I'll probably rush through this a bit, just because it's been three months and I'm trying to get this out before another festival swamps it. It should be noted that the feature component of the day was strong as heck; even if the three movies weren't always my exact thing, they were nifty genre movies with specific points of view, the sort that leave you excited to learn a little bit more about the situations that birthed them or which give you a chance to see something familiar from a somewhat different angle. Which is a big reason why I love genre film festivals - they often seem like an even more direct look at how different cultures are thinking of topics than the "classier" fests.
"Fulcrum"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
"Fulcrum" is one of those animated shorts that starts out as a loose sort of narrative only to see that subverted to the joy of playing with shapes fairly quickly, but to its credit, seldom entirely loses the plot - or at least, you can at least generally find the characters filmmaker Timothy David Orme started with somewhere in the rapidly-filling screen. It's not just a case of something being a jumping-off point.
The end result is impressive; Orme duplicates and spirals out in recognizable Fibonacci sequences and other forms of mathematical precision but avoids the feel of cutting and pasting, with transitions that feel like they're exploiting the leverage of the film's title. Nine minutes isn't a huge running time for an animated short, but it's enough time for others following this general pattern to get lost, which doesn't happen here.
"In the Water's Wake"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
A short that feels like it could be the beginning of something, although if it were, filmmaker Sarah Kennedy would likely have to draw things out more if she were looking to tell an entire story as opposed to snippets of it. What is here is a nifty little piece, though; good-looking and trippy in its explorations of a beach town that may only exist in the castaway hero's mind.
"Johnny Crow"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
Jesse Gouchey and Xstine Cook appear to have done something a little like this before, in terms of style, but it's a good one - live-action backgrounds in kind of run-down areas, mostly devoid of people, but the street art coming to life in response to the narration. It makes the moments when imagery breaks free even more powerful, and underlines the setting in interesting ways, a culture trying to thrive despite having to exist among that of its invaders.
It bolsters the story about a native man trying to find stability as he's in and out of prison, worrying about what his absence means for his family. There's a frustrating familiarity to it, but the filmmakers seem aware of this, balancing their frustration and anger without succumbing to resignation.
"PORT"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
Not a whole lot to say - it's two minutes and mostly has a neat look - but it's enough to say that I'd like to see what else director Andrew Lehman can do.
"Hakkori"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
I had the weirdest feeling while watching "Hakkori", pretty sure I'd seen it as part of a shorts package with either Fantasia or Nightstream last year, but every once in a while having a reaction like "well, I'd have remembered that. The fact that most film buffs I know can apparently identify every movie they've ever seen from a single frame in one of those puzzle games is utterly foreign to me.
I was probably not entirely experiencing this again for the first time, but it's a fun one to do that with, following some cute yokai as they take the offerings from the local humans and frolic, bring it back to the boss, and the like. It's cute, drawn in a traditional cel-based style, or something that resembles it, the creatures inserted into live-action backgrounds that have a hint of the artificial to them because one isn't often looking at them from this close. The characters are wonderfully designed, getting a lot of emotion out of minimal features and expression, moving naturally but not in an overly-rotoscoped manner.
What strikes me most on this viewing where I am maybe a bit less in full "look at that!" mode is the way filmmakers Aya Yamasaki and Jason Brown approach nature and the yokai - one and the same, really - allowing them to be sort of alien and amoral, devouring each other, merging, splitting, executing these processes which are too chaotic to inevitably lead to renewal but tend to do so, letting the audience identify with the main guys they follow and be nervous that the world doesn't necessarily work by the terms humans will try to impose on it. It's a lesson that doesn't exactly feel like the point of the film even if it is a large part of what it's saying.
"Pottero"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
This one's a nifty little short that also has creatures who are not quite the personification of something more basic but which aren't entirely something else. Here, Lindsey Martin tells the story of a woman who encounters a monster from her backwoods town said to kill all that encounter it, escapes, tries to make something of herself, but cannot entirely escape the gravity of home, and must confront it.
It's simple, and told with animation that is not exactly pretty as it is in some cases, but Martin's got an eye for using ugliness with purpose, and is able to crank up tension even as he is sometimes able to treat a situation casually or dismissively. It's a reminder that people in simple or rough situations aren't stupid or lacking self-awareness, even though even the people from that sort of place can fall into the traps of believing in monsters and dismissing those who do simultaneously.
"Posted No Hunting"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
Stop-motion found-footage horror? Sure, why not? Director Alisa Stern and co-writer Scott Ampleford get right into it here, establishing an immediately creepy vibe with how the night-vision look makes models that should be cute something else even before things start to go seriously wrong and they're called on to contribute some annoyed and panicked voice acting.
A lot of folks doing live-action features would like to be able to do what they manage with three minutes and figures that look like they should be silly more than scary.
"Everybody Goes to the Hospital"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
This one's a nightmare that will likely feel all too familiar - waiting what may be too long to take an ailing child to the hospital, where Little Mata is as confused as she is sick and the parents feel powerless. It probably plays for everyone.
Filmmaker Tiffany Kimmel does things that maybe other directors wouldn't. She never makes this hospital seem overly large and out of proportion to Little Mata; the world seems out of scale to kids anyway and this is not a special property of this time. Indeed, there's a sort of quiet acceptance and even trust in Lucia Hadley Wheeler's narration as the title character, like she's trembling but has been raised to listen and keep out of the adults' way. It can still seem an alien place, though, with exterior shots often depicting it as up in the air, with nothing nearby other than the winding road leading to it, like it exists outside the world Mata knows.
Visually, it's kind of a familiar sort of movie, characters not exactly stiff but having limited joints and papier-mache heads whose expressions are animated sparingly. It's the sort where the animators will often hold most of the image still so that they can zoom into a little hand movement or the like, boosting its import. It's a known technique but it works because one still tends to expect exaggeration with this medium, and that sort of focus becomes doubly effective.
"The Bum Family: Lilly goes to the Dogs"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
I must admit, I haven't exactly loved previous "Bum Family" shorts that have popped up in the BUFF comedy and animation packages - they've had the randomness of something a little kid was making up as they went along, but not necessarily the wild creativity, and they've juggled too many characters who are mostly interesting for their odd designs.
This one winds up working fairly well, though, probably in part because it by and large strips the group down to just Lilly and her pet Fluffle and lets them be chaos agents in a place that can probably use a little chaos like a dog show, with Lilly getting down on all fours and taking Fluffle's place while she leads a revolution among the dogs. It's a pair of absurdities that the filmmakers commit to utterly even as it gets more ridiculous by the second and makes one question where the whole thing started. It's madness, but madness that seems to know its target.
"Argus"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
An impressively well-executed bit of dystopia, as one can have a difficult time telling whether something literally reality-warping is going on to the employee who comes in to do a menial, senseless task or whether it's just the sort of distorting job that creates such a feeling that this all could be a flight of fancy or a science-fictional premise that is inherently madness-inducing if real.
It's impressively executed, a nift combination of shabby and futuristic, nicely blurring the line between existential and science-fictional horror.
"O, What Rice! O, What Beans!"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
Not really my thing, I've got to admit, as much as I like rice and beans myself. It's a rough thing to say about a short where the production appears to mostly be a one-man show, but its idiosyncratic style often works against it. The joke is that the main character is obsessive over something kind of bland and unexciting, and that mania being incongruous is where the comedy comes from, but if the whole world is weird and kind of grotesque, it doesn't work nearly as well, and neither does the gross-out humor.
"Pancake Panic!"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)
I've got enough notes for "Pancake Panic!" in my festival notebook to make some features blush; it's as tightly-plotted and cleverly-assembled a story as you'll find anywhere, and it's not exactly something with an elaborate look or even ten minutes long. Filmmaker David Filmore leans on deadpan humor so that the brutal slapstick can surprise, and pulls together seemingly random threads in really impressive fashion.
Neptune Frost
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)
Afrofuturism of this variety does not give a shit about whether my white North American self understands it, and that's kind of great. Even though there are a lot of Americans involved with this production, including writer/co-director Saul Williams, it feels like it comes from a different tradition with different assumed lines between reality and fantasy, let alone different genres, and no particular interest to explain things that a non-Rwandan audience might not get.
In a sense, that spark of discovery, whether it be an outsider learning a new culture or that culture seeing itself in a way they seldom had before, is the film's draw. The science fiction and adventure of it is kind of fuzzy and familiar - a government-corporate alliance oppressing the poor to exploit a vital resource and chosen ones rising to inspire a revolt, with "hacking" as a sort of magic. But what a spark, with a charismatic cast who all seem to have something defiant not far from the surface, computer and surveillance centers that opt for feeling like an art installation over a sleek but boring realism, a semi-magical sex change that manages to feel both like a trans person finding her true self and a man shedding his old life and ultimately feels like an act of evolution, and a willingness to dip into poetry and music when emotion charges the characters, but without it feeling like a not-literal representation.
At times, Neptune Frost seems to be trying to evolve new language, frantically trying to marry African culture to the technological world powered by its resources, and if it sometimes seems to be grasping, that's fine, because the discovery is exciting. It's a movie where I'm genuinely excited to dive into the eventual Blu-ray to see what I find on a second and third pass now that my mind is a little more attuned to whatever wavelength Williams and co-director/cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman were on.
Medusa
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)
The politics of other countries can get flattened when you only hear of them occasionally, and such it has been for Brazil where I'm concerned (and I suspect for many other Americans) - it's easy to associate the whole country with what its leaders are doing as opposed to getting down into the guts of what people are dealing with. It's different all over, but a lot of the forces are the same, just interacting a bit differently.
So this film presents Michele (Lara Tremouroux) and Mariana (Mariana Oliveira), two best friends in their twenties who have been part of an evangelical church for some time, and often serve as the pretty faces it presents to the world. That cheery facade hides nightly acts of violence against sinners and, worse, those who would leave the church. One of these raids gets them in over their heads, with Mariana winding up scarred, and while she's supposed to be mentoring a new, mousy member of the group, she becomes obsessed with a woman who escaped the cult only to possibly wind up burned worse afterward, taking a job as a nurse at the coma center where she suspects this woman is a patient.
There's a lot going on - satire of the hypocritically pious chasing power and using the sex appeal to pull others in despite a fair amount of talk about virginal purity, a mystery, romance and jockeying for position. Amid all of that, I suspect that most viewers will respond to Mariana's honest, well-earned growth; there's intelligence and empathy to her which actress Mariana Oliveira seems to enjoy teasing out, and something hopeful about how someone can seem to slide out of a group like this as easily as they can slide in. It's all the better because few of these young characters seem cheaply brainwashed or knowingly hypocritical - "evangelical influencer" is a goofy character description but makes sense when you meet her. The neon lighting and pulsing beat of the soundtrack is a terrific set of choices, too; the characters' youth and wiring to be regular young women is never far off and never treated as weird or paradoxical.
It's an energetic romp through the heads of young evangelicals that initially benefits big time from treating them as complicated young adults and thus going in directions that will be unexpected given their usual portrayal. The finale is, admittedly, kind of all over the place, right on the border of doing the worst thing a movie with people shouting about demons despite being otherwise grounded can do. It earns its way there, though, offering more to chew on than just plot contrivances.
Pahanhautoja (Hatching)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)
Director Hanna Bergholm and co-writer Ilja Rautsi seem to have ideas for two fine horror movies with enough overlapping material that it probably made sense to combine the two, and if that's the case, they do so well enough that it would be hard to disentangle them. The two halves don't quite mesh, though - what starts out as a story about a kid who tries to protect a monster from her ingratiating but harsh mother but loses control when it tries too hard to protect her is a great, darkly funny scary story for kids, but where it ends seems to be heading in the other direction.
This works in large part because the young actress at the center, Siiri Solalinna, is great at playing a kid who is terrified of her own emotions, and Hatching is at its absolute best when it plays into that. In those moments, it's creating a constant relatable knot in the belly, not just because everyone who has been Tinja's age recognizes the feeling, but because of how those emotions are well worth being scared of, especially when directed at those Tinja knows meant no harm and don't deserve the horrible things her monster will do to them. It's the sort of thing that can drive a girl mad.
When the movie gets away from that in the last act... Well, there's an argument that it still makes sense, that dark sides are like this, but it still sort of "just" becomes a monster hunt and takes the most generic horror-movie way out, down to the last-minute twist that, whoops, the story has no time to deal with!
That said, there's a lot of other good stuff in here, darkly funny bits executed with tremendous precision, easy mommy-blogger jokes that get sharper as the movie goes on (you can feel the filmmakers honing their knives), and a cruel irony in how both of this family's kids physically resemble one parent but are much more like the other inside, even if those parents are blind to it. Bergholm has her eyes on the goal and a lot of good bits that fit into it, and still makes a cutting, smart, funny monster movie.
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