It was a fun conversation, because this was obviously a very low-budget movie and there was therefore a lot of talk about just how much of it was thrifted in and around New Orleans, or shot without permits and the like. The film hit various pandemic and hurricane-related delays, but, one has to admit, there are times when you can't imagine it taking place anywhere else.
Sriram also spent a lot of time talking about how the heart of the film is how, when you're young, especially a young woman, you can sort of know danger but kind of blithely go ahead anyway, and this was about when a person's luck runs out, and how you recognize that and react.
And with that, BUFF is finally wrapped up, and I've blown right past IFFBoston. Here's hoping that is finished before it's Fantasia time!
"Lilly Visits the Hospital"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
"The Bum Family" shorts are kind of BUFF tradition by now - I feel like we've seen them at every festival going back to before the pandemic - and, honestly, they've never been my favorite things in the package, very much "I'm glad you guys had fun making this but I'd never seek this out on my own". As usual, it's got some fun gags and some that feel inside. I kind of feel like this one has the characters feeling a little more self-aware of their weirdness than previous shorts have - not entirely planning to be an agent of chaos instead of just being one while trying to be normal, but with more of that than usual.
"Les Bêtes"
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
I loved the heck out of this at Fantasia last summer, and seeing it a second time months later maybe shaves a little of the novelty off but sharpens the satire a bit - one goes from laughing at the darkly comic awful ways that the aristocrats treat the macabre but lively little animated performers that are brought into the castle to feeling the callousness, especially in the performative cruelty of the little impressario who thinks it will bring him closer to his human masters. No, guy, you're one of the creatures to them.
It makes for a delightful little short, though, as filmmaker Michael Granberry and his crew make a bunch of Weird Little Guys and have them perform, do nifty character animation on the aristocrats, and use the petty bourgeois envy of the folks in between as a catalyst to something more destructive that constantly moves between horrifically destructive and satisfying bits of small-scale revenge. There is something especially powerful about a stop-motion film that ends in flames; for all that one knows that there were probably multiple copies of each little figure made, there's a special horror to the destruction and sense of the miraculous in what survives.
"Peeping"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
Four minutes of odd that kind of looks like either the hardware or software used for rendering could use an upgrade in a way that may be deliberate, to give it a bigger underground/raising a fist to the man feeling. The premise is pretty straightforward and not going to be misread - folks just trying to have fun and do picking themselves apart to please a censorious authority - but some of the designs are neat and it's not trying to do too much.
"Pocket Princess"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
This one's a neat stop-motion tale that feels like it's adapting a lesser-known fairy tale, one which makes it pretty clear that the cruel priest uncle isn't just an unsympathetic taskmaster but almost certainly molesting his niece, which makes its Grimm-ish finale something between a horrible nightmare and an escape. I suppose that's what makes a lot of those original-recipe stories work sometimes - looking at the world's horrors and admitting that sometimes the only escape you can construct is mental.
It's also kind of nifty-looking, really knowing how to make its various characters have the right balance of innocence and malice, and also making the fantasy world that Anna retreats into both fraught and tight, even when it might seem relatively bigger.
"Pippy and the Typist"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
Look, it's got a moment where the main character dropkicks the person controlling the world's actions from the magic typewriter, and that's quality physical comedy. I'm not sure its meta hijinks ever get quite that funny again, but it puts in the effort, very much dedicated to chaos and the idea that just because you're a cartoon character, you may not actually know the best way to deal with cartoon characters, especially if you're already vindictive about your prior bad situation.
"The House of Weird"
* * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking, what you get when folks self-describe themselves as "weird" ever since the original Weird Tales ceased publication isn't great (yes, there's nuance to be had here, but this is a review of a 4-minute short), even if you can see folks having fun and want to applaud that. That's more or less what "The House of Weird" is - filmmaker Mark Reyes and friends screwing around with various tools to create series of funky looking rooms in a house that doesn't exactly open geometric law, and maybe trying to say something about how today's world is incomprehensible and like an escape room you can't exit, but mostly coming off as lightweight oddity for the same of oddity. But, hey, it's a first film, and maybe a learning experience.
"Poppa"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
Hmm.
Yep, weird, but it builds up to the one joke you can fit into its two-minute runtime, and there's something really pleasant about its 1990s TV animation style that makes the gross bits work a little better.
"The Garden Sees Fire"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
Another bunch of weird little guys, but drawn out trying to create a sense of importance. Mostly well done, I suppose, but 15 minutes is a lot of abstract weirdness.
"Red Thumb"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
An impressive dark fantasy that does nice work combining story, allegory, and world-building into a tight space.
"Demons in the Closet"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
One-minute stop-motion horror story, riffing a bit on Army of Darkness, perhaps. Might have taken months to do, but works out pretty darn nice.
"A Walk in the Park"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
I can't seem to find the particular Jay Marks who made this one on IMDB but I hope folks in Hollywood are noticing this short because he certainly seems like a guy where you try and recruit him for something bigger, whether in animation or live-action. He's got a really good knack for building eerie atmosphere into blockbuster action, makes a twist into a deeper horror work, and inserts comedic bits in that don't undermine the sort of story he's telling.
It turns out to be the sort of big, slick banger that tends to be the grand finale for one of these blocks, except…
"Howl if You Love Me"
* * * ½ (out of four) Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)
This is also a great one, a zippy little cartoon where a couple manages to work around the lady's lycanthropy until the werewolf hunters come and make everything worse. It's upbeat and adventurous with a fine score and plenty of comic relief from their little dog, and despite the lack of dialogue and the cartoon character designs, there's a moment or two that really captures the best bit of werewolf stories, where someone is absolutely terrified of what their conditions will do to their loved ones. It's also built up in such a way that we can really enjoy the final rampage.
Genuinely fun note to end the package on.
Mina ni sachi are (Best Wishes to All)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Best Wishes to All is quality Japanese "the world is somewhat askew from what you think" stuff, although very much the sort where I kind of want an argument to be raised with its premise at some point, even if it ultimately fails. This lady wants to push back on nihilism, but doesn't really get a chance to try.
The young woman in question (Kotone Furukawa) is visiting her grandparents for the first time in years while on break from college, with her parents and brother expected to join them soon. Something seems off, though, compared to when she visited as a child; there are strange noises, and a mysterious locked door at the end of the upstairs hallway. Eventually, what she finds shocks her, and the reaction of everyone around her but one childhood friend shocks her even more.
What she discovers doesn't really make sense, but that's exactly the point of this sort of Twilight Zone-ish story: Director Yuta Shimotsu and co-writer have a broad idea here, that the price of one person's happiness is another's suffering, and will generally always err on the side of the mechanism being vague and the feeling being authentic than trying to construct a perfect, detailed set of parallels. The discovery is a quality slow burn, though; the filmmakers have a nice way of raising flags right away so that the audience gets a feel for what they're in for but not the how, so the audience is kind of poking around the corners trying to see what's coming. When things get definitively weird, it gets more ominous.
It's also got quite the nice lead performance from Kotone Furukawa; she quickly sells the audience as a likable, down-to-earth student and recoils in horror well, but she's good at the middle part, too, where the heroine is between the horrible discovery about her world and anything she can possibly do about it, processing without looking blank. There are plenty of complementary folks to make it work, too: The too-friendly grandparents, the friend who knows what she doesn't and suffers more for it, the recluse who had the same reaction she did and had it drive her mad. The performances as a group sell the idea of a world that is (probably) different from ours in one very important way but can seem like it isn't twisted into unrecognizability, at least on the surface level.
It does kind of get scattered toward the end, sort of tossing in every sort of symbolic idea for how this works semi-randomly rather than building something that feels like it could actually be the case or has interlocking bits of meaning, which would be nice. It's effective for most of its hour and a half, though, and doesn't stretch out past that enough to undo it.
Fucktoys
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Fucktoys is probably the most cheery example of this sort of proudly disreputable movie - the type where you can imagine the folks involved taking each gasping patron who flees the theater out of shocked propriety as a sort of victory - that I can recall seeing. It's all sex workers on the margins of a place that is pointedly already marginal, but is never really looking to make the audience feel like they're slumming it, even when it eventually gets to the point when the candy coating starts to wear off.
AP (Annapurna Sriram) is one of them, a sort of flighty young woman who has been able to earn all she needs to get by selling sex she kind of wasn't opposed to having anyway when she feels like it. The thing about trusting fate in that way is that a girl can wind up in a panic about what fortune tellers say, specifically that her recent run of bad luck is due to a curse, and that she needs to earn some money quickly in order to hire someone to get it off her. So, with the help of friend and lover Danni (Sadie Scott), who just got out of jail, she hops on her scooter and starts looking around Trashtown for ways to earn some quick bucks, though her scatterbrained nature means she often finds herself at the same place she started, if not further behind.
That the movie generally seems to be going somewhere is a neat trick, because it's a story that requires a lot of episodic bouncing and things sort of sinking to a slightly lower low that would kind of die if it stopped being fun despite the trajectory. Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram does impressive work in all three areas keeping the energy up, playing AP as the right sort of dim but scrappy-sweet girl who can keep forward momentum for 100 minutes without slowing down for the audience to question anything and keeping things upbeat despite the absurdity. Sadie Sweet is a good foil for her, harder-edged but on the same wavelength, and there are a few other one-off types who match the vibe, notably Danian Young as a politician too genuinely nice for his own good and François Arnaud as a high-roller who might be able to solve AP's money problems himself.
The film is often stripped-down to an extent that approaches surreal, never more so than when hanging out in AP's "bedroom" in the middle of a field - is this literal, the way AP perceives homelessness that includes freedom, or something else again? The film is full of stripped-down locations and characters that could fit some version of them. Sriram lets them move blithely along, suggesting that the inconveniences of living hand to mouth more than make up for being smothered under patriarchal, moralistic expectations. Even a square like me can understand where AP is coming from.
The film is, however, ready for the conclusion it winds up reaching, which delivers the right emotion for every moment after the twist that sets out on a new course. Sriram shows a really steady hand here to make a point without the topical moralizing, and the poetic license taken at that point feels earned even as it lets her not go into what could have been a lot of details about how things would play out that the audience neither need nor wants. The big twist is jaw-dropping for all that it's maybe been in plain sight despite how the vibe is very much anti-twist, and she shows as much skill turning a screw as she had deliberately not doing so.
Some folks are still probably going to opt out pretty quickly; Sriram is certainly not making any effort to include a big, mainstream audience here. It's good work, though, whether she intends to ever make movies for the more easily-upset or not.
Cong 21 Shi Ji an Quan Che Li (Escape from the 21st Century)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)
Even folks who like and watch a lot of imported movies often tend to forget about the foreign film filter - that they often look better or classier because, with only so much demand for them outside their native territory, only the best or most mainstream cross borders in any meaningful way. China produces a ton of movies, though, both for theaters and its big streaming services, to entertain its population of 1.4 billion, but it's a rare thing for something as decidedly odd as Escape from the 21st Century to push its way into North America in even the tiny way it's managing.
It opens in the summer of 1999 on "Planet K" (which is basically Earth but pointedly not so, which I imagine gets you a little more leeway with the censors), introducing the audience to fat kid Paopao (Kang Qixuan), his dumb friend Wang Zha (Chen Yichen) with a "Hong Kong" wig for hair, and their buddy Wang Chengyong (Li Zhuozhao), who is super-popular, dating the gorgeous and equally popular Yang Yi (Ma Fanding), and will fight anybody who tries to get between them. That's how they wind up exposed to a weird chemical that allows them to take the places of with their future selves while their teenage bodies are unconscious - but in 2019, Paopao is now not only a hunk (Leon Lee Chenhao), but he's the one dating Yang Yi (Zhu Yanmanzi); Chengyong (Song Yang) is gangster working for a mysterious Boss (Wen Zhengrong); and Wang Zha (Zhang Ruoyun) is a photographer partnered with reporter Liu Lianzhi (Elane Zong Chuxi). Worse, they find out that this dystopian world where they're at odds with each other may be their fault, and they may even be putting their past lives at stake!
Story-wise, this movie is wobbly as heck; there's a good sort of time-travel farce set up in the idea that Paopao and Wang Zha are determine to keep the extremely jealous Chengyong from finding out Paopao and Yang Yi wound up together in both the present and future, but it doesn't really work, both because Yang Yi never really becomes enough of a distinct character of her own to make the answer interesting (as is wont to happen to girlfriends in movies about three or more male buddies) and because that piece is mostly a way to get these kids to stumble around and get into bigger trouble, which could have dire consequences for planet K, although it's the sort of "paradoxes just sort of make things blow up for reasons" sort of time travel trouble as much as anything really clever.
Still, that all leads up to an absolutely crazy, apocalyptic climax, with Bonnie Tyler singing "Holding Out for a Hero", missiles flying, characters sneezing themselves between 1999 and 2019 to try and keep a henchman from becoming too good at Street Fighter, and even more ridiculous things. Writer/director Li Yang throws the whole kitchen sink at the audience at hyperspeed with visual effects that do their level best to pull off every gonzo thing in his head, and he mostly does it without the audience getting lost. That doesn't mean one necessarily knows what's happening, but you can keep track of what the various characters are doing and what their individual stakes are, with nobody getting left behind.
Of course, the whole movie is cranked up to eleven even before this The present and the past have different aspect ratios, the film will become animated when live action is simply not sufficiently trippy for what's going on, and why settle for larger-than-life when one can be absurdly larger-than-life? It's exhausting at times and often both over-complicated and without room for nuance, but it's seldom boring, and it really helps that the teenage and adult actors do an excellent job of staying in sync rather than letting the two time periods get away from each other.
It's weird, maximalist filmmaking that was probably lucky to hit the festival circuit and gather up people to tell their friends they won't believe how nutty it is rather than try to cram that into a high-pressure worldwide release.
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