Fantasia 2022.15: "Flames", Out in the Ring, Freaks Out, and DJ XL5's Ultimate Zappin' Party.

End of an era with the final Zappin Party. But first...

First up, we've got Bertrand Hebert and Out in the Ring director Ryan Bruce Levy. There were apparently a lot more people in town to support the documentary on Tuesday, but they're pro wrestlers, so they take gigs when they come, and if that's the middle of the week, it's the middle of the week.

It's a neat documentary, something I'm kind of curious about because for as much as I watched a bit of wrestling back in the 1980s and 1990s, because what else was on Saturday afternoon? A couple of my brothers still follow it, I think, although how much they're still into WWE as opposed to the other circuits like AEW, I don't know. I'm also kind of surprised how many women I know (though not particularly well in some cases) got into wrestling in general and AEW in particular over the last few years, seemingly out of nowhere. I kind of wonder to what extent these alternate circuits being easy to follow online has done, especially with folks having found reasons to be disillusioned with the McMahons' outfit.

The post-film talk was kind of interesting, even if some of it was kind of inside to me - Levy mentioned that they had to reconfigure a lot of the back half of the movie and shoot new material when folks that were apparently a major part of the original cut were involved in a scandal, saying it like this was something most of the wrestling fans in the audience would recognize but not a lot more details (they weren't upset, as it allowed them to get Dark Sheik and other folks they really liked in). It was kind of odd to me that it was in the Q&A that they brought up that Mike Parrow hadn't won a match since he came out and that, contrary to the way she's presented in the film, Sonny Kiss doesn't get on the AEW television shows, which is crazy considering how acrobatic and charismatic she is from what we see in the film. These seem like kind of important omissions.

Take a bow, Mark Lamothe, who has been programming the "DJ XL5 Zappin' Party" program at Fantasia for more or less as long as I can remember going - per the blog, I saw my first one in 2009, and I bet if I dug through whatever boxes my old festival programs are in, I'd find them back to 2005. This was apparently the final one, which means the festival won't be the same next year, at least one one night.

(Apologies for the quality of the photo; I was sitting back much further than usual and while the new phone has a pretty amazing camera, it can only do so much!)

I should have asked Gabrielle to translate for me - as I mentioned the previous time Monsieur Lamothe took the stage, my French was not great when I stopped taking the class in high school 30 years ago - but I caught enough to sort of piece it together: "Soixante", "mes VHS cassettes", "comédie" all came up, and, yeah, I imagine it must be tricky to program a comedy program for a younger crowd once you get up past 60, and Fantasia does do a pretty good job of drawing new young attendees rather than catering to older nerds like me, and given how Québêc-centric a lot of the material can be in some years (including this one), there must be a lot of overlap with Fantastique Week-end programming.

Which isn't to say that times have passed this block by; he seemed surprised by just how many folks in the audience were attending their first Zappin Party show. But, on the other hand, how many of those first-timers had actually spent a late night sitting around, "zapping" between channels on cable, coming across the odd or unusual because a lot of these stations could be kind of fly-by-night, filling the off-hours with any old thing that one might tape (on actual tape) because it may never show up again, as opposed to part of some corporate behemoth that just reruns familiar things constantly (if they've even got cable at all)? If they're college students, not many, I imagine. That makes the format kind of alien, as opposed to something that us fogies remember well and can see this as a heightened take on it - the Zappin' party has gone from a twist on the familiar, to something nostalgic, to a period conceit over the course of its life.

(Maybe in a couple of years, there will be a DJ XL6 who puts a show like this together emulating an eccentric and deranged streaming algorithm, but that might hit different, in that it would be an idealized version of what we want YouTube to do, not the whole thing getting weird and surreal the way the Zappin' Party is.)

We also spent some time talking about how the specific community around the show was, if not gone, dispersed. This show is usually a must-see for another friend, but he wasn't here for this one, having to handle his own screening elsewhere. The presentations always ended with thanks to "the front row crew" (and maybe this one did as well) but that group has thinned out a lot in recent years, even before covid. Where there used to be a group of up to a dozen people who would settle in the front row of almost every screening in Hall and quite a few in de Seve - like, as much as I often take the first row, I always felt like I would be encroaching when I first started coming - they were less and less a presence during the last few in-person festivals, and I think I only saw one of the folks I recognized for a few shows at the tail end this year. And it happens; people go all-in on three-week movie events and the like when they're younger, but then they relocate for work, get married, have kids, maybe move out to the suburbs so that it's a little more hassle to come into the city. It probably hasn't been quite the same for a while.

And then, of course, there's covid, which had this program virtual at least in 2020 and maybe 2021, so really not the same. There were also local folks we used to see a lot, but didn't see at all this year. One in particular was older and somewhat frail-looking back even before 2019, so we found ourselves kind of hoping that he was just staying away from indoor crowds, but you never know with this sort of nodding acquaintance, do you?

Ah, well. Some of this is probably way off, me projecting a lot of feelings about a dynamic, evolving festival and my own growing older on some poorly-heard words in a foreign-to-me language. But even if so, there's going to be a hole where the Zappin' Party used to be ⅔ the way through the festival next year. Maybe it gets filled with something similar, or something new and exciting, or maybe it's just another spot to show movies until someone comes up with a new signature event. Time will tell.

But as we say goodbye, let's applaud all the folks who made shorts for the festival and came, in large part because they were local. Enough were pickle-related that I wonder if there was some sort of Montreal-area filmmaking challenge, but it's cool to see this sort of crowd of filmmakers.

One last thing - Gabrielle wondered if the meowing between the time the lights went down and the film started up would fade in coming years, as it originated what the regular "Simon's Cat" shorts here (themselves no longer an indie cartooning thing, but something bought by a larger company that makes plushes, greeting cards, and the like along with the cartoons). I figure it won't, because it's too much of a thing on its own now, for better or worse, and I wouldn't exactly put it past the programmers to pair a Simon's Cat cartoon with the opening-night film just to make sure it continues.

So, this is Thursday. Friday is up next, another short-ish day with What's Up Connection, Whether the Weather Is Fine, and The Witch Part 2: The Other One.

"Flames"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)

A cute little short that pairs quite well with Out in the Ring, although it's one of those where I looked at the program's description afterwards and was like "oh, yeah, that explains some things!" It's always interesting when you see just how well a short can get by without much in the way of exposition, but what's in the program is necessarily nothing but that.

As to the film itself, it's very cute, a pair of young men practicing pro-wrestling moves but not exactly entirely into it while being heckled by an older man watching from the apartment. There isn't exactly a lot to do at this point, so filmmaker Matthew Manhire has his cast quickly sketch some emotions out, establish that the old man has probably been this specific sort of pain since these two were little, and then give them time for a rather nice reversal of emotion before an entertainingly goofy punchline.

It packs a fair amount into its six minutes, without a whole lot of talking but with an earnest vibe of it not being what you love, but that you love it and how you express that.

Out in the Ring

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)

Not a lot of documentaries made by people who are clearly fans are able to approach their subject quite so clearly as Out in the Ring does, openly acknowledging that the history it presents is full of contradictions, and that the thing those fans love has so often not loved them back. There's no escaping the cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, the filmmakers clearly love wrestling and celebrate queer people, even when the intersection can be a mess.

As the film points out, queer angles in wrestling go back in 1940s lucha in Mexico, where the "exoticas" gimmick was actually created by American Dizzy Davis, although when he returned home, he didn't think it would work north of the border, telling George Wagner to run with it if he wanted. "Gorgeous George" quickly became a superstar with his make-up, capes, and boas, and other wrestles with pretty-boy gimmicks would prove popular through the years (and even those not technically doing that sort of thing, like Ric Flair, would lean into that sort of flamboyance). There would be leathermen more clearly inspired by Tom of Finland than any real bikers and other similar angles, but at the same time, folks like Pat Patterson, who started out in Montreal before moving to Boston and the West Coast, would stay carefully closeted, even as he took behind-the-scenes roles and was arguably the architect of what made Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (later World Wrestling Entertainment) the dominant force in the industry.

There are plenty of stories like Pat's and George's, and plenty which don't turn out so well, as well as a lot of chances to impishly point out that if a lot of wrestling wasn't directly lifting from drag balls and other pieces of queer culture, they certainly came up with a lot of the same things. Filmmaker Ryan Bruce Levey has a big job in compacting 75 years or so of history into something under two hours, and that he manages it without feeling like he skipped over any particular time periods or got trapped in a repeating cycle is actually fairly impressive, when you think of how many documentaries don't find the time or the good combination of archival footage and people who were there to make that happen. It reassures the audience that he's not trying to shape the narrative into something else without hammering points home too bluntly.

(He is also very helpful in putting names, areas of expertise, and pronouns on the screen nearly every time someone appears as an interview subject. It may seem like overkill, but there are a lot of people popping up even if people weren't more inclined to watch movies in general and documentaries in particular in chunks in the streaming era.)

As I imagine that most stories of wrestling inevitably do, Out in the Ring sort of gets swallowed by the WWE during its second half, and it's kind of a tricky thing to maneuver: How Vince McMahon built what sure looked like a monopoly to non-fans - one that has only recently seen its first real competition in a decade or two emerge - is a big part of the landscape but not the point of this story. It does allow the filmmakers to zero in on a certain type of hypocrisy in how it's often good business to demonstrate you're not bigots but maybe not so much to put your money where your mouth is, which could probably be extracted as an object lesson in it. Based on the Q&A, the film probably paints things a little rosier than is actually true, at least in how prominent some of the gay or trans wrestlers shown are in the mainstream, at least if you're not coming to it as someone who watches regularly.

And it's a shame that wrestling fans are not getting as many chances to see that talent as they should; the film is at its best when celebrating the folks who would be up and comers in a just world - the acrobatic stuff Sonny Kiss does is particularly amazing - and otherwise showing some joy. There are moments when it engages in the sort of weird meta-reality that wrestling often indulges in, like Charlie Morgan coming out during a show somehow feeling just different enough from typical mic work to feel authentic even as one is aware just how much acting is involved in those segments, and cockeyed bits where tiny shows of people beating on each other in high school auditoriums are family entertainment for queer kids. For a film that's about something so physical, where the performance clips are expected to be the most fun, it's able to get incredible mileage out of its subjects probably feeling more comfortable about the intersection of the thing they love and who they are than they were a few years ago, let alone when some of the older subjects were active. It's infectious, although it can be even more so because it's not just talk.

Despite what Levey and company choose to show, those things don't actually intersect as well as one might hope. On the other hand, the end of a documentary that might not really circulate until a couple years after it's done, festival circuits and sales and release schedules being what they are, needs to show trajectory as much as anything, and there's no shame in being a little hopeful there, given how good and persistent some of these folks are.

Freaks Out

* * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As oddball superhero movie premises go, one would think that "Italian circus X-Men versus a 12-fingered Nazi who gets hgh and sees the future" would be an excellent starting point, and it winding up a complete mess makes it one of the festival's biggest disappointment. Director Gabriele Mainetti and co-writer Nicola Guaglianone seem to be trying to do too much on the face of it, but they often have the opposite problem, lacking the important pieces needed to pull the story together.

As it opens, Ringmaster Israel (Giorgia Tirabassi) is showcasing the other four members of his small troupe: Fulvio (Chaudio Santamaria), an erudite beast-man covered in fur with superhuman strength; Mario (giancarlo Martini), a diminutive clown who is also a human magnet; Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), who can control insects, which is particularly impressive with fireflies, though he dislikes bees; and Matilde (Aurora Giovinazzo), a teenager who can channel electricity, though controlling it is another story. It's interrupted, though, as the town where they've set up is bombed - it is World War II, after all - and they find themselves making thier way to Rome without a tent. Israel intends to get visas so that they can escape to America, but vanishes, and while Matilde seeks him, the others figure they may as well see if the German circus direct from Berlin is hiring. What they don't necessarily realize is that its leader Franz (Franz Ragowski) is not just a pianist with an extra finger on each hand, but that he can see the future, and has become convinced that the only way to prevent the Nazi's ignominious defeat is by him leading a team that includes a foursome of people with powers like his.

Superhero tales have been inserting World War II since it was current events, and it's easy to understand why - the truly monstrous villains, the iconic imagery, the real-life stories that seemed to become iconic immediately - but it always winds up a little trickier than it looks. You're also talking about the Holocaust, after all, and there at least should be a certain amount of unease in rewriting history to fit in necromancers and super-soldiers or juxtaposing the horrors of war with the whimsy of brightly-colored costumes. This film opts to confront the Holocaust directly, and while it could go much worse, it's hard to see the point of mixing it with this sort of fantasy - the reality of it is so seemingly larger than life that you don't need fantasy to lay things out in starker terms, and it risks recasting true horrors as cartoon villains. Mainetti and Guaglianone seem aware of this, and work hard not to diminish the reality, but it mostly means there's not much fantasy value here. It's an alternate history where everything's all going to turn out the same, except there are mutants.

And on top of that, their mechanics of building the story are kind of terrible. There's a sequence where Fulvio, Cencico, and Mario wind up on a truck heading toward a concentration camp, bust out in violent screw-these-guys fashion… and then just head back to town to join the Nazi circus. Once there, Franz bounces between making the guy very comfortable and torturing them for no reason, and there are at least two or three times when the only way the filmmakers can get to the next stage of the story is just to have Matilde walk deliberately and stupidly into danger even when it's exceptionally clear she should know better, when a well-written movie would have actually having her learning from the first time it ended in disaster. It's odd, because they never really come up with much for the troupe to do beyond the absolute basics, rather than having any sort of particular stories of their own.

Frustrating because as much as so much is dumb, one can see where the filmmakers are right on target. The opening introduction, for instance, is terrific, a way to introduce the characters and their personalities and powers without a lot of exposition before pulling the curtain back on the sort of darkness the movie is dealing with. There's a bit of inspired lunacy with the cannon used to launch human cannonballs that's just goofy enough that one can happily overlook how, nah, it's not going to help them catch up with that train. And for all the dumb anachronistic jokes built around Franz, there's a specific sort of angering tragedy about him: It's not just that he can see the future, but he's pulling in songs and art that only he can play on the piano, seeing other ways to delight people, and all he wants is to be a normal Nazi, even knowing that they're a historical dead-end.

Those clever bits are too few and far between, though, and too much that's in-between winds up tacky or boring when it's not just downright ill-considered. It's a terrific premise squandered by people never finding the right material to flesh it out.

DJ XL5's Ultimate Zappin' Party

Seen 28 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

So many of these shorts are very short indeed, too short for notes, and many of them local-enough that I'd just be grasping them by the time they finished, so let's just hit the highlights:

• "Monsieur Magie" - A delightfully daft premise which almost feels enhanced for those of us who speak little French because we get the slow dawning on us as to what's happening organically: The title character, the sort of magician who usually works children's parties, is brought out to a cabin to perform for an adult audience, and while on the one hand the guest of honor just seems kind of dim, it eventually turns out that these guys are criminals, and they want him to make a body disappear.
  
  It's a nutty, dumb idea that would probably absolutely self-destruct if dragged out much longer than these ten minutes, but at that length it's still got me chuckling at the goofball logic of it while M. Magie is trying his best to extricate himself from a bunch of murderers using only his skills at close-up magic and their evident gullibility. Just long enough not to get frustrating and just tricky enough to keep a contest of wits with morons from being an unfair fight.
• "Simon's Cat: Light Lunch" - Maybe not the most brilliant or original "Simon's Cat" short, as we have probably seen Simon leave food unattended only for the cat to be gross, or go to some trouble to feed him only for the cat to ignore it, and there's not exactly a lot of creative destruction here. It's a comfortable familiar gag, though, and it would have been wrong to see the Party without a visit from its favorite feline. Though it does seem likely that it was chosen for the fact that there's a pickle in it, which made for a bit of a theme with other shorts.
• "Felis Infernalis" - Then again, this kitty sows a fair amount of havoc in one minute. Just a cute, funny short that captures the exact line cats straddle between deliberate and uncaring mayhem.
• "Spaghetter Getter" - The sort of short that seems custom-made for the Zappin' Party, because it initially seems like it could be one of the screwy commercials used to pad out the time between shorts until it just starts going off the rails. It's random-seeming, dark and absurdist comedy, maybe not actually that funny unless you're on its up-too-late-what-is-this vibe, but this is a package that gets you there.
• "Guimauve" - Kind of comedy torture, in a way, as writer/director/star Daniel Grenier demonstrates his skill at tossing a marshmallow in the air and catching it in his mouth, tosses one too high, and then spends the next ten or fifteen minutes getting in position to catch it. Silly and self-aware, but Grenier by and large has the right instincts on when to get laughs from stretching a bit out and when to cut something off and amble on to the next thing.
• "Guts" - The of "guy with his guts either on the outside of his body or his belly just sliced open and somehow not bleeding out feels he's being discriminated against at work" sort of speaks for itself, but it escalates into chaos even as it repeats its joke four or so times, treating the weird gross-out bit as a sort of safe place to reset as the film spirals into bigger messes.
• "Panique au village: Les grandes vacances" - Who doesn't love "Panique au village" (aka "A Town Called Panic")? Joyless monsters, that's who. This one's a jumbo-sized short, nearly half an hour, but it hums along as the mischievous Cowboy and Indian create trouble, have it spin out of control, and have to do something even stranger to fix what they've broken. Somehow, this goes from building a toy boat to having to win a bicycle race to replace Horse's car, all while Horse is trying to impress his would-be girlfriend.
  
  Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar are masters of just piling one thing on top of another, having it fall down, and then having their characters scramble to make up for lost time in a way that makes the audience feel almost as frantic as they do. As is often the case, they use this to let them suddenly take sharp turns into new territory even as they maintain the running jokes that have been going on since the whole thing started. The very limited stop-motion just adds to this, like they're frantically trying to keep up with their story while also reminding the audience that this is a totally made-up cartoon place with no rules , so absolutely anything can happen next.

… and a dozen more, and a bunch of stuff in-between where you kind of had to be there.

Fantasia 2022.09: The Harbinger, Stellar: A Magical Ride, "Lass Mörder Sein", and Megalomaniac

In a month and a half or so, when I'm joking about how all the people at Fantastic Fest saying they're really feeling it after four or five days are soft, I won't mention that day nine of Fantasia was like this, with me missing the first show because I was doing day job stuff (which engages a different part of the brain), taking a slot in the afternoon off because I'm still not into the Cavalcade of Perversions, and then effectively punting the last film because I was drifting off.

It's taken me this long to figure out that I should probably sit a bit further back for late shows in De Seve than I typically do. There's a stage and stadium seating, and widescreen films are a bit further up, so when I'm hanging out in the third row my natural eyeline might actually be underneath the screen. If you're starting to feel the length of the day, dropping it just a little means you're no longer looking at the actual film and then it's just a bit easier to drop out.

Not that this was a particular issue with Harbinger, a darn good covid-set horror flick that had a nice turnout even for the second show: Writer/director Andy Mitton, producer Richard W. King, co-stars Myles Walker, Gabby Beans, and Emily Davis, plus producer/guy-playing-three-rolls-but-only-one-where-you-see-his-face Jay Dunn. I noted with some amusement that Walker at least was masked right until he sat on the lip of the stage and most of them had masks at the ready. The folks who made a movie set in New York during the early days of Covid were still taking it seriously.

Of course, the pandemic is part of the reason that they were in this movie, too - the cast was almost entirely New York stage actors who took on the job while Broadway and even most of the city's smaller stages were shut down, and had probably spent a fair amount of time in the circumstances that inspired the movie.

See also Stellar director Kwon Soo-kyung, whose movie isn't quite the creative (but probably impossible to actually stage) car chase movie suggested by its taglines, but a shaggier sort of caper with hints at something a bit mystical but doesn't actually rely on it. Not disappointing at all, but also maybe not what one expects from a Korean film in this particular place.

He noted that "casting" the car took a bit of effort - they managed to source two Hyundai Stellars from the proper year and they were apparently every bit as much of a pain in the ass as portrayed in the film, one of them basically unsalvageable by the time they were done shooting and the other, well, not exactly something he'd want to keep as a souvenir. There's a little meta moment in the movie where the lead has the chance to sell it to someone who needs them because they're making a period film, and it speaks a bit to how that can be tricky; there's not a lot of people keeping non-classics like this model in good condition.

Also, in response to a question, he had never heard of Herbie: The Love Bug (which kind of feels like it might be due for a Disney+ revival especially since it's been a while since "New Beetles" were a thing). Just not really a thing in South Korea.

Last up, we've got Megalomaniac writer/director Karim Ouelhaj and producer Florence Saâdi, with (I think) the festival's Celia Pouzet on the left. As I mentioned before, I hit the wall during this one, so I really didn't have much context for their Q&A. The movie itself is stylish but punishing, so I wasn't exactly tempted to try and catch the second screening a couple days later. Must be a different experience at 11am Sunday morning capred to 10pm Friday.

Next up for Saturday the 23rd: Anime no Bento, Demigod: The Legend Begins, My Grandfather's Demons, Deadstream, and Kappei.

The Harbinger

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I found myself excited by the opening of this movie just seeing that it was going to acknowledge the pandemic. It will, after all, be very strange when, in a decade or two, people start talking about the movies that best represent the 2020s and the thing that defines the early part of the decade is just never present. Even better, though, is that this is a genuinely creepy movie that has all the fears and concerns of these days right at its heart.

As it starts, Mavis (Emily Davis) is not doing well at all, sleepwalking around her Queens apartment, disturbing the neighbors, and having to take increasingly extreme means to snap out of it. The building manager (Jay Dunn) asks if there is some family or friends in the city that she can call, but there really isn't. There is Monique (Gabby Beans), though, a college friend who is trying to ride out the pandemic in a bubble with brother Lyle (Myles Walker) and father Ronald (Raymond Anthony Thomas) at the family home, and Mavis was there for Monique when she needed it. So back to the city she goes, where she finds Mavis is in a really bad state - sometimes sleeping for days, having to dig deep into her skin with her nails to wake herself up from bad dreams which feature the figure of a plague doctor. Soon, Monique is having those dreams too, and when Reddit points them to a demonologist who does Zoom consultations (Laura Heisler), they are told to delete any mention of the problem from the internet, because this thing is a powerful meme (in the classic sense of the word) that can spread just through people knowing about it.

It's a sneaky good metaphor that Mitton has found here, not an allegory for the disease itself but the heightened sense of anxiety and alienation that were a by-product of trying to deal with it. Lots of people lost sleep, found themselves out of contact with friends, or saw people just disappear from their lives without a proper goodbye. The movie does a nifty job of heightening all of that, establishing its own mythology on top of it, careful not to make something real into the work of an outside force. There's a sharp sense of the trade-offs made while people were hunkered down, with the genuine relief Monique and Mavis feel at considering each other safe enough to unmask and approach compared to how Monique's family is warm appreciative of each other but also kind of on edge as the fortress mentality takes hold.

Another part of what makes the whole thing work is not getting too fancy with its nightmares - as surreal as dreams and dream imagery can be, they often feel ordinary in the moment, so Mitton and his crew don't change the lighting or color grading or focus on anything immediately strange until it would also alert Monique. The slow realization that one is in a dream, without it even being weirdly ironic, and the difficulty getting out, pushes the particular horrors of its setting even further. The twist, when it comes, is almost self-aware, what a dream should be, fed when that's an expectation that can be subverted.

There's also a pretty great cast, New York stage actors available because their shows were canceled, fresh faces who are nevertheless not affected, comfortable with a story that they are often telling to each other rather than recreating. Gabby Beans and Emily Davis have such good chemistry together that it's easy to miss just how solidly this film is built around Monique's perspective, with Davis finding ways to carry both Mavi's accelerating breakdown from scene to scene even as Monique's presence is ameliorating it. Beans makes Monique empathetic and thoughtful in a strange situation while still seeming unusually heroic, and her scenes with Myles Walker and Raymond Anthony Thomas feel like a family that gets along but has some sharp differences in priority about how to deal with something like the pandemic. I hope some of them wind up doing more film.

The movie does stretch on a bit toward the end, when it sort of gets into potential mechanics of defeating the Plague Doctor on the one hand and struggles a bit with what sort of horror movie it is on the other - is it ultimately going to be about facing and defeating one's fears or about creating unease and despair to the last frame? There's not exactly a right or wrong answer as opposed to preferred ones, and it's also something of a relief to see these particular fears handled at all.

Stellar (aka Stellar: A Magical Ride)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

The high concept used to sell Stellar - a repo man chases down a stolen Lamborghini Huracan with his father's beat-up Hyundai Stellar - probably would have been impossible to pull off as anything but the most carefully constructed car-chase movie imaginable, far more likely to fall critically short than succeed. Instead, the filmmakers go for something a little more offbeat, and the result is fine - not brilliant, not a disaster, but eminently watchable on a lazy evening.

It starts with Young-bae (Son Ho-jun) and his partner Cheol-gu (Ko Kyu-pil) getting their hands on said red Italian supercar and stashing it it the garage owned by Young-bae's friend Dong-sik (Lee Kyu-hyung) until it's time to deliver to their boss Seo (Heo Sung-tae) so that he can put it on a ship for a foreign buyer. Dong-sik drives off with it, though, and Seo interrupts Young-bae and sister Young-mi (Kim Seul-gi) at their father's funeral to exact punishment. Young-bae escapes, but can't take his own car; instead, he's forced to use the Stellar that his father bought to use as a taxi some thirty years ago and has probably spent the last decade under a tarp. It's no match for a Lamborghini - it topped out at about 50 km/h (about 30 mph) and has seen better days besides - but Young-bae has to find Dong-sik before chasing him anyway.

There are a lot of things in Bae Se-young's screenplay that don't really make a whole lot of sense - would this car not have some sort of tracker, for one, and just how exactly does Seo think that beating on Young-bae and taking his non-shitbox car is going to do anything to advance his goal of getting the Lambo back (it always strikes me that the really successful gangsters are the ones who are able to frighten but not do actual damage, keeping underlings useful and debtors repaying, and Seo doesn't seem very good at that in this instance)? Meanwhile, Dong-sik is just kind of hanging around, not quite waiting to be found but not doing a lot to make Young-bae work for it.

Then again, that's not exactly what this movie is really about - the Stellar is not just a cruddy old car, but a connection to Young-bae's late father (Jeon No-min), whom Young-bae hadn't seen much since he left his wife and children in a "they're better off without me" thing and still resents. Of course, girlfriend Sung-hee (Park Se-young) has just had a positive pregnancy test, so Young-bae has a lot of issues to work through, and the script has him just aware enough of this that when he finds himself talking to the car, he'll finish it by rhetorically asking who he's talking to. And while Seo is in no way any kind of father figure, every misadventure Young-bae gets into that doesn't specifically involve him plays on parents and children in some way, and that's before you get to how, while the car may not have Herbie levels of personality, it can be arbitrary in ways that are all too human. Hmm…

It puts the car in enjoyably abrasive company, as Young-bae can be a selfish dirtbag, but Son Ho-jun isn't asked to cross the line to mean and it's pretty clear that he's basically responding to a world that has treated him poorly in kind. Lee Kyu-hyung and Ko Kyu-pil similarly play unreliable but not mean-spirited partners, and Heo Sung-tae navigates his role as the main villain well, able to look the fool while still being threatening. And while this never becomes a movie built around the chase, the moments where it does start leaning into action, vehicular or otherwise, are not bad at all, particularly one chase with a whole slew of unlikely participants that eventually winds up in reverse.

Even knowing that it's not going to be all chase, the film winds up more than a bit sillier and sappier than it initially sounds, but it mostly navigates that fairly well. It just means there's still room for someone to figure out what happens when you put the Transporter or Special Delivery drivers behind the wheel of a Stellar and ask them to catch the Lamborghini…

"Lass Mörder Sein"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Max Gleschinski has made impressive little lo-fi short here - a sometimes painfully slow burn that opens with a slow pan across what will be revealed as a crime scene, a murder committed with no particular motive for gain, before flashing back to show how it went, and how it could have gone. It issues its foregone conclusion early, and then somehow still manages to build tension through its dynamic of reluctance, bullying, and something just hanging there unsaid - a woman caught between not really being interested in some guys' company not sure whether to push them away or not, even if the situation isn't consciously registering as unsafe.

The film consciously avoids much in the way of obvious polish, opting to look like something its characters might make using regular consumer equipment. There's no glee in the violence, and Gleschinski keeps rolling long enough after for it not to feel like a climax, managing to make the dragging it out seem purposeful.

Megalomaniac

(Sort of) Seen 22 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As I say up top, I hit the wall during this one and really didn't absorb much of anything during it. It's a particularly rough sort of movie to do that with, because from what I saw it seemed to be trying to illustrate something cyclical, and was also maybe told out of strictly chronological order, so it's easy to get lost. I got very lost indeed.

A ton of style, though - it's a great looking movie that does an excellent job of establishing that the twisted and horrific can often exist behind boring, bucolic fronts in any neighborhood. The soundtrack is also terrific, and necessarily loud.

Fantasia 2022.06: Employee of the Month, "Hell Gig", Sissy, and We Might as Well Be Dead

Another day skipping out on one of the afternoon shows. Look, I am descended from New England Puritans, and while I am fairly open-minded and willing to see a lot of weird stuff and live and let live about the rest, I am just not going to go to one of three short packages labeled "Cavalcade of Perversions" when I could be sitting down for some decent fish and chips. It's just the way I'm wired.

Besides, you should always find a chance to sit down and eat in the middle of a marathon festival day if you can. Subsisting on popcorn and candy isn't good for you.

The day started with the encore show of Employee of the Month, whose director Véronique Jadin mentioned up front that she'd never really had this sort of corporate drone work, but that there was plenty of obvious idiotic sexism in the movie industry to draw on. This film at least rings frustratingly true on those points, which was a relief, because I often kind of worry about how much art and entertainment is created by people who have never been anything but artists and entertainers.

Here's Mitch with the makers of Sissy, Hannah Barlow (who also co-starred) and Jane Senses. It's an Australian film which they describe as being the overlap of their tastes, bloody and girly in equal measure. It's a clever little movie, and navigating those extreme as well as it does is no small feat, even if it's not exactly my thing.

Both heaped a ton of well-deserved praise on Aisha Dee, whom they'd originally wanted for a spring role but who convinced them that she knew Sissy and the particular panicky lack of confidence that manifests as carefully cultivated extroversion inside out.

Also, they've been on a hack of a festival tour with this, starting out in their home base in Sydney, then to Perth, Busan, and Montreal. Each leg of that is an order of magnitude larger than the last, so I presume they'll be at the moon next.

Last, but certainly not least, Natalia Sinelnikova of We Might as Well Be Dead, which had a lot of people murmuring about High-Rise and what a disappointment it was beforehand, but which turned out pretty dang good. It is, it turned out, a student film, leading my friend Kurt, seeing his last film of the festival for the year, to marvel at the sort of film education you can apparently get in Germany, as Luz from a few years back was a similar case of students cranking out a pretty darn good feature.

Sinelnikova was most excited to talk about her lead, Ioana Iacob; casting films has been as tricky as everything else over the past couple of years, so on the one hand it can be hard to keep things nailed down, while on the other you can sometimes get a hugely-respected actress to do your student film because a global pandemic shut down theater in Romania. Also, it was interesting to hear her talking about the language choices - most of it is in German, but Iacob's character is Polish and Jewish, so she's often speaking Polish or Yiddish as opposed to German when not talking with her daughter and other immigrant friends. It's an odd thing to watch when you're not that familiar with those languages - they seem just close enough that I could occasionally note that there had been a language switch, but probably didn't clock every one of them.

Random spoiler-y question I wish I'd asked during that session: Did she deliberately look for a girl who was taller than Iacob when casting Pola Geiger as Anna's daughter? Her appearance near the end of the movie delighted me and I'm not sure exactly why I liked that facet of it so much - because she'd been so afraid through the movie and emerged from her cocoon bigger and stronger-looking than expected? Like, even if she's not actually going to knock her bullies over, she's more than they expected and she'll be formidable if she ever returns? Dunno. Just one of those details that was unexpected but hit right.

Next up: Wednesday and the end of the first week, with Just Remembering, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, One and Four, Chun Tae-Il, and On the Line

L'employée du mois (Employee of the Month)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Hurrah for 78-minute black comedies! As much as releasing a feature that runs less than 90 minutes has often seemed taboo, there's a lot of room under that threshold for a movie to be just right. In this case, it's probably just the right length for an impressive amount of problems snowballing without the caricatures that fuel them to wear thin (or, perhaps, to not boil over with rage that they're not entirely caricatures).

Inès (Jasmina Douieb) has been the glue holding the office of Eco-Clean Pro together for a long time; her title is technically "legal expert" but she also functions as secretary, personal assistant, and is expected to make the coffee even though she doesn't touch the stuff, being the only woman in the office. Well, usually - Mélody (Laetitia Mampaka), daughter of a former colleague, is starting a one-month internship on the day that a visitor from the home office (Laurence Bibot) is making an annual presentation. It includes notes on pay gaps, but as long-time manager Patrick (Peter Van den Begin) puts it, that's more a goal for when they can afford it, despite salesman Nico (Alex Vizorek) and some of the other men in the office getting raises. A gruesome accident and an investigation by the financial police is all Inès and Mélody need - except that Inès may be even more frighteningly capable than even she knows.

Even at its fairly compact scale, many in the audience will find themselves waiting only semi-patiently for the first murder, even without knowing that it's quite that black a comedy - it is important, apparently, for everybody in the office to be kind of awful to Jasmina Douieb's Inès individually before the timid lady who keeps everything running from day to day gets to show how she handles herself in a crisis. At that point, though, we get to see something kind of wonderful in Douieb's performance, like she's figuring out that she can get away with doing something more broadly comic even as Inès is gaining confidence that she might be able to get away with covering up her boss's death and whatever else that follows in its wake. There's something similar going on with Laetitia Mampaka as the intern getting the full measure of how bad a first day on the job can be, although the filmmakers are smart in how they make it clear well beyond their different physiques that Melody isn't Inès minus twenty-odd years, but someone who has a different set of institutional biases to combat and different baseline expectations.

They do it in a pleasantly small-scale film, with the office feeling cramped in the way a real one can often be, rather than one that looks "tight, but not so you can't run a dolly through it". It means that there's got to be a weird efficiency to even the brutal bits of slapstick, like Rube Goldberg disasters compacted into one or two steps, or the phallic nature of a trophy pulling double duty. Every minor character is similarly a perfectly-captured bit of awfulness, with Peter Van den Begin's Patrick an especially great example - he's ridiculous and transparent but there's a scene or two where one can see a hint of the superficial appeal that initially put Inès under his thumb and kept her for something like 20 years.

There are times when it seems maybe a bit too efficient; there's room for some later shenanigans to play out funnier, or at least less directly. On the other hand, a movie like this can burn out quickly if they're not careful, and it's better off doing a quick hit and then letting the audience leave still laughing.

"Hell Gig"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There's a really fun zippiness to "Hell Gig", with writer/director Ella Gale seeming to consciously strip away anything that's not going to lead to a joke within twenty seconds or so and letting stars Brooke Bundy and Jamie Loftus sort of riff their way through things, spilling what the audience needs to know while dealing with the supernatural trouble that has attached itself to one of them. It's fast and consciously banter-y, but not rushed.

Heck, even the rapid-fire jokes kind of feel explained within the short, with both women trying to make it as comedians and probably kind of quippier than the general population (it took me a bit to not associate "gig" with musicians, but it becomes clear quickly enough). Gale also gets what sort of vibe she's going for here and that the comedy is with the cast. A kind of goofy-looking monster is funny, but she mostly keeps it out of the center of action because otherwise camp could become the main joke.

Anyway, good stuff. Someone hire these folks for bigger things.

Sissy

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Every once in a while, I watch a movie like Sissy and wonder if I'm the reason why it doesn't click with me a bit better. It's well-made, creative, and I can certainly see what the filmmakers are getting at, mostly successfully. Am I just too old, male, and comfortable for it to speak to me? I don't know. I just find myself liking the film when I feel like I should love it.

It introduces the audience to Cecilia (Aisha Dee), an influencer who is doing pretty well for herself streaming tips about how to refocus when the world is too much, which often seems to be the case for her once the camera stops rolling. After posting her latest, she randomly runs into Emma (Hannah Barlow), her best friend as a child, who invites her to a night of karaoke with fiancée Fran (Lucy Barrett) and friends Tracey (Yerin Ha) and Jamie (Daniel Monks), and then to their shared bachelorette weekend. What Emma neglected to include was that this party would be at the home of Alex (Emily De Margheriti), who bullied "Sissy" when they were kids and is a big part of the reason Cecilia hasn't seen Emma since. It's not a pleasant experience for either from the get-go, and it's going to get worse.

This is a spectacularly bad idea on Emma's part that it maybe winds up undermining the movie a bit when the full extent of it is made plain (though it's pretty clear early on), in part because co-director Hannah Barlow plays the character as probably being smarter and more empathetic than that even if she is impulsive. There are other pieces of it that don't quite fit together - Cecilia is so reactive most of the time that the moments when she does plan ahead are jarring and almost feel out of character. It's also the second movie I saw at this festival where somebody does just a terrible job of making sure that their victim is dead.

That's all kind of nitpicky stuff if the movie is vibing with you, and though it doesn't quite do that for me, one can easily see all the situations where it would work. Barlow and co-director/co-writer Kane Senes build the whole film around intertwined earnestness and phoniness - not only is that the very foundation of Cecilia's online persona, but it's in the way many of the characters interact, heightened versions of their core selves so that Cecilia doesn't know what's fake about them and vice versa. There's an awful whimsy to the way a couple of kills are presented that's not out of place with the faux-glitter of others or how one scene is shot upside down mainly because it looks cool. The filmmakers and audience are going to struggle with the concept of "too far" as much as the characters.

And, above all, Aisha Dee is terrific as Cecilia - she's very much not well mentally but the fact that she's a bright and warm presence doesn't play as a façade, but like both halves are real, a duality that few performances capture as well as Dee manages. She's able to grab the audience early and mostly able to keep them past a point where a connection might snap, with Barlow & Senes knowing just which buttons to push to let her. She's counterbalanced extremely well by Emily De Margheriti, despite the latter entering relatively late - she's icy, mean, and angry from the start and never manages to grab the audience's sympathy even when it looks like she deserves some.

It is, I suspect, a tale of horror that will connect much better with folks closer to its characters than I am, which is absolutely fine. Sometimes a film can break through barriers and communicate something universal, and sometimes it's okay to be that specific if it works well enough for the intended audience.

Wir könnten genauso gut tot sein (We Might As Well Be Dead)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Paranoia's a funny thing; give it even the slightest justification, and it grows out of control. The trick with a movie about it is that we often expect more from fictional characters and situations than we observe in real life, and doing something speculative can put fingers on the scales to an even greater and more obvious extent. That's what makes Natalia Sinelnikova's We Might As Well Be Dead so impressive - she does a nifty job of withholding some and giving even the most rational something to fear that the absurdity and tension of the situation are able to coexist.

As the film opens, a family is making their way for the woods to the St. Phobus tower, warily watching for any potential attackers. They're given a tour by Anna Wilczynska (Ioana Iacob), the head of security for the secure, apparently self-contained community, who is careful to tell them that she will not take their bribes but also won't let management know they were offered. The main portion of her job would seem to be smooth - the biggest complaint is from Gerti Posner (Jörg Schüttauf), whose dog hasn't returned after he let it out to run on the grounds, so it looks like there's a bigger parenting challenge, as daughter Iris (Pola Geiger) has shut herself in the bathroom and won't come out because she's afraid she's got the Evil Eye and that was responsible. Meanwhile, Gerti just won't let it go, and when Anna's investigation accidentally upsets another well-to-do family, things start to spiral.

The type of viewer that finds "plot holes" when a character doesn't do the reasonable thing they would have done in that situation may have a hard time with the back half of this one, because it sure seems like a lot of trouble could have been avoided by Anna just telling someone the embarrassing truth, but that's the beauty in the balanced-but-rickety situation Sinelnikova and co-writer Viktor Gallandi have built: The audience can clearly see Anna weighing how, as much as she is said to be trusted, she's also keenly aware that as an employee, she's not in the same social class as her neighbors and an immigrant to boot, so anything that makes her appear less that perfectly competent is threatening to her personally. The audience never learns how bad it is outside the grounds, really, other than how prospective clients appear to be screened for weapons rather than contagion, but it doesn't necessarily matter whether the residents are reasonable people afraid of real danger or paranoids jumping at shadows - the end result is still going to be the same unless Anna can manage the impossible task of reassuring them.

It's absurd, of course, and the filmmakers never lose track of what that means, both in terms of it frequently being funny and also leading to despair, but they manage the descent well, with inexorable progress, things that make one simultaneously laugh and shake one's head, and just enough time to consider what's going on before moving to the next stop. The team is also very specific about the world they're creating - it feels like an upscale complex that's maybe a bit understaffed, so it's not run-down but also not gleaming. It would be easy for this to tip into something that's mainly about the wealthy exploiting desperate immigrant slaves, and there's a sense that something like that may be what's next while lurking in this movie's corners, but it's not this movie's story.

Of course, Ioana Iacob could star in that one, but she aquits herself quite well here. Anna is good at her job because she is sensible and no-nonsense, but more empathetic than this job requires - you can see the woman who can't quite bring herself to drag Iris out of the bathroom for what may be weeks in how she discreetly refuses bribes, but you can see the half-second when she considers whether cutting some entitled rich jerk down to size. There's a neat group of supporting characters - Jörg Schüttauf in how he sours from a man who just wants his dog, Siir Eloglu as the building manager who seems quite nice until it's time to throw someone out, Mina Sadic as a fellow staffer who knows just how precarious her family's position is - and I find myself with a weird, special fondness for Pola Geiger, who spends most of the film capturing the film's central absurdity and desperation behind a locked door and is a surprise when she finally emerges.

It's an incredibly smart, confident movie under any circumstances - that it's a student film made during a pandemic makes Natalia Sinelnikova someone to watch even more closely.

Fantasia/New York Asian Film Festivals 2021.06: Hotel Poseidon and Baby Money

Fairly narrow windows of availability during this virtual festival had me watching Giving Birth to a Butterfly and Hotel Poseidon back-to-back, two films with surreal elements that may be revealing just in terms of what I'm up for. Butterfly is 77 minutes long, builds sympathy, and generally gives the audience something worth looking at. Poseidon is considerably longer, pushes the audience away early, and mostly delivers more ugliness. I don't necessarily think that a film should be obligated to be nice or pretty, or to make it easy on its audience, but I must admit, as I started to get through Hotel Poseidon, the thought going through my head was "this probably has as much going on as Butterfly, but is it worth it? Does it have enough more going on that to be worth more effort than something which is not just friggin' nasty?"

Anway, I did wind up finding more than I expected in Poseidon, although I can't say I really like or recommend it that much. I feel like I had to actively play film critic to find metaphor underneath its ugliness, while Butterfly resonated immediately. Different audiences react to different things, which is why star ratings are as foolish as they are addictive.

For example, I don't know how many other folks like "dumb crime" as much as I do. I suspect that for a lot of people, it's tied up pretty strongly in "what the Coen Brothers do", and they are the unquestioned masters of this genre, there are times when I think they may be too clever for it, like they can't help but scoff at the schlubs who have backed into a bad situation that they can't get out of. This genre doesn't have to be black comedy, but it's really easy to stumble into that, or make it sort of straight twisty crime. I've commented before that I think the fourth season of Fargo (talking about Coen-adjacent) isn't dumb enough, all told, except maybe the nurse who is sort of a side story. Props for trying something new, but it didn't feel like Fargo.

Which is a long way of saying that I liked Baby Money for being serious dumb crime. More or less everyone screws up at some point, but it feels legit, like the way most of us would panic and not think things through if we ever got to the point where crime seemed to be our best option. Most of us aren't wired for it, despite what some will tell you about humans being innately sinful or selfish, and as a result, we're going to handle this stuff badly, and I dig the way that the filmmakers found a way to work with that despite the fact that our brains are pretty well trained to either solve a puzzle or enjoy someone being unusually clever when watching this genre, and this defies expectations without being disappointing.

Hotel Poseidon

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

Hotel Poseidon is probably not the first film to peak with its opening titles and decline precipitously after that - at some point in his career, Saul Bass must have worked on a stinker - but what it demonstrates about getting through off-putting material for a payoff is interesting. That opening has its gross bits, but they pay off in a nifty title reveal; the rest of the movie asks the audience to endure plenty more for less concrete awards.

Admittedly, filmmaker Stef Lernous is aiming to make a strikingly off-putting first impression, showing Dave (Tom Vermeir) living in the midst of the rot and decay that has overtaken the shuttered hotel that his late father opened, with this late morning bringing something between belittling and encouragement from the neighbor on the other side of a thing wall and his apparent lover (Ruth Becquart) skipping the latter. It also brings Nora (Anneke Sluiters), whose options must really be limited if she's knocking on the papered doors and asking Dave to rent her a room for one night; an appointment with Jacki (Dominique Van Malder), who has ideas of transforming the function room into a cabaret; and the death of his Aunt Lucy, whose hospital bed had been parked in a hallway, inactive to the point where she may actually have passed some time ago.

The hotel is established as a nasty place, with moldy surfaces, standing water in every aquarium used as decoration, and every disused item from the coffee pot to the lights catching on fire when it they try to draw a little electricity from the shoddy wiring, and Dave himself seems to belong there, walking around as if he's long accepted that adapting his routine to the squalor is less effort than making it what one might call livable. Lemous and actor Tom Vermeir seem to understand this mindset well; they make Dave feel like he absolutely hates the very idea of people, to the extent that one can see him accepting abuse because he feels he deserves it but also sneering in his responses because everyone else does too. That so many of them are played as cruel or callous doesn't exactly make one inclined to disagree with this take. Dave seems to barely leave the hotel, and they run together, with it hard to see where he ends and it begins.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Baby Money

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

Of all the different ways one can make a crime movie, there is probably none more difficult to get right than straight "dumb crime" - that is to say, one which reflects that few crimes (beyond white-collar frauds that are seldom investigated much less prosecuted) are actually committed by people who are actually good at it. There are moments when one wants Baby Money to have a clever twist or characters colorful enough to make for black comedy, but it manages the trickier route of getting suspense from its characters being enough out of their depth to be unpredictable but not random.

Minny (Danay Garcia) isn't dumb herself; she's just had an unexpected pregnancy put a real hitch into her job as an exotic dancer. Her boyfriend Gil (Michael Drayer) has a line on a job that can earn them some quick cash: He'll serve as lookout while Tony (Travis Hammer) and Dom (Joey Kern) break into a house to retrieve a purple box, with Minny driving; a call on the burner phone at 4AM will say what to do. Things naturally go completely sideways, with Minny fleeing the scene as the police arrive and the home invaders taking refuge in an empty house - at least, until Heidi (Taja V. Simpson) and her autistic son Chris (Vernon Taylor III) arrive home.

The typical caper tends to go sideways because of a hidden flaw in the plan - somebody can't be trusted, or there's some unexpected security measure - and while that is kind of the case here, it's not like anything unlikely happens. Instead, writers Mikhail Bassilli and MJ Palo build the bulk of the movie on fight-or-flight responses, and the irony is that most of the time, the characters are probably better off that way; even they are as relatively bright as Minny and Heidi seem, they misread the situation and make bad decisions, and the neat trick the movie pulls off is that characters always seem to panic in the way that makes the most sense in the moment. It makes a crime into a chaotic combination of understandable actions.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Fantasia 2020.02: Dinner in America, Hunted, Cosmic Candy, and "You Wouldn't Understand"

Would you believe me if I said The Undertaker's Home isn't included here because I was trying to emulate the festival experience and I would have been in de Seve watching Dinner in America while it played in Hall so that doesn't ring true? No? Is it because I clearly would have been in the other room because the subject matter would have been more my speed even if Dinner had actors I like?

Well, it would be fun to say, but I don't necessarily have the room to be clever like that. It turns out that Dinner in America is not necessarily a bad movie but it is very much a not-for-me one, although it likely would have found its way onto my dance card during a normal fest for the same reason it did here: I'm going to try and max out my time with as many movies as possible, and maybe only give the program a cursory glance early on so that I'm not 100% sure what I'm getting into as I sit down. I'm probably doing that a little bit more here than I would in Montreal, since I'm not carrying around the big paperback program which I like flipping through a lot more than the website. But I'm also just kind of taking the screeners as they come.

Hunted, on the other hand, turns out to definitely be my thing, especially now that I'm probably a little more aware of how Little Red Riding Hood probably resonates a lot more with women's experiences than I was when I noted that something like three or four entries in a short women's horror program referenced it. The star is actually wearing a red hoodie through much of the movie, but it's also tons of fun when you get down into the details, including a bunch that were too fun to put in the review because of the surprise (though I will say that the blue paint goes from "wait, what?" to "that's kind of perfect" in about two seconds). I also really dug Cosmic Candy along the same lines - it's another simple story told well with sharp details.

And then, finally, we looped back around to "You Wouldn't Understand", which I gather played before Dinner in America if you watched it via the livestream. It's a nifty little short that hits a really specific mood better than a lot of jokier attempts to do so, and I'm looking forward to having a little time to dig further into what the group has posted on YouTube.

Dinner in America

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)

Sometimes there's a thin line between characters who are difficult and abrasive but interesting and characters you just plain hate. Sometimes it's not necessarily thin, but it just seems to take forever to reach the point where you can see it and maybe get something out of it. Dinner in America is in the second category, but by the time I realized that I found it hard to give it the proper credit. It spends so much time being nasty and charmless that it is hard to take its better impulses seriously.

We first meet Simon (Kyle Gallner) puking as he takes part in a drug study which is going about as well for Beth (Hannah Marks). They're booted out, and she invites him over to her place for Sunday dinner, which goes about as well, with him burning some bridges and other items on the way out. Elsewhere in Detroit, mousy 20-year-old Patty (Emily Skeggs) is being bullied on the bus and at work, with her parents saying she can't go to a concert on Friday night. She spots Simon as he's dealing some drugs and running from the cops, and he decides to hide out at her place for a while, although he's got a whole list of things he's got to do while she's looking for a new job.

Simon is a miserable little jackass, and while writer/director Adam Rehmeier will occasionally toss in something to make him seem a bit more sympathetic, but almost every bit of it is just targeting his violence at people the audience disapproves of more, and even his eventual opening up to Patty is selfish, like he can't see her having value until it's revealed that she has talent directly related to his own interests. It could be a moment of growth, but he's not given much of a chance to show he's a better person in general. He's the sort of petulant punk-rocker who's got nothing but anger and violence most of the time, and while it's energetic and entertaining at moments, it can wear on a viewer.

yle Gallner is kind of fun to watch in the role, at least; he spends almost the entire movie not quite bug-eyed but with that sort of intensity either on display or obviously just under the surface, always ready to pull out an arch variation that indicates he's got a brain behind the bile, and even on occasion showing a bit of humanity. It's a broad performance but not a bad one. Emily Skeggs doesn't quite gel with him as Patty, but it may be more about Rehmeier not having the same handle on her than he does on Simon than any shortcoming of Skeggs's; she pulls off the necessary blank and uncomprehending stare that comes from a too-sheltered upbringing without looking stupid, which is no mean feat, while also occasionally bringing out frustration that there's more in her head than her folks have prepared her for

One almost wonders at times if the script started with Patty in high school only to be revised older, but not everything made it all the way, and it wouldn't really be surprising; it's a script full of moments and characters who are strong and well-crafted for single scenes or sequences but which don't stretch that much further. Sometimes that works out pretty well - the quick hits of black comedy work, and it occasionally gives a "guest star" like Lea Thompson or Hannah Marks the chance to be memorable without holding back. That the film seldom stops to explain people's backgrounds can be a bit of a double-edged sword; it doesn't slow things down artificially but can sometimes make things seem random, or has Rehmeier losing track of the line between the bits that seem real and the ones which are meant to be heightened.

Rehmeier brings enough scrappy energy to the movie that it's entirely possible I'm judging it harshly for doing a bunch of things that I generally don't care for - I've got spectacularly little patience for movies where someone being a talented musician is meant to excuse his being a turd as a person and baseline assumptions that families are all stuck with each other and kind of miserable about it, and this one has a lot of both. It's designed to rub me the wrong way, but even given that, it's enough of a battle between nastily clever and boringly nasty that those things can easily push a viewer one way or the other.

Dead(?) link to original review at eFilmCritic

Hunted (2020)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)

Most moviegoers don't see that many movies like Hunted, but if you go to genre festivals or spend a lot of time digging through your favorite streaming services to find the new selections, it gets categorized: Survival horror, nature, woman on the run, etc. What makes one of those stand out? A couple good performances. Some visual style. And a willingness to go kind of crazy at the point where the audience might be expecting the filmmakers to coast.

It starts in familiar-enough fashion - a fairy tale allusion, a woman frustrated at work who goes out to a bar to blow off some steam, and a guy who initially seems nice enough but shows his true colors quickly. Soon enough Eve (Lucie Debay) is stuffed in a trunk, but able to flee her kidnappers (Arieh Worthalter & Ciaran O'Brien) thanks to a freak accident. They are never that far behind, though the woods are full of surprises.

Writer/director Vincent Paronnaud is likely best-known internationally as Marjane Satrapi's collaborator on the film version of Persepolis, and he's spent much of the rest of his career in comics and animation, so it's not exactly a surprise when the bit before the opening title includes a nifty bit of animation that is nevertheless well-enough matched to the rest of the movie that it doesn't feel like it doesn't belong. It's quickly contrasted with a moment or two of grainy-video shot in less than great lighting, and that's a bit of a preview of what's going to happen throughout the movie: Every time Eve is able to put a little bit of distance between herself and her pursuers, the forest scene takes on a bit of a fairy-tale quality, albeit as much Grimm as Disney, while there's a flatness to the guys' scenes, maybe a slight washing-out, like they're living in the violent constructed fantasy meant to be captured on camera.

The violent nature of that means Lucie Debay is going to be spending a lot of the movie running, being afraid, and looking more worn-down as things go on, which could be fairly thankless, but she never gives a half-effort, especially considering that Paronnaud and co-writer Léa Pernollet have her start from a place of having a chip on her shoulder from people wanting the impossible at work rather than having her ever be surprised that any man can be like this. It is fun to see her suddenly redirect all of that into rage when she gets her hands on a nice, solid stick to swing, though, and I also want to compliment the hairstylists who give her a cut that lets her catch the camera's eye in early scenes, tagging her as confident and savvy, but degrades exceptionally well over the course of the film.

Opposite her, Arieh Worthalter seems to be having a lot more fun, doing a great turn from gallant to downright nasty without it being a showy mask-drop, and then happily chewing the scenery for the rest of the film because his guy (credited as just "The Guy") is just completely unhinged. For much of the film, he's given Ciaran O'Brien as a sidekick to abuse, and while his part is less showy, he does a good job of playing the put-upon beta without ever becoming more than nominally sympathetic. His job is to give Worthalter's guy an audience to perform to and otherwise remind the audience about this man's need to dominate even when Eve is far off, but it's a pairing that works.

It plays into a tiny scene that demonstrates how Paronnaud is bringing a little something extra in terms of skill to this bit of VOD fodder, as Worthalter opens a candy bar and casually chucks the wrapper into a nearby stream. The camera tracks it a bit until it passes Eve, and in that moment the audience gets a little more on edge, because the way that shot works establishes that she is moving toward her would-be rapists, rather than away. But it also seems calculated to anger even a jaded viewer who has watched hundreds of these chases, because the guy is freakin' littering. It's silly, but the different form of callousness of it works. There's another bit later when the filmmakers start messing around with things happening out of order, and it feels fair because there's a bit of a warning in it, and it also makes a natural lead-in to how crazy the last act will get.

Which is impressive, because for all that stuff like that candy wrapper was making the film feel fairly tight, the homestretch has at least three crazy things that come out of nowhere and send the chase off in a new direction, often in such an absurd way as to elicit a cackle or a delighted "what!?" It's an impressively go-for-broke set of bits that works because Paronnaud hasn't entirely forgotten what got him there in terms of style or essentially being Eve fighting the guy in an uncertain environment. He's willing to pick up and drop those bits of randomness fast enough that the film doesn't get overloaded on the way to maybe, sort of, coming full circle, and while it really shouldn't work - films which drop what had been a good tense thing for an hour to do something else entirely with the finale are usually misfires - but does.

Though made in Belgium with a broadly European cast, it's shot in English, likely because the producers knew that would be good for sales to the streaming services where this will inevitably find long-term homes. I am rather looking forward to the waves of tweets that will come from people stumbling upon it, expecting a generic 85-minute time-waster, and instead getting something where the filmmakers put in the effort to make something memorable and entertaining from start to end.

Dead(?) link to review at eFilmCritic

Cosmic Candy

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

It took me a bit of time to reset my brain for how off-kilter Cosmic Candy is, and the funny part is that because I saw it via this festival and consume a fair amount of fantastical material anyway, I had to adjust it downard. It's trippy at the start but things didn't click into place until I realized that it didn't take place in a world where hallucinogenic confections make it to supermarket shelves, but one where things get plenty weird and interesting on their own.

So that piece at the start where Anna Pilarinou (Maria Kitsou) seems to fly into space from the liquor aisle of the supermarket where she works is just a dream, one from which she is wakened by Persa (Magia Pipera), the ten-year-old next door, loudly practicing her lines for the Independence Day school play. That may not be an issue for very long; the other residents of the building are circulating a petition to kick Persa's father (Dimitris Lalos) out, what with them being behind on the rent, attracting suspicious characters, and being generally weird. Of course, Anna is a bit of a mess herself, probably kept on at the shop because her late father was the best friend of proprietor Yannis (Fotis Thomaidis) and apparently suffering from some sort of compulsive behavior. But when Persa's father disappears and the landlord changes the locks, she can't bring herself to push the girl in front of her door away.

It takes a while for director Rinio Dragasaki and her co-writer Katerina Kaklamani to really start digging into the reason why Anna is the way she is, if that's what they actually do - for all that viewers may wisely nod at understanding why she's a lousy supermarket clerk clinging to certain things despite apparently owning a very nice apartment outright, the filmmakers leave the exact extent to which it is cause and effect up to viewers. Similarly, there's almost no time spent on exactly why Persa's father needs to run and hide; the two learn just enough about each other to recognize a bit of themselves, but the story keeps their backstories fuzzy enough that the film can't really lead to them confronting the past as opposed to deciding on a present and future.

Dead(?) link to full review at eFilmCritic

"You Wouldn't Understand"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

The fun of "You Wouldn't Understand" is that it never quite makes sense, but always feels like the piece that would make everything fall into place is just around the corner. It starts with a man (Anthony Arkin) having himself a tastefully-elaborate solo picnic, seeing something odd in the distance, and then having one of the folks he sees (Jacob A. Ware) approach and ask for some "horsey sauce" but dissemble just enough to make it weird before things start getting truly strange. From there, things seem to get even more bizarrely random.

But… not quite. I don't know whether director Trish Harnetiaux and co-writer/co-star Jacob A. Ware have mapped out what's really going on to the point where the film is actually tight and self-consistent if you know all the background, but they've built something just steady enough that they can throw in a bunch of science-fiction tropes and have the viewers both feel like they have seen this bit and understand it enough to get by but also sympathize with Anthony Arkin's bemused observer and get the feeling that this is what suddenly finding yourself in a sci-fi situation where the underpinnings of reality are being kicked out. Or, hey, living in a world where something that should be a really big deal gets tweeted out every ten minutes but the cumulative effect is kind of numbing, if you have to align it with the real world.

Not that there's much effort to do that, and indeed, Harnetiaux and company do a nifty job of mixing the comfortable with the unusual; all the white in the wardrobe and other spots marks things as specifically otherworldly, though there's a sort of comforting normalcy about the setting, even if it does seem like it's designed as an idealized early-twentieth-century. The two actors strike this balance extremely well too; Anthony Arkin has a reassuringly grounded nature even as he gets pulled into the weird here while Ware has a wide-eyed beaky presence that suggests a lot of times through the scenario has not exactly driven him mad but made him care very little about appearing sane.

It's kind of odd to apply the "it only felt like…" line to shorts, but it's amusingly true here - this ten-minute movie comes together well enough to only feel like five, never hitting a snag despite having a whole lot of ideas to fit in and move through. Arkin probably has a hand in that as editor, although it goes to show just how well Harnetiaux and the rest of this "Steel Drum in Space" team works together. I'm not sure I've ever been inspired to follow a YouTube channel from a festival short before, but this is certainly a group I'll keep an eye on.

Fantasia On-Demand Preview 2020.01: Clapboard Jungle, Yummy, Life: Untitled, and Sleep

So, Fantasia is weird this year - it's happening as an online film festival from 20 August to 2 September, with the streaming from the festival site requiring that you be in Canada to watch. I could probably try and get around it with some VPN chicanery and maybe even feel good about it - I've been coming for 15 years and am way closer to Montreal that the folks in Vancouver! - but I decided I wasn't going to do that even if I didn't get credited as media. The festival has been absurdly generous to me as a guy for whom this is an avocation rather than a job and I sure as heck am not going to give the people running the festival any reason to (a) not give me a pass in the future or (b) not even sell me tickets because I acted like an entitled jerk.

Anyway, as you can see, they did accredit me this year, which means I'm eligible for screening links and the like. It won't get me access to the entire program, and I may be denied some of the stuff that is available because some films' producers/distributors are pickier about giving out links, but I suspect that the bigger releases will be well-covered by the major sites. I figure my willingness to cover the smaller things is why they keep accrediting me anyway.

The festival's online offerings are split into two parts - some movies are available on-demand throughout the entire two-week period, while others are live-streamed at specific times, like with the regular festival. When the festival starts, I will be doing my best to mirror that schedule to the extent that I can, so those two weeks should look like the regular "Fantasia Daily" posts I've been making for the past decade and a half. I kind of have to, what with the embargo schedule and all. But, here's a funny thing about the embargo schedule - the programmers (and, presumably, content-owners) have staggered it so that reviews will be spread out over the next week, kind of approximating an extra week of the festival (or, because this is Fantasia, getting it up to its proper three-week length. There's no way I wind up that same schedule, but it feels a little right, and this post, at least, is all stuff from "Preview Day One" (festival day -6, if Wednesday is a day 0; "7 B.F." if we want the Georgian Calendar to inspire our numbering).

For Canadian friends, you could do a lot worse than to start your virtual Fantasia with Clapboard Jungle, where the festival plays a part and you'll get a glimpse of Mitch and some of the regulars. You guys can figure out the purchasing of tickets and such at the official site. For Americans (and the rest of the world), I suspect that some of these movies will be part of Nightstream, a joint venture between five American genre festivals (including my local one, Boston Underground). And, heck, I gather Yummy is already on Shudder and will be on disc in a couple of months, so consider it a preview of that!

Also: No really great place to say it in the review, but Sleep reminded me of the basic premise of Hereditary in a lot of ways, and while it's not quite so polished, I feel like it didn't completely lose itself in the potentially-supernatural aspects the way that movie did, certainly leading me to like it more than that film, although I don't know how many other people have the same sort of hang-up about that as I do.

Clapboard Jungle

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, Vimeo via Roku)

It's probably not particularly important to mention that I was fairly disappointed in Lifechanger, the feature film made by Clapboard Jungle director Justin McConnell whose production is a major focus of the second half of his documentary on being an independent genre filmmaker at the present moment, but the review is easy enough to find on this site, so there's not much point of not putting that context right up front. It kind of doesn't matter, though - it's not just that McConnell does a good enough job of showing the madness of independent film production to make you realize that just getting something made is a victory, but that the madness is the point.

He makes this point by making the risky choice of making himself, rather than the film, the story, which he acknowledges as hubris right at the start, but it's necessary: Focusing on the production of one film would give a documentary such as this a clear beginning, middle, and end, with resolution and boundaries, but that would be something of a lie: Even as Lifechanger is taking shape and going into production, the theme that is taking shape is that filmmakers like McConnell can't just focus on the one thing; they must have a "slate" of multiple projects in the works at all times because not only are there are going to be long stretches where work on that one project is stalled, waiting for someone else's interest or availability, but because producers investing in a filmmaker are looking for longer-term returns, or because nothing will come of it. Eventually, yes, shooting, editing, and doing the festival circuit with Lifechanger will take center-stage, but outside of those moments, McConnell and those like him have to split their attention, build a pipeline, and be ready to change direction .

It changes the focus of the movie from what you might expect, and it works sneakily well - one of the first filmmakers McConnell talks to is Guillermo del Toro, and while it's always fun to hear him wax rhapsodic about how much he loves movies and enjoys making them (and useful to demonstrate the dedication filmmaking inspires), one sees him making The Shape of Water and knows that, even if he's famously had trouble getting films off the ground, he's a bit disconnected from the granular struggle at this scale. He soon expands it to folks the mainstream may not know, whether because their successes at the box office are still relatively minor or because they work well behind the scenes - people like producers, packagers, and festival programmers - the ones who are usually cast as villains or obstructions in movies about moviemaking.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Yummy

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo)

If enthusiastic gore and violence is your first priority for a horror movie, Yummy has you covered; the filmmakers spill a lot of blood and build some gross prosthetics, and they don't waste a lot of time getting from one gruesome gag to the next. That's not quite all it's got, but it's close, and while that may be enough for those just looking for an hour and a half of splatter, it's the sort of horror movie with a lot of places where it could have been great if the filmmakers had run with something a little bit more.

It quickly introduces the audience to Alison (Maaike Neuville), her boyfriend Michael (Bart Hollanders), and her mother Sylvia (Annick Christiaens), driving to a clinic in Eastern Europe where Alison can get inexpensive breast reduction surgery and Sylvia can get some more stereotypical procedures. Michael, who studied to be a doctor before discovering he can't stand the sight of blood, finds the low-rent place suspicious, from namesake surgeon Dr. Krawczyk (Eric Godon) to administrator Janja (Clara Cleymans) to travel coordinator Daniel (Benjamin Ramon), and he's not wrong: There's an occasional zombifying side-effect to Krawczyk's experimental stem-cell formula, and when one gets loose, Alison and company are in a particularly bad situation.

The sight of that first zombie is the first of many times a viewer may raise an intrigued eyebrow; she's topless, super-perky, toned, and smooth, and while "sexy zombies" isn't necessarily the most creative idea out there, you can do something with it, flipping the script by having perfect-looking but hollowed-out undead chasing folks who look impaired or maimed in some way, but it's a passing fancy, with moments of role-reversal though it's never a consistent-enough theme to become the movie's thing. There's a weird creature that may or may not be connected to the zombies, because why not, and a thread about Michael being kind of clumsy and having bad luck that kind of lurks without getting a really great moment, especially since director Lars Damiseaux and co-writer Eveline Hagenbeek seem to be playing with the idea of Michael being more useful as a healer than a fighter at one point, another potentially interesting twist.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Life: Untitled

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, Vimeo via Roku)

Writer/director Kana Yamada's Life: Untitled is based upon her play, and it's a fair translation, but it's kind of funny how things that are just part of how things work in one medium can make you wonder if something else is up in another. This one, for instance, opens with a character addressing the camera directly and mostly takes place in one location, no big deal in the theater, but do it in a movie and eventually something seems like it might be up. Is this some sort of deal where there's really just one character and everyone else is some sort of figment of her imagination or fragment of her personality?

Probably not. Well, not literally, but it's that sort of movie.

The girl who starts by breaking the fourth wall is Kano (Sairi Itoh), who has had what she describes as an "ordinary life" - though not one that exactly has her eager to jump into any sort of intimate relationship. She goes to work for the Crazy Bunny escort service, but recoils the first time that she's in a hotel room with a client. She doesn't quit, though, instead staying on to help around the office, assisting the manager by answering phones, keeping the fridge stocked, and making sure everybody gets paid. The girls include bookish Shika (Aika Yukihara), gossipy Atsuko (Aimi Satsukawa), and businesslike Riyu (Tomoko Nozaki), as well as Shiho (Reiko Kataoka), who at about 30 is the "older woman" of the group, and Mahiru (Yuri Tsunematsu), who has a tendency to smile a little too wide and laugh a little too hard. Drivers include friendly Hagio (Dai Ikeda) and bleach-blond Ryota (Shunsuke Tanaka), who is maybe not having the best reaction to how serious a crush Kyoko (Kokoro Morita) has for him.

There aren't a whole lot of men to be found in this movie, just enough that it's not entirely obvious that Kano has cocooned herself among this group at least partially in order to avoid dealing with them. That's kind of impressive, because Yamada is fairly pointed during that first monologue that she's had some really lousy experiences that culminate in a lousy first assignment, but avoidance has a different feel than overt anger. One doesn't necessarily notice that a lot of them men who might be aggravating the situation are off-screen, just being referenced rather than having it demonstrated, but it builds. It is, without calling attention to itself as such, a precise sort of encapsulation of how men tend to treat women as just sex objects and then look down on them even more when they leverage their sexuality. It's kind of exhausting and frequently humiliating but not something a woman can completely extricate herself from.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Schlaf (Sleep)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)

The trick that the makers of Sleep pull off isn't necessarily rare, but it leads to disaster often enough that you have to admire how well they manage it. It's a thriller that is so exceptionally grounded at its center that one can easily discount just exactly how almost everything else about it is. It's a trip but not so random that filmmaker Michael Venus ever actually loses track of what made the audience get invested in the first place.

That would be the mother/daughter pair of Marlene (Sandra Hüller) and Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof); the former is a flight attendant who has a few health issues, mostly a sleep disorder that sometimes interrupts her breathing, manifesting as frightening nightmares, although Mona is starting to realize Marlene might have mental health issues as well, especially when they come to a head as a particularly bad dream sends her into a breakdown at a Stainbach hotel, in a fugue state when Mona arrives. She winds up staying in the same hotel, run by Otto Fahrmann (August Schmölzer) and his wife Loretze (Marion Kracht), trying to solve the mystery of what sent her mother over the edge, or why the hotel seems to match drawings Marlene made before she left. Soon she's having nightmares of her own, which is understandable under the circumstances, even without the doctor's warning that Marlene's condition may be hereditary, unless there's more to it.

Mona is an intelligent, rational young woman who winds up dropped into some very irrational situations, the sort of character who could easily be swallowed alive by a movie like this, with filmmakers often working overtime to make her seem cool or quippy, but that's not the way Venus and star Gro Swantje Kohlaf go. Kohlof has room to seem puzzled by the mystery and unnerved as she finds signs of her mother's issues in her own head, and she does so without ever seeming to lose the initiative. One gets the sense that because Mona has been dealing with Marlene's issues her entire life, she has a handle on how to navigate strange situations and maintain some control even if she's being buffeted. It's fun to watch her react uncertainly to this town's eccentrics, shiver at the things that make her question her own sanity, and make seemingly aggressive leaps out of character when that's the only reaction to everything going crazy.

Full review at eFilmCritic