Plenty of filmmakers, though!
So, for the International Sci-Fi shorts, we have "Spin" director Leticia Belliccini, "Be My Guest" director David Jermyn, "Greater Good" director Andrea Ashton, "One Day the Sun Turned Black" director Joe Lueben, and "They Wait For Us" directors George Thomson & Lukas Schrank.
It was a pretty good group of shorts, with Belliccini noting that they didn't have a location until relatively late in the process, because permitting didn't come through at the other places, and it didn't become a one-shot movie (or at least cannily edited to look like one-shot) until that location was chosen. It's a pretty impressive result, as was what Ashton achieved with her short, initially part of a 72-hour-film project, which is usually good fun and good practice but doesn't necessarily produce something worth a festival entry. Some folks had nit-picky questions, but, guys, 72 hours is not a lot of time to smooth everything out, and in the case of some of the particular questions asked, sometimes people don't act perfectly in real time, and it's okay if a movie captures that.
Also: "One Day the Sun Turned Black" was something Joe Lueben came up with inspired by something in a paper by one of the kids he teaches (though the kid doesn't seem to be credited), and let me just say that though I think it's based on a neat idea and a pretty good movie, folks in the audience had opinions on the white guy making a movie about white people who have to change their skin color to survive in a world where the sun has changed. As they should! It's an intriguing what-if that goes some questionable if unintended places when you look at it closely. I don't know if it works at another scale, but it's an idea that kind of fascinates me.
(Another one where people were nitpicking afterward, about how a less-bright sun probably wouldn't necessitate more melanin or how one character didn't have white-person hair, and, folks, please remind me to not be that guy, especially when the movie is 14 minutes long! At that scale, it is okay to leave a lot of explanation out, because there's just not time and those details, fun as they may be when you get them right, just aren't important.)
For the animated shorts, fewer movies were represented but often more of the team. Here we have "Building 108: Barnacle Bill the Tailor" animator Raph Bard and director Rick Trembles (though that is but a small sample of the jobs each did); "Albatross Soup" illustrator Fiona Smyth, composer Daniel Rosato, and Director Winnie Chung; and "Space Between the Stars" director Samuel Bradley. An interesting group, with a fair number of questions for Bradley because the company which produced the short (and for which he works), Guru Studio, is apparently kind of a big deal in animation, working on a number of series, but not necessarily doing these one-off things so much, although Bradley found it incredibly gratifying.
Winnie Chung came at "Albatross Soup" from a different angle; she mostly works in live-action and documentary, came across the albatross soup riddle from some friends, and thought the process of working it out would be nifty to visualize. She said she probably could have just gone from there, but wound up bringing in other groups so that the audience would hear different accents and ethnicities, a sort of audio contrast to how Smyth went with different visual styles. Smyth, from what I gather, doesn't do a whole lot of animation work herself, so that made for an interesting, unique short.
Then there was Trembles, who can seem to land in that weird spot where you're not sure whether he is trying really hard to be iconoclastic or if he's the genuine article. It doesn't really matter. Having Raph Bard around to kind of puncture that a bit ("are you going to explain my process when I'm standing right here?") made that team's questions go down easier, and it was an interesting talk about how their styles contrasted and made the short better - he's very Fleischer-like with lots of short motion loops while she tends to go for something bigger and smoother.
After that, it was across the street for One Cut of the Dead and Five Fingers for Marseilles, which was pretty good, although I get the feeling that the audience for that 9:30pm movie on the third Sunday of the festival is roughly 50% tired but committed people and 50% folks with a serious interest in (South) African cinema. It's pretty good, but I was pretty worn out.
Next up…. Okay, let's not pretend that I posted this and some chunk of 30 reviews the next day. It's taken some time.
Penguin Highway (Pengin haiwei)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)
For a movie about penguins just showing out of nowhere in a precocious kid's hometown, and that being the tip of the iceberg as far as weirdness gets, Penguin Highway is kind of dry. There's an angle from which that's kind of nifty - the film and its hero don't just love science as a reference book that contains interesting facts, but as a rigorous process that allows them to expand their knowledge - but that does cut down on the goofy antics, and the strangeness gets kind of straight-faced at times. It's got a bunch of fun scenes when things do get silly, but its whimsy and focus do sometimes work at cross purposes.
Aoyama (voice of Kana Kita) is a very focused fourth-grader, whether one is talking about his studies, his attempts to beat his classmate Hamamoto at chess, retaliating at the guys who bullied his friend Uchida without throwing a punch, pursuing his intense crush on the busty receptionist at the dentist's office (voice of Yu Aoi), or investigating just where the heck all the penguins who show up out of nowhere are coming from and going. What he doesn't initially realize is that there's another scientific mystery, just outside of town, that may dwarf a bunch of random penguins.
Most kids' movies position the kid like Aoyama as a side character - even when the main character is a meant to be sort of a nerd, this guy is so eccentric that he makes the other guy more relatable for a large audience. He is, at times, humorous and frustrating in equal measures and often for the same reasons: The very serious, self-important knowledge of just how smart he is can make a viewer nod every time someone seems exasperated with the little brat, but is also fantastic raw material for voice actress Kana Kita to make deadpan magic (aided by animators giving him a small mouth inside a big, round kid's face for those lines). He's definitely a weird kid that takes some effort on the part of the audience, but the filmmakers make his quirks add up to something rather than making them things that must be chipped away.
Full review at EFC.
"Be My Guest"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
It's natural to snicker a bit at sci-fi shorts like "Be My Guest" which build an ambitious story around a prop that looks to be made out of junk found in the director's garage, but a lot can be forgiven if it actually uses that as a jumping-off point for something interesting, which writer/director David Jermyn manages here. It's kind of basic, telling the story of a guy (Zachary Bennett) who rents the use of his body out to someone online almost entirely from his perspective, so the audience experiences time jumps rather than tha actor sort of playing a dual role, and its early talk of "hibernation" at times makes it feel like the filmmakers hae their sci-fi concepts confused.
It winds up working well enough, though, because the audience can see the relevance to real-world concerns easy enough - a husband who is literally not present, a gig economy that offers people a bit of money but no actual experience, being destroyed by envy that one has helped create. Jermyn occasionally just lays the metaphor right out there, but clarity is often better than ambiguity when you actually have something to say.
"Exit Strategy"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
As with the short that preceded it, "Exit Strategy" lays what it was going for down without a lot of embellishment when it gets to the finish, but it's interesting how it gets there, and likely fairly rewatchable as the audience discovers what is actually going on. Which isn't hard; if you're seeing it in a science fiction block, it telegraphs where it's going pretty hard, and even if you're not, you can probably guess. Still, writer/director Travis Bible plays just exactly which fantasy cardy he's playing fairly close to the vest, enough to keep a viewer guessing about where it's leading for a while.
I suspect that a second time through will make one really appreciate the work done by Christopher O'Shea as Shane, the brusque genius brother. It's a performance that initially just looks like a socially-stunted nerd but more clearly becomes a man carrying a weight as it goes on, but with a little hint of not exactly being unhappy to spend time with Matt. Richard Kohnke turns in a nice, simply sincere performance as that brother. His job is to basically be a good guy and mean what he says, which is earnest when the audience might be braced for another twist. It lets the movie back off a bit in its last scene, giving it a low-key but emotionally satisfying ending.
"Spin"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
Director Léticia Belliccini said in a Q&A that the location they found would determine the shape of this short, and it's hard to imagine it in a place where she didn't have just enough room to play while still making her characters feel boxed in. Two or three minutes in, you realize you haven't seen a cut yet, and as she keeps her camera a few steps behind Mallard (Johan Libéreau) as he races about the apartment building and courtyard in a panic after witnessing his wife (Armelle Gerbault) being attacked, it becomes a nifty trick. He seems unstuck in time, chasing a doppelganger and visiting happier times but being shadowed by his own guilt.
Story-wise, it's the sort of thing one might have to watch two or three times in a row to really absorb all of what's going on, but it's the sort of propulsive movie where you can enjoy getting about 75% there because seeing it come vaguely into shape is enjoyably tantalizing, not slowed down much by dialogue, as Belliccini mostly advances the story through action and movement. There's the occasional quick change without a hidden cut, the feeling of pieces coming together, and it's a strong enough mood with everything else working together so well that even those who prefer a more thoroughly explained narrative should enjoy it.
"One Day the Sun Turned Black"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
The neat idea behind "One Day the Sun Turned Black" could probably become an impassable minefield if not handled carefully, but the thing is, a big part of the appeal is that it's got a land mine or two buried in it, placed kind of indiscriminately, just waiting to explode in a hail of well-intentioned but misdirected commentary on race and appropriation. It's a fertile enough universe that it might be interesting to see it as an anthology, put together by a more diverse group of filmmakers than the white man who made this one.
Joe Lueben and his collaborators tell a good story, though, first positing that something happened with the sun, not only causing it to appear black in the sky but showering the Earth with some sort of radiation that does a number on fair skin. So dark-skinned Harmony (Shavonna Banks) can jog around the park but her very Caucasian father (Daniel Martin Berkey) can't, leading to him living the life of a shut-in, his already aggrieved mental state exacerbated by the talk radio he listens to. It's not a story that has a lot of events, or dramatic speeches, but it works in large part because most people will get the generational conflict there - young people embracing a world that is less white-by-default while their elders are torn between retreat and defiance.
The devil is in the details, and my favorite one comes when Harmony buys a bottle of "pigment" at the corner store - it's not just that what's going on starts to fully snap into place, but that the African-American woman ringing her up packs a lot of context into just a couple of looks and lines, telling us that, yes, there is a lot more to this situation than things being uncomfortable for a woman and her prejudiced father. Lueben strikes a nice balance between the personal story and the larger world, making sure that the audience sees that these two sides don't exist in isolation. It's good enough and rich enough to make one curious about more stories within that world even if one also worries that it's the sort of scenario that stokes white paranoia.
"Expire" ("Exhale")
N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
It's been a month, my notes stink, I'm basically giving this a pass. It looked gorgeous, a quality vision of a post-apocalyptic world where breathable air must be zealously conserved, but pretty much no story that stuck.
"Greater Good"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
Products of 48-hour film challenges don't often actually make festival programs; they're more about having fun and maybe just convincing people that making a movie is an actual thing that they can do rather than something that requires trained professionals and huge budgets. Sometimes, though, you get something like "Greater Good", which has a simple but solid idea, just the right resources to tell the story, and no time to second-guess all the details.
It is, after all, very easy to second-guess this one. The plot involves pregnant Madeline Knight (Miranda Plant) surprised by the arrival of Dr. Alexis Livingston (Annelies Lee-Reid) of the Department of Alternate Timelines along with a woman said to be her future daughter (Lauren Kneteman), who has committed an atrocity in 2041; Livingston offers Madeline a syringe that will safely, painlessly induce miscarriage. The three actresses all play their roles well, and the filmmakers keep the focus squarely on the classic moral dilemma of what one should do with that sort of foreknowledge. It's sad but not manipulatively so - it doesn't celebrate the doing of bad things for good reasons to excess - and finishes quickly without ever having strayed far off course.
Which is where it could have become a mess; it's exceptionally easy to look at this story and say "but how does she know Livingston's on the level" or "as far as the people in the future know, this Department has never actually changed anyone's mind" or want to dig into just what Isabelle's crimes were and if time travel might just be the ultimate tyranny, preserving not justice but the status quo. These are good questions, but for the purposes of this story, not actually important, and I suspect that making the movie fast kept the filmmakers from undermining themselves trying to answer them. There is just no time, so you focus on what can be controlled, and that works out pretty well in this case (plus or minus a plinky, maudlin score).
"El aleteo del colibrí" ("The Flapping of the Hummingbird")
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
This short is a stylish enough bit of work, but one that falls into the category of films that feel like they have weighty concerns (the festival description talks about fate and free will, while the opening points out that of the 60 thousand thoughts humans have per day, 90% are about imagining the futre) but which in practical terms, aren't really saying anything important. This one follows Fran (Adrià Collado), a middle-aged man not really satisfied working at a gas station/convenience store, who is having a spat with his wife Sara (Melena Miquel) and thus doesn't let her call distract him from a shoplifter (Igor Szpakowski). Writer/director Mertxell A. Valls rewinds, goes into bullet-time, takes different perspectives and plays with how small changes could alter the action. It's the sort of thing that seems profound, but maybe actually isn't.
It's still put together in terrific fashion, though - writer/director Mertxell A. Valls is good at focusing the audience's attention on small but important things, highlighting the way that small choices seem like they can have much riding on them, pointing out pathways that could cause things to go differently, accepting complexity but not overwhelming the audience. The small cast is generally excellent, as well - Collado gets the most room to create his character, but all of them create characters that fit their purpose perfectly, but also seem like they have a life beyond the film, that they've arrived at the start of the film through a messy process, and as a result are easy to root for. Not so much to win, but to stumble through, which is all most of us can hope for.
"They Wait for Us"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)
Another one I'm going to pass on I'm afraid; it's just not registering a month later.
"The Origin of Sound"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
You can fall down a rabbit hole considering "The Origin of Sound" as part of a festival shorts block; it's got smaller animations of different styles within it, making the whole thing a kind of fractal experience (now, imagine if you're at a festival that shows multiple animation blocks in a day…). That's not quite the most interesting thing about it, but it's fun to think about.
It also makes the short kind of inside-baseball, in a way, God creating sound as a metaphor for animators adding sound to their creations, though it's a fun one. The creation he's adding it to is something of a cliche - an amusingly resigned husband and his perpetually annoyed wife - but it's played out in visually distinctive fashion with live actors being manipulated like stop-motion puppets or at least giving the impression of such. It's neat to look at, although maybe a bit too drab after a while, compared to the bright and varied cartoons the sound man is taking his rude noises from.
It goes on a while and eventually this gag gets a little worn, especially since a lot of these cartoons are either little but (or reduced to) basic gross-out gags. It feels like directors Paul Driessen & Toon Loenders are taking the long way around to get to a single pratfall, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - what better ending is there for a cartoon, really?
"Island of the Deceased"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
A kind of impressively gross bit of animation which starts with a man plucking the eye from a mummified corpse to place into a taxidermied girl and continues from there to feature a whole bunch of cadaver art and surreal, spooky imagery. It's impressive and atmospheric - director Kim Ji-hyeon has a fine eye for macabre design and uses churning backgrounds to make the island setting feel even tighter, like there's some sort of force field around it. The story is thin - of course these grounds are cursed and the people who trespass will be consumed - but presented well enough that it's okay.
I must admit, I often feel like shorts like this are just on the border of something - very impressive for those who already find the macabre enticing but not quite able to convince those who don't already love that sort of thing of its twisted beauty. It's impressive, and others will like it more than me, just not transcendent enough to cross the gap.
"I Don't Like the Comics You Drew"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
Maybe you need a little context for this one. Lei Lei's animations are often filled with fine detail, color, and a scrolling two-dimensional world that seems overwhelming while still being somewhat abstracted and whimsical. This has a lot of the same style, but the drawings are simplified, more monochrome, with thick black lines, and attention much more focused on the foreground than the environment. It feels like a guy who, having generally been nice and encouraging to all the people seeking his approval, has finally snapped.
It's a style that pairs nicely with the music by Shanghai Restoration Project (who did the soundtrack for Have a Nice Day, last year's memorable Chinese animated noir), a diss track that is catchy and funny while getting some genuine frustration to come through. It's a project that integrates both halves well, not feeling like music slapped onto a cartoon or like a music video, but an excellent collaboration all around.
"Crazy Cat"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
I liked this one a lot. I'm not much of a gamer, and even though the pixel-art style of this one harkens back to when I actually really did play video games, that's not an automatic plus. There's a lot to like about its particular cute designs (which can handle a little violence being done to them) and synth-y soundtrack; they don't necessarily reference something especially specific to my eyes and ears, and director Seo Ji-hyeong's world of anthropomorphised animals seems fun and eccentric on its own.
I like the way it does a bit more than just tell a story without words, too - you get that the cat of the title has some pretty severe anxiety issues, probably related to her bunny nemesis, and copes with it by imagining her life as an RPG or dungeon crawl and everyday challenges she has to face as boss battles. Seo does a nice job of differentiating the pixel art so that there's a clear distinction between an actual game, the real world, and how the character copes. There's enough in common to keep transitions from beig jarring, even though there's some delightful absurdity in someone being a jerk on the subway becoming a fight to the death.
It's funny and cute, but also good communication, which always impresses.
"Building 108: Barnacle Bill the Tailor"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
This isn't quite a pilot for a series, technically - I believe director Rick Trembles did an even shorter take on his monster-inspired characters to get this one made - but it feels like one, spending its ten minutes to both introduce the characters and their world and also give them an adventure, and it feels kind of insufficient on both counts: Drac, Cobweb, Ghost, and Braindead are all more concepts than friends and neighbors, while the whole thing with the barnacles never quite feels like either a story or a joke about how crazy apocalyptic stuff intersects with these guys' lives and they just shrug it off. Double the running time to broadcast-series length or get a couple more episodes under the belt, and maybe it comes into focus.
It's kind of fun, though - the characters do pop as individuals despite being obviously inspired by classic monster imagery, and Trembles does a fair job of indulging his campier impulses without having them become the entire short. He's very much a fan of the spookier Fleischer toons, referencing their obvious animation cycles and happily increasing the gore, but he's wise enough to let co-director Raph Bard break those cycles when something more free-flowing is needed.
I don't know if more "Building 108" would get things working or wear out the joke, but I'd kind of like to see him get the chance to find out, if that's his intention.
"The Voice Over"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
The gag behind "The Voice Over" isn't a new one - there have been a number of short films where the narrator was revealed to be a voice in the protagonist's head - but its filmmakers do a fine job of sneaking up on that, playing the kind of cutesy cartoon gag where "going crazy" is just aggravation before jumping right to antipsychotic drugs, and that feels downright ruthless. It shifts the feel of the film, which was kind of cute but nervy, into something with a genuine edge.
"One Small Step"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
"One Small Step" is such a beautifully designed dialogue-free short, built to efficiently grab at the audience's heartstrings and pull, that someone watching it without logos would almost certainly presume that it's this year's Pixar short film. That's not what every filmmaker aspires to, but when you hit that goal as well as this one does, you're doing something right.
Admittedly, this hits a lot of my sweet spots, with a kid who absolutely adores space; an immigrant dad working hard to support her dreams, both making her adorable moon boots as a kid and to send her to college; bright, colorful visuals that emphasize the excitement of the goal; and bright, sharp design that can feel a bit mocking when she is falling short. The falling short isn't necessarily a sweet spot in and of itself, but it's the unexpected thing that makes the story work - there's a moment when it genuinely feels like this may become a movie about learning to still love something after it's clear you won't be part of it in the way you'd dreamed.
And it may be that story, eventually; it ends with hope but no guarantees. Still, it's a charmer, and a delightfully sweet moment in the middle of an often-bloody program.
"Lovely Girl"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
I remember this vaguely from my notes ("Girl accepting flowers puts guy in trippy happy place… then not"), and that I kind of liked it, especially with the Chubby Checker song in the background - it communicated in the moment, the heady experience of being loved and then having doubts.
"Albatross Soup"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
A pretty good "animate-to-voices" piece, although I wonder how it would play if you've heard the "Albatross Soup" riddle before. Do the various voices trying to puzzle it out become frustrating, or does the impressive, varied art still impress. Truth be told, I kind of didn't like the riddle itself, finding myself reacting "wait, what?" to each step toward solving it. It's a mean one.
Not liking the riddle itself, though, doesn't mean you can't enjoy the sound of people solving it. That variety of voices clearly enjoying the mental exercise is the strong base that the filmmakers start from, and artist Fiona Smyth gives director Winnie Chung creative, constantly-shifting imagery to illustrate it. It's a fine example of a film depicting not so much what is happening but a thought process, with what's shown having a properly ephermeral, not-solid feel.
"Simbiosis Carnal"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
Images stick, but not the whole. There were, I recall, some very nice bits of design where the male and female figures hit both "sexy" and "cute" even as they shifted shape and position.
"Space Between Stars"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
Something initially misfied in my brain while watching this, thinking it was about alien astronauts whose spaceship has been overrun by robots, when it's actually the other way around, with those cute octopi actually being the interstellar equivalent of parasites being fought off by the ship's automatic defenses. That's kind of the point, minus the credentialed dummy missing a couple of important seconds to write something down: Both are travelers in the void, doing what evolution or engineers have made them to do, their conflict inevitable and as fierce as anything in nature, with human viewers subconsciously taking sides for entirely superficial reasons.
Part of the reason for being able to take such a claim is that it is consciously and brilliantly designed, with the aliens in round shapes pastel blues and while the machines are foreboding reds. The audience is perhaps hypersensitive to that because director Samuel W. Bradley and his animators present the action with the smooth lines and bold palette of an infographic, switching the brain into learning mode and helping the viewer pick up geography, capabilities, and the like as the well-orchestrated and high-stakes action (accompanied by a nifty Jim Guthrie score) begins. From there, it's smooth and thrilling, despite the way that its abstraction could be distancing.
"The Ricochet Splendid"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Circo Animato, digital)
It's hard to review "The Ricochet Splendid" without more or less repeating what it says in the festival program or sounding like you're trying to write a blurb for the program: It's the terrific opening credits for an anime series that sadly does not really exist. I kind of doubt that 2Veinte has any plans to make a series out of it, because it's probably too big to fit the budget, but I am impressed as heck that filmmaker Pablo Gostanian so often manages to find a spot where a viewer will think "not sure if parody or awesome" at least two or three times. It's a canny act of pastiche, with its footage deliberately leaving a lot of gaps that might be hard to reconcile, action that is over the top but maybe not more than the real thing, and a legitimately catchy theme song and a title that, like a lot of Japanese adventure series, seems pretty meaningless but sure as heck sounds cool.
I'll take more if you've got it, but enjoy it as a singular work otherwise.
"Crying Bitch"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Well, there's a title I'll have a hard time recommending to the women I know who would probably enjoy the heck out of this short. I love you when you're at your weirdest, Japan, but you don't always make it easy!
Still, I enjoy the heck out of this one, which offers Sho Mineo as a philandering husband, Miko Terada as his young lover, and Hinako Saeki as the wife who is just about ready to snap. Writer/director Reiki Tsuno often builds the movie like it, personally, is about to snap, with sudden changes from day to night implying that something you're taking as a given might flip instantly, with violence that may be spontaneous and excessive or reluctantly practiced, but which is probably a long time coming but hard to stop.
The film seems a little rough at times, like there was a hard cap on how much they could shoot so they accepted good enough rather than perfect, but it's a steady good enough, and the conception and editing was solid enough to hold that together. That leaves "Crying Bitch" memorable inn its outrageousness, but not sloppy or poorly-executed.
Kamera wo Tomeru na! (One Cut of the Dead)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
It's not unusual to have a conversation about a television show and have someone say that the first year isn't very good, but if you hang in there for something like fifteen hours, it starts to get good, but also occasionally have the same people say that they turned a movie off ten minutes in. One Cut of the Dead is an odd movie because is more or less counts on at least part of the audience cutting it the same slack they would a serial whose early segments aren't actually that good. A risky play, but one that is eventually rewarded.
It opens in fairly conventional manner, in some sort of abandoned factory setting with a zombie attacking his girlfriend - a scene ruined by the boom operator (Hiroshi Ichibara) being caught in the shot, but by actor Kazuki Kamiya (Kazuki Nagaya) apparently not not committing fully to his part as the zombie, for which director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) excoriates him after yelling cut. But the camera keeps rolling, capturing makeup artist Nao (Harumi Syuhama) telling Kazuki and co-star Aika Matsumoto (Yuzuki Akiyama) that the director is just high-strung, and there are actually legends about the place where they are shooting - legends which appear to be all too true, which means Higurashi will have a heck of a one-shot zombie movie, at least if anybody survives the shooting.
How much a viewer likes cheap, cheesy zombie movies is an important factor in how much they will enjoy One Cut of the Dead, because while that description above is not the entirety of what the movie has to offer, it is a long unbroken stretch where filmmaker Shinichiro Ueda is not spoofing sub-streaming zombie movies or presenting it with any sort of irony or wink at the audience - it is effectively what it appears to be, with the long-take gimmick feeling like an overreach. Some folks go for that, and they'll probably dig that first half-hour or so on its own merits, but if that's not your thing, it is a lot of pretty awful set-up to get to a hilarious last act - you have to dig through three layers of bad to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff doesn't really work without the bad. Throw some bland flashback material in, and It is a slog for nearly an hour to get to 30 minutes of good material.
Full review at EFC.
Five Fingers for Marseilles
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Five Fingers for Marseilles is being labeled a "South African Western", which describes it as well as anything but also doesn't feel quite right. There's too much history to the characters, and not enough frontier, but that seems a bit like quibbling. It feels more like a western than anything else, especially once it gets to the end.
The action opens not in the South African city of Marseilles, but "Railway", the black-populated township that was just outside, during the apartheid era, and introduces six kids: Zulu, the group's leader; Tau, his hard-headed brother; "Pastor" Unathi the storyteller; "Pockets" Bongani, from a richer family; "Cockroach" Luyanda, a big, quiet boy - the "five fingers" who fancy themselves rebels - and Lerato, the girl the brothers both like. A clash with the white police sends Tau on the run, where he'll eventually become an outlaw. Twenty years later, he's released from prison and decides to return home, though the Marseilles that Tau (Vuyo Dabula) finds is different: Zulu has died and his son Sizwe (Lizwi Vilakazi) is having little luck as a farmer, while Lerato (Zethu Dlomo) is one of the few that has stayed in Railway after main city's integration. Pockets (Kenneth Nkosi) is mayor, Luyanda (Mduduzi Mabaso) is chief of police, but both of them tend to let a gangster calling himself "The Ghost" (Hamilton Dhlamini) have his way. Tau had hoped to live a quiet life, but it looks like his hometown still needs heroes.
Five Fingers takes the shape of a Western, and a beautiful one. The deserts and scrublands of South Africa feel just as open as those of California, dangerous and beautiful. Director Michael Matthews and his crew never pretend that it's anything but the late twentieth century, but by and large make the movie feel like it's got a foot in multiple eras - the shantytown of Railway feels like a western town, there aren't a lot of familiar product logos on display, and some of the wardrobe and prop choices feel meant to evoke another era even if they are modern. If a weapon seems personalized and weathered, it doesn't really matter that it's a Kalashnikov. Matthews and cinematographer Shaun Lee happily quote Sergio Leone, sometimes using kids with slingshots, sometimes with their weary adult selves. The raids by the Ghost are horrific and violent.
Full review at EFC.
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