it's doing so with the straightest face imaginable. The cast and crew all seem to be completely earnest in their efforts to make the best damn "killer bulldozer that is actually some sort of otherworldly beast" movie that they can, and if their ambitions outstrip their talent and/or resources, that can be forgiven.

That doesn't mean it's a good movie, by any means. The scenes with the CGI tentacles look awful, not so much because the digital work is bad but because the entire lighting and shooting scheme seems to get much worse in order to disguise the work. The nature of the monster changes on the merest of whims. It's set in the U.S. even though several actors have obvious French-Canadian accents.

The crowd was into it, though, and not entirely because it seemed to consist in large part of the cast, crew, and their friends. Sometimes bad horror movies can be fun, and by apparently doing their best, Sv Bell and company have made a bad horror movie that's as good as the worst of them.


Today is awfully thin for what could potentially be a packed day, but there's a chunk in the middle where everything is in unsubtitled French, giving me time for an afternoon meal, I guess: Private Eye, Rough Cut, Embodiment of Evil, and maybe the midnight Troll 2. Speaking of which, Best Worst Movie (7:30pm in de Seve) is pretty good.

Sunday could turn into a long or a short day, depending on when I get up. Fireball, The Eclipse, and Breathless are most certainly on the docket, but the 10am kaiju show (Mothra, a short, and the documentary Bringing Godzilla Down to Size) may just be too early. K-20: Legend of the Mask is recommended, enough that I may see it again, depending how the day works out.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 23 July 2009: Edison and Leo, "Yariman", Crazy Racer, Cryptic, and The Possibility of an Island

Coming into the festival, the "Vers les Étoiles: Cerebral Science Fiction Cinema" program was probably the one I looked forward to the most, because I always want more sci-fi (versus fantasy and horror) at this sort of festival, and in the movies in general, and I'd like it to be good. But, more often than not, this program wound up highlighting how disappointing science fiction is when the lit-crit crowd gets hold of it.

Science fiction was born in the pulps, and there's a part of me that thinks it should never leave there. Now, the Golden Age wasn't as golden as it's made out to be - a vast amount of the material produced was amateurish and unreadable; we just remember the brilliance of Asimov, Heinlein, and the other stars. But that material wants to excite you, not just with action, but with ideas, and it knows its audience has a decent crap detector when it comes to the details.

It reminds me of a funny story from before I left for the festival - I'd been gushing over Moon to my brother Matt and his girlfriend Morgan, and she said she wasn't sure she'd be interested - she'd heard all the 2001 comparisons and that was sort of a boring movie nap for her. I had to reassure them that, yeah, Moon had a lot of the aesthetic style of 2001, but it was also an exciting movie with a nifty story. So many of the "cerebral" science-fiction movies in this program were like 2001 in that they were trying to impress the audience, but have neither Kubrick/Clarke's truly sweeping scope or the ability to tie their supposedly-grand ideas into a story the way Duncan Jones, Kubrick, or the like do.

(And this is why I'll defend A.I. pretty much forever - it may not be quite so close to perfect as I see it, but it tells a story even while throwing big ideas around like they're penny candy).

Edison and Leo

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

For a movie about a great inventor, Edison and Leo is curiously lacking in spark. There are moments of quirky inspiration, but they're quickly followed by fairly uninspired bits of meanness, ultimately wasting some fine animation.

George T. Edison (voice of Powers Boothe) is a great inventor, but also a ravenous collector and a bit of a lech. As the film opens, he is hiring and Eastern adventurer to seek out a particular type of bamboo that he believes may have potential as light bulb filaments, but the man is more interested in a ceremonial knife in Edison's collection - while Edison has an eye for his wife. The caper will have dire consequences for Edison's wife and younger son Leo, and come home to roost ten years later when Toni (voice of Jacqueline Samuda) and her daughter Zella (voice of Carly Pope) return, even if Zella does have eyes for the now-grown Leo (voice of Gregory Smith).

There's a sort of anarchy to the opening reels of Edison and Leo that may not always be fun, in the strictest sense - it can go from something cute, like the Edisons saying their good-nights in Morse code, to nasty mutilation in no time at all - but at least tosses out new ideas at a decent clip. The dry delivery of the film in general and Powers Boothe as George in particular initially creates a darkly comic feel, and George starts out as one of the more intriguingly multifaceted characters in animation history. He's selfish, unable to resist his baser urges, and has a huge place in his heart for his wife and son.

Full review at EFC.

Yariman

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival - Behind the Pink Curtain)

This is something close to what I expected when I first started hearing about Japan's pink films - it's a real movie, albeit a fairly short one (65 minutes), but one which has an actual story and plentiful acting to go with its soft-core sex scenes. There's been recent stories (widely mocked) about porn stars lamenting that they don't get to do much acting today, but watching something like this, you see what they mean - just because a movie is looking to get somebody off doesn't mean it can't be entertaining as well.

S & M Hunter

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival - Behind the Pink Curtain)

Boring movie nap.

No, seriously - I conked out at points watching this one, and had to stitch the plot together on my own afterward, despite the provocative title. I'm not sure whether the retro style of the movie, which I did kind of like, is just what Japanese film looked like in the eighties or whether it was calling back to an earlier era (it felt like something from the seventies).

Feng Kuang de Sai Che (Crazy Racer)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - Hong Kong Cinema 100 Years)

Ow, that video projection hurts my eyes, especially considering that all the stills promised a visually amazing picture (the 35mm print that arrived lacked subtitles, necessitating a fallback to video). It's still a pretty darn enjoyable, fast-paced comedy, and the introduction's comparison to Guy Ritchie (good Guy Ritchie!) is pretty apt. A lot of fun, and one I'd like to see again in non-cruddy projection.

"Hirsute"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

The evening's shorts seemed more closely paired to their features tonight than usual, particularly this one, in which one-man-band A.J. Bond creates a quirky time-travel story that has an odd digression into the topic of body hair (hence the title), but does a nice job of wrapping its story up like a pretzel.

Cryptic

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Speaking of time travel movies that tie their plots up like a pretzel... This one is ultra-low budget, without even the minor amount of special effects that you see in "Hirsute", but the time-travel plot is extremely tight - impressively so, because it's a story that resets itself a couple of times before it gets to the end. No mean feat, that - the first time it happens, you're at great risk of having the audience think that these are new characters, so why should they care?

Pretty nice performances by the actresses playing the lead character at the ages of 9 and 18 - aside from being a great casting job (they really could be the same person nine years apart), they both handle some nutty concepts with style.

"StereoLife"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

This one's a pretty frantic thing, but even beside that, I tend to look at it as starting from a false premise - that there's a particular conflict for people who have skills in both the arts and the sciences. I can't speak to it personally, but the folks I've met who are drawn in both directions tend to be some of the healthiest, and best at both.

Even with that, the concept - transplanting the right hemisphere of one's brain into an illegal clone to give that part full reign - is a nifty one, and most of the technobabble thrown out to make it work sounded right. Maybe, if the filmmakers had just slowed down a little to really explore the idea, it would have been a better movie.

La possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival - Vers les Étoiles: Cerebral Science Fiction Cinema)

The Clone Returns Home redux, in many ways - it plays with a lot of nifty ideas, and is beautifully photographed, but is in many ways severely lacking in the story department. It's a curious thing, I suppose, but what passes for cerebral, idea-oriented science fiction on film is pretty weak sauce compared to what it does in print. Vernor Vince or Charles Stross probably gets through everything in The Possibility of an Island by page seven, by which point an exciting story is under way.


Today, the decisions are/were really easy, since de Seve is given over to French-language shorts packages and (presumably Francophone) panels for the weekend. So we go with You Might as Well Live, Cyborg She, Battle League of Kyoto, My Dear Enemy, and Crawler. Big recommendation for Deadgirl at midnight in the Hall theater.

Saturday is awfully thin for what could potentially be a packed day, but there's a chunk in the middle where everything is in unsubtitled French, giving me time for an afternoon meal, I guess: Private Eye, Rough Cut, Embodiment of Evil, and maybe the midnight Troll 2. Speaking of which, Best Worst Movie (7:30pm in de Seve) is pretty good.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 22 July 2009: Reel Zombies, The Divine Weapon, Black, and Orphan

You know how you can tell that you're spending too much time in the apartment, writing up reviews rather than seeing the city you're vacationing in? When the plastic lampshade near the computer in the place you're subletting melts. I guess I'll have to replace that before I leave, even if I do figure that this would have happened anyway. The soft plastic seems to be a really foolish material to make a lampshade out of, quite frankly, and the fact that the bulb in the lamp was at the very edge of what is recommended (150W, 120V) didn't help - and as much as I like bright lights, even I don't use that much light bulb in my house.

I did finally have a meal on Crescent Avenue today - mid-afternoon fish & chips at Sir Winston Churchill's, and I don't feel cheap for ordering the least expensive thing on the menu. I figure if you go to a pub by that name, you have to get fish & chips, and should perhaps feel a little gypped when they're not served to you on genuine newspaper.

...

Note for future festival-going: The 9:30pm Pepsi Max does get me through the last movie, but keeps me up way too late. Maybe the super-caffeinated beverage isn't the way to go there.

Reel Zombies

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Zombie Night is, I'm given to understand, a terrible movie, bottom-dozen of all-time bad. Thus it has a cult following. The sequel, to hear the filmmakers tell it, was better-made to the point of mediocrity, but paradoxically less entertaining as a result; the making-of feature on the DVD was allegedly more fun. So, this time around, they set out to combine the two.

Thus, the film starts out with Mike Masters, producer of the Zombie Night movies, saying he never wanted to make another. But in the aftermath of the recent zombie-virus outbreak, he has a brainstorm - make the third part with real zombies! Surely there will be a demand for zombie-killing movies as soon as there's theaters again! So director David J. Francis throws a script together in a couple of days, they get as much of the cast and crew who are still around together, hire a new DP (Jean-Marc Fontaine), and a zombie wrangler (Bill Simmons), find some actresses willing to do nudity, and they are ready to go! Granted, they weren't so good at this before, but having real zombies should make it easier, right?

The "movie movie" is a popular genre, since folks who like to watch movies are naturally curious about how they're made, and it's generally a topic filmmakers know something about (insert joke about the makers of Zombie Night here). Even without real zombies, there's a bunch of fun ways for everything to go wrong on set, especially with this cast of characters - guys who are familiar with each other, but maybe don't really like one another. Camaraderie is fun; everyone being in "I can't work under these conditions!" mode is funnier.

Full review at EFC.

Shin ge jeon (The Divine Weapon)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

When you think about it, my attitude toward watching Divine Weapon probably reflects bad things about me: I basically wanted to watch an entire army get slaughtered by overwhelming firepower. The Singijeon is basically the medieval equivalent of the ballistic missile and cluster bomb, and tossing one of those at what are basically infantry generations behind technologically is far from sporting. Though, to be fair, this was an attack on an army whose king basically ordered the Joseons to mass-produce eunuchs, so the Mings in this movie more or less had it coming. Well, actually, the Mings had something else coming, and the soldiers weren't exactly the ones asking for eunuchs, but you know what I mean.

That aside, this is an entertaining war epic. It's got a roguish hero, a leading lady who is into engineering, plenty of action, predictable but enjoyable romance, and a final battle that absolutely gives the audience what they have waited the last couple of hours for. Kind of paint by numbers? Sure. Doesn't make it less fun, though.

Black

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I saw this back in March, as a midnight at SXSW, but I was so wrecked at most of those midnights that I couldn't trust myself to write a decent review, and since the filmmakers announced that Evokative had picked it up for Canada and it would play Fantasia during the Q&A, I decided I'd hold off writing an actual review until then.

Back in March, I called it fun and crazy, and I'll stand by that assessment when I get around to writing the full review sometime in the weeks ahead. I still don't really think that "Lion and Panther vs. Snake-Man" is a better way of ending a movie that starts out as a bank heist and then becomes Midnight Run than something more conventional, although props must be given out for full-blown lunacy.

I also really like MC Jean Gab'1 in the title role. He attended the screening at Fantasia, along with the director and producer who had attended in Austin, and he's the kind of guy whose charisma shines through even when one's command of his language is as terrible as my French. It comes through very nicely on film, too, as he somehow manages to make Black charming and kind of lovable even in the middle of a lot of no-fooling-around action.

Orphan

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I guessed what Orphan was heading toward pretty early in the film, but dismissed it. Plot-wise, it was perhaps the best way to connect all the dots, but director Jaume Collet-Serra doesn't seem to be making that kind of movie early on. So the film becomes something of an odd mish-mash - the plot details fit together, and there's some pretty strong early character work, but it doesn't feel like the movie knows what it wants to be.

Maybe the opening should have served as a hint; it's a surreal nightmare of a hospital visit, leading into Kate Coleman (Vera Farmiga) discussing the plans she and husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) have to adopt with her therapist (Margo Martindale). Nine-year-old Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) makes an immediate connection with the pair at the orphanage, and Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder) informs them that though something of a loner (and eccentric in dress), she's bright and very mature for her age. She soon joins the Colemans' other children - slightly older Daniel (Jimmy Bennett), and younger, deaf, and adoring Max (Aryana Engineer). Some of what she does sets off warning bells in Kate, though Kate's got a few skeletons in her own closet.

Early on, Orphan seems like an unusually smart and sympathetic take on the evil child genre. Esther is a little odd, sure, but the film plays it as the logical extension of the fear and paranoia that any adopted child must feel - especially one on their second family, after the first had died in a fire. The early stages of the movie play like a fine set-up for miscommunication leading to tragedy, and Collet-Serra does a fine job of playing on the audience's emotions there.

Full review at EFC.


Today has a ton up in the air: Edison and Leo, "Yariman" & "S&M Hunter" (unless the TBA on the schedule gets filled in with something interesting), Crazy Racer, Crime or Punishment?!? (unless I get a screener for it but not Cryptic), and The Possibility of an Island.

Friday, the decisions start getting really easy, since de Seve is given over to French-language shorts packages and (presumably Francophone) panels. So we go with You Might as Well Live, Cyborg She, Battle League of Kyoto, My Dear Enemy, and Crawler.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 21 July 2009: Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, Canary, and 8th Wonderland

Yes, I'm ready to start actually getting out and seeing some of Montreal this trip, but it just doesn't seem to be happening much - something winds up keeping me tied to the laptop to grind out reviews right up until it's time to head out for movies. Yesterday it was laundry, today it's sleeping in. I'm glad I have the apartment through August, so that I can come back for a weekend or two next month and just do the touristy stuff.

One place I will definitely stop by again, either while I'm still here or on my way back, is the m:brgr bar. I had one of the best burgers I've ever eaten there last night. A bit pricey, but to be fair, it is ten times the burger-eating experience for only four or five times the price of a fast food place. That's arguably value.

Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

There's a group of filmmakers cranking out crazy exploitation in Japan; the results are not really good movies by any objective standard, but the creativity, energy, and commitment to giving the audience what it wants has to be admired. In America, we're busy blandly rehashing the ghosts and serial killers of twenty years ago or coming up with minor variations, whereas these guys decided that there needed to be a movie worthy of the name Vampire Girl Versus Frankenstein Girl. If you must watch teenagers get carved up, you might as well embrace the full strangeness of the latter.

In Japan, girls give chocolate to boys they like on Valentine's Day, but one teacher at Tokyo Public High School (conveniently located just below Tokyo Tower) spoils all the fun by taking away all non-academic materials - even after goth-loli queen bee Keiko (Eri Otoguro) screams for her ather, the vice principal. Now she can't show Mizushima (Takumi Saito) how much she tolerates him over the losers that make up the rest of the school! But Monami (Yukie Kawamura) can; her chocolate was tiny and people tend to ignore her (odd, because she's beautiful). And it's no ordinary chocolate - it's filled with Monami's blood, so eating it will bring Mizushima halfway to being a vampire like her. Crazy as that sounds, it may not be the strangest thing happening on campus, what with Keiko's father secretly working on reanimating the dead with oversexed nurse Midori, and some truly strange clubs.

Better make that strange and offensive - one is "gonguro", girls in blackface acting like a bizarre pastiche of African(-American) culture, although they're probably not worse than the competitive wrist-slitters. There's good satire possible with both, but filmmaker Naoyuki Tomomatsu isn't working that sort of subtlety, but instead making jokes as big and as broad as the bloodletting, and if you've got a problem with that, well, it's not like you chose to watch this movie because you've got a problem with bad taste and this was the classiest option. Still, it's not like many of the jokes are very funny beyond "I can't believe they did that!".

Full review at EFC.

"From Burger It Came"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Voice-over synced to animation that literalizes what the narrator is saying, this one involving memories of a young man's AIDS hysteria back when he had just transferred from Catholic school and not only didn't know much about the disease, but wasn't getting good information.

Fair enough as those things go, I guess, but this sort of thing doesn't excite me much. The reminiscence isn't particularly interesting, and the animation, though technically done well, doesn't especially illuminate or play off the words.

Canary

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival - Vers les Étoiles: Cerebral Science Fiction Cinema)

Canary is not for everyone. I know this because despite sitting in the fourth row of the auditorium, I saw a dozen or so people in front of me up and leave; I assume there were others behind me. Usually this happens in intensely off-putting films like Audition or Irreversible, but these people weren't grossed out or shocked in some other way. They were just fed up.

How did Canary try their patience? Well, to start, it opens with a scene of people speaking unsubtitled German, with no apparent reason for them to be incomprehensible to most of the audience. Later scenes in a doctors' office contain so much overlapping dialog that even if it's in English, it's nearly incomprehensible. And it utterly refuses to tell its story directly, reveling in approaching main storylines from a tangent - for instance, a story about a news crew investigating Canary Industries spends more time on the report feeling that her producer is undercutting her authority and effectiveness than the actual investigation.

For some, this is going to be boring and intolerable; others will see it as brilliant, improvisational pseudo-documentary style filmmaking that challenges the audience. There are certainly elements of both to it. What it comes down to, in a nutshell, is that director Alejandro Adams is completely forsaking plot in favor of world-building. He's not interesting in crusading reporters discovering the truth about Canary Industries' "organ redistribution" program, members trying to escape their fate, or how the plague of organ failures may be connected. He just wants to show us this world and let us mull it over a bit. So we're given reflections to study, little bits of everyday life that build not to a climax, but a picture.

Full review at EFC.

"La Révélation"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

A pretty darn nifty short film from France, which goes from the audience watching a B-movie to shooting it to aliens announcing their presense to the people of Earth. It's funny, kitschy without being abnoxious about it, and a little bit of a mindbender about what is "real" and what is not at various times. Very cool.

8th Wonderland

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - Vers les Étoiles: Cerebral Science Fiction Cinema)

The "virtual country" has been a favorite device of science fiction authors for a while now. The idea is that an online community would grow large and organized (and, perhaps, wealthy) enough to be more of a player on the world stage than nations defined by geography. 8th Wonderland transplants the idea to film, and while I don't know that the concept is as viable or inevitable as it's often presented as being, it's an interesting idea to play with.

The film opens on channel-surfing, from a documentary about cockroaches with chips implanted to news coverage of a South American election. There is another election going on, though, in the on-line community "8th Wonderland", directly tied to the real-world one. They end at the same time, and then the movie flashes back a few months. 8th Wonderland was a bit smaller then, and while its activities initially came off as pranks - installing condom dispensers in Catholic churches, for instance - they soon began to acquire more muscle in their attempts to strike blows for justice. Things get complicated in a hurry - American opportunist "John McClane" (Matthew Géczy) claims to have started the community, but those within have never heard of him, and appoint David (Robert William Bradford) as their Ambassador to the world. When they strike against a multinational corporation, the nations of the world start to take them seriously, as terrorists - and even though all activities were approved democratically, some members find themselves agreeing.

8th Wonderland starts out with the more sinister possibilities of this kind of rogue international organization, but without that flash-forward, it would be starting off as a comedy, as many of the initial operations are pretty entertaining, and play off both the idea that nations have a hard time fighting their jesters and how it can be difficult for those jesters to keep the attention of a public with a twenty-first century attention span. Even as they get into more direct intervention, such as Ludmilla (Irina Ninova) interceding as the translator in a meeting between Russian and Iranian Presidents - the film is still, initially, very funny.

Full review at EFC.


Wednesday: Reel Zombies, Divine Weapon, Black, and Orphan. Hells very much recommended; Canary, as you see, is an acquired taste.

Thursday has a ton up in the air: Edison and Leo, "Yariman" & "S&M Hunter" (unless the TBA on the schedule gets filled in with something interesting), Crazy Racer, Crime or Punishment?!? (unless I get a screener for it but not Cryptic), and The Possibility of an Island.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 20 July 2009: The Warlords, Coweb, and Life is Hot in Cracktown

The day was going to start with La Marque; my comments at the end of yesterday's posting, I do look forward to seeing the locally-made stuff. I just wound up over-committed to a plan made before actually seeing the 20th Century Boys movies, wanting to get their reviews done quickly, before they became blurred in my mind. Now, of course, I see that the two films are pretty darn distinct, what with the jump in time between them, but it got me hung up just long enough to arrive at the theater at 1:05.

Still, that did give me a little more time to walk around St. Catherine Street and the general area. I poked around three comic shops hoping to find things to fill some recent gaps in (2000AD #1625, Star Trek Countdown #3, and Judge Dredd Megazine #282), but no luck in any of them.

Tau ming chong (Warlords)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - Hong Kong Cinema: 100 Years)

At certain points, the fact that Warlords licked around for a while without a U.S. distributor despite being an epic with high production values and a star in Jet Li who is still relatively bankable was taken as the final sign that any remaining interesting in Asian cinema on this side of the Pacific had dried up. There's likely a depressing amount of truth to that, but it may also be because Jet Li does still sell as an action star, and studios may not want to counter that image with such an ambiguous role.

Li plays Pang Qing-yan, and as we open the film he is crawling out from under the corpses of his men, the only survivor of a battle against rebel forces in which his supposed ally, General Ho, abandoned rather than assisted them. He briefly abandons the army, sharing a single night with Lian (Xu Jing-lei), although he soon encounters her again in a bandit village - along with her husband, village chief Zhao Er-hu (Andy Lau), and his second in command, Jiang Wa-zhoa (Takeshi Kaneshiro). When finding out how poor they are, he suggest the army as offering regular pay and support for their families. It sounds like a good deal - until they find out that General Pang is as ruthless as any bandit.

Last week, I opened a review by mentioning that Jet Li wasn't getting any younger, and that's never been more true - nor used to better effect - than in this film. It's no so much that he's slowing down; he's still a force of nature on the battlefield. He looks middle-aged, though - Pang has graying, thinning hair, and we see wrinkles in his face other than laugh lines when the filmmakers go in for a close-up. There's a bit of a rasp to his voice, too, the sort that indicates that the authority there hasn't just come from confidence or skills, but more experience than any man need accumulate in real or metaphorical battlegrounds. Jet Li may not be as young as he once was, but he's not this old, either; he's giving one of his best performances as an actor, as opposed to just as a martial artist.

Full review at EFC.

Zhang wu shuang (Coweb)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - Hong Kong Cinema: 100 Years)

Jiang Lu Xia has, arguably, come full circle very quickly - not long ago, she was demonstrating her martial arts skills on internet videos and competing on Jackie Chan's The Disciple TV series (a program looking for the next big Hong Kong martial arts star). Now, she's starring in a movie which involves her character being sucked into a martial arts competition being streamed online.

That character, Nie Yiyi, is a skilled martial artist working as a security guard after her father's death. A childhood friend, Zhong Tien (Sam Lee), now works as a personal assistant to a local billionaire, Mr He (Eddie Cheung), and when he needs a bodyguard for his wife, Tien convinces them to hire Yiyi. The Hes are kidnapped anyway, though, and Yiyi blames herself - there were only seven of them, with one a running-through-walls giant, after all! A cell phone left at the scene leads her to a nightclub, where she's thrown into the first fight in a gauntlet.

As silly and hackneyed as that story sounds, the reality is, amazingly, actually far stupider, with final act revelations that really don't make a lick of sense, characters who act suspicious for no apparent reason, and ways of getting Yiyi into fights that only get more ridiculous as they go along; the story also largely depends on Yiyi not really being terribly bright. In a genre where screenplays are often the merest wisp of reasons to get from one fight scene to another, what "Sunny" Chan Wing-sun does here is especially transparent.

Full review at EFC.

Life is Hot in Cracktown

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - Hell on Earth: The Films of Buddy Giovinazzo)

There's a line in Buddy Giovinazzo's adaptation of his 1993 book of short stories that encapsulates the lives of its characters to a tragic extent; it's a man berating his girlfriend on her priorities: Food, then fix, then rent. I may have the first two in the wrong order. Combine that with how nobody in the movie really ever talks about getting clean, and you see the direction Giovinazzo is going: In some places, addiction is just a fact of life, as natural as breathing.

Not everybody in the film is an addict; one of the main characters, Victor Rasuk's Manny, seems to be living pretty clean, though he's at times as strung out as anybody by working two jobs to support a wife (Shannyn Sossamon) who is going stir-crazy with a baby that just will not stop crying. Elsewhere, pre-op transsexual Marybeth (Kerry Washington) and her husband Benny (Desmond Harrington) try to support fellow TS Ridley (Mark Webber) in coming out; ten-year-old Willy (Ridge Canipe) tries to protect his sister Susie (Ariel Winter) from the neglect of their addict mother (Illeana Douglas) while nursing a crush on not-much-older Melody (Elena Franklin), whose mother has brought her into prostitution; and Romeo (Evan Ross) works the streets with a ferocity that belies his sixteen years.

Crack is pervasive in this movie and this world, a supporting character in the same way the term is often applied to distinctive locations, but the film is not about drugs. Marybeth could drink, Willy's mother could gamble, and so on, and their stories wouldn't be acutely different. It's about people who, despite their circumstances and activities that most would disapprove of, still manage to interest us. They may not be heroes, but they are trying to survive as best they can, and Giovinazzo interweaves their stories in such a way to remind us that everybody is their own protagonist, even if they only exist on the periphery of our notice.

Full review at EFC.


Tuesday: Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, Canary, and 8th Wonderland (with having to miss The Canyon reallly hurting). Portrait of a Beauty and Tactical Unit, again, are both pretty good.

Wednesday: Reel Zombies, Divine Weapon, Black, and Orphan. Hells (and hopefully Canary) very much recommended.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 19 July 2009: Samurai Princess, 20th Century Boys double feature, and Portrait of a Beauty

The time spent in the Hall theater yesterday: Pretty first-rate, with both the quite satisfactory adaptations of 20th Century Boys and the pretty-good Portrait of a Beauty. The bookends across the street, though... I had issues. If I were smart, I would have skipped Samurai Princess, because it does look just like the cruddy gore movie it is. But, hey, I figured - Evangelion is playing at the Brattle next month, so why not see one more movie you might not. Because it's going to be crap, is why.

On the other end... I'd forgotten that the description to Train to Nowhere made it look like one of those movies where nothing happened, and it did indeed wind up being a bit of a boring movie nap. It was also one of those cases where being at the end of the line really hurt, because it meant I couldn't get a seat on the aisle. I don't normally favor those, but I don't want to climb out over people, which is the only alternative to sitting through a french-language Q&A session where I understand maybe one word in twenty.

Samurai purinsesu: Gedô-hime (Samurai Princess)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Why watch this crap? I ask not just because it's tacky exploitation that's bad for you, but because it's not even ably made bad exploitation. The acting is terrible, the director can't even frame a shot properly, and the action, for all the lovingly realized gore it leads to, is not exciting.

Seeing it a day after the Hard Revenge, Milly films makes it even worse, as there you at least get to see it done right. This... Well, it's just crappy and embarrassing, even if it does play with an interesting idea or two.

20-seiki shônen: Honkaku kagaku bôken eiga (20th Century Boys)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I considered skipping the 20th Century Boys double feature at Fantasia, not out of disinterest or fear that it wouldn't be any good, but because the weeks that translations of Naoki Urusawa's manga are released are the ones where I most look forward to visiting the comic shop. Three of about twenty-five volumes have been published so far, so figuring on a bi-monthly schedule, we're looking at about two and a half years of spoilers in one afternoon. But it's a ride!

When he was a kid, back in '69, Kenji Endo dreamed of changing the world with rock & roll. He played for a while, but as the film opens in 1997, Kenji (Toshiaki Karasawa) is no big star - he's taken over he family business, enduring humiliation from corporate reps after changing it from a liquor store to a franchise convenience store, and looks after Kanna, the baby his sister Kiriko (Hitomi Kuroki) left in his care before disappearing. Things are about to get a lot more exciting for Kenji, though - the police have questions about an entire area family's disappearance, a childhood friend has apparently committed suicide, and the talk at his elementary school reunion is about a religious cult led by a mysterious "Friend", all of them linked by a symbol they created as kids. Even worse, a series of viral outbreaks is mimicking the story Kenji wrote back then, "The Book of Prophecy" - a story which promises much worse to come.

The opening minutes give the audience some idea of just how sprawling the 20th Century Boys saga is; it jumps in time from 1969 to 2015 to 1997 (though not necessarily our 1997), and this film alone will make some other stops. There are literally dozens of characters, many of whom we see as both adults and children, and things introduced early on that won't pay off until the second or perhaps even the third film. And that's after paring it down from a comic series that published weekly 18-page installments for around five years!

Full review at EFC.

20-seiki shônen: Dai 2 shô - Saigo no kibô (20th Century Boys Chapter Two: The Last Hope)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

So, how about that ending for part one? Crazy, huh? Going to be hard to top. Hard enough, in fact, that the filmmakers don't quite manage it in the second chapter, although they certainly do an entertaining job of getting to the next phase of The Friend's plan and whetting our appetite for the forthcoming Chapter Three.

(Note: Do not click through to the rest of the review unless you're okay with knowing how Chapter One ends. I mean it. It'll still be here later.)

Full review at EFC.

Mi-in-do (Portrait of a Beauty)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Passion is at the core of Portrait of a Beauty, both that of one person for another and a person for his or her art. The former comes across loud and clear; the heat on this film is dialed almost all the way up. The latter, while there and important, doesn't always come through quite as well as it perhaps could, although perhaps that's fitting, considering the love both the film and its subjects have for the world's earthly and sensual delights, in contrast to the abstract.

The film opens during Korea's Joseun dynasty, with people admiring a young boy's artwork, but when he is asked to take brush in hand, he freezes, wetting himself. His enraged father comes to look for him after he has fled the room, only to find the boy has hung himself. That's when the true story emerges: Despite his father's ambitions, the boy has no talent for art; his sister Yun-jeong has been filling his portfolio and allowing him to pass it off as his own. The father is further enraged, blaming the girl for her brother's death but also insisting she continue the deception, disguising herself as a boy and going off to the art academy under Yun-bok's name. She does, and quickly becomes a favorite of the court artist, Kim Hong-do (Kim Yeong-ho); however, when the adult "Yun-bok" (Kim Min-sun) meets mirror maker Kang-mu (Kim Nam-gil), he soon discovers her secret and they fall in love, which not only adds a forbidden erotic streak to her art, but threatens to expose her in a time when women were not allowed to become artists.

Though several of the characters are actual historic figures, the premise advanced in the 2007 novel on which the film is based, that Shin Yun-bok (also known as "Hyewon") was actually a woman, is fictional, so far as anybody knows. It does make for an intriguing scenario, albeit one which requires some suspension of disbelief if Yun-jeong was really as beautiful - and the other students as masculine - as presented in the film. It also leads to the question of just what her father's plan was - when sending her off, he makes comments about how artists are brought down by their best pupils, but what does he mean? That Yun-jeong would succeed Hong-do as court artist, or that he intended to reveal the deception in such a way as to ruin Hong-do? Either way, the long-term repercussions of that plan don't seem to be very well thought out.

Full review at EFC.


Today's plan: The Warlords, Coweb, and Life is Hot in Cracktown. Crush and Blush, Orochi, The Chaser, and Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms are all recommended.

Tuesday: Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, maybe "Small Gauge Trauma", Canary, and 8th Wonderland (with having to miss The Canyon reallly hurting). Portrait of a Beauty and Tactical Unit, again, are both pretty good.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 18 July 2009: Paco; Milly; Yesterday; Crush and Blush; Orochi; Smash Cut

Not much time for other comments after finishing the review of Paco (didn't get back in until nearly 3am last night, first film today is at noon, so not a lot of time in between), but I will say that that is how you do a film festival day right - six films, all pretty good, guests at three who give entertaining Q&A afterward.

Pako to mahô no ehon (Paco and the Magical Book)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

You could probably cut quite the deceptive trailer for Paco and the Magical Book, if you chose, by concentrating on the fast-paced, animation-heavy last act. It wouldn't be a complete misrepresentation, but it sure wouldn't give a true idea of what director Tetsuya Nakashima has in store for the audience.

He starts with a framing sequence in which an eccentric old man (Sadao Abe) goes to visit an aimless heir. He's looking for the book of the title, now beaten and worn. But once upon a time, there was a hospital. The patients included badly injured firefighter Takita (Hitori Gekidan), hypochondriac drag queen Kinomoto (Jun Kunimura), a psych case who wishes he wasn't human, and failed suicide Muromachi (Satoshi Tsumabuki). There was a doctor who looked forward to the annual play put on for the "Summer Christmas" celebration, and two nurses - Tamako (Anna Tsuchiya), who was always angry, and Masami (Eiko Koike), with vampire-sharp teeth that she frequently sank into her husband, the nephew of the hospital's wealthiest patient, Onuki (Koji Yakusho). Onuki was a mean old man, cruel to everyone he met, even Paco (Ayaka Wilson), whom he thought had stolen his solid-gold cigarette lighter. What Onuki didn't know was that Paco cannot retain a new day's memories after a night's sleep - hence her excitement at reading her new book for the first time every morning. After their first encounter, though, she vaguely remembers Onuki the next day, which stirs some small vestige of human emotion in the old grouch.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that Onuki's heart will grow three sizes by the end of the film. Despite the unorthodox cast of characters, Paco is a fairy tale, and even the smallest of children will not fail to see the connection between Onuki and the greedy, selfish Toad Prince in Paco's storybook. Nakashima and co-writer Nobuhiro Monma (working from a book by Hirohito "Elvis" Goto) are a step or two ahead of the audience in that case, though, using the framing scenes to comment on how most stories work and then sending it off in a different direction - one that doesn't feel arbitrary at all.

Full review at EFC.

"Hâdo ribenji, Mirî" & Hâdo ribenji, Mirî: Buraddi batoru ("Hard Revenge, Milly" & Hard Revenge, Milly: Bloody Battle)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm going to have to add these two to the EFC database so that reviews can go in, even though the first is about half-length at 44 minutes. They are pretty exceptional pieces of work for their low budget: Exciting action movies, for sure, but not only does director Takanori Tsujimoto shoot a good action scene - which he does, and having a screen fighter as good as Miki Mizuno in his corner doesn't hurt at all - but he's actually built enough of a story and a world around pretty standard post-apocalyptic trappings that I really want to see more.

Yesterday

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Another no-budget special, almost literally - a bunch of Vancouver film students shot it during their summer vacation for about $10k - and while it doesn't break new zombie-movie ground, it is a pretty darn good "no-one is safe" example of the genre.

Misseu Hongdangmu (Crush and Blush)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Fantasia being the sort of festival that it is, it doesn't always feature a lot of female-oriented movies, so it's nice to see something like Crush and Blush every once in a while. It's written and directed by a woman, and there's really only one noteworthy male character in it. It's also the sort of movie where the knives are out, with the various characters finding ways to make each others' lives miserable even under the occasional guise of sisterhood.

Orochi

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Darn it, I'm not going to start buying Kazuo Umezu horror manga from the comic shop, no matter how many stylish horror movies they make from his work. Orochi is actually pretty restrained (although also a bit plot-heavy) compared to last year's Akanbo Shojo, not showing much in the way of gore or grotesquery at all, and featuring some nice performances from Yoshino Kimura and Noriko Nakagoshi. I've just picked up too many things like The Drifting Classroom, opened to a random page, and put it down having seen something I couldn't unsee.

Smash Cut

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Smash Cut is a lot more fun this sort of "homage" usually is, in large part due to the performance of David Hess as a director of crappy horror movies who finally snaps and starts making his latest flick more real by actually killing people and using their corpses as props (as well as acting out some low-budget filmmaker revenge fantasies). Much of the rest is enjoyably silly, but it's Hess that makes this film worth watching.


Today's plan is Samurai Princess, both 20th Century Boys pictures, Portait of a Beauty, and A Quelle Heure le Train pour Nulle Part.

Monday is looking like La Marque, The Warlords, Coweb, and Life is Hot in Cracktown

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 17 July 2009: GS Wonderland, Instant Swamp, Animation, Secret Hot Spring Resort, and The Chaser

Huh; I could have sworn I slept through Arcanum as a work-in-progress when it screened at Fantasia back in 2006, but I can't find any record in the blog of doing so. So I guess my being knocked out this time around may entirely be me being tired after a few hours in the office, four movies, and one shorts package.

GS Wandarando (GS Wonderland)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

One of the signs of a particularly good comedy - or any sort of movie, really - is when there are funny or interesting things happening in the corners; stuff that the movie doesn't need but which make things even better. GS Wonderland has plenty of these things, but rather than enhancing an above-average movie, they point out how bland the actual center of the film is.

It's the summer of 1968, and Beatlemania has hit Japan with the sort of pop-cultural wallop that gives rise to scores of imitators. Tomonoro Sasaki (Tetta Sugimoto) has been charged with starting a "group sounds" label for his company (or it's back to producing nursery rhyme flexi-discs!), and has agent Kajii Ryosuke (Shinji Takeda) hunt up a band. He stumbles upon The Diamonds, three guys who had had a cruel prank played upon them by another band - guitarist Masao (Takuya Ishida), drummer Shun (Hiro Mizushima), and bass player Kenta (Yosuke Asari). The song that the company has requires an organist, though - and the only keyboard player Kajii can find is Miku Ono (Chiaki Kuriyama)... and who has ever heard of a girl in a GS band? So, one promise of a solo contract and wig later, "Michio 'Mick' Ono" is part of the group. The Diamonds are a disaster, but when the label rebrands them as "The Tightsmen", they score a smash hit - in part, of course, because the girls find Mick so dreamy.

This is a fun idea, dressed up in colorful 1960s costumes, and with a bit of satire about the music industry that is still relevant today; what could go wrong? Well, mainly, director Ryuichi Honda and his co-writer Yuji Nagamori could fail to make the Tightsmen interesting in almost any way. Masao, Shun, and Kenta are completely interchangeable; their supposed characterizations (Shun was bullied by his seven older sisters, Masao has dropped out of school to pursue his music career) are briefly mentioned but never matter that much. Miku is a bit of an enigma herself; she's strong-willed and tough, but that's sort of the extent of what we know about her.

Full review at EFC

Insutanto Numa (Instant Swamp)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Satoshi Miki's follow-up to Adrift in Tokyo isn't quite as magical as that movie was, and it's not hard to guess the reason - it feels like it's trying harder, rather than just capturing a moment between a couple of characters. It does have a lead character that is awful easy to like in Kumiko Aso's Haname Jinchoge, who early on does a nice job of balancing quirkiness and with a sort of no-nonsense attitude, although the quirk starts to take over as the film goes on.

It's a fun movie, though, and props must be given for the ending, which features an event so audacious as to be ridiculous, and yet it works for this film.

The Outer Limits of Animation 2009

N/A (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Unfortunately, the longest two segments of this shorts package ("God of Tears" and "Spaceman on Earth") were also among the least entertaining - doubly sad, given that the directors were there in person. In sharp contrast were the four tiny pieces by PES - delightful in a very compact package - and some of the other short-shorts like Philip Eddolls's "Gib Gob" and Patrick Boivin's "businessman version" of the Iggy Pop song "King of the Dogs". I also rather dug Run Wrake's "Control Master" and "This is J03" from Rory Lowe & Tom Schrapnel". "Aerius" by Tanya Erzinclioglu & Nicola Coppack is utterly beautiful and I loved the imagination in "Après la Pluie". Best of show, though, was easily "Mr. Wire's Nostalgia" by Jonathan Ostos Yaber, both for its nifty stop-motion design and the emotional wallop it packs at the end.

(Maruhi) yu no machi - Yoru no hitode (Secret Hot Spring Resort)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Okay, maybe I'm not so keen on the Brattle picking up the pink movie series. I liked this a little better than Gushing Prayer, and actually thought there was a pretty good movie in here somewhere. It kind of goes a little off the rails in the end, though, and there's something distinctively unsavory about how the characters are trying to sell what is basically a rape as titillation (and, by extension, how the film is trying to sell that to us).

Chugyeogja (The Chaser)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

The Chaser was not quite the movie I expected, but not in a bad way - where I sort of figured on it being a feet-on-the-ground race across Seoul, that part ends fairly quickly; from then on, it's a bit of a mind-game as former-cop-turned-pimp Jung-ho (Kim Yun-seok) as well as the police force tries to find proof that Ji Young-min (Ha Jung-woo) actually is the monster they know him to be: A tough enough job with the force's hands tied by procedure, but even Jung-ho is hampered by a distinct lack of information.

I believe this has been optioned for a Hollywood remake, and it's one I wouldn't necessarily mind, in that I can't see how they wouldn't tone the end down a little bit.

Today's plan is Paco and the Magic Book, the Hard Revenge Milly double bill, Yesterday, Crush and Blush, The Horseman, and Smash Cut. Alien Trespass isn't bad.

Sunday, it's Samurai Princess, both 20th Century Boys pictures, Portait of a Beauty, and A Quelle Heure le Train pour Nulle Part.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Fantasia Daily for 16 July 2009: Slam-Bang, Gushing Prayer, Hells, and "La Tueur de Montmarte"

I think I was kind of sick on Thursday: I felt chilly in the de Seve theater, had a headache later on (and maybe a fever), my legs felt pretty weak, and this morning nothing tastes right. It sucks when you have a day like that on "vacation", although it didn't seem to affect me much at work.

In the "ain't that always the way" file: It took me longer than I wanted to get out of the office, as I was trying to upload a spreadsheet that was too big. I got on the Metro, did the transfer, found the wrong exit at Guy-Concordia, and arrived at the theater just as Rough Cut was scheduled to start... And then proceeded to wait a half hour because the previous show had a long Q&A going on.

"Très (très) chasse"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

A Quebec DIY short just good enough to also play in front of Slam-Bang, and it is a nicely-shot action piece, although once you get beyond the camera work and action staging, it's not so clever. The action gets started because the villain makes two crack shots to take out 2/3 of a hunting party, but then cannot hit the broad side of a barn thereafter. The twist at the end is kind of clever, but still requires the antagonists to be unreasonably stupid, even by inbred inarticulate redneck standards.

Slam-Bang

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

I was kind of excited to see this one, as I'm curious about the chances of seeing interesting things coming out of South Africa. There's some money there (and also an appalling lack of money in other quarters), and that parallel-universe show that blipped on the Sci-Fi channel a year or so ago was an indication that they'd make things that might not come out of other English-speaking countries.

Sadly, Slam-Bang is just kind of unpleasant, from the voice of "the Chinaman" on the phone who always addresses the hero as "Lound-eye", to the casual violence that doesn't even provide much in the way of atmosphere, to the ending that just isn't satisfying in any way whatsoever. A lot more intestines than this sort of gangster/thriller film needs, too.

Funshutsu kigan: 15-sai baishunfu (Gushing Prayer)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival: Behind the Pink Curtain)

I hope that the touring pink eiga film series included in Fantasia makes a stop at Boston, as the Nikkatsu Action! series did a couple years ago. I didn't love Gushing Prayer, but found it fairly interesting. There was a fairly involved discussion before and after about what sex was the stand-in for in this movie, but I think it works well enough if you just take it as it is - a story about kids who are experimenting with sex and trying to devise rules for it that will prevent them from being their parents.

It's an uncomfortable watch in places - the subtitle that has been dropped in order to cause less trouble with bookings is "A 15-Year-Old Prostitute", and lead actress Aki Sasaki does look young enough to make the sex scenes more than a little questionable. If the series does show up in the area, well, that's what you're getting into with this one.

Heruzu Enjueruzu (Hells)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

It's fitting that this adaptation of Sin-ichi Hiromoto's manga Hells Angels is produced by a company called Madhouse, because it is apparently the result of throwing in everything, plus the kitchen sink, plus any other sinks that may be around. The animation is hand-drawn and stylized, and some new crazy thing, whether it be a visual, an idea, or just a bit of crazy optimism from its blue-haired heroine Linne, pops up every thirty seconds or so. It's dizzying, but delightful, for ninety minutes, at least.

And then it's as if the filmmakers are utterly ignorant of the concept of "enough"; the thing just won't end! They're still pumping out creative and astonishing visuals, but the movie is dry on ideas; the final battle blasts through multiple logical endpoints, and it just gets repetitive: "You have to believe!" "I believe!" "I have doubts!" "Nooooooooo!!!!..." "You have to believe!" And so on. Maybe I'd have been a bit more tolerant if it weren't late and I wasn't feeling kind of under the weather, but there's a real strong vibe of "weren't we just here five minutes ago?" throughout the last half hour.

"Le Tueur de Montmarte" ("The Killer of Montmarte")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Because as midnight approached, what I really needed was another featurette that ran nearly an hour. It's a nifty one, though, with fantastic character designs, pitch-black comedy, and a way of combining what may be traditional or digital animation (it can be difficult to tell with this sort of chunky character design) with photographic backgrounds that is much more effective than the technique usually is.

It also seems a bit strung out, and there were a number of walk-outs, though I believe that was more due to the lateness of the hour than the quality of the film. It's got a tendency to go off on tangents that are generally more nifty than tiresome.



Today's plan is GS Wonderland (if I can finish work early), Instant Swamp, "Outer Limits of Animation", Les Lascars, The Chaser (or maybe the other screening of GS Wonderland, if work doesn't co-operate), and Arcanum.

Saturday's plan is Paco and the Magic Book, the Hard Revenge Milly double bill, Yesterday, Crush and Blush, The Horseman, and Smash Cut. Alien Trespass isn't bad.