On the one hand, I'm sad that Away didn't wind up getting a theatrical release, because I really loved it and the audience was into it.
On the other, you can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video for six bucks in HD. You can also rent it for two or three, but, come on, that's an absurdly good price even to just hold
Anyway, enjoy me trying to make a case for/against movies based upon my Letterboxd entries and notes several months later!
The Deeper You Dig
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
Every time I see a movie like The Deeper You Dig, I wonder how many more groups there are out there like the family that made it, tight-knit enough to do something as resource-and-time-consuming as a movie not just for no money but without the expectation that it will lead to something else. Hundreds, probably, with vanishingly few cracking the lineups of a major genre festival, mostly winding up on virtual shelves next to a hundred times as many self-published novels and indie rock MP3s online. Like most of that material, it will almost certainly not be the most accomplished or easily-recommended movies you'll see all year, but it's individual enough that it will speak almost directly to those who like it.
Ivy Allen (Toby Poser) has a good little grift going as a fortune teller, with 14-year-old daughter Echo (Zelda Adams) helping, shall we say, to set the scene. With other things to do around the house, Ivy's not able to watch Echo as she goes sledding on one of those winter days where the sun goes down quickly, and she is hit by a drunk driver. Horrified, Kurt (John Adams) starts to turn his life around, even making firends with Ivy when they meet in town and guiltily helping out where he can. Of course, it turns out that Ivy's connection to the spirit realm isn't completely imaginary, and Echo is not resting easily.
It's a bit strange to call a horror movie "cute", but that's the sort of vibe this DIY production gives off, especially once you know that the main cast are real-life parents and daughter. It's less actually scary than an earnest attempt to make a scary movie, with the basic shape of a ghost story and the bones of a good parallel between the haunted parties, though it can't help but feel more like people excited to make a horror movie than a group into the particular story they're telling. On top of that, it's a bit of a case where ghosts aren't necessarily as interesting as the guilt that they represent. That said, when the film takes an odd twist that leads to the movie trying to do two or three different things at once that don't quite mesh, it at least handles it better than a lot of films that take a big swing do. The last act may not be quite so eerie or unnerving as it is meant to, but it is also not nearly so unintentionally funny as expected.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Away
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
It's a rare feature film that is as singularly the work of one artist as Away, and of that small sample, few are this good. With nobody else credited on the film, director Gints Zilbalodis strips an adventure story down to fundamentals, makes some choices that maybe a larger team might not have, and comes through with an animated film for all ages that comes across as unique but not gimmicky.
The plot is dead-simple - a boy has survived a plane crash, starting the movie dangling from a tree by his parachute. He's in the middle of the wilderness, and the nearest city, Cloud Harbor, is some distance away. He's soon befriended by a yellow bird who seems to be about as alone as he is, and together, they journey through dangerous and surreal landscapes in hope of getting to the place that can get him home.
Away is a very simple movie in a lot of ways - Gints Zilbalodis made it on his own, and he's smart to keep from overburdening himself in ways that filmmakers telling this sort of story often do. He doesn't bother with dialogue, for instance, and makes it feel natural by not feeling the need to give the boy someone to talk to. He has, in large part, structured the film like a video game, and rendered it either with a gaming engine or some similar software, and it becomes an intriguing artistic choice on top of being very practical: It works as this boy attacking his problems in a way he understands, and why he doesn't necessarily need to be vocal. Zilbalodis doesn't make it an overt theme by being judgmental - this isn't a "kid who only knows the world through screens can't handle the real thing" movie - but going for a gaming aesthetic lets him buck filmmaking conventions and create different ways of understanding a character who doesn't have much reason to explain himself.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Jade's Asylum
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, ProRes)
I can't say I much enjoyed Jade's Asylum, but the discussion with the filmmakers included one of the more tellingly confessional moments I've seen at a festival screening: It went from mostly indoors to mostly outdoors when they got on site and saw that their monster suit didn't look good in the mansion they'd rented. It doesn't make the final product better, but it gives one an idea of how many different pieces have to come together for a movie to work and an appreciation for how often you have to try and fix things on the fly.
The mansion is somewhere in Costa Rica, to which Jade Williams (Morgan Kohan) has come with boyfriend Toby Hunter (Kjartan Hewitt), one of several guests Toby's brother Wesley (Jeff Teravaninen) has invited for a housewarming party. Most are obnoxious bro types, although Mike (Sebastian Pigott) seems pretty decent despite coming with Instagram-diva girlfriend Tanya (Deanna Jarvis). Jade's in a fragile state and ready to walk back to the city to try and get home despite not having the money to fly back to Canada and Toby unwilling to help despite not really wanting her there, and that state of mind is not going to improve with a bunch of dudes covered in mushroom coming out of the woods to attack the gringos.
There's potential to that, if you want to dig into these characters' relationships and maybe make what's got Jade reeling feel much more central, but filmmaker Alexandre Carrière never seems to find anything there, and stretches what he has thin. This movie is 83 minutes long, but includes a whole ton of outtakes and such over the end credits, along with other big chunks of runtime wasted on pointless nonlinear circling back around to various flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout the film. Take out the subplots that go nowhere and the repetition and there's maybe a half-hour of movie here, and that half-hour doesn't make a lot of sense. One suspects that it is missing a lot of pieces that could have clarified things, but Carrière instead pursues the sort of ambiguity that does a movie little good unless there's something more compelling behind "real or not?" Maybe retooling while they shot put the filmmakers in a bad position, but the result isn't good.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Machida kun no sekai (Almost a Miracle aka Machida's World)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It's always the ducks. No matter what the cartoon, or movie, or what, the ducks will be the funniest part. They don't actually make themselves known until relatively late, but the teenagers in this movie give them a run for their money, making for a high-school comedy that, for all of its eccentricities, often gets at the heart of what it means to be growing up and finding oneself.
Most notable is Hajime Machida (Kanata Hosoda), who is helpful and altruistic to the point where folks really don't know what to make of him. He winds up at the infirmary at the same time as Nana Inohara (Nagisa Sekimizu), and while something seems to spark, Machida immediately makes it weird. Meanwhile, Ryota NIshino (Taiga Nakano) likes Inohara but accidentally sends his letter declaring it to Machida, recently-dumped Sakura Takashima (Mitsuki Takahata) likes Machida but is liked by Yu Himuro (Takanori Iwata), and a struggling writer (Koichi Sato) thinks that there's a story in all this.
The teens are a bunch of lovable weirdos trying to figure themselves out, sometimes from odd starting points, and the compulsively altruistic Machida is intriguing for how he's such an extreme character who is such an odd type that one might find him hard to believe in, at least compared to some of the others - the cynical, gossiped-about Inohara is certainly much more immediately recognizable. It's often hard to be sure just what to make of Machida's broad-ranging generosity, especially since Kanata Hosoda's performance often makes it clear that Machida is doing what he has been told he should do, but there's not a contrasting "real Machida" behind it. It's a bit of a put-on, but also genuine. It's often easier to recognize the suspicion and confusion in Inohara's reactions; Nagisa Sekimizu plays a more conventional complex teen.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Bâsudê wandârando (The Wonderland)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)
The Wonderland (aka "Birthday Wonderland") has all the surface elements of big, respectable anime - a decent coming-of-age story, absolutely beautiful animation, certain specific character types, a traditional life/environmental message - and does each of them well enough that it plays really well from minute to minute. The trouble is that the whole doesn't fit together in a way that does those pieces justice. It's kind of about moving forward but also accepting destiny and how modern life isn't good for the soul but also shopping… It's all over the place.
It has a common sort of template. Akane (voice of Mayu Matsuoka) is a moody girl turning thirteen, sent by mother Midori (voice of Kumiko Aso) on an errand to the junk shop run by Akane's weird aunt Chii (voice of Anne Watanabe), which gets stranger than things usually do around Chii: A secret passage opens and the alchemist Hippocrites (voice of Masachika Ichimura) and his apprentice Pipo (voice of Nao Toyama) emerge, seeking the "Goddess of the Green Wind" and deciding it's Akane. Soon, they're all transported back to another land, magical and of an earlier era, where Zan Gou (voice of Keiji Fujiwara) and his bat-like sidekick Doropo (voice of Akiko Yajima) are collecting metal for a nefarious purpose, and if Akane doesn't stop them with her "Momentum Anchor" necklace, she'll never get home.
I can't speak for Sachiko Kashiwaba's original novel, but the movie is scattered as heck. That doesn't make it bad, although it can start to wear; it's got the sort of quest structure that has a viewer just starting to get a feel for something before it's on to the next thing, leaving characters and settings and the like behind. For all that growing up is in many ways the process of taking all of this and figuring it out to make it part of oneself, there's not much time spent on Akane resolving these complexities or coming up with her own perspective. The film is never quite just things happening to Akane, but she finds herself along for the ride more often than leading the charge.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Bbaengban (Hit-and-Run Squad)
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
How does a movie about Seoul's car-crash investigators, on the tail of a Formula 1-driving criminal mastermind, have so little in the way of automotive action? For crying out loud, when a person buys a ticket for a movie named "Hit-and-Run Squad", they've got expectations, so get to the car chases already! This thing is 133 minutes long and really only has a couple of worthy bits of stunt driving.
That mastermind is "JC" Jung Jae-Chul (Cho Jung-Seok), who retired from the track early to get into business and has seemingly gotten as far as he has with bribery and extortion. It's being investigated by prosecutor Yoo Ji-Hyun (Yum Jung-Ah) and Lieutenant Eun Shi-Yeon (Kong Hyo-Jin), but when a sting backfires in disastrous fashion, with a star witness (Park Hyoung-Soo) attempting suicide during an interrogation and Eun reassigned to investigating car accidents. Not exactly a great career step for a rising star, and she's partnered with Seo Min-Jae (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), who can read an accident scene like a savant but isn't allowed to drive himself because of his checkered past. Then again, it's not like Eun is actually going to let this go, and Seo's skills may prove useful considering that JC still really likes his cars.
Even when you consider that JC is still invested in racing and racing-adjacent businesses, there's still a fairly substantial gulf in what goes on in those two types of stories, and the screenplay by Kim Kyung-Chan and director Han Jun-Hee doesn't do the best job in bridging it. The worst part is, all of the twisty corruption stuff which takes up the bulk of the running time not only doesn't make much sense, it's boring. The writers never seem to figure out who should be the big villain and why - the corruption seems to be fairly generic as opposed to in the service of something in particular - and it keeps stretching out and reversing until it becomes extremely hard to care about all the material that is just making the movie longer. There is so much going on that just doesn't matter, and it dilutes the bits that at least hint at something interesting in the focus on corruption.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Dreamland (aka Bruce McDonald's Dreamland)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The opening stretch of Bruce McDonald's Dreamland introduces a bunch of visually striking characters against a moody environment, has then open their mouths to begin a story, and then summarily has the all shot them in the head. The rest of the film isn't quite that nihilistic, but it is fairly pointedly eccentric and detached, the sort of thing that needs the idea that anything can happen in the audience's head lest they get frustrated with how little is happening right now. McDonald is going for a specific idea of cool here above all else, where it's more important to be stylish than tense.
It is plenty stylish, mostly taking place in the neighborhoods of a European capital where the movies that make a person want to visit Europe take place, the parts not developed into glass skyscrapers or filled with historical buildings that remain preserved in amber. There's cafes and clubs and pawnshops, and the assassin who frequents them taps into a network of cigarette-smoking urchins in suits, one of several places where the wires seem to be crossed and weird chimeras created. McDonald and his collaborators do a decent job of finding entertaining ways of mixing familiar tropes up into different arrangements so that there's often something both comfortingly familiar and bizarrely creative about them when he attempts to do so usually misses the mark.
Not everybody can fit into that sort of milieu, but frequent McDonald collaborator Steven McHattie can, and this movie fits him like a glove. He has a dual role, laying both a world-weary assassin and a decadent trumpet player, and a viewer probably wouldn't want anyone else playing either of those parts, even if the way the film winks at it is another thing that makes a viewer more aware of the games being played than a part of them. Watching him shamble around as the drug-addled musician or trying to do good while not really believing in his own humanity is a distinct pleasure even when a scene is going on too long. He's surrounded by similarly entertaining support - Henry Rollins as a gangster who seems laid-back to a fault but still carries grudges, Juliette Lewis as a maniacal Countess, Lisa Houle as a sympathetic ear in a bar - but these guys are never quite completely engaged with others, just as part of their nature.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Chiwawa-chan (aka Chiwawa)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Chiwawa is structured kind of like a murder mystery, but it's 50/50 as to whether that's the direction it's going to go at any point, and that's fine. After all, it seems like the other way they could have gone with it is faux documentary, which probably would have seemed more like middle-aged folks trying to make a movie about youth, despite actually having been made by a filmmaker relatively close to his characters in age. As someone who has never been a Japanese person in their early twenties, I can 't exactly say how well the film represents that group, but it nevertheless paints an interesting portrait.
It opens with a news report on the especially grisly murder of Yoshiko Chiwako, a twenty-year-old nursing student who, it is suggested, also found herself involved in less savory situations. It is a shock to their friends - they knew Yoshiko (Shiori Yoshida) as "Chiwawa", an effervescent party girl who parachuted into their group when Yoshida (Ryo Narita) picked her up in a bar, sticking around even as relationships changed between her, best friend Yumi (Tina Tamashiro), camera-toting Nagai (Nijiro Murakami), cynical model Miki (Mugi Kadowaki), and Yoshida's friend Katsuo (Kanichiro Sato). There are some wild times and emotional blowouts, but nothing that seems to actually explain what happened to Chiwawa-chan.
Screenwriter/director Ken Ninomiya adapts a manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and though he leads off with homicide, the actual crime is not quite so important as what it implies about the life she and her friends lead, and how it lacks the stabilizing influences and structures that their parents may have had. There's rocket fuel in certain sections of this movie, like how they find a bag with six million yen (roughly $60,000 American) and blow through it in three days of partying, and it doesn't necessarily feel like something that's pushing the plot to how things are going to end. Instead, it's a sign of the abandon with which it is possible for young people to live, while the news occasionally give them reasons to live like there's no tomorrow. People stop in the last leg of the movie to be transfixed by reports of a bombing in Singapore, and like the party, it's less a story point than illustration of the times and how little is in their direct control.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Porno
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Porno is the sort of movie that feels like someone should have thought of it and done it before, but I can't think of anything particularly similar, and I bet those with better catalogs in their brains won't think of a better "monsters in a run-down movie theater" picture (although, as this is very much my thing, I'm happy to hear what obvious example I'm blanking on ). Inspiration usually seems obvious in retrospect, and thus is inspired even before the nice cast and quality, fearless execution shows up.
It takes place in the early 1990s (Encino Man and A League of Their Own are on the two-plex's marquee), and as they do every Friday night, the teenagers who work there are going to watch a movie after the customers leave. Chastity (Jillian Mueller) has just been made assistant manager, and Ricky (Glenn Stott) has just come back from camp, though his talk of the girlfriend he met there have had no noticeable effect on Chaz's crush. Also working are Abe (Evan Daves) and Todd (Larry Saperstein), but before they can tell projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann) what they want to watch, a homeless man bursts in and uncovers a secret door, behind which they find a strange archive and a third screen in the basement. Obviously, when that happens, you watch what you just found - and, of course, it's inevitable that in addition to being more sexually explicit than anything these nice church-going kids have seen before, those reels of film are exactly the sort of thing hide and seal away in horror movies because they imprison a demon.
The last quarter-century or so of cinema construction has given us recliners, digital projection and sound, stadium seating, and, more to the point, buildings where even the first wave has more or less remained in its original configuration (even if the box offices are sometimes unnervingly unmanned). I will not argue for the superiority of the places that came before, their large screens awkwardly divided, their behind-the-scenes areas cramped and labyrinthine, and their projection booths filled with equipment bolted onto projectors that have been there since the silent era, but they undeniably have history and personality, and a large portion of the audience for this movie has probably spent enough time in those places for it to resonate. The oddity of the architecture combines with the way film holds frozen life to make the movie fantastical but also kind of right.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Misterio de la noche (Mystery of the Night)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Everybody's folklore is kind of messed up, but this movie makes it feel like a competition that the Philippines could win. It's a simple but impressively nasty combination of colonial horror and local legend, giving the audience what they've come for, albeit on a scale that may be a little too grand for what the filmmakers have to work with.
It starts with a town's mayor, Anselmo, going out to the forest to hunt, doing Father Parorozo a favor by taking a ranting, pregnant woman with his party and perhaps not being too concerned if she returns with them. A generation later, his son Domingo (Benjamin Alves) makes his own trip to the woods, where he discovers and makes love to a beautiful but feral woman who was raised by the forest spirits after her mother was killed by an angry sow. She is spellbinding but Domingo must eventually go home. "Maria" (Solenn Heussaff) follows him, but she has no more been prepared for the fact that a man who has been so attentive on his trip out of town may have a wife and child at home than she has been taught to walk on two feet. She reacts badly.
That's kind of inevitable, once you've seen Solenn Heusaff's performance leading up to that, which is a no-holds-barred take on the wild child tope that's kind of impressive in that it still has a sort of fantastic authenticity despite the fact that she's got to play things a little more broadly than one might necessarily have to do in order to stay ahead of the rest of the cast, which isn't exactly being restrained themselves. It's an enjoyable physical performance, unabashed in its sexualilty - the filmmakers tend to treat shame and denial as worse than actual sexual activity - and always a nice complement to what Benjamin Alves is doing as Domingo, whether he seems earnestly smitten or casually dismissive when he gets home and decides it can't continue. He does a nice job getting between those states, too, not making it feel like a switch has been turned or like Domingo had been dishonest before.
Full review on EFilmCritic
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