After scooting out of the apartment to get to Wild Blood - not really worth it, but I'd seen the other features and I hate to leave a hole in the schedule, because while I don't necessarily get a lot of hits per review, I'll try to write up everything - it was across the street for the Outer Limits of Animation, which is always one of the best shows, but as you might expect, the guests were Canadian as heck
First up were "Skin for Skin" directors Kevin D. A. Kurytnik & Carol Beecher (second and third from left, with Ruppert Bottenberg, director of the animation programs, second from right), who actually weren't local, but you could tell they were Canadian as soon as they opened their mouths, and they seemed please as punch to be premiering their short film about Canadian history at a big Canadian festival in Montreal, not far from the NFB/ONF (right down to making sure they used both English and French initials), during the 150th anniversary of the confederation. There were a number of people in the audience who had traveled specifically to see this short, including some educators. Everybody involved seemed pretty pleased, as well they should - it was clearly the centerpiece of the block, and exceptionally well-done, with a great deal of research behind it.
Truth be told, I wish I'd gotten more of a chance to get out and see some of the "Canada 150" (and "Montreal 250") stuff being done around the city; between the schedule of the festival, the schedule I set for myself, and the weather, I did relatively little but the festival this trip, and I tend to love learning about our northern neighbor's history, how it parallels and differs from that of the United States. We're like close cousins (with Australia and New Zealand a more distant branch of the family tree), and we should know each other better.
Also making an appearance was Lori Malépart-Traversy (far left, with Marc Lamothe, far right), who made the pretty darn adorable "Le Clitoris", and there's little screwier about words having gender than that one being masculine. Which is all the insight I've got from this mostly-French introduction. I liked how irreverently educational the short film was, though.
No guest for Animals, which wasn't surprising - it was an oddball European thing - and by the time it was over, we were being shuffled in and out of the room quickly enough that I don't think many of us had had times to check our phones before Mitch Davis came in to introduce Replace looking like he'd been punched in the stomach. He had just gotten the word that George Romero had died, and though I don't think I'll ever doubt that the Fantasia folks absolutely love what they do, seeing how gutted he was by this news should allay any future doubts.
He was a bit more composed afterward, introducing writer/director Norbert Keil, co-writer Richard Stanley, and co-star Barbara Crampton, even having a self-deprecating laugh at himself when he pointed out that the movie's star, Rebecca Forsythe, was the daughter of William Forsythe and the audience collectively couldn't quite recall him. As usual, he led a pretty good Q&A, although what struck me was what an interesting cross-section of genre film the guests were. Keil is the up-and-comer, directing what I believe is his first English-language feature, fairly excited to be collaborating with the other two but also carving out his own career. Stanley is sort of a fringe figure and iconoclast, because as much as folks may know the name, his movies are often an acquired taste and he's probably just as famous for being a very distinct personality and, as a result, not getting his big mainstream break. I swear he was wearing the exact same outfit the last time he had a movie playing the festival (that one about him more than created by him). Crampton, meanwhile, has probably handled a career that made her a horror icon impressively well; where a lot of actresses will probably resent winding up most famous for Re-Animator and the like, she seems to genuinely like the genre, making the festival rounds with enthusiasm and getting excited about horror movies she's got nothing to do with on social media. She'll probably wind up saying that, yeah, there's a lot of Jeffrey Combs's Dr. Herbert West in the mad scientist she plays in this one a lot as it makes the festival circuit, shows up on VOD, and is then released on home video, but she'll be gracious and sincere throughout.
Not a bad day, movie-and-guest-wise. Next up: A day in De Seve with Tom of Finland, The Honor Farm, The Senior Class, Shock Wave, and Free and Easy.
Vahsi kan (Wild Blood)
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Tribute to Cüneyt Arkin, HD)
Every few years, the festival will have a sidebar that is basically "movies that have an important place in pop culture history somewhere in the world, even though they're kind of objectively terrible", and it's probably worth checking one out so you've got some idea of that chapter of cinematic history in your head. But, don't look too much more closely than "right place, right time" for why these action movies were a big deal in Turkey; the likes of Wild Blood are not good movies, no matter how excited the people of Turkey were to see this sort of home-grown action at the time.
This one opens with a flurry of witnesses in a potential trial against Hasmet (Hüseyin Peyda) being rubbed out, mostly at the hands of son Osman (Osman Betin). Unfortunately for him, his most bitter enemy, Riza (Cüneyt Arkin), escapes from the military police escorting him, although not until after saving the lives of his guards. As he moves through the wilderness, making his way to Hasmet's well-guarded stronghold, he meets up with another escapee, the daughter (Emel Tümer) of one of the other witnesses.
It's barely seconds into the film before the audience is struck by how choppy the editing of this movie is, especially for something made in the early 1980s, bouncing all over the place, with random cuts to weird angles and a tendency to leave a conversation midway through, but without a pause to indicate it's a bit of a cliffhanger moment. It seldom reaches the point of complete incoherence, but it reflects a "throw it all together" feel, content to explain some bit or piece of Riza's deal whenever they get around to it. There aren't very many transitions or bit of exposition in the movie that aren't somehow bumpy, like it doesn't matter how things are connected so long as they're all there.
Full review on EFC.
"Il Etait 3 Fois"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
My French has apparently atrophied to the point where I can't quite understand what little kids are saying, even with visual aids. It's sad.
Still, this short is cute as all get-out, looking and sounding like it was animated to a group of toddlers trying to one-up each other improvising a story of kings, princesses, and knights, leading to absurdity and physical comedy. The art is the sort of colored pencils you associate with children even if most kids that age struggle with getting lines that straight and scales that consistent, at least a bit. Charmingly chaotic.
"Birdy Wouaf Wouaf"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
Another quick but funny cartoon from France, "Birdy Wouaf Wouaf" tells the tale of a baby bird that gets booted out of the nest because his tweets occasionally come out as barks, stumbling around the area until he finds a friend with a similar speech impediment.
Good, funny stuff with a spare style that really helps focus on just how frantic things are for the poor little bird, with pauses just brief enough to prime for the next disaster and spots of greater detail that hint at horror. Director Ayçe Kartal is also sharp in terms of building and undermining expectations of just where things will go as the bird meets cats and dogs. Generally, just a lot of fun.
"Untamed Truths"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
A spiffy-looking bit of cardboard-cutout-style animation that seems like a conventional bit of animal ABCs with fun facts until you get to "D", which is about how even though dolphins have flippers, they do have one member that can actually grip things, and then parents might start rushing kids out of the screening. It's funny stuff, and more fun besides because most of what it talks about is kind of interesting well beyond the combination of cute pictures and gross-out material.
"Skin for Skin"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
The block's centerpiece and standout is easily "Skin for Skin" by Kevin D. A. Kurytnik & Carol Beecher, a downright gorgeous tale of "The Emperor of the North", as the head of the company that controlled much of the fur trade in Canada was called when he toured his territory, checking the books in 1832. It is a perilous journey, as you might imagine, with dangers aplenty and revelations to be had.
The mythology they synthesize eventually chooses the crow as its particular trickster god, serving as pest and beacon before shooting one purges the rest of the trip into horror. It's a genuinely striking, unrelenting horror show, sometimes not entirely clear that it is supposed to be metaphorical to some extent, with imagery of bones and mayhem and disaster indicating the sort of damage that unbalanced, unwavering profit-seeking can do to a place but also just effective on their own, It's genuinely nightmarish, especially for how it leaps to the fore after a stiff sort of opening to reflect the Emperor's dour character.
The animation is impressively styled, too, with plenty of detail and weight to its 3D rendering, not just going for parallax but an expansive world to roam. The often-brown palette suggests autumn and potential endings with the need for later renewal, as well as giving the look of faded history while still being sharp on its own. The sound design is very nice as well, with the traditional songs on the soundtrack gradually verging closer to dirges as the film goes on.
Educators in the audience reported coming out to get a look at this, so I wouldn't be surprised if the NFB makes sure it has a life beyond the festival circuit. It certainly hits its targets well enough to impress.
"Inhibitum"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
More fun knowledge to be gleaned here, as Atelier Collectif presents five twentieth-century inventions that were suppressed or diminished for commercial or political reasons - the aero-train, durable nylons, safe cigarettes, the water engine, and bio-resonance. It's not necessarily the best medium for this - compacting this much contrariness into an eight-minute short can make it look like the work of cranks and diminish even the factual material - but it's still impressive work of presenting the information in a concise, easy-to-understand way, even with the sarcastic end to each segment about how it's all for the best.
It's also a very nice bit of playing with style, though, as each of the "avoided inventions" is presented with a different look, but this never prevents the short from feeling unified as a whole. It feels like the sort of anthology whose bits could be scattered throughout a program, but also unified enough to work as a single short.
"Decibels"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
Léo Verrier's "Decibels" certainly has one of the most striking visual looks, with huge heads on small bodies making for a hyper-expressive group at a party trying to take control of the soundtrack, with our sad-sack-looking hero always pushed away even though he's got a really good mix on his USB drive. It's a nifty design, and that Verrier pulls it off is more impressive than it looks at first - those tiny bodies don't seem particularly suited for dancing, and a lot of things have to be designed just so for the hands to be able to get past the heads and manipulate it.
Someone who responds to music a little more than I do will probably get a bit more a kick out of some of the jokes that run along those lines, but it's not needed to really enjoy this - it gets a lot of good character animation in and does a nice job of telling a compact story.
"First Snowfall"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
It's a bit strange to see something as thoroughly commercial as "First Snowfall" in the middle of a program of what is not necessarily independent animation, but not really promoting anything else - the Mattel logo on either end doesn't even suggest that this "Masters of the Universe" piece is a fan film like we used to see when "Square Jaw Theater" was a regular part of the fest. Take that away, though, and it's a pretty decent piece, with He-Man and Skeletor battling in a snow storm with a decidedly different animation style.
It's not a whole lot more than a fight, and while it's nicely staged and animated, it's not quite a nifty enough bit of work that it would work for me despite my not being a fan of those particular toys and cartoons. It will be worth looking out for some of director Sam Chou's other work, though.
"The Absence of Eddy Table"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
I've not seen any of Dave Cooper's Eddy Table comics (and I've probably skipped right over Cooper's stuff in the comic shop generally), so I've got no idea how well this adapts them. It is, on its own, a pretty surreal bit of animation, starting off looking like a somewhat awkward attempt to convert something two-dimensional to three. It's surprising how Cooper's curvy, rounded characters don't look quite so right as you'd think when CGI'd, although director Rune Spaans puts Table into an environment rendered beautifully. It feels like a small world whose curve you can see and feel, with everything made of little thriving nodes, and it's impressively if unevenly enveloping.
Then Eddy spots a will-o-the-wisp, and some super-curvy girls, and they lead him to some genuinely creative and bizarre horror material, although it often plays out as other genres in cartoony fashion. I don't know if Spaans and Cooper quite hit the emotional beats that they're going for, but it doesn't matter that much, as the singular, oddly-well-connected strangeness works on its own
"La Bite"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
"La Bite" is, in many ways, French satire at both its best and worst - fearless, anti-authoritarian, and happy to be vulgar if it gets a point across, but also so full of blanket cynicism and "both sides though" that it might as well not be saying anything. So it is here, where cops beat up a jackass spray-painting a penis onto a wall, get caught on video which goes viral until… Well, you can guess how it turns out.
It's fun, and directors Jérôme Leroy and Pierre Tolmer have a genuine knack for zipping through casual violence and vulgarity to make them play as well-timed jokes; there's a lot of laughs and you can't say that much of the cynical viewpoint isn't well-earned. But "hey, everyone's awful eventually" isn't really that clever a statement, and getting there leaves things a bit hollow.
"Richard Twice"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
Matthew Salton's film is in that odd "animated documentary" genre, and it's an interesting-enough story - an interview with Richard Atkins, who was half of the title duo that made one album and then walked away, with Atkins becoming a woodworker and not performing for 40 years. It's an interesting story backed up by some good music and the further hook of Atkins having lost a leg in a motorcycle accident some years earlier.
The animated nature hurts it, though - maybe finding footage to use or recreating it would have been prohibitive, but the squiggly, not-particularly-striking style used here never really feels like showing things that the filmmakers otherwise can't; it's more off-putting than intriguing. It also never makes the incident that ended things seem like the watershed moment it was. That may be fair - the point of the story may just be that sometimes show business is just that random - but it doesn't really communicate that, either.
"Le Clitoris"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
Another animated documentary, albeit on a somewhat different subject. This one is an appropriately cheery thing, as would seem appropriate for "the only organ devoted exclusively to pleasure", though writer/director Lori Malépart-Traversy is sneakily clever on that one - an early comment about how the clitoris has been "repeatedly rediscovered by men" gives a bit of hint to how, while Malépart-Traversy will mostly focus on basic biology that both men and women in the audience may not be aware of, there's an important undercurrent to what she's saying about how science and knowledge are often defined in terms of male experiences and how it fits into cultural norms, making this sort of basic primer more necessary than it should be.
All that, and it's a cute, fun picture to watch - it may technically be a lecture, but it's an enjoyable one.
"Vibrato"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
Things stayed sexy with "Vibrato", a somewhat unconventional narrative that focused on the Paris Opera House through the eyes of architect Charles Garnier's wife, who points out that they made love just about every one of its many nooks and crannies as it was built, breathy narration not normally used for architecture and generally more metaphorically for music. It's an odd but clever choice - architecture is an art form that can easily be reduced to mathematics or appreciation for scale, and this pushes the viewer to experience it on a more raw, direct level.
The animation is beautiful, naturally, but more often impressionistic than detailed, occasionally making use of interesting transparency to show multiple layers. It also shows mechanical marvels within the building, and allow reminders that this is a performance center rather than a cathedral accrue.
You can see all the architectural details in photographs or in person; this is about showing the building as a living place with an energy of its own.
"Yin"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)
The program finishes up with "Yin" by Nicolas Fong, a funny and striking short which opens on a cosmic scale, zooming in on coupled gods before finding the one grumpy, solitary one at the center. He goes on to create a world with one creature with male and female halves, splits it, and then devises various obstacles to the pair reuniting. The message: Patriarchal monotheism is a path to misery.
Well, not the only message, but I suspect that would be a fun place to start when pulling apart the symbolism in Fong's movie, which seems delightfully deep but also charmingly whimsical - it gives the viewer a vast, beautiful universe to consider even if it puts the focus on a small corner, and then plays with big ideas and emotions with a smile. As the male and female figures pursue each other despite their miserable creator's attempts to keep them separate, they're occasionally separated as much by scale as distance as something that goes in a door small comes out large because this is no simply physical portal. The temple they climb is an Escher-like edifice even without the creator's interference; take the message about how faith and ritual can create both obstructions and connections as you like.
But mostly, enjoy the fun, upbeat atmosphere, the black-and-white visuals which incorporate and eschew grey scales as necessary, and the general sense of fun. There's a brain and a heart to "Yin", but never without a smile.
Tierre (Animals)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Greg Zglinski at times gleefully dispenses with basic narrative logic and consistency in Animals, and often seems to taunt the viewers who would be inclined to to navigate it on the basis of symbolism or some sort of dream logic besides. Instead, he takes a simple-seeming situation, loads it with inconsistency and alternate realities, and tells the audience good luck with that. But for all that his movie is peculiar and self-contradictory, it's never exactly confusing, letting the audience both digest and laugh at its strangeness.
It opens with a set of quick snapshots - popular chef Nick (Philipp Hochmair) chatting with customers at his restaurant, his wife Anna (Birgit Minichmayr) practicing asking him about the affair she's sure he's having, and a woman throwing herself out the window of her apartment. The camera implies she disappears before hitting the street, though, and soon we're seeing Nick and Anna preparing for a six-month working trip to Switzerland, where Nick will collect local recipes and Anna will work on her first novel for adults after many successful children's books. Mischa (Mona Petri), a friend of a friend of Nick's, will apartment-sit. All well and good, except for the furtive call from Nick's depressed lover Andrea (whose familiar window is directly above their own), the sheep Nick hits with his car on the way, and how, after Andrea finally does jump, her ex-boyfriend Harald (Michael Ostrowski) comes to Nick's apartment to confront him, only to be certain that Mischa is actually Andrea.
There's more strangeness on tap - more doppelgangers, missing time, memories that seemingly come from the future rather than the past, doors in both Mischa's borrowed apartment and the cottage rented by Anna and Nick that don't open, etc. - and though Zglinski initially seems to offer a logical explanation in how both Anna and Mischa have sustained a head injury that they don't necessarily tend as well as they should, that soon proves not to be enough; the men are also seeing double. And yet, as the movie goes on, the idea that there might be some sort of in-story explanation becomes less important. After all, as the potential concussions remind us, human memory is not a perfect mechanism. Maybe, when we see things from Anna's perspective, she's confusing faces because in her mind, the two people already both represent her husband's infidelity. Things are shown, shown not to have happened, and then happen later, but that can represent a struggle - Andrea seems depressed the one time the viewer sees her, and it's not hard to see her as contemplating suicide every day, and this is the day she finally goes through with it. Maybe what seems prophetic is just a coincidence, or influenced by the earlier impression. On top of that, Anna is writing a book about a woman who kills her husband. Life is a series of reflections, roads not taken, and things which seem inevitable at the time, imperfectly recorded by a process we do not truly understand.
Full review on EFC.
"Emily"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
A genuinely nifty little short that I'd like to see expanded into a feature, as writer/director Mamady Condé hits the same sort of intersection between superhero and horror material that M. Night Shyamalan did with Unbreakable and Split, giving us Lindsey Shaw as the title character, narrating to a friend how she survived a disaster while on a cruise with her family which should have been impossible. It's found-footage, doing a quick build to a sort of inevitable reveal, but Condé, co-writer Kyle Meade, and Shaw do a nice job in keeping the tone appropriate, remembering that Emily is grieving even as they build to an exciting finale with potential for different directions.
Replace
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Replace has a creepy, au courant premise for a horror movie about a woman afraid of losing her looks to the aging process - in fact it's got two, and that may be its biggest issue - though the two attack the same idea, they do so from decidedly opposite directions, and combining the two, as necessary as it seems for the plot, often has the movie feeling like it's at cross-purposes, and not in a way that creates interesting moral ambiguity.
That young woman is Kira Mabon (Rebecca Forsythe) - she's hot and knows it, letting tonight's boy Jonas (Sean Knopp) know he's lucky to get her into his crappy apartment. It's a funny thing, though - she barely seems to have left when she finds herself coming back, like it's her apartment and she's been there a while with no sign of Jonas. That's the way her next-door neighbor Sophia Demeraux (Lucie Aron) seems to see things, and that's not the only strange thing going on - the skin on her hand is decaying, and the spot seems to be spreading quickly. The researcher she's referred to, Dr. Rafaela Crober (Barbara Crampton), prescribes Kira some drugs, but Kira discovers something else - her skin will quickly integrate with that of someone else, although the tissue needs to be fresh. So, just how badly does Kira want to stay young and pretty?
Director Norbert Keil and co-writer Richard Stanley seem to have come up with two answers to that question - one where she goes out with a knife and gets replacement parts and another where she unwittingly trades something precious for it in a way that explains her missing time, and while that may seem like too much for one movie, the links Keil and Stanley build between the accelerated decay that leads to the violence and the missing time are tantalizing, especially since Kira needs to be doing something while she and the audience figure out what is going on in the part of the story where she's relatively passive. They just seem to have a problem stretching things quite far enough - they're almost there on the desperation that leads to Kira taking other women's skin but never quite manage for there to be consequences - murder-for-beauty may be graphically presented, but remains a sort of moral abstraction when they need to have Kira as a protagonist and victim of someone else's horrific machinations later.
Rebecca Forsythe generally seems more comfortable doing the latter, in part because that's when her material makes a bit more sense - though most people will accept the reality that they are presented in most situations, there's something more immediately easy to believe about how Kira picks at the corners of her life later on; Forsythe has a way of communicating that her character is perhaps more curious out of obligation, that her youthful self-centeredness needs cracking to get to the better woman inside. She's able to sneak an impressively sympathetic performance out as the film goes on, convincing enough when communicating horror, fear, and regret that the fact that she was a bit flat earlier on is a bit of a positive: She wasn't so convincingly monstrous that a viewer can't get past it.
Full review on EFC.
Game of Death (2017)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Even when manga adaptations like Tokyo Ghoul start to seem like they are covering the same territory - it's not hard to read the description in the festival program and think "wait, didn't we just have two Parasyte movies last year?" - they at least tend to have enough off-center to not just be another secret-monster-society riff with slight difference. Even this one, which comes pretty close to being familiar mopey-vampire fare, it occasionally gets just weird enough to be worth it.
Ghouls, in this case, are human-looking folks who live in hidden communities, are pretty damage-resistant, have at least one hidden limb that tends to be useful in a fight and, of course, can't eat much besides human flesh. They are mostly urban legends to the general public, although there is a Commission of Counter-Ghoul Operations that fights them in the shadows. Ken Kaneki (Masataka Kubota) doesn't know much about any of that; he's a bookish college student who only winds up on a date with longtime crush Rize Kamishiro (Yu Aoi) because his friend Hideyoshi Nagachika (Kai Ogasawara) pushes him into it. Thanks a lot - Rize is a ghoul and the only thing that stops her from finishing him off is a very convenient industrial accident, and when Ken wakes up in the hospital, he finds out his life was saved by transplant organs… from a ghoul. Now stuck with a glowing red eye and an unseemly appetite, he's fortunate to find "Antieku", a coffee shop run by Kuzen Yoshimura (Kunio Murai), a ghoul who tries to ensure his people have a low impact on the human world, joining Toka Kirishima (Fumika Shimizu) on the wait staff. Unfortunately, his senpai Nishiki Nishio (Shunya Shiraishi) is a ghoul who isn't so inclined to defer to humans, and CCG agents Amon (Nobuyuki Suzuki) and Mado (Yo Oizumi) are following a trail of bodies that can't help but reach Antieku eventually.
It's a bit surprising to see that Sui Ishida's manga comprises relatively few volumes, as these things go, because that is a whole bunch of characters to juggle, and it doesn't even include the regulars at Antieku, supporting cast at both the school and CCG, and so on. It's a setting that seems more apt for an ensemble-based television show, and the film does eventually feel like that - once Ken settles into Antieku, it has the feel of a status quo, where stories will start, characters will meet, and where everybody will regroup before the next thing gets started. As screenwriter Ichiro Kusuno and director Kentaro Hagiwara are getting the audience familiar with the ghoul world, it's not exactly a bad arrangement; they're able to ground things in the familiar while still popping in a gross image or two, pushing things forward bit by bit. It does, however, lead to a movie that perhaps seems to stop more than end, with the characters who are still left around more or less in the same in-between position as they were two or three times before, with what had read as hints of secrets still simply potential, waiting for the next episode.
Full review on EFC.
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