I'm going to have to find a way to make the Fantasia reviews come faster next year, whether it's remote-working less so that I've got more mornings to write, finding someone else to come for eFilmCritic so I don't feel obligated to review everything I see with the press pass, or just improving my focus so it doesn't take me so long. I've still got 17 Fantasia films that haven't received full reviews and I'm sure I was finished with 2018 by this point last year.
Of course, who knows how CoVID-19 will fit into this? I'll probably have more chance to crank through these over the next couple weeks that I would have otherwise, especially with roughly zero new releases to push them back, and I can't yet guess when the local film festivals that would be taking up my writing time over the next couple of months will reappear - maybe in the fall (the Irish Film Festival has already staked out November dates), maybe at a point which creates hard decisions re Fantasia in the summer, maybe we'll just have a skip year for the Underground and Independent Festivals. Heck, who knows what Fantasia will be like with so many films not getting released in their native lands in the first half of 2020, if we're not all still self-isolating by then?
Anyway, as you might imagine, this whole operation is getting tricky this far from the festival, no matter how good my entries on Letterboxd are and how much my notes fill in the rest. I got to Idol and had to punt it; I liked the film, but the details were not just gone but mixed up with another Korean thriller. I've skipped over G Affairs too, but that's because I was able to order a disc from DDDHouse and I can catch myself up later, while I'm locked in with no baseball.
The bright side: Those omissions mean that, as I cruise through the unreviewed movies, 8 wound up being eighth in this batch!
Kimi to, nami ni noretara (Ride Your Wave, aka Riding a Wave with You)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
As Masaki Yuasa's output increases, he seems to be moving away from the strange and trippy films that gained him attention and toward the conventional, though if the result is something like this sweet animated romance, that's not a bad thing. It's still distinctive and occasionally eccentric, and winds up being something fairly unique once the bits of fantasy there are kick in.
He quickly introduces the audience to Minato Hinageshi (voice of Ryota Katayose), a lifeguard and fireman trainee whose eye is quickly caught by Hinako Mukaimizu (voice of Rina Kawaei), an incoming freshman studying oceanography who would probably spend all day surfing if she could. They connect pretty quickly, with Minato's best friend Wasabi Kawamura (voice of Kentaro Ito) knowing his buddy's found a good thing even if Minato's little sister Yoko (voice of Honoka Matsumoto) is jealous. It seems like a perfect romance in this seaside college town, but things can change in an instant.
They do, of course, with an inevitability that will likely have viewers noting that these nice young people are almost certainly being set up for a fall early on. Ideally, the audience wouldn't see it coming that way - it is generally far better to be completely gobsmacked than to pick up on things going too well - but Yuasa and screenwriter Reiko Yoshida are smart enough to not make a morbid game of it or make the moment that things change so grim that the fantasy that comes afterward seems completely ill-advised. It's a tricky line to walk, and I suspect that some will find that the filmmakers are being too playful with serious matters, while others will be impressed with the line being walked between frightening and seemingly harmless delusion.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Maggie
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Yi Ok-Seop's Maggie is a genuinely peculiar little picture, and maybe could have done well being a little smaller with its eccentricity a bit more specific. It winds up being fun in spots while not quite living up to its ambitions in others, but the clever bits are quite fun.
It opens at the "Love of Maria" hospital, a former convent that has been converted into a private hospital that, with things like a space-themed x-ray room, can often seem like a fancy hotel. Nurse Yeo Yoon-Young (Lee Joo-Young) and her boyfriend Sung-Won (Koo Gyo-Hwan) get it on in that room, and when photographs from its equipment are posted on a bulletin board, chief of orthopedics Lee Kyung-Jin (Moon So-Ri) makes it very clear to Yoon-Young that this is not that sort of place. Meanwhile, Sung-Won has taken a temp job trying to fill the massive sinkholes that are appearing around Seoul, and his co-workers are even bigger screw-ups than he is.
When I was choosing films to see at the festival, the description of Maggie had me thinking it would be a farce about how everybody in a hospital thinks the picture of two people having sex in the x-ray room is their bones and soft tissue, leaving Yoon-Young (who came in to spite Kyung-Jin) and her boss the only people to care for patients and make house calls, so I was probably more disappointed than I should have been when Sung-Won and the sinkhole side winds up taking up more time later, and the really great comic hook is pushed aside. A shame, because the hospital introduces a fun group of characters, several of whom are more memorable than the ones who get actual names, and there's a great sense of dominoes falling as one thing leads to another here. It's how great episodic comedy works, and there's a keen eye for absurd detail that carries forward through the whole film.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Un-ni (No Mercy)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, DCP)
Man, how many times do the makers of this movie think we need to see a developmentally disabled 17-year-old raped before we're invested? I praise Korean genre cinema for not messing around on a regular basis, but there's a fuzzy space between being no-holds-barred in a thriller inspired by an actual crime and making a rape-revenge story extra tacky without finding a new angle. That's a simple way to look at No Mercy, I suppose, but it's not a complicated movie despite its occasional efforts to become one.
It picks up with Park In-ae (Lee Si-Young) walking into a garage in a red dress and heels that don't exactly beg to be accessorized with a sledgehammer, but In-ae is the sort of lady who makes it work. A beauty with strong mixed-martial arts skills who is having a little trouble finding work after a couple years in jail for a trumped-up charge, though Ha Sang-man (Lee Hyung-Chul) of "Happy Cash Loans" will throw her some work for collections. She is at least happy to be reunited with sister Eun-Hye (Park Se-Wan), a pretty teenager who is mentally about ten years old and whose history of being bullied had inspired them to move before. When Eun-Hye doesn't come home from school one day, In-ae naturally starts worrying and looking, and what she finds as she examines both Eun-Hye's current circumstances and the way things were in the last town where they lived fills her with the sort of horror and rage that leads back to visiting small businesses with a sledgehammer in hand, working her way up to Senator Park Young-Choon (Choi Jin-Ho).
This film doesn't necessarily demand a whole lot of range from its two lead actresses - the happiness and affection between the Park sister as they see each other again is something of an oasis among the rest of the film - so much as sustained effort that leaves a little room for individual personality. Lee Si-Young is committed and properly intense, doing good work to find distinct notches to push In-ae's fury to new levels with each new revelation and communicating how terrible she feels for somehow not having seen this before. It's not exactly an emotional roller-coaster, but it's not something where one can settle in or detach. Park Se-Wan occasionally falls into the trap of making Eun-Hye's disability substitute for a personality, but more often she captures a kid wanting people to like her and knows she's got to work a little harder, even if she doesn't fully understand why what's involved makes her feel awful. The rest of the cast may be playing creeps without much in the way of nuance, but those two are able to anchor things.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Kuru (It Comes)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It's not often that you see a horror movie like this that has both an incredibly clear idea what it wants to be about but also has such ambitious sweep, managing what sometimes seems like multiple new takes on old ideas without losing what makes them work. That would be enough, but the film also builds to an absolutely amazing climax that is continuously offering more, the best and wildest exorcism put on film in a long time. It's a wonder this thing is never even close to careening out of control, but director Tetsuya Nakashima knows what he's doing.
After a flash-forward teaser, we're properly introduced to Hideki Tahara (Satoshi Tsumabuki) and his fiancee Kana (Haru Kuroki), who will soon be married and expecting a baby. Before they've told anyone the name they've chosen, someone visits Hideki at work to talk about Chisa. The colleague who took the message dies under mysterious circumstances, and as events get stranger (on top of the regular stress of a new baby), they find themselves reaching out to an old friend who studies folklore (Munetaka Aoki), freelance occult writer Nozaki (Junichi Okada), and club hostess/medium Makoto Higa (Nana Komatsu). At first, this seems a small enough haunting as such things go, although it may grow to the point where Makoto's sister Kotoko (Takako Matsu), one of the world's top exorcists, may need to get involved.
The trick of a good horror movie is often finding something that already scares the audience and giving is a life of its own, and Nakashima and company have a clear eye on, among other things, the potentially maddening nature of parenthood and living one's expected life. Part of what they do that's impressive is build the story such that things have some time to fester and recur, which means they can turn the Taharas' lives around and find different angles on how it can translate into supernatural horror, and in doing so deliver some impressive, varied shocks. Nakashima' adaptation of Ichi Sawamura's novel gets out there enough that things never play as purely metaphorical - there's themes and cleverness found here, but they don't overwhelm the thrills by making them just simple analogs to real life - but the scares get bigger even as they stay connected to what makes them mean something.
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Wretched
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The Wretched does things that relatively few horror movies seem to think of, and does them with a skill that a lot of its brethren that are traveling more well-worn paths don't necessarily manage. That's enough to get the horror fans most susceptible to becoming jaded excited about it - the ones who love this stuff but who, in their jobs as festival programmers or production company employees, see every movie less creative filmmakers crank out must find their eyes going wide. I don't know that it will be the case for those not quite so immersed in the genre; somewhere along the way, there maybe should have been a little something more to make its often audacious choices really hit home.
Five days ago, Ben (John-Paul Howard) arrived to spend the summer with his father Liam (Jamison Jones), who has thoughtfully found him a job at the marina he manages. His co-worker Mallory (Piper Curda) and her kid sister Abbie (Zarah Mahler) are pretty cool, but he is, as is customary with children of recent divorce, not impressed with Sara (Azie Tesfai), his father's new girlfriend. He's also noticed Abbie (Zarah Mahler), the attractive mom next door, although when her son Dillon starts noticing that she's acting strange...
Filmmakers Brett & Drew Pierce are working in a great horror movie tradition here, of the kid who knows something awful is up but can't get anyone to believe him, but at times it seems like they chose the wrong kid - not the eight-year-old who is in the middle of it, but the seventeen-year-old who is next door and is only kind of involved at first. It puts the scares at a little distance, and makes it feel like it should be working harder to pull it together. A late-film twist reveals how this might all fit together, but that puts a lot on the audience as well, because there's no time to spell out details, and requires the audience to be horrified at the idea of what's been lost more than the actuality of it
Full review on EFilmCritic
The Prey
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, DCP)
As "The Most Dangerous Game" riffs go, this certainly is one. You know the story, and the makers of this one don't have any particular twist or hook to add to it too make this stand out in a sea of them. Or at least, not an obvious one from this side of the Pacific; maybe it touches on something topical in Cambodia, but I'd be surprised, as it seems fairly generic, though enjoyably violent.
In it, undercover Chinese Interpol agent Xin (Gu Shangwei) winds up in Cambodia's Western Region Prison when caught at the scene of a crime, and it's not long before he learns that the warden (Vithaya Pansringarm) has a side operation in letting wealthy sadists hunt folks who are unlikely to be missed. The latest group is Mat (Byron Bishop), Payuk (Sahajak Boonthanakit), and his nephew Ti (Nophand Booyai), and it makes sense to include the Chinese guy with no friends in the country among the prey. And if someone like Detective Li (Dy Sonita) shows up to spring Xin after learning where he wound up, it just becomes all that much more important to destroy the evidence and kill the witnesses.
The disappointment is not so much that the story is familiar, but that the execution is mostly just decent. This is the team that made the fairly impressive Jailbreak a couple years earlier, but having a more open environment doesn't necessarily do a lot of good. There's some decent gunplay, but it's seldom as good as the previous film's martial arts and inventive camerawork, mostly just a lot of sharp running and tumbling and pointing guns with purpose. The technique is still slick and it does lead two a couple of quality fights, but the close quarters seemed to inspire more creativity.while the sharply defined geography gave the previous movie structure that this one doesn't have in such abundance.
Full review on EFilmCritic
El increíble finde menguante (The Incredible Shrinking Wknd)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The big question after this screening was "when did you see it", referring to the compositional trick going on through the film, which maybe speaks to how it's more of a visual gimmick than something that enhances the film's themes without overstating them. Which is a shame, because as much as that particular element may or may not work for a viewer, it does play into what filmmaker Jon Mikel Caballero is going for, helping to focus a genre often played for laughs into something a little more thoughtful.
It starts with a group of friends heading to a house in the country for the weekend, one that Alba (Iria del Rio) used to visit when she was a child. With her are her kind-of-snotty boyfriend Pablo (Adam Quintero), square-but-funny Mark (Jimmy Castro) and his girlfriend Claudia (Irene Ruiz), would-be YouTube star Mancha (Adrián Expósito), and cheerful-but-unemployed Sira (Nadia de Santiago). It should be fun, but as is often the case, it's complicated; Alba's father is having health issues and things are starting to fray with her and Pablo, while Mark and Claudia have their own things to bring up. It is not, necessarily, the sort of weekend where one wants to get caught in a time loop, especially one that Alba soon discovers is an hour shorter each time through.
Many time-loop stories are built to create a sort of existential despair or repetitive trauma underneath the comedy of being able to predict what's coming and figure out a situation given enough reps, but the twist Caballero puts on it gets to an intriguing and resonant paradox: Alba has not been doing much with her youth, only to suddenly get hit with the idea that there's less she can do and less time to do it than she thought. It's a take that has bits of wasted potential and bits of dying young to it, but isn't about making existence seem pointless with drudgery. Alba is on vacation, and it's potentially nice, but it's limited, and making the most of the good times, it turns out, takes effort and consideration rather than just casting one's cares aside and living for the moment.
Full review on EFilmCritic
8
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The demon, of sorts, at the center of 8 is a sad, guilty one, something which makes for a different sort of thriller than the fairly traditional opening implies; it's as much the story of someone bound to something supernatural as those facing it, which means that filmmaker Harold Holscher doesn't have save the sense of tragedy that goes with these stories entirely for after he's done stringing the audience along.
Set "somewhere in South Africa", it introduces the audience to Mary (Keita Luna), a precocious young girl who has come to the country with uncle William (Garth Breytenbach) and aunt Sarah (Inge Beckmann) after the death of William's grandfather. The farm has seen better days and the house at the center is far too large for such a small, modest family. They soon meet "Lazarus" (Tshamano Sebe), who says he used to work for Master Zeke and who quickly befriends Mary, but there's something strange about the drifter, with other locals unwilling to take work on the farm if he's around and some even calling him a demon.
Small things give 8 a distinct, South African identity; the very time it takes place, in 1977, seems too late for this kind of story in many locations, like the rest of the world is more settled, but here these sort of old family mansions are just starting to become obsolete. It makes "Lazarus" feel even more like a lingering remnant of something else, which the white family doesn't understand but the locals do. There is mistrust between the various groups that needs little explanation but forms a real barrier, but one which is part of the landscape rather than the most central point of the film. It's an extra layer of tension that keeps the audience from ever getting too complacent.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Cencoroll Connect ("Cencoroll" & "Cencoroll 2")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)
There's a shift in the animation style somewhere in the middle of this film, but that's natural; there's ten years between the releases of "Cencoroll" and "Cencoroll 2", and you can't help but see the spot where they are fused into a short feature. The thing is, it becomes a bit of a different sort of anime at that point, introducing more characters who have clear purpose and sense of urgency, piling more action on, losing a bit of what made the opening feel unique even if it isn't necessarily anything completely new.
A sonic rift in the sky occasionally belches out strange creatures, which run around and fight and do some damage, and high school girl Yuki (voice of Kana Hanazawa) is fascinated by them. Getting too close to one of those showdowns, she discovers that her classmate Tetsu Animiya (voice of Hiro Shimono) is somehow bonded with one, communicating with "Cenco" and helping the creature to feed, but really not curious about all the rest beyond that, even as a similarly bonded teen, Shiuu (voice of Ryohei Kimura) is spoiling for a fight.
Short films like the original "Cencoroll" sometimes wind up in the same sort of place despite being made for opposite reasons, either as calling-cards to show bigger studios and producers just what makes a given team stick out or in a burst of independent creativity that they know they'll likely have reined in should they make the big time. Whichever is the case for director Atsuya Uki, he came to play, and his team seems to have a blast with exaggerated character designs, Cenco morphing into new shapes and the characters making the same sort of right-angle turns as they drive each other nuts. It's high-energy and a delight to look at, full of surprises even as the story is purposefully meandering and not exactly driving toward anything in particular.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Journal 64 (aka The Purity of Vengeance)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
"Department Q" has, as a film series, reached the point where it not only has to deal with characters staying in the same place rather than having some sort of shift in their job or life, but where a character is compelled to mention that they really didn't have this many perverse cold cases before Carl Mørck was assigned to them. It's not quite a breaking point, but it's a spot where I suspect everyone involved is thinking about how to avoid inertia while not changing the series's basic appeal.
And it does okay. This time around, the more personal narrative that takes center stage for those following the characters as much as the mysteries revolves around Carl's partner Assad (a first-billed Fares Fares), who is given a rare chance to move up while confronting the issues with being an Arab in Copenhagen more directly. It's nicely and sympathetically laid out (down to the way emphasis is placed in the phrase "non-ethnic Danes" to make it sound reluctant and avoid positioning Assad and his friends as outsiders), giving Fares the chance to act as the movie's rock rather than just having Assad be Carl's. It takes some of the pressure off co-star Nikolaj Lie Kaas as well; his morose, cynical detective can hold steady rather than having to plumb further depths, even making a joke or two on occasion.
This case launches in the present with the discovery of a mummified family around a table with one empty chair in the walled-up room of an apartment, and touches on an uglier bit of Danish history that can't be entirely consigned to the past (don't they all). In this case, it's the story of Nete (Fanny Leander Bornedal), who was sent to the island "girl's home" of Sprogø in 1961. The place would later become infamous for illicit experiments and forced sterilization in the name of eugenics, with Nete's particular tormentors doctor Curt Wad (Elliot Crosset Hove) and nurse Gitte Charles (Luise Skov). In 2016, Wad (Anders Hove) is now running one of Copenhagen's most successful fertility clinics, and once Carl and Assad tie the room to Sprogø, it's not altogether unreasonable to assume that he may have been intended for the empty chair and thus might still be a target.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Showing posts with label Cambodia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cambodia. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Fantasia 2019.10: Ride Your Wave, The Prey, Born of Woman '19, The Incredible Shrinking Wknd, and 8
Is there a place near Concordia that does a nice, simple omurice? It was all that the little girl in It Comes wanted and apparently the comfort food of choice for the couple in Ride Your Wave. A dish shows up twice in less than 48 hours at a film festival, that's a message, I guess.
Anyway, Ride Your Wave and The Prey were the early-afternoon shows in Hall, guest-free, leaving me some time to poke around the comic shops on Sainte Catherine to fill in holes to no avail. I'm beginning to suspect that Marvel just didn't print a few relatively recent issues. Plenty of time for a burrito before heading into DeSeve for the rest of the day.
First up there was the annual "Born of Woman" shorts block, which I missed the first couple of years because it always seems to get scheduled in such a way as to span two films on the other screen, one of which I want to see badly. This year, the stuff in Hall was stuff I could take or leave, meaning it was little issue getting into this 9-short block, with filmmakers Valerie Barnhart, Michelle Garza Cervera, Erica Scoggins, and Yfke Van Berckelaer on-hand.
It's a pretty great block of short films, where even the least exciting entry was pretty decent and the best were fantastic. It's worth noting that Ms. Barnhart (whom I think I've seen around the festival in previous years, perhaps as a volunteer) basically taught herself animation while making "Girl in the Hallway", grumbling later that she didn't realize that she'd chosen one of the most demanding forms of animation to work with. She seems to have mastered it, though, as several people are talking it up as not just their favorite short in the program, but one of their favorite shorts in the festival.
Later in the evening, I decided to switch from my planned selection of Killerman to 8, and I'm pretty glad I did; as much as I liked Cash Only a few years back. Harold Holscher made a pretty nifty little film that I'm glad I had a chance to see on the big screen. Holscher sounded like he was not necessarily optimistic about people in its native South Africa getting to do so. Distribution and exhibition are pretty hard there, and there isn't a lot of support for local genre film (something I remember hearing from a South African genre director at this festival something like ten years ago, claiming all the funding was for apartheid dramas).
Kind of a shame, since he made a great-looking movie, and it sounds like they had fun - the young lady playing the monster was a ballerina, and while they were initially worried about her freaking out the young co-star while in full make-up, they were apparently great friends by the end.
It's been a busy enough weekend that this post about Saturday is going up on Thursday, when I'll be at Shooting the Mafia, Lake Michigan Monster, Miss and Mrs. Cops, and the Zappin Party. Shadow is playing during my late-lunch-break, and well worth checking out on the big screen.
Kimi to, nami ni noretara (Ride Your Wave, aka Riding a Wave with You)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
As Masaki Yuasa's output increases, he seems to be moving away from the strange and trippy films that gained him attention and toward the conventional, though if the result is something like this sweet animated romance, that's not a bad thing. It's still distinctive and occasionally eccentric, and winds up being something fairly unique once the bits of fantasy there are kick in.
Part of that's his character design; there's not much mistaking the jangly limbs, pointy noses, and skinny necks his characters have. There's also the sheer playful abandon in how, when the thing that does give this a certain amount of fantasy emerges, there's a whimsical acceptance, that what might mark a person as crazy can somehow happen, especially since it fits the personalities of everyone involved so well. Yuasa's movies have always had a bit of the fantastic amid the everyday, and here he slides into more carefully than usual, keeping it in Hinako's head until it absolutely must come out.
And then there's the delightful animation, where once again Yuasa is using water to craft a fluid reality while also filling the world the characters live in with nifty detail. It's maybe not always the ones people might consider important or universal, but things like a particular coffee shop, firefighting techniques, and smooth surfing pull the audience in even when they might look at the very simple story with side-eye. It's a very nice combination of down-to-Earth and fantastical that does a fantastic job of getting at just how powerful young love and be and how unreal the fallout is.
Full review on EFilmCritic
"Bar Fight"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, digital)
"Bar Fight" is the result of filmmaker Benjamin R. Moody finishing up a horror movie and deciding he wanted to hit something, and what he delivers here is a pretty darn good fight sequence with a minimum amount of filler around it. Some guys show up in the middle of a bar that's closing and find that the bartender is no pushover, and that's that.
With any luck, it will serve as a nice calling-card for star Aaron D. Alexander, who has enough screen presence to sell the tired, put-upon bartender before the action starts getting crazy and then surprises when the man is eminently capable of dealing with anything thrown at him. The film is five minutes long, but between them, Moody and Alexander imply the entire "guy has been through some things and doesn't think he's up to the challenge any more" story in body language and reaction shots, and the fight choreography doesn't entirely take precedence over showing who this guy is. He's reluctant and doubts himself all the way through the end, and even good action movies sometimes have trouble putting that amount of characterization into their action. The best use that action in part to reveal character, and it's great that the film found time for that without a lot of room to spare.
The Prey
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, DCP)
As "The Most Dangerous Game" riffs go, this certainly is one. You know the story, and the makers of this one don't have any particular twist or hook to add to it too make this stand out in a sea of them. Or at least, not an obvious one from this side of the Pacific; maybe it touches on something topical in Cambodia, but I'd be surprised, as it seems fairly generic.
The big disappointment is not so much that the story is familiar, but that the execution is kind of lackluster. This is the team that made the fairly impressive Jailbreak, but having a more open environment doesn't necessarily do a lot of good. There's some decent gunplay, but it's seldom as good as the previous film's martial arts and inventive camerawork, mostly just a lot of sharp running and tumbling and pointing guns with purpose. There are a few striking shots - filmmaker Jimmy Henderson knows exactly what he's doing when the characters burst out of the woods and into a beautiful, bright open space on a riverbank - but mostly it's just a decent example of Action Movie Plot #8.
Full review on EFilmCritic
"Lili"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
"Lili" is as clear and concise a story about how men use power positions to coerce women, and how even in situations like film where sexuality can be part of the job description, it is, at the bare minimum, a pretty crappy thing to do. Filmmaker Yfke Van Berckelaer lays it out step by step, showing how "strength" is often twisted as a route to intimidation. I don't know how many people seeing this will need the lesson, but it's an impressively clear one.
There's also no small amount of fun in watching Lisa Smit act as the title character. Some may feel that audition scenes, like the one that make up this movie, or other things where you can see the performers going about their business, ruin the magic, but it comes across here as somebody doing a thing well, and I've always enjoyed skill on display. Smit's good at her job, giving Lili a character even as Lili is donning other personae, and that's fun to watch.
"Sometimes, I Think About Dying"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Stefanie Abel Horowitz does a nice job of digging right into self-doubt in "Sometimes, I Think About Dying"; I have no idea how much she and playwright Kevin Armento compressed his original work to get it down to 11 minutes, but it does fine work cutting down everything extraneous, never needing to offer an origin story or specific counter-arguments for how its narrator feels, just letting her show how navigating these feelings can seem almost impossible.
To do so, she chooses a lot of visually quiet locations where Fran can be overwhelmed by her thoughts, whether her house, a somewhat sparse office, or empty streets, or space outside the city. Katy Wright-Mead does a nifty job of making her seem more outwardly put-together than she feels most of the time without it conflicting with her narration, so that when one collides with the other, it feels a bit more wrenching, with Jim Sarbh making the guy who is genuinely interested in Fran maybe a little nervous on his own but not a matching-misfit sort.
"The Hitchhiker" (2018)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Adele Vuko puts a couple of familiar short-film subjects together - 'hitchhiker leaving a corpse behind" meets "hiding something from concerned friends" - with a twist that unites them in maybe slightly-too-easy fashion in order to create a women-helping-women narrative. There should, it seems, be more of an explored downside to the deal offered, although there's not really room for it in a film this relatively short.
Vuko's put a nice cast together and given them plenty of room to play off each other, with Isaro Kayitesi especially fun as the group's worrywart, obsessively jumping immediately to Google to find whatever freaks her out, playing well off a group that are, for different reasons, more likely to let things go. It's a group that doesn't always seem to belong together but which makes you think they want to be, which is enough and important as things get more tense and the idea that things might not work out well becomes clearer.
"Wakey Wakey"
* * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Mary Dauterman has made a nice-enough looking short, although I kind of got thrown by how I viewed it: My brain had the characters in a spaceship because the compositing which put an ocean outside their window made me think it was a screen rather than a look at what was right outside, and I'm still kind of not sure whether they were meant to be in a seaside house or on a boat, with the otherwise-unseen motion meant partly explain the twist ending. I kind of think there's a nifty sci-fi plot about dream machines or what have you possible, but there's also not enough there to presume it.
The result's certainly got intriguing potential, but plays like a short that just doesn't have enough to it to make a solid impression one way or another, and not having that definitive push toward a conclusion makes me less interested than having one and winding up as a bad idea.
"Vaspy"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Hweiling Ow builds the sort of horror short hear that is originally weird and gross, but seemingly not about that much - or at least, not about that much in ways that particularly work for me. It offers an offbeat horror take on pregnancy stress and cravings being amplified by already having a five-year-old doing what he does, but it sort of feels like we've seen that connection before and the toy wasp making its heroine have somewhat more wasp-like tendencies which she dismisses doesn't quite seem special enough. It's an eccentric take on a classic, but one that's so eccentric that it doesn't quite hit so hard.
"Maggie May"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
It's kind of interesting that what are likely the two best shorts in this program both find their horror in not so much violence but inaction and dismissal. Filmmaker Mia Kate Russell offers up a villain that is fearsomely sociopathic in her idleness, and Lulu McClatchy is unnervingly great in the role: She has the sort of blankness that implies some sort of cognitive disability where she is genuinely paralyzed by not knowing what she should do, but also the sort of sneer that implies she knows just exactly what she's allowing to happen. She's thoroughly awful, but Russell and McClatchy invite you to feel bad about hating her.
Meanwhile, Katrina Mathers is making her sister a little more than generically nice; Russell gives her a bit of personal dissatisfaction to work with, and once she finds herself injured by a freak accident, she does a fantastic job of channelling the viewers' horror and confusion without telling them what to feel. Russell keeps certain dangers off the screen in a way that allows her to strike at the heart of someone's worst fears without feeling exploitative. It's the sort of horror that leaves a nice, hard lump in one's stomach even before you start wondering how much it applies to broader situations.
"The Boogeywoman"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Would I probably get more out of "The Boogeywoman" if I had, at some point, been a teenage girl? Almost certainly. Even without being able to personally identify with what Sam (Amélie Hoeferle) is going through as she gets her first period well after her friends at an inopportune time, I loved watching the way these kids played off each other, for good and ill, as well as how things like a power failure at the roller rink and empty small-town streets are nervous-making without being overbearingly so.
When it gets the the supernatural part, it kind of loses me; I kind of feel like I should be making some greater connection between all the talk of Sam never knowing her mother and what else is going on, but it's never quite there for me, although it's acted and presented well enough that I can see that something is going on. Which may just mean that this short is made with other people in mind who will see how it fits together, which is fine. There's certainly enough there for me to give whatever I couldn't catch the benefit of the doubt.
"The Original"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
"The Original" is the rare short film where the finale is a kind of perfect knife to the gut, where I both want to see the fallout of it while also appreciating that the stabbing pain of it is undiluted. It's a nifty concept explored just enough to be a big emotional mess but not fall apart through being over-detailed.
Director Michelle Garza does a lot of nifty things to make writer Andrew Fleming's script seem more personal than topical, mostly by not setting it in something that clearly feels like the near future, but rather by shooting in black-and-white and creating a world that seems half British and half Mexican, making it hard to "yeah, but…" at any point. There's also an impressive division of labor between the actresses - Ariana Lebrón gets what at some points seems like most of the heavy lifting, as her character visibly grapples with all the hard decisions and loops the hospital makes her jump through to get her girlfriend's consciousness transferred into a healthy clone body, but Rebecca Layoo is doing amazing work in the background, so unsettlingly convincing as the victim of what appears to be a stroke that seeing the new her well feel genuinely mind-boggling.
There's a catch, though, and it's a delicious one, and I'm still pondering how it seemingly must have played out days later. You could make a feature out of this story, but it's still pretty great at 13 minutes.
"The Girl in the Hallway"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
I'm not sure whether director Valerie Barnhart animated directly to a spoken-word performance by Jamie DeWolf here, or whether she had him record a new version for this film, but that's just nitpicking in how the great work she did was split between direction, animation, and editing. The full result is immensely impressive for a first-time filmmaker.
She's got a fine base to build on - DeWolf's story of how he can't read "Red Riding Hood" to his daughter because it's associated with something awful in his mind is exceptionally well-told without ornamentation; he's a raconteur who builds up and spaces out without it seeming obvious while also making it clear that he has to do it this way, because confronting these memories is hard. It's a lurid-sounding bit of true-crime, shot through with how hard many work to avoid confronting this sort of thing, and you can feel both the guilt and not having done more and the need for self-preservation that prevents it.
Barnhart layers impressive animation on top of it, and the result is something that is very conspicuously not beautiful - even the sweet-seeming missing girl who deserved better is not fully idealized - but is full of the little details that help put those who have lived a comfortable life into a scary situation and transitions which keep the story moving even as it stretches out in time. Barnhart enhances mood and storytelling without ever straying from or undercutting DeWolf's base.
El increíble finde menguante (The Incredible Shrinking Wknd)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The big question after this screening was "when did you see it", referring to the aspect ratio changes going on through the film, which maybe speaks to how it's more of a visual gimmick than something that got across what the movie was going for. Which is a shame, because as flawed as it was, it plays into how the film is about someone not doing much with her youth, only to suddenly get hit with the idea that there's less she can do and less time to do it than she thought.
It's a strong idea but one that didn't necessarily get translated into events that well; unlike most time-loop movies, this one never has a period where Alba is trying to figure out what's happening or do something about it before getting to acceptance. In a way, that's just her character, but it leaves a chunk of time in the middle when the film seems to be running out the clock as surely as she is, and while there must be some waste to realize that time is precious, it's not the audience's time that should be wasted. Director Jon Mikel Caballero really doesn't seem to have a great idea of how to fill the time before the resets get tighter (the loop tightens by an hour every time through), and that's a frustrating issue at times.
It's still put together well, and there's some really nice work by cinematographer Tânia da Fonseca. It's a great-looking movie all around, especially with the camera often pointed at pretty locations, but the way she had to reframe for different shapes throughout seems deceptively tricky, and her knack for shooting with depth comes in handy as the screen becomes a window the audience is peering through. There may be tricks here, but everybody rises to the challenge to make an impressive film.
Full review on EFilmCritic
8
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The "demon" at the center of 8 is a sad, guilty one, something which makes for a different sort of thriller than the fairly traditional opening implies; it's as much the story of someone bound to something supernatural as those facing it, even if it has the look of something a bit more conventional.
Small things give it a distinct, South African identity; the very time it takes place, in 1977, seems too late for this kind of story, like the rest of the world is more settled, but here these sort of old family mansions are just starting to become obsolete. It makes "Lazarus" feel even more like a lingering remnant of something else, which the white family doesn't understand but the locals do, enhanced by Tsamano Sebe's fine performance, which seems a bit out of time itself. There is lingering mistrust that needs little explanation but forms a real barrier.
The film doesn't coast on its particular setting, though. It's a great little scary story, with dangerous gentility serving a more plainly monstrous entity from the start. The tension is built on nervous hope that some sort of basic decency will counter the need for a fight that many of the characters don't seem like they can win. It's shot on great-looking locations, with a striking change of scenery and style at the end, and plenty of chances to enjoy the way of the more traditional ghost story bits play out in handsome style.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Anyway, Ride Your Wave and The Prey were the early-afternoon shows in Hall, guest-free, leaving me some time to poke around the comic shops on Sainte Catherine to fill in holes to no avail. I'm beginning to suspect that Marvel just didn't print a few relatively recent issues. Plenty of time for a burrito before heading into DeSeve for the rest of the day.
First up there was the annual "Born of Woman" shorts block, which I missed the first couple of years because it always seems to get scheduled in such a way as to span two films on the other screen, one of which I want to see badly. This year, the stuff in Hall was stuff I could take or leave, meaning it was little issue getting into this 9-short block, with filmmakers Valerie Barnhart, Michelle Garza Cervera, Erica Scoggins, and Yfke Van Berckelaer on-hand.
It's a pretty great block of short films, where even the least exciting entry was pretty decent and the best were fantastic. It's worth noting that Ms. Barnhart (whom I think I've seen around the festival in previous years, perhaps as a volunteer) basically taught herself animation while making "Girl in the Hallway", grumbling later that she didn't realize that she'd chosen one of the most demanding forms of animation to work with. She seems to have mastered it, though, as several people are talking it up as not just their favorite short in the program, but one of their favorite shorts in the festival.
Later in the evening, I decided to switch from my planned selection of Killerman to 8, and I'm pretty glad I did; as much as I liked Cash Only a few years back. Harold Holscher made a pretty nifty little film that I'm glad I had a chance to see on the big screen. Holscher sounded like he was not necessarily optimistic about people in its native South Africa getting to do so. Distribution and exhibition are pretty hard there, and there isn't a lot of support for local genre film (something I remember hearing from a South African genre director at this festival something like ten years ago, claiming all the funding was for apartheid dramas).
Kind of a shame, since he made a great-looking movie, and it sounds like they had fun - the young lady playing the monster was a ballerina, and while they were initially worried about her freaking out the young co-star while in full make-up, they were apparently great friends by the end.
It's been a busy enough weekend that this post about Saturday is going up on Thursday, when I'll be at Shooting the Mafia, Lake Michigan Monster, Miss and Mrs. Cops, and the Zappin Party. Shadow is playing during my late-lunch-break, and well worth checking out on the big screen.
Kimi to, nami ni noretara (Ride Your Wave, aka Riding a Wave with You)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
As Masaki Yuasa's output increases, he seems to be moving away from the strange and trippy films that gained him attention and toward the conventional, though if the result is something like this sweet animated romance, that's not a bad thing. It's still distinctive and occasionally eccentric, and winds up being something fairly unique once the bits of fantasy there are kick in.
Part of that's his character design; there's not much mistaking the jangly limbs, pointy noses, and skinny necks his characters have. There's also the sheer playful abandon in how, when the thing that does give this a certain amount of fantasy emerges, there's a whimsical acceptance, that what might mark a person as crazy can somehow happen, especially since it fits the personalities of everyone involved so well. Yuasa's movies have always had a bit of the fantastic amid the everyday, and here he slides into more carefully than usual, keeping it in Hinako's head until it absolutely must come out.
And then there's the delightful animation, where once again Yuasa is using water to craft a fluid reality while also filling the world the characters live in with nifty detail. It's maybe not always the ones people might consider important or universal, but things like a particular coffee shop, firefighting techniques, and smooth surfing pull the audience in even when they might look at the very simple story with side-eye. It's a very nice combination of down-to-Earth and fantastical that does a fantastic job of getting at just how powerful young love and be and how unreal the fallout is.
Full review on EFilmCritic
"Bar Fight"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, digital)
"Bar Fight" is the result of filmmaker Benjamin R. Moody finishing up a horror movie and deciding he wanted to hit something, and what he delivers here is a pretty darn good fight sequence with a minimum amount of filler around it. Some guys show up in the middle of a bar that's closing and find that the bartender is no pushover, and that's that.
With any luck, it will serve as a nice calling-card for star Aaron D. Alexander, who has enough screen presence to sell the tired, put-upon bartender before the action starts getting crazy and then surprises when the man is eminently capable of dealing with anything thrown at him. The film is five minutes long, but between them, Moody and Alexander imply the entire "guy has been through some things and doesn't think he's up to the challenge any more" story in body language and reaction shots, and the fight choreography doesn't entirely take precedence over showing who this guy is. He's reluctant and doubts himself all the way through the end, and even good action movies sometimes have trouble putting that amount of characterization into their action. The best use that action in part to reveal character, and it's great that the film found time for that without a lot of room to spare.
The Prey
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: ACTION!, DCP)
As "The Most Dangerous Game" riffs go, this certainly is one. You know the story, and the makers of this one don't have any particular twist or hook to add to it too make this stand out in a sea of them. Or at least, not an obvious one from this side of the Pacific; maybe it touches on something topical in Cambodia, but I'd be surprised, as it seems fairly generic.
The big disappointment is not so much that the story is familiar, but that the execution is kind of lackluster. This is the team that made the fairly impressive Jailbreak, but having a more open environment doesn't necessarily do a lot of good. There's some decent gunplay, but it's seldom as good as the previous film's martial arts and inventive camerawork, mostly just a lot of sharp running and tumbling and pointing guns with purpose. There are a few striking shots - filmmaker Jimmy Henderson knows exactly what he's doing when the characters burst out of the woods and into a beautiful, bright open space on a riverbank - but mostly it's just a decent example of Action Movie Plot #8.
Full review on EFilmCritic
"Lili"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
"Lili" is as clear and concise a story about how men use power positions to coerce women, and how even in situations like film where sexuality can be part of the job description, it is, at the bare minimum, a pretty crappy thing to do. Filmmaker Yfke Van Berckelaer lays it out step by step, showing how "strength" is often twisted as a route to intimidation. I don't know how many people seeing this will need the lesson, but it's an impressively clear one.
There's also no small amount of fun in watching Lisa Smit act as the title character. Some may feel that audition scenes, like the one that make up this movie, or other things where you can see the performers going about their business, ruin the magic, but it comes across here as somebody doing a thing well, and I've always enjoyed skill on display. Smit's good at her job, giving Lili a character even as Lili is donning other personae, and that's fun to watch.
"Sometimes, I Think About Dying"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Stefanie Abel Horowitz does a nice job of digging right into self-doubt in "Sometimes, I Think About Dying"; I have no idea how much she and playwright Kevin Armento compressed his original work to get it down to 11 minutes, but it does fine work cutting down everything extraneous, never needing to offer an origin story or specific counter-arguments for how its narrator feels, just letting her show how navigating these feelings can seem almost impossible.
To do so, she chooses a lot of visually quiet locations where Fran can be overwhelmed by her thoughts, whether her house, a somewhat sparse office, or empty streets, or space outside the city. Katy Wright-Mead does a nifty job of making her seem more outwardly put-together than she feels most of the time without it conflicting with her narration, so that when one collides with the other, it feels a bit more wrenching, with Jim Sarbh making the guy who is genuinely interested in Fran maybe a little nervous on his own but not a matching-misfit sort.
"The Hitchhiker" (2018)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Adele Vuko puts a couple of familiar short-film subjects together - 'hitchhiker leaving a corpse behind" meets "hiding something from concerned friends" - with a twist that unites them in maybe slightly-too-easy fashion in order to create a women-helping-women narrative. There should, it seems, be more of an explored downside to the deal offered, although there's not really room for it in a film this relatively short.
Vuko's put a nice cast together and given them plenty of room to play off each other, with Isaro Kayitesi especially fun as the group's worrywart, obsessively jumping immediately to Google to find whatever freaks her out, playing well off a group that are, for different reasons, more likely to let things go. It's a group that doesn't always seem to belong together but which makes you think they want to be, which is enough and important as things get more tense and the idea that things might not work out well becomes clearer.
"Wakey Wakey"
* * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Mary Dauterman has made a nice-enough looking short, although I kind of got thrown by how I viewed it: My brain had the characters in a spaceship because the compositing which put an ocean outside their window made me think it was a screen rather than a look at what was right outside, and I'm still kind of not sure whether they were meant to be in a seaside house or on a boat, with the otherwise-unseen motion meant partly explain the twist ending. I kind of think there's a nifty sci-fi plot about dream machines or what have you possible, but there's also not enough there to presume it.
The result's certainly got intriguing potential, but plays like a short that just doesn't have enough to it to make a solid impression one way or another, and not having that definitive push toward a conclusion makes me less interested than having one and winding up as a bad idea.
"Vaspy"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Hweiling Ow builds the sort of horror short hear that is originally weird and gross, but seemingly not about that much - or at least, not about that much in ways that particularly work for me. It offers an offbeat horror take on pregnancy stress and cravings being amplified by already having a five-year-old doing what he does, but it sort of feels like we've seen that connection before and the toy wasp making its heroine have somewhat more wasp-like tendencies which she dismisses doesn't quite seem special enough. It's an eccentric take on a classic, but one that's so eccentric that it doesn't quite hit so hard.
"Maggie May"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
It's kind of interesting that what are likely the two best shorts in this program both find their horror in not so much violence but inaction and dismissal. Filmmaker Mia Kate Russell offers up a villain that is fearsomely sociopathic in her idleness, and Lulu McClatchy is unnervingly great in the role: She has the sort of blankness that implies some sort of cognitive disability where she is genuinely paralyzed by not knowing what she should do, but also the sort of sneer that implies she knows just exactly what she's allowing to happen. She's thoroughly awful, but Russell and McClatchy invite you to feel bad about hating her.
Meanwhile, Katrina Mathers is making her sister a little more than generically nice; Russell gives her a bit of personal dissatisfaction to work with, and once she finds herself injured by a freak accident, she does a fantastic job of channelling the viewers' horror and confusion without telling them what to feel. Russell keeps certain dangers off the screen in a way that allows her to strike at the heart of someone's worst fears without feeling exploitative. It's the sort of horror that leaves a nice, hard lump in one's stomach even before you start wondering how much it applies to broader situations.
"The Boogeywoman"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
Would I probably get more out of "The Boogeywoman" if I had, at some point, been a teenage girl? Almost certainly. Even without being able to personally identify with what Sam (Amélie Hoeferle) is going through as she gets her first period well after her friends at an inopportune time, I loved watching the way these kids played off each other, for good and ill, as well as how things like a power failure at the roller rink and empty small-town streets are nervous-making without being overbearingly so.
When it gets the the supernatural part, it kind of loses me; I kind of feel like I should be making some greater connection between all the talk of Sam never knowing her mother and what else is going on, but it's never quite there for me, although it's acted and presented well enough that I can see that something is going on. Which may just mean that this short is made with other people in mind who will see how it fits together, which is fine. There's certainly enough there for me to give whatever I couldn't catch the benefit of the doubt.
"The Original"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
"The Original" is the rare short film where the finale is a kind of perfect knife to the gut, where I both want to see the fallout of it while also appreciating that the stabbing pain of it is undiluted. It's a nifty concept explored just enough to be a big emotional mess but not fall apart through being over-detailed.
Director Michelle Garza does a lot of nifty things to make writer Andrew Fleming's script seem more personal than topical, mostly by not setting it in something that clearly feels like the near future, but rather by shooting in black-and-white and creating a world that seems half British and half Mexican, making it hard to "yeah, but…" at any point. There's also an impressive division of labor between the actresses - Ariana Lebrón gets what at some points seems like most of the heavy lifting, as her character visibly grapples with all the hard decisions and loops the hospital makes her jump through to get her girlfriend's consciousness transferred into a healthy clone body, but Rebecca Layoo is doing amazing work in the background, so unsettlingly convincing as the victim of what appears to be a stroke that seeing the new her well feel genuinely mind-boggling.
There's a catch, though, and it's a delicious one, and I'm still pondering how it seemingly must have played out days later. You could make a feature out of this story, but it's still pretty great at 13 minutes.
"The Girl in the Hallway"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Born of Woman, digital)
I'm not sure whether director Valerie Barnhart animated directly to a spoken-word performance by Jamie DeWolf here, or whether she had him record a new version for this film, but that's just nitpicking in how the great work she did was split between direction, animation, and editing. The full result is immensely impressive for a first-time filmmaker.
She's got a fine base to build on - DeWolf's story of how he can't read "Red Riding Hood" to his daughter because it's associated with something awful in his mind is exceptionally well-told without ornamentation; he's a raconteur who builds up and spaces out without it seeming obvious while also making it clear that he has to do it this way, because confronting these memories is hard. It's a lurid-sounding bit of true-crime, shot through with how hard many work to avoid confronting this sort of thing, and you can feel both the guilt and not having done more and the need for self-preservation that prevents it.
Barnhart layers impressive animation on top of it, and the result is something that is very conspicuously not beautiful - even the sweet-seeming missing girl who deserved better is not fully idealized - but is full of the little details that help put those who have lived a comfortable life into a scary situation and transitions which keep the story moving even as it stretches out in time. Barnhart enhances mood and storytelling without ever straying from or undercutting DeWolf's base.
El increíble finde menguante (The Incredible Shrinking Wknd)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The big question after this screening was "when did you see it", referring to the aspect ratio changes going on through the film, which maybe speaks to how it's more of a visual gimmick than something that got across what the movie was going for. Which is a shame, because as flawed as it was, it plays into how the film is about someone not doing much with her youth, only to suddenly get hit with the idea that there's less she can do and less time to do it than she thought.
It's a strong idea but one that didn't necessarily get translated into events that well; unlike most time-loop movies, this one never has a period where Alba is trying to figure out what's happening or do something about it before getting to acceptance. In a way, that's just her character, but it leaves a chunk of time in the middle when the film seems to be running out the clock as surely as she is, and while there must be some waste to realize that time is precious, it's not the audience's time that should be wasted. Director Jon Mikel Caballero really doesn't seem to have a great idea of how to fill the time before the resets get tighter (the loop tightens by an hour every time through), and that's a frustrating issue at times.
It's still put together well, and there's some really nice work by cinematographer Tânia da Fonseca. It's a great-looking movie all around, especially with the camera often pointed at pretty locations, but the way she had to reframe for different shapes throughout seems deceptively tricky, and her knack for shooting with depth comes in handy as the screen becomes a window the audience is peering through. There may be tricks here, but everybody rises to the challenge to make an impressive film.
Full review on EFilmCritic
8
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The "demon" at the center of 8 is a sad, guilty one, something which makes for a different sort of thriller than the fairly traditional opening implies; it's as much the story of someone bound to something supernatural as those facing it, even if it has the look of something a bit more conventional.
Small things give it a distinct, South African identity; the very time it takes place, in 1977, seems too late for this kind of story, like the rest of the world is more settled, but here these sort of old family mansions are just starting to become obsolete. It makes "Lazarus" feel even more like a lingering remnant of something else, which the white family doesn't understand but the locals do, enhanced by Tsamano Sebe's fine performance, which seems a bit out of time itself. There is lingering mistrust that needs little explanation but forms a real barrier.
The film doesn't coast on its particular setting, though. It's a great little scary story, with dangerous gentility serving a more plainly monstrous entity from the start. The tension is built on nervous hope that some sort of basic decency will counter the need for a fight that many of the characters don't seem like they can win. It's shot on great-looking locations, with a striking change of scenery and style at the end, and plenty of chances to enjoy the way of the more traditional ghost story bits play out in handsome style.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Fantasia 2017 catch-up, part 4: Thousand Cuts, A Thousand Junkies, Attraction, Jailbreak, Fashionista, Geek Girls, Mumon: Land of Stealth, Lu Over the Wall, Prey, and The Endless
And that's 72 feature films reviewed on eFilmCritic for Fantasia, give or take - it's not counting A Taxi Driver, which opened in Boston the week I got back and was thus skipped in Montreal accordingly, but is counting Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which I didn't actually see as part of a festival screening but did go to see between the start and end of the festival. There were also 4 short film packages that got pretty good write-ups (as did most of the shorts I saw), and 7 features I saw, but didn't get a chance to expand into full reviews. One was in unsubtitled French, so maybe give me a pass on that, and a couple of the others… Well, the filmmakers would probably rather I not share my feelings on a couple in any depth.
Yeah, it took three and a half months after the actual end of the festival, which is not ideal, but given that I kind of tapped out last year, it's an improvement, and I'm glad I figured out a bit more of a better way to go about it. Picking back up on updating my Letterboxd account and not shying away from using the international plan on my phone let me update a fair chunk in real-time. I didn't have more time during the fest, or immediately after, but a good chunk of first impressions being down as an initial draft helps, and getting this chunk down has helped me discover something reassuring - that, contrary to what some seem to think, it is much easier to write about what we love than what we dislike. That sticks around.
It means that, though it took me months to write them up, I was able to say all I want Mumon: Land of Stealth and The Endless, saving the best for last, so to speak. I'm kind of surprised that The Endless didn't get bumped up because of an impending release by Well Go, but I'm hoping that they find an early-2018 slot that gets it a semi-wide release. I've been waiting months to talk about something in this movie, and even if I figure that a lot of the people I'd want to discuss it with have already, you like to do it publicly these days. A far sadder consequence of the delay can be seen with A Thousand Junkies: The film I saw as darkly funny when watching it feels quite different on the other side of one of its stars dying what may have been a drug-related death. I really wasn't sure how to handle that when expanding the review; I tried to just stick to my initial impressions.
By interesting coincidence, I saw Mumon: Land of Stealth pop up in a YesAsia email, and it got me frustrated with the Japanese film industry's apparent disinterest in the world market all over again. Yoshihiro Nakamura's films may not quite get the buzz they deserve at festivals, and apparently haven't found favor with the broader J-pop fandom here, but they're consistently great. Because the audience is currently rather niche, nobody is paying the fees Japanese studios want to license their movies, but the studios don't want to jeopardize that potential revenue stream, so they don't put English subtitles on their Blu-rays. Or maybe it just doesn't occur to them to make them English-friendly because they don't see enough opportunity there - certainly, there are very few of us that will pay the ridiculous prices they want for those discs (the three editions up for pre-order have list prices from $45 to $90). The upshot is, nobody sees these films outside festivals, and it seems as if the desire to get the most potential money out of them is preventing people in North America from buying them at all.
But you know what's not expensive?
Yes, it's a Jay-at-Fantasia tradition, where I spend the last loonies in my pocket on Crush Cream Soda and Oh Henry bars that you can't easily find in the United States, saving them until after I finish my reviews. They will taste so good tomorrow!
Le serpent aux mille coupures (Thousand Cuts)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
You can tell Thousand Cuts ("Le serpent aux mille coupures" in the original French) is going to be an excellent slow burn from the start, as director Eric Valette contrives to bring three or four more or less unrelated groups to the same deserted spot in rural France and doesn't make it seem like a ridiculous premise despite being a huge coincidence. It's a tingly feeling that this could be a really entertaining mess, a sensation that only increases as an even more dangerous fellow shows up after the first bit of violence and two law-enforcement agencies get involved.
It starts with a drug deal going down; Jean-François (Stéphane Debac) doesn't really want to go through Spanish drug kingpin Javier any more. He soon won't have to, as an escaped felon (Tomer Sisley) crosses path with Javier's crew and comes out injured, but at least alive, disposing of the car and bodies well enough that a cartel lawyer and fixer (Terence Yin) are dispatched to find out who is responsible. Adrien holes up in the nearby farm, where owner Omar (Cédric Ido) and his wife Stéphanie (Erika Sainte) are already on on high alert because a lot of the locals do not like that a black man purchased the place after the previous owner went bankrupt - and, indeed, the key witness who could unravel the whole thing (Guillaume Destrem) was there to vandalize and destroy crops.
From there, it's all about turning the screws, and Valette does a fine job of that making not just the audience but the less-hardcore thugs wince as the worst of them tortures his way to what's going on while the folks pegged as heroes are more or less helpless. It does, eventually, wind up with Valette and co-writer Hervé Albertazzi (who wrote the source novel and is credited under nom de plume DOA) stretching themselves a little thin - Omar and his family disappear for a while as the situation in town gets more out of control, and while the various law-enforcement agencies getting along is a nice change of pace, it implies we don't need quite so many people involved. This mostly works, because the careful, measured progress keeps the audience glued to the screen as the very implausibility of the set-up keeps everybody orbiting each other, eventually drawing closer until the big confrontation comes.
Full review on EFC.
A Thousand Junkies
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
At some point during A Thousand Junkies, a viewer will likely think it's getting dark, but of course it's been dark since the start, when its main trio got into their beat-up Volvo to score their first heroin of the day, and starting to get strung out really just emphasizes what the oddball banter had been hiding. It's a humanizing though not particularly sympathetic look at being that far into addiction, though I've got no idea how accurate it may be.
Tommy (Tommy Swerdlow) is the guy with the car, and he starts his day before 7am, picking up T.J. (TJ Bowen) and Blake (Blake Heron), and putting in a call to Jimmy, their favorite dealer, who will, as the day goes by, always seem just out of reach. In the meantime, they chase down other leads, like Igor (Dinarte de Freitas), a rich Russian kid that Blake knows who doesn't like to shoot up alone; they'll also think back to how they met and how they got the car.
This is a story set in Los Angeles, so it's almost fitting that the car gets an origin story of its own; it's an indispensable part of the group, and as run-down, desperate for fuel, and close to collapse as its human occupants. It's not a character in the movie, but it's a necessary part of the framing: Director Tommy Swerdlow shoots a lot of scenes through the windshield, of course, but it's also important as the only true home these three have - they may have places where they sleep, but those belong to other people. The car is the only place or piece of the scenery that is constant as the men travel from one neighborhood to another, never letting a true sense of place build up. And when they finally start to get desperate enough to turn on each other, the car is part of that, too.
Full review on EFC.
Prityazhenie (Attraction)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It's something of a pleasant surprise that Attraction is more of a Russian take on The Day the Earth Stood Still than War of the Worlds or Independence Day, although I suspect that few looked at The Day the Earth Stood Still and thought that the movie needed more dumb teenagers, although it's possible. It makes the constantly changing impulses a bit more believable, at least, although is justifying the weak bits better than avoiding them?
As it opens, a Moscow high school class is more or less ignoring the teacher going on about the night's meteor shower - well, the nerd everyone calls "Google" (Evgeniy Mikheev) is interested, while Yulia Lebedeva (Irina Starshenbaum) and her friend Svetlana Morozova (Darya Rudenok) make plans to watch it from the top of Sveta's apartment building. Or not - "watching a meteor shower" makes for an excellent excuse for Yulia to sneak off with boyfriend Artyom (Alexander Petrov) without Yulia's strict military father Valentin (Oleg Menshikov) being terribly suspicious. It works out well until one of those meteors hits an alien spaceship, the spaceship crashes, and Sveta is in the impacted area that Valentin is placed in charge of securing. Yulia, Artyom, and some of his friends sneak in and find both some alien tech and an injured member of the crew - and this "Hakon" (Rinal Mukhametov) not only looks human, but kind of cute.
Though the film has its problems - it can tend toward spinning its wheels on the way to an extremely obvious "power of love/danger of jealousy" story - its heroine Yulia actually manages to grab hold of the movie once it had settled on her being basically decent and wanting to help, albeit in a somewhat entitled way (she is the type that rebels against her military father while still being comfortable throwing his weight around). Irina Starshenbaum has the right sort of attitude for the bratty but basically decent Yulia, and she's able to sell the necessary quick growth while still showing the same prickly exterior. She's kind of got to; neither Alexander Petrov or Rinal Mukhametov is nearly as charismatic in their parts as she is, leaving her having to do the heavy lifting to make those scenes compelling.
Full review on EFC.
Jailbreak
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Action!, DCP)
Like a lot of action flicks from places that don't export a whole lot of movies, Jailbreak shows that there are a fair number of folks in Cambodia who know some martial arts and aren't particularly concerned with the safety standards other places have in place. Whether the excited reception this movie got at the festival will translate into a steady stream of Cambodian action movies or not, time will tell, but this first foray into cinematic mayhem is a high-energy hoot.
As it opens, the local authorities have just captured "Playboy" (Savin Philip), the presumed leader of the Butterfly Gang, and he's being transferred to Prei Klau Prison by an elite escort: Dara (Dara Our), the team leader; Sucheat (Dara Phang), just transferred from an undercover unit; Tharoth (Tharoth Sam), tough enough to hang with the guys; and Jean-Paul Ty (Jean-Paul Ly), a French GIGN agent. Of course, Playboy being the actual leader of an all-female gang rather than just the money man is unlikely, and he's ready to roll on Madame Butterfly (Celine Tran), and knowing this, she's made it known to Scorpion Gang leader Bolo (Sisowath Siriwudd) that there's a price on Playboy's head and an opportunity for a breakout. There are, of course, a whole ton of Scorpions in this prison, and Playboy is supposed to be locked up with the worst of the worst.
This may be giving the plot a bit more credit than it deserves. It's basically twenty minutes of enough exposition for the cops to be more than "the girl", "the guy with the beard", and the like, and then all hell breaking loose. Once things get started, the movie is basically one brawl after another, as the cops are constantly outnumbered by less-skilled but more numerous prisoners, and they just keep going, knocking each other around, throwing the occasional knife into it, and every once in a while going for a one-on-one with a featured heavy. Director Jimmy Henderson and his co-writer Michael Hodgson don't clutter things up with a lot of complexity or worries about people switching sides, but they're good at splitting the group up and bringing it together to make for good fights, and not cheating too badly with the geography of the place. It's not the detailed, obviously creative choreography you'd see from Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen, but it's busy and exciting without overloading the audience.
Full review on EFC.
Fashionista
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Roughly a minute or so into Fashionista, I could feel my eyes start to roll as the opening credits not only cut to a similarly-framed shot of Amanda Fuller's April with a different outfit for each new name put up, but the soundtrack changed as well (my notes say something along the lines of "oh, this is just precious!"). It works, I suppose, as shock therapy to get the audience used to the way director Simon Rumley puts his movie together, taking a lot of distinct moments and putting them next to each other without obvious transitions and trusting that the audience will see the through-line even on the first time through.
April (Amanda Fuller) has more than enough outfits to make that happen; she and her boyfriend Eric (Ethan Embry) run the Austin second-hand shop that bears his name and the overstock fills their apartment. It's alarming to see, really, but seems relatively benign until a few things start to threaten that status quo, like when Eric starts taking trips to Dallas to discuss opening a location there with the uncle of cute customer-turned-employee Sherry (Alexandria DeBerry), leading to some fierce arguments. It's after one of those that she meets Randall (Eric Balfour), a well-to-do man with fingers in some unsavory pies and whose own clothing obsessions complement April's. Soon he's paying for fancy, designer outfits, and it's a big change for someone who so closely identifies with her outfits.
The big idea at the center, how April's creative fashion sense comes across as fun and cool and hides a tendency toward hoarding and addiction, is kind of fascinating. Lots of movies link creativity and addiction in a way that positions the latter as the necessary side-effect of the former, and in April's case it goes further because she often seems to literally be creating herself. In her mind, how she presents herself is a large part of who she is, and the wardrobe upgrade Randall offers feels like a sort of upward mobility even if it is still putting on the outfits another man gives to her, and within a more narrow range. It's a tendency to define herself by what she has and allowing herself to be trapped by what feels like her own initiative.
Full review on EFC.
Geek Grils
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)
A great number of documentaries might be said to have the prime of their lives on the festival circuit; that's where they're most likely to find packed houses and lively discussion, far more so than during the later years when they're getting one viewer at a time on whatever streaming services pick them up and their information ages. This is especially true for Geek Girls, which seems especially designed to play to audiences at genre film festivals, whether as a rallying point or a useful wake-up call, depending on one's perspective.
It's the work of Gina Hara, a Canadian born in Hungary who, like many women who enjoy comics, video games, and science, has occasionally been made to feel unwelcome by male would-be gatekeepers, enough to be interested in documenting the phenomenon. And so she does, starting in Tokyo's Akihabara district ("where geek history began") and initially finding nobody who would agree to be interviewed on camera, causing her to circle back to North America with a stop in her childhood hometown, talking to an interesting group along the way: Jamie Broadway of Black Girl Nerds, competitive gamer Stephanie Harvey, Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Anita Sengupta, and many others, before returning to Japan for an interview with a pair of tentative, anonymous young women.
One of the more interesting facets of the film is actually one of its more implicit, in that the way Hara defines the geek world is markedly different than how I would as a man a decade or two older who loves genre material but never embraced the term "geek". Calling Akihabara ground zero highlights the focus on manga, gaming, and cosplay, which from one perspective is a bit of a slight on folks like Bjo Trimble (an important figure in early Star Trek fandom) and authors like Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh who injected a female perspective into science fiction and fantasy even if they had to do so under androgynous pen-names. It's an important choice in a couple of important ways: It focuses the film on the present rather than the past, and it serves as an important reminder that what men generally place at the center of geekdom - and the mostly-male media that treats this as the default - can be markedly different from what women do, with much of the friction where these two spheres intersect.
Full review on EFC.
Shinobi no kuni (Mumon: The Land of Stealth)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, HD Cam)
When attending a genre festival, find the movie by Yoshihiro Nakamura. It will often be relatively unheralded, either because he's not as outrageous as fellow very productive Japanese auteurs like Miike or Sono, or because he's not adapting something that has already found a fandom across the Pacific, but it will almost certainly be one of the best films there. Such is the case with Mumon: The Land of Stealth, and on top of that, it's one of Nakamura's very best. It looks every inch the silly bit of ninja action from the start, but there's a biting criticism of capitalism lurking underneath, so that when it comes to the fore at the end, the audience shouldn't be surprised, but it still hits a bit harder than expected.
As it opens, it's September 1579, and the ninjas of Iga are battling again. They're not really enemies - ninjas are too much the dedicated mercenaries to really hate the rival clans - but fighting is what they do, and being on top leads to the best jobs. Heibe Shimoyama (Ryohei Suzuki) recognizes it as a stupid exercise, but it should be relatively harmless; his clan's fortress is well fortified. At least, it seems that way before Mumon (Satoshi Ono), whose name means "no door", crashes through and then steps aside because he was only paid to make an entrance - at least until he's offered a better deal. The he returns home to his wife, Okuni (Satomi Ishihara) who is refusing to let him into their modest house until he makes good on what he he promised when he kidnapped her from her hometown of Aki. Meanwhile, in Ise, Nobunaga Oda's plans to unite the kingdom are blocked by Iga, but who wants to fight a province full of ninjas? Instead, he sends his son Nobukatsu (Yuri Chinen), to keep them busy by building a fortress. They figure, fine, we can just tear it down when we're done.
It's a whimsical, silly series of events, adapted by screenwriter Ryo Wada from his own novel Shinobi no Kuni, and the filmmakers deliver a lot of poppy, bubbly scenes that serve as a fun contrast to how dour this sort of period film can be. There's a skewed logic to how scenes play out, with the ninjas coming off as simple folk with simple needs, almost refreshing in how they outright avoid tying themselves in knots. In a way, they're almost like children, and there's great hay made out of how these fearsome warriors are kind of goofy, with Mumon easily admonished and pushed around by a woman who is technically his prisoner.
Full review on EFC.
Yoake Tsugeru Lu no uta (Lu Over the Wall)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, Bu-ray)
Masaaki Yuasa had two feature films at the festival, which is some pretty spectacular productivity for someone working in animation, and I suppose that when you're on that kind of roll, it's no surprise that both wound up pretty darn good. Lu Over the Wall is a different sort of delight than Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, in some ways a more conventionally unconventional coming-of-age fantasy: It's hardly the first story with magical creatures helping a lonely kid find his place and save the town, although few are quite the same feast for the eyes and ears.
The kid is Kai (voice of Shota Shimoda); he lives in Hinashi, a fishing town denied sunlight by its massive "Shadowstone" wall, which also hides Merfolk Island, a failed amusement park built around the legends that mer-people lived nearby. He and his father just moved there from Tokyo, and Kai is trying to be invisible, but when classmates Yuuho (voice of Minako Kotobuki) and Kuniko (voice of Soma Saito) discover his DJ skills from something he posted on YouTube, they get him to join their band. They are not the only ones who hear Kai's music - Lu (voice of Kanon Tani), a young mermaid, hears it and sings along, and she gets so caught up in it that it gives her legs to dance with. Soon, she's joined the band, even though Yuuho and Kuniko don't know anything about their new singer other than her amazing voice.
That's just the basic plot, and while that's effective as heck - Yuasa and co-writer Reiko Yoshida pack all the coming-of-age themes, young romance, running around to keep a secret, and subplots which flesh out the supporting characters as complete, interesting people into a leisurely but not over-stuffed film - it's the way that this story sometimes gives Yuasa the chance to suddenly jump into something new that lets it grab a spot in a viewer's head. It's using music as a jolt from the very start, where the audience not only gets a sense of the strong feelings Kai is holding in as he composes and arranges in the opening before sudden jump to a bouncy theme song that occasionally feels like it has set too high a bar for the rest of the film because the music won't quite be so popping and married to fantastic visuals until almost the end. Teenagers in a band can often seem like shorthand, piggybacking on the viewer's own memories of a time when music was a direct line to their passion, but Yuasa and Yoshida seldom actually have their characters talk about this rather than just throw themselves into it in various ways.
Full review on EFC.
Prooi (Prey)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Prey is, make no bones about it, a silly extra-large-animal-attacks-humans movie, but it's one that is quite well aware of precisely what audiences want from that sort of picture. There is not really a single sequence that doesn't play out with exactly the beats that one might expect for this sort of B-movie, which adds up to the film in general playing in the same sort of way. This is thankfully more of an asset than a weakness here - director Dick Maas and company hit familiar genre notes, but hit them fairly well.
After a poor suburban family encounters something wild and hungry, we meet Lizzy (Sophie van Wilden), a veterinarian at Amsterdam's Artis Zoo who specializes in large animals, whom she generally considers less troublesome than her recently-discarded-but-still-hopeful ex-boyfriend Dave (Julian Looman). She's called in by Detective Olaf Brinkers (Rienus Krul), who has her name on file for dealing with animal attacks. He's hoping for a coyote or the like; she frightens him by saying it's a lion, larger than average, maybe escaped from some illegal private menagerie. Olaf's boss wants to keep it quiet and have a cousin who has gone on safari handle the situation, but eventually they're going to have to call Lizzy's former colleague (and lover) Jack (Mark Frost), not aware that his last job has left him a little less equipped to hunt down this sort of predator.
The long tradition of people who would ordinarily encounter an actually dangerous animal being menaced by something large and carnivorous isn't exactly distinguished - for every Jaws, there are a great many inferior imitations. Fortunately, director Dick Maas is a B-movie pro, and he hits the right notes at the right moments, so that while the film never really has great moments of surprise and shock, it's very satisfying in terms of execution. There's a certain comfort to being able to see that the people involved know what a killer-animal movie is supposed to do and do that, giving the audience what it wants with just enough color to keep it from being self-parody. The moments of black comedy feel more genuine than ironic.
Full review on EFC.
The Endless
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson have not only not made a bad movie yet, but they're 3-for-3 in making fantastic films that at some point make the viewer's eyes bulge with delight at one point or another, when it becomes clear that they are doing something really clever. The Endless is no exception, building tension in an almost conventional way and then making sure that both the things that build mystery and resolve it are genuinely thrilling. It's a genuinely great horror film that will excite their fans and likely impress even those who aren't huge fans of the genre.
Benson & Moorhead also star in the movie, playing brothers Justin and Aaron Smith, who escaped from a cult ten years ago. Or at least, that's how Justin puts it; younger brother Aaron still romanticizes the group and tends to skip his deprogramming appointments. He might be tempted to go back if the pair didn't receive a videotape in the mail, but that's what it takes to get Justin to join him for a visit, especially with it referencing a mysterious "ascension" and seeming to end with disaster. So they return to Camp Arcadia, past the oddly-fresh memorial for their mother on the side of the road, and see that things have not changed much - Hal (Tate Ellington) is still working on some strange equation, Aaron still has a huge crush on Anna (Callie Hernandez), and neighbor Carl (James Jordan) is still kind of a jerk. There are new additions - cute artist Lizzy (Kira Powell) and Jennifer (Emily Montague), who came to California after her husband disappeared. There are secrets here which could, at the very least, tear the brothers apart.
This is only the pair's third feature (after Resolution and Spring), but one can already see strong themes emerging in their work that runs deeper than the love of analog media or the threat of something too ancient for its origins and purpose to be properly remembered. All of their films deal in some way with the idea of getting stuck at some point in one's life and someone trying to break free, and they aren't shy about laying this idea right out there from the start, with Aaron especially wanting to return to the safety of the place that sheltered them when their mother died and Justin trying to mount an argument for moving them forward. Right at the start, it's feelings that most in the audience can immediately connect with, even if the source is unusual, and it forms the bedrock of the movie.
Full review on EFC.
Yeah, it took three and a half months after the actual end of the festival, which is not ideal, but given that I kind of tapped out last year, it's an improvement, and I'm glad I figured out a bit more of a better way to go about it. Picking back up on updating my Letterboxd account and not shying away from using the international plan on my phone let me update a fair chunk in real-time. I didn't have more time during the fest, or immediately after, but a good chunk of first impressions being down as an initial draft helps, and getting this chunk down has helped me discover something reassuring - that, contrary to what some seem to think, it is much easier to write about what we love than what we dislike. That sticks around.
It means that, though it took me months to write them up, I was able to say all I want Mumon: Land of Stealth and The Endless, saving the best for last, so to speak. I'm kind of surprised that The Endless didn't get bumped up because of an impending release by Well Go, but I'm hoping that they find an early-2018 slot that gets it a semi-wide release. I've been waiting months to talk about something in this movie, and even if I figure that a lot of the people I'd want to discuss it with have already, you like to do it publicly these days. A far sadder consequence of the delay can be seen with A Thousand Junkies: The film I saw as darkly funny when watching it feels quite different on the other side of one of its stars dying what may have been a drug-related death. I really wasn't sure how to handle that when expanding the review; I tried to just stick to my initial impressions.
By interesting coincidence, I saw Mumon: Land of Stealth pop up in a YesAsia email, and it got me frustrated with the Japanese film industry's apparent disinterest in the world market all over again. Yoshihiro Nakamura's films may not quite get the buzz they deserve at festivals, and apparently haven't found favor with the broader J-pop fandom here, but they're consistently great. Because the audience is currently rather niche, nobody is paying the fees Japanese studios want to license their movies, but the studios don't want to jeopardize that potential revenue stream, so they don't put English subtitles on their Blu-rays. Or maybe it just doesn't occur to them to make them English-friendly because they don't see enough opportunity there - certainly, there are very few of us that will pay the ridiculous prices they want for those discs (the three editions up for pre-order have list prices from $45 to $90). The upshot is, nobody sees these films outside festivals, and it seems as if the desire to get the most potential money out of them is preventing people in North America from buying them at all.
But you know what's not expensive?
Yes, it's a Jay-at-Fantasia tradition, where I spend the last loonies in my pocket on Crush Cream Soda and Oh Henry bars that you can't easily find in the United States, saving them until after I finish my reviews. They will taste so good tomorrow!
Le serpent aux mille coupures (Thousand Cuts)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
You can tell Thousand Cuts ("Le serpent aux mille coupures" in the original French) is going to be an excellent slow burn from the start, as director Eric Valette contrives to bring three or four more or less unrelated groups to the same deserted spot in rural France and doesn't make it seem like a ridiculous premise despite being a huge coincidence. It's a tingly feeling that this could be a really entertaining mess, a sensation that only increases as an even more dangerous fellow shows up after the first bit of violence and two law-enforcement agencies get involved.
It starts with a drug deal going down; Jean-François (Stéphane Debac) doesn't really want to go through Spanish drug kingpin Javier any more. He soon won't have to, as an escaped felon (Tomer Sisley) crosses path with Javier's crew and comes out injured, but at least alive, disposing of the car and bodies well enough that a cartel lawyer and fixer (Terence Yin) are dispatched to find out who is responsible. Adrien holes up in the nearby farm, where owner Omar (Cédric Ido) and his wife Stéphanie (Erika Sainte) are already on on high alert because a lot of the locals do not like that a black man purchased the place after the previous owner went bankrupt - and, indeed, the key witness who could unravel the whole thing (Guillaume Destrem) was there to vandalize and destroy crops.
From there, it's all about turning the screws, and Valette does a fine job of that making not just the audience but the less-hardcore thugs wince as the worst of them tortures his way to what's going on while the folks pegged as heroes are more or less helpless. It does, eventually, wind up with Valette and co-writer Hervé Albertazzi (who wrote the source novel and is credited under nom de plume DOA) stretching themselves a little thin - Omar and his family disappear for a while as the situation in town gets more out of control, and while the various law-enforcement agencies getting along is a nice change of pace, it implies we don't need quite so many people involved. This mostly works, because the careful, measured progress keeps the audience glued to the screen as the very implausibility of the set-up keeps everybody orbiting each other, eventually drawing closer until the big confrontation comes.
Full review on EFC.
A Thousand Junkies
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
At some point during A Thousand Junkies, a viewer will likely think it's getting dark, but of course it's been dark since the start, when its main trio got into their beat-up Volvo to score their first heroin of the day, and starting to get strung out really just emphasizes what the oddball banter had been hiding. It's a humanizing though not particularly sympathetic look at being that far into addiction, though I've got no idea how accurate it may be.
Tommy (Tommy Swerdlow) is the guy with the car, and he starts his day before 7am, picking up T.J. (TJ Bowen) and Blake (Blake Heron), and putting in a call to Jimmy, their favorite dealer, who will, as the day goes by, always seem just out of reach. In the meantime, they chase down other leads, like Igor (Dinarte de Freitas), a rich Russian kid that Blake knows who doesn't like to shoot up alone; they'll also think back to how they met and how they got the car.
This is a story set in Los Angeles, so it's almost fitting that the car gets an origin story of its own; it's an indispensable part of the group, and as run-down, desperate for fuel, and close to collapse as its human occupants. It's not a character in the movie, but it's a necessary part of the framing: Director Tommy Swerdlow shoots a lot of scenes through the windshield, of course, but it's also important as the only true home these three have - they may have places where they sleep, but those belong to other people. The car is the only place or piece of the scenery that is constant as the men travel from one neighborhood to another, never letting a true sense of place build up. And when they finally start to get desperate enough to turn on each other, the car is part of that, too.
Full review on EFC.
Prityazhenie (Attraction)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It's something of a pleasant surprise that Attraction is more of a Russian take on The Day the Earth Stood Still than War of the Worlds or Independence Day, although I suspect that few looked at The Day the Earth Stood Still and thought that the movie needed more dumb teenagers, although it's possible. It makes the constantly changing impulses a bit more believable, at least, although is justifying the weak bits better than avoiding them?
As it opens, a Moscow high school class is more or less ignoring the teacher going on about the night's meteor shower - well, the nerd everyone calls "Google" (Evgeniy Mikheev) is interested, while Yulia Lebedeva (Irina Starshenbaum) and her friend Svetlana Morozova (Darya Rudenok) make plans to watch it from the top of Sveta's apartment building. Or not - "watching a meteor shower" makes for an excellent excuse for Yulia to sneak off with boyfriend Artyom (Alexander Petrov) without Yulia's strict military father Valentin (Oleg Menshikov) being terribly suspicious. It works out well until one of those meteors hits an alien spaceship, the spaceship crashes, and Sveta is in the impacted area that Valentin is placed in charge of securing. Yulia, Artyom, and some of his friends sneak in and find both some alien tech and an injured member of the crew - and this "Hakon" (Rinal Mukhametov) not only looks human, but kind of cute.
Though the film has its problems - it can tend toward spinning its wheels on the way to an extremely obvious "power of love/danger of jealousy" story - its heroine Yulia actually manages to grab hold of the movie once it had settled on her being basically decent and wanting to help, albeit in a somewhat entitled way (she is the type that rebels against her military father while still being comfortable throwing his weight around). Irina Starshenbaum has the right sort of attitude for the bratty but basically decent Yulia, and she's able to sell the necessary quick growth while still showing the same prickly exterior. She's kind of got to; neither Alexander Petrov or Rinal Mukhametov is nearly as charismatic in their parts as she is, leaving her having to do the heavy lifting to make those scenes compelling.
Full review on EFC.
Jailbreak
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Action!, DCP)
Like a lot of action flicks from places that don't export a whole lot of movies, Jailbreak shows that there are a fair number of folks in Cambodia who know some martial arts and aren't particularly concerned with the safety standards other places have in place. Whether the excited reception this movie got at the festival will translate into a steady stream of Cambodian action movies or not, time will tell, but this first foray into cinematic mayhem is a high-energy hoot.
As it opens, the local authorities have just captured "Playboy" (Savin Philip), the presumed leader of the Butterfly Gang, and he's being transferred to Prei Klau Prison by an elite escort: Dara (Dara Our), the team leader; Sucheat (Dara Phang), just transferred from an undercover unit; Tharoth (Tharoth Sam), tough enough to hang with the guys; and Jean-Paul Ty (Jean-Paul Ly), a French GIGN agent. Of course, Playboy being the actual leader of an all-female gang rather than just the money man is unlikely, and he's ready to roll on Madame Butterfly (Celine Tran), and knowing this, she's made it known to Scorpion Gang leader Bolo (Sisowath Siriwudd) that there's a price on Playboy's head and an opportunity for a breakout. There are, of course, a whole ton of Scorpions in this prison, and Playboy is supposed to be locked up with the worst of the worst.
This may be giving the plot a bit more credit than it deserves. It's basically twenty minutes of enough exposition for the cops to be more than "the girl", "the guy with the beard", and the like, and then all hell breaking loose. Once things get started, the movie is basically one brawl after another, as the cops are constantly outnumbered by less-skilled but more numerous prisoners, and they just keep going, knocking each other around, throwing the occasional knife into it, and every once in a while going for a one-on-one with a featured heavy. Director Jimmy Henderson and his co-writer Michael Hodgson don't clutter things up with a lot of complexity or worries about people switching sides, but they're good at splitting the group up and bringing it together to make for good fights, and not cheating too badly with the geography of the place. It's not the detailed, obviously creative choreography you'd see from Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen, but it's busy and exciting without overloading the audience.
Full review on EFC.
Fashionista
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Roughly a minute or so into Fashionista, I could feel my eyes start to roll as the opening credits not only cut to a similarly-framed shot of Amanda Fuller's April with a different outfit for each new name put up, but the soundtrack changed as well (my notes say something along the lines of "oh, this is just precious!"). It works, I suppose, as shock therapy to get the audience used to the way director Simon Rumley puts his movie together, taking a lot of distinct moments and putting them next to each other without obvious transitions and trusting that the audience will see the through-line even on the first time through.
April (Amanda Fuller) has more than enough outfits to make that happen; she and her boyfriend Eric (Ethan Embry) run the Austin second-hand shop that bears his name and the overstock fills their apartment. It's alarming to see, really, but seems relatively benign until a few things start to threaten that status quo, like when Eric starts taking trips to Dallas to discuss opening a location there with the uncle of cute customer-turned-employee Sherry (Alexandria DeBerry), leading to some fierce arguments. It's after one of those that she meets Randall (Eric Balfour), a well-to-do man with fingers in some unsavory pies and whose own clothing obsessions complement April's. Soon he's paying for fancy, designer outfits, and it's a big change for someone who so closely identifies with her outfits.
The big idea at the center, how April's creative fashion sense comes across as fun and cool and hides a tendency toward hoarding and addiction, is kind of fascinating. Lots of movies link creativity and addiction in a way that positions the latter as the necessary side-effect of the former, and in April's case it goes further because she often seems to literally be creating herself. In her mind, how she presents herself is a large part of who she is, and the wardrobe upgrade Randall offers feels like a sort of upward mobility even if it is still putting on the outfits another man gives to her, and within a more narrow range. It's a tendency to define herself by what she has and allowing herself to be trapped by what feels like her own initiative.
Full review on EFC.
Geek Grils
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)
A great number of documentaries might be said to have the prime of their lives on the festival circuit; that's where they're most likely to find packed houses and lively discussion, far more so than during the later years when they're getting one viewer at a time on whatever streaming services pick them up and their information ages. This is especially true for Geek Girls, which seems especially designed to play to audiences at genre film festivals, whether as a rallying point or a useful wake-up call, depending on one's perspective.
It's the work of Gina Hara, a Canadian born in Hungary who, like many women who enjoy comics, video games, and science, has occasionally been made to feel unwelcome by male would-be gatekeepers, enough to be interested in documenting the phenomenon. And so she does, starting in Tokyo's Akihabara district ("where geek history began") and initially finding nobody who would agree to be interviewed on camera, causing her to circle back to North America with a stop in her childhood hometown, talking to an interesting group along the way: Jamie Broadway of Black Girl Nerds, competitive gamer Stephanie Harvey, Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Anita Sengupta, and many others, before returning to Japan for an interview with a pair of tentative, anonymous young women.
One of the more interesting facets of the film is actually one of its more implicit, in that the way Hara defines the geek world is markedly different than how I would as a man a decade or two older who loves genre material but never embraced the term "geek". Calling Akihabara ground zero highlights the focus on manga, gaming, and cosplay, which from one perspective is a bit of a slight on folks like Bjo Trimble (an important figure in early Star Trek fandom) and authors like Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh who injected a female perspective into science fiction and fantasy even if they had to do so under androgynous pen-names. It's an important choice in a couple of important ways: It focuses the film on the present rather than the past, and it serves as an important reminder that what men generally place at the center of geekdom - and the mostly-male media that treats this as the default - can be markedly different from what women do, with much of the friction where these two spheres intersect.
Full review on EFC.
Shinobi no kuni (Mumon: The Land of Stealth)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, HD Cam)
When attending a genre festival, find the movie by Yoshihiro Nakamura. It will often be relatively unheralded, either because he's not as outrageous as fellow very productive Japanese auteurs like Miike or Sono, or because he's not adapting something that has already found a fandom across the Pacific, but it will almost certainly be one of the best films there. Such is the case with Mumon: The Land of Stealth, and on top of that, it's one of Nakamura's very best. It looks every inch the silly bit of ninja action from the start, but there's a biting criticism of capitalism lurking underneath, so that when it comes to the fore at the end, the audience shouldn't be surprised, but it still hits a bit harder than expected.
As it opens, it's September 1579, and the ninjas of Iga are battling again. They're not really enemies - ninjas are too much the dedicated mercenaries to really hate the rival clans - but fighting is what they do, and being on top leads to the best jobs. Heibe Shimoyama (Ryohei Suzuki) recognizes it as a stupid exercise, but it should be relatively harmless; his clan's fortress is well fortified. At least, it seems that way before Mumon (Satoshi Ono), whose name means "no door", crashes through and then steps aside because he was only paid to make an entrance - at least until he's offered a better deal. The he returns home to his wife, Okuni (Satomi Ishihara) who is refusing to let him into their modest house until he makes good on what he he promised when he kidnapped her from her hometown of Aki. Meanwhile, in Ise, Nobunaga Oda's plans to unite the kingdom are blocked by Iga, but who wants to fight a province full of ninjas? Instead, he sends his son Nobukatsu (Yuri Chinen), to keep them busy by building a fortress. They figure, fine, we can just tear it down when we're done.
It's a whimsical, silly series of events, adapted by screenwriter Ryo Wada from his own novel Shinobi no Kuni, and the filmmakers deliver a lot of poppy, bubbly scenes that serve as a fun contrast to how dour this sort of period film can be. There's a skewed logic to how scenes play out, with the ninjas coming off as simple folk with simple needs, almost refreshing in how they outright avoid tying themselves in knots. In a way, they're almost like children, and there's great hay made out of how these fearsome warriors are kind of goofy, with Mumon easily admonished and pushed around by a woman who is technically his prisoner.
Full review on EFC.
Yoake Tsugeru Lu no uta (Lu Over the Wall)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, Bu-ray)
Masaaki Yuasa had two feature films at the festival, which is some pretty spectacular productivity for someone working in animation, and I suppose that when you're on that kind of roll, it's no surprise that both wound up pretty darn good. Lu Over the Wall is a different sort of delight than Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, in some ways a more conventionally unconventional coming-of-age fantasy: It's hardly the first story with magical creatures helping a lonely kid find his place and save the town, although few are quite the same feast for the eyes and ears.
The kid is Kai (voice of Shota Shimoda); he lives in Hinashi, a fishing town denied sunlight by its massive "Shadowstone" wall, which also hides Merfolk Island, a failed amusement park built around the legends that mer-people lived nearby. He and his father just moved there from Tokyo, and Kai is trying to be invisible, but when classmates Yuuho (voice of Minako Kotobuki) and Kuniko (voice of Soma Saito) discover his DJ skills from something he posted on YouTube, they get him to join their band. They are not the only ones who hear Kai's music - Lu (voice of Kanon Tani), a young mermaid, hears it and sings along, and she gets so caught up in it that it gives her legs to dance with. Soon, she's joined the band, even though Yuuho and Kuniko don't know anything about their new singer other than her amazing voice.
That's just the basic plot, and while that's effective as heck - Yuasa and co-writer Reiko Yoshida pack all the coming-of-age themes, young romance, running around to keep a secret, and subplots which flesh out the supporting characters as complete, interesting people into a leisurely but not over-stuffed film - it's the way that this story sometimes gives Yuasa the chance to suddenly jump into something new that lets it grab a spot in a viewer's head. It's using music as a jolt from the very start, where the audience not only gets a sense of the strong feelings Kai is holding in as he composes and arranges in the opening before sudden jump to a bouncy theme song that occasionally feels like it has set too high a bar for the rest of the film because the music won't quite be so popping and married to fantastic visuals until almost the end. Teenagers in a band can often seem like shorthand, piggybacking on the viewer's own memories of a time when music was a direct line to their passion, but Yuasa and Yoshida seldom actually have their characters talk about this rather than just throw themselves into it in various ways.
Full review on EFC.
Prooi (Prey)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Prey is, make no bones about it, a silly extra-large-animal-attacks-humans movie, but it's one that is quite well aware of precisely what audiences want from that sort of picture. There is not really a single sequence that doesn't play out with exactly the beats that one might expect for this sort of B-movie, which adds up to the film in general playing in the same sort of way. This is thankfully more of an asset than a weakness here - director Dick Maas and company hit familiar genre notes, but hit them fairly well.
After a poor suburban family encounters something wild and hungry, we meet Lizzy (Sophie van Wilden), a veterinarian at Amsterdam's Artis Zoo who specializes in large animals, whom she generally considers less troublesome than her recently-discarded-but-still-hopeful ex-boyfriend Dave (Julian Looman). She's called in by Detective Olaf Brinkers (Rienus Krul), who has her name on file for dealing with animal attacks. He's hoping for a coyote or the like; she frightens him by saying it's a lion, larger than average, maybe escaped from some illegal private menagerie. Olaf's boss wants to keep it quiet and have a cousin who has gone on safari handle the situation, but eventually they're going to have to call Lizzy's former colleague (and lover) Jack (Mark Frost), not aware that his last job has left him a little less equipped to hunt down this sort of predator.
The long tradition of people who would ordinarily encounter an actually dangerous animal being menaced by something large and carnivorous isn't exactly distinguished - for every Jaws, there are a great many inferior imitations. Fortunately, director Dick Maas is a B-movie pro, and he hits the right notes at the right moments, so that while the film never really has great moments of surprise and shock, it's very satisfying in terms of execution. There's a certain comfort to being able to see that the people involved know what a killer-animal movie is supposed to do and do that, giving the audience what it wants with just enough color to keep it from being self-parody. The moments of black comedy feel more genuine than ironic.
Full review on EFC.
The Endless
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson have not only not made a bad movie yet, but they're 3-for-3 in making fantastic films that at some point make the viewer's eyes bulge with delight at one point or another, when it becomes clear that they are doing something really clever. The Endless is no exception, building tension in an almost conventional way and then making sure that both the things that build mystery and resolve it are genuinely thrilling. It's a genuinely great horror film that will excite their fans and likely impress even those who aren't huge fans of the genre.
Benson & Moorhead also star in the movie, playing brothers Justin and Aaron Smith, who escaped from a cult ten years ago. Or at least, that's how Justin puts it; younger brother Aaron still romanticizes the group and tends to skip his deprogramming appointments. He might be tempted to go back if the pair didn't receive a videotape in the mail, but that's what it takes to get Justin to join him for a visit, especially with it referencing a mysterious "ascension" and seeming to end with disaster. So they return to Camp Arcadia, past the oddly-fresh memorial for their mother on the side of the road, and see that things have not changed much - Hal (Tate Ellington) is still working on some strange equation, Aaron still has a huge crush on Anna (Callie Hernandez), and neighbor Carl (James Jordan) is still kind of a jerk. There are new additions - cute artist Lizzy (Kira Powell) and Jennifer (Emily Montague), who came to California after her husband disappeared. There are secrets here which could, at the very least, tear the brothers apart.
This is only the pair's third feature (after Resolution and Spring), but one can already see strong themes emerging in their work that runs deeper than the love of analog media or the threat of something too ancient for its origins and purpose to be properly remembered. All of their films deal in some way with the idea of getting stuck at some point in one's life and someone trying to break free, and they aren't shy about laying this idea right out there from the start, with Aaron especially wanting to return to the safety of the place that sheltered them when their mother died and Justin trying to mount an argument for moving them forward. Right at the start, it's feelings that most in the audience can immediately connect with, even if the source is unusual, and it forms the bedrock of the movie.
Full review on EFC.
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
I had no idea that this was a Netflix production before their logo popped up before the film and thus had me a little surprised it was playing theaters at all. I suspect it's gone from Kendall Square on Friday, either because it doesn't draw when a lot of people can see it as part of their subscription package or because the release was a heavily-subsidized stab at awards consideration. Whatever the case, I've heard (and participated in) a lot less outcry over this only having a small theatrical footprint than Okja just a few months ago, and I wonder if it's a matter of my being in the wrong circles and the art-house crowd is just as annoyed as the genre crowd was, or if we just get tired about yelling about the same things again and again.
I do kind of suspect this loses a bit playing at home versus the theater. In the review I talk about how the wide overhead shots go from making the exodus from Phnom Penh look big to making the individual people look small, and I suspect that's something the cinematographer and visual effects guys have to be pretty precise with - the average person in those shots being a few pixels wider jumps him or her from being an anonymous entity to an individual human for the audience, but I suspect that threshold is different on the big screen than on the smaller one. Maybe not, and maybe they're primarily composing for video anyway, what with Netflix putting up the money and the monitors both on-set and at the FX house not being twenty feet wide.
Speaking of theaters, it looks like Kendall Square is pretty much done its renovation, and so far, it doesn't feel a whole lot different - the lobby has basically replaced the spot with the baked goods with a bar space, and video screens have replaced the manual signage. So far, mostly harmless, so long as they don't go in for animating them too much. The hallway has gotten a little too low-key, perhaps - no posters next to the doors or signs above, just a fairly low-key numeral. I initially walked past the auditorium, and I've been in those rooms a lot. Inside, I noticed that the seats had been upgraded, though the rows were much closer together than the surprisingly sparse arrangement in theater #9, enough so that though they reclined, the foot-rest didn't extend. Still fairly comfortable, at least.
The marquee outside is still kind of a mess, but maybe they won't be cleaning that up until the rest of the work around the area is done. It'd be nice if the thing most visible from the street made a nicer impression, but it's certainly the part of the theater that has the least impact on it beating the heck out of my living room.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, DCP)
It's a bit surprising to me that First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers didn't have its name cut in half during the transition from page to screen, and not just because it may look unwieldy on a VOD menu (let alone a marquee in the small number of theaters that are booking a Netflix original). That title implies adult reflection, while the film is almost entirely devoted to the child's point of view. That's often a source of its power, although it sometimes denies the film some of the clarity director Angelina Jolie looks to find elsewhere.
It opens in April 1975, when Loung Ung (Sareum Srey Moch) was six or seven, the second-youngest of six siblings whose father (Phoeung Kompheak) works for the government - or at least, until the Khmer Rouge takes over and they, like everyone else, are forced to flee Phnom Penh. The father is canny enough to hide his identity as the family eventually winds up in one of the camps where the KR is trying to rebuild the country on communist ideals, but there's no end to the danger and cruelty to be found in post-revolution Kampuchea.
Jolie and the real-life Loung Ung collaborated on the screenplay (from Ung's book), and mostly keeping this a kid's-eye-view account has its pluses and minuses. It's important to note, for instance, that Jolie bookends the film with more documentary-style bits that highlight America's contributions to the rise of this regime, and while that's an important subject, it's not what the rest of the film is about. There's a majesty to the final shot that emphasizes that the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror was, though destructive, an aberration, and that point of view seems like a bit of an afterthought within the film itself.
Full review on EFC.
I do kind of suspect this loses a bit playing at home versus the theater. In the review I talk about how the wide overhead shots go from making the exodus from Phnom Penh look big to making the individual people look small, and I suspect that's something the cinematographer and visual effects guys have to be pretty precise with - the average person in those shots being a few pixels wider jumps him or her from being an anonymous entity to an individual human for the audience, but I suspect that threshold is different on the big screen than on the smaller one. Maybe not, and maybe they're primarily composing for video anyway, what with Netflix putting up the money and the monitors both on-set and at the FX house not being twenty feet wide.
Speaking of theaters, it looks like Kendall Square is pretty much done its renovation, and so far, it doesn't feel a whole lot different - the lobby has basically replaced the spot with the baked goods with a bar space, and video screens have replaced the manual signage. So far, mostly harmless, so long as they don't go in for animating them too much. The hallway has gotten a little too low-key, perhaps - no posters next to the doors or signs above, just a fairly low-key numeral. I initially walked past the auditorium, and I've been in those rooms a lot. Inside, I noticed that the seats had been upgraded, though the rows were much closer together than the surprisingly sparse arrangement in theater #9, enough so that though they reclined, the foot-rest didn't extend. Still fairly comfortable, at least.
The marquee outside is still kind of a mess, but maybe they won't be cleaning that up until the rest of the work around the area is done. It'd be nice if the thing most visible from the street made a nicer impression, but it's certainly the part of the theater that has the least impact on it beating the heck out of my living room.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, DCP)
It's a bit surprising to me that First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers didn't have its name cut in half during the transition from page to screen, and not just because it may look unwieldy on a VOD menu (let alone a marquee in the small number of theaters that are booking a Netflix original). That title implies adult reflection, while the film is almost entirely devoted to the child's point of view. That's often a source of its power, although it sometimes denies the film some of the clarity director Angelina Jolie looks to find elsewhere.
It opens in April 1975, when Loung Ung (Sareum Srey Moch) was six or seven, the second-youngest of six siblings whose father (Phoeung Kompheak) works for the government - or at least, until the Khmer Rouge takes over and they, like everyone else, are forced to flee Phnom Penh. The father is canny enough to hide his identity as the family eventually winds up in one of the camps where the KR is trying to rebuild the country on communist ideals, but there's no end to the danger and cruelty to be found in post-revolution Kampuchea.
Jolie and the real-life Loung Ung collaborated on the screenplay (from Ung's book), and mostly keeping this a kid's-eye-view account has its pluses and minuses. It's important to note, for instance, that Jolie bookends the film with more documentary-style bits that highlight America's contributions to the rise of this regime, and while that's an important subject, it's not what the rest of the film is about. There's a majesty to the final shot that emphasizes that the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror was, though destructive, an aberration, and that point of view seems like a bit of an afterthought within the film itself.
Full review on EFC.
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Fantasia 2017.17: Attraction, "Cocolors", Jailbreak, and Fashionista
The last weekend of the festival is best described as "there are many things you want to see and the fact that there are only a couple days left means there are far fewer second chances on the schedule, so suck it up and make choices you don't want to" - so, as a result, I regretfully skip Gintama, the 35mm print of Bastard Swordsman, Another WolfCop, and Tragedy Girls, only really regretting the first, and that mostly because Attraction wasn't really good.
Bunches of guests, though, with an unexpectedly packed house for Attraction because the preceding short was from Quebec. I kind of hoped it would clear out a bit after that, give me a little more breathing room, but that didn't happen. Good for them!
Next up were Toshihisa Yokoshima and Park Hyemi, directors of "Cocolors" and "Scarecrow Island", respectively, here seen as if consulting with their translators because that was the best picture I got where the faces weren't right behind their microphone stands. The director of the third short in the collection sent a video greeting, so that's a lot of people really happy to be in Fantasia. Heck, after the Q&A, Yokoshima set up a desk in the lobby and autographed a souvenir for everyone who came.
I didn't get a picture of Louisa Phung when she introduced her film before Jailbreak, but she was pretty enthusiastic and animated, joking about how she was from Vancouver, where DC-based action projects are half their work, so this film was Canadian content, on top of getting another female and Asian filmmaker into the lineup, to applause. She also ran up to get a selfie with the audience, saying she didn't get a chance to do it the first time because that was justifiably more about Jailbreak with those filmmakers in town from Cambodia, which only made sense.
Last up, Simon Rumley (c) and Amanda Fuller (r) in town to support Fashionista, which Rumley said started off being much more about consumerism than addiction, but that script eventually got scrapped and changed for the better. Fuller talked about how costuming went amazingly well, considering she had something like a hundred outfits in a 108-minute movie, and they were pulling liberally from both her own wardrobe and that of the costume designer, who had a very different body type but somehow still got stuff to fit. At the end, they joked about how it took Rumley roughly ten seconds to decide what he was going to wear to the screening and Fuller, well, somewhat longer.
Also, I bet the Q&A went on for twice as long at Fantastic Fest despite likely having fewer questions because there would have been a standing ovation every time Rumley said he liked Austin. Part of that was praising the friend whose apartment they were able to use to shoot the movie, as an offshoot of someone in the audience asking about the great movie posters you see in the background, although I suspect I would have framed the question in terms of "what's up with all the Nazi stuff on those posters".
Sunday is for Geek Girls, Mumon: The Land of Stealth, Bushwick, and Mayhem. Bad Genius is pretty great, Extraordinary Mission has some good action, but they'll have already started by the time this is posted.
"Past and Future Kings"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Fantastique Week-Ends, DCP)
At half an hour long, "Past & Future Kings" is kind of long for a short but still not quite long enough for the breadth of its ambition - its long fast-forward, in which a would-be king (Jason Cavalier) convinces the mage (Elias Varoutsos) bound to his new crown to show him his future, is all major events but very little motivating him to get from one spot to another. It's fine as things start - at that point, the film is drawing on pseudo-Arthurian themes, and you just kind of expect that a noble knight will become a compromised king with enemies in his court, because that's the natural way of things, but as things become more fantastical, it feels like "that's how these stories work" is covering a lot more ground. By the time we get to the end, there's a twist or two, but it seems like a lot of time but not a lot of work to get there, story-wise.
The writing may presume things, but the execution is impressively hard-working, putting Cavalier in a lot of different scenarios, all of which look fairly good, including fine action choreography at times when it calls for that. Though the film starts with people saying "look at all this carnage" in a way that calls attention to how the filmmakers really couldn't manage a huge medieval army with their resources, the later, tighter scenes work quite well. Cavalier is chameleonic enough to make his multiple iterations of the same character work, and Varoutsos seems to be having a great time as the mage who, seeing the future, is perhaps not terribly interested in his age's stuffy formality.
Prityazhenie (Attraction)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It's something of a pleasant surprise that Attraction is more of a Russian take on The Day the Earth Stood Still than War of the Worlds or Independence Day, although I suspect that few looked at The Day the Earth Stood Still and thought that the movie needed more dumb teenagers, although it's possible. It makes the constantly changing impulses a bit more believable, at least.
That is where the movie tends to fall over, as its heroine Yulia actually manages to grab hold of the movie once it had settled on her being basically decent and wanting to help, albeit in a somewhat entitled way (she is the type that rebels against her military father while still being comfortable throwing his weight around) but takes a long time selling her into that role, and in the meantime tends to change character direction for everybody at the drop off a hat. It's also a funny thing that how weak and clichéd much of the characterization is (and the focus on the teenage characters) manages to undermine one of the film's more interesting choices, where the military folks who maybe have some idea how well attacking a technologically superior opponent would go tend to be cautious while the civilian authorities are hotheads. It's just that the movie as a whole is not clever enough for the audience to expect subversion there.
This apparently got a big Imax release in Russia, although it probably wouldn't make the cut elsewhere; it's got some nice design, and looks nice when things are holding still, but action often looks like a video game, weightless and not really pay off the world around it.
"Valley of the White Birds"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)
Quite the beautiful animated fantasy from Cloud Yang and Wolf Smoke Studio, "Valley of the White Birds" shows a knack for using design to indicate character early on, as the young man seen moving through the woods is visually closed off by robes that cover half his face and swallow his arms, hair in a tight bun and eyes piercing, a complete contrast to the older man he meets, round and shaggy, approaching the white birds of the title with friendship while the birds turn to dried leaves in the younger man's hands.
It's a nifty bit of visual characterization that immediately makes "Valley" more impressive than the simple fantasy about a man confronting some sort of spirit in combat that it could have been; combine what we infer about this guy with his visions of a younger, more open version of himself as the characters wander an abandoned village, decay accelerating as the birds whither at his touch,, and the obvious question is how misguided his quest may be, though he doesn't read as the villain. It's great characterization matched by impressive animation that blends a traditional look with the occasional subtle three-dimensional effect, all on top of a nice, atmospheric soundtrack.
"Scarecrow Island"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)
Park Hye-mi's follow-up to Crimson Island is a bit smaller in scale both for being a short and in its basic story, though it builds a fairly full world in its introduction, quickly getting the audience up to speed about how an atomic war 180 years ago left the bulk of the world uninhabitable and full of mutants, which the island-based survivors attempt to eradicate on bombing missions - at least, until the narrator discovers an island with green vegetation that seems to be inhabited by an old woman who has built herself scarecrows for company, leading him to start dropping supplies.
Park tells a nifty little story here, using the playful arrangements of the scarecrows and how the pilot sneaks around to find discarded clothing to contrast the propaganda images and unnerving indications that the "monsters" being bombed may not be far from human on the plane's screens, making it feel like a small act of rebellion that could potentially lead to more, especially when the voice-over indicates that he is becoming more interested than this than his actual job. I like the design for the hero, too, freckled and young even if his flight suit doesn't quite seem too large for him.
I still must admit that the design and the present-day voice-work had me thinking he was a girl at first, especially since some of the other narration seemed to be a different, more masculine-sounding voice. I suspect the confusion was mostly on my part, although I'd be a little interested in whether Park has more story to fill out the gap.
"Cocolors"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)
The main event of this shorts triple-feature is pretty terrific, mostly taking place in a busy underground city where the population has retreated after a cataclysm, although the contamination in the air is still so dangerous that you never see the people without their helmets and environmental protection suits. It is, to us looking in, a supremely isolating way to live, especially as the lighting and reflection often makes the helmets look like giant eyes, but the people in the movie don't seem to think so - those suits are what they need to live, there's plenty of customization so you can tell who is who, and on festival days, they put on skeletal designs with phosphorescent paint.
It's a haunting world that feels familiar through the efforts of director Toshihisa Yokoshima and the Kamikaze Douga team, using CGI to give the underground city a busy appearance lit by dozens of sources, not quite cheery compared to the hellish surface we see once some characters start going on salvage missions, but home enough that the audience can feel it dying as those lights slowly become fewer and the crowd scenes less crowded. There are twists to it as the world distorts in nightmares as the characters we meet as kids - pushy Shu, meek Aki, and sickly mute Fuyu - become adults and find that this means losing people.
And yet, amid all that, there's something not quite hopeful, but powerful in its truth as Fuyu develops into an artist, rediscovering printing so that his drawings can be preserved, and the rest of the community seems to instinctively know that this is important. There would usually be a character who characterizes the ailing runt as a drain on their resources, but there seems to be a tacit understanding that getting Fuyu colored rocks with which to make paints is a useful part of the salvage missions, and a scene of his art being destroyed in a fit of anger is among the most frightening despite more obviously horrific events. It's not necessarily what the movie is about - the main beats at the end are about being committed to your friends even if there's a barrier of abstraction between you - but that it's an important part of the film gives it an extra level that makes it all the more impressive.
Stealth&Silence: DC Comic Fan Film
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Action!, Blu-ray)
Writer/director Louisa Phung joked before the film about the various levels of nerdery you would have to be to catch certain references, and I kind of wonder at what level you're saying "this seems more like a Huntress story than a Catwoman story" is. Probably "you're a big giant nerd but also kind of an ass". Hopefully noting that I and the rest of the theater perked up at the appearance of a character who was obviously Cassandra Cain and wondering why DC seems to have no idea how to use a character that people really like a lot.
That aside, it's a fun little fan film with some impressive action, really feeling like it's cutting loose when the characters get to start throwing down; the various screen fighters know their stuff. It's also when the DC stuff starts become less like Easter egg material and more like things the filmmakers genuinely like - they made a pretty good Black Mask prop, for instance.
Jailbreak
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Action!, DCP)
Like a lot of action movies from places that really don't have that sort of industry, Jailbreak shows that there are a lot of folks in Cambodia who know some martial arts and aren't particularly concerned with the safety standards other places have in place. Whether it will translate into something that lasts or not, time will tell, but this first foray into it is a high-energy hoot.
It's not exactly a lot but action; once things get started, the movie is basically one brawl after another, as the cops transferring gangster "Playboy" into a maximum-security prison are constantly outnumbered by less-skilled but more numerous prisoners, and they just keep going, knocking each other around, throwing the occasional knife into it, and every once in a while going for a one-on-one with a featured heavy. It's not the detailed, obviously creative choreography you'd see from Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen, but it's busy and exciting without overloading.
And sometimes, the fact that there aren't a whole lot of established rules here work in their favor. Sure, it's easy enough to snort at the all-female gang that goes in for more spike heel/push-up/leather pants combos than really makes sense for their work, but a lot of it plays as enthusiastic pulp rather than our exploitation. Plus, the camera work is kind of nuts, weaving in and out of fights, sometimes being bowled over and having to right itself, but eventually feeling like it's being improvised well. Eventually, they'll probably figure out how everyone else does things, and their best talent will get poached by Hollywood or China, but for now, Jailbreak is an action flick quite unlike even those that share its basic plot, and that's always a neat discovery.
Fashionista
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Roughly a minute or so into Fashionista, I could feel my eyes start to roll as the opening credits not only cut to a similarly-framed shot of Amanda Fuller's April with a different outfit for each new name put up, but the soundtrack changed as well (my notes say something along the lines of "oh, this is just precious!"). I works, I suppose, as shock therapy to get the audience used to the way director Simon Rumley puts his movie together, taking a lot of distinct moments and putting them next to each other without obvious transitions and trusting that the audience will see the through-line even on the first time through.
It works, mostly; the big idea at the center, how April's creative fashion sense comes across as fun and cool and hides a tendency toward hoarding and addiction, is kind of fascinating. Lots of movies link creativity and addiction or mental illness in a way that positions the latter as the necessary side-effect of the former, because it's tough for an artist to say that the way that a person expresses himself or herself may be hurting that person or those he or she cares about. Fuller is really great at bringing this out - as much as she's a fun character at the start, before a yuppie monster pulls her into the dark side of memorable attire, she always hits the notes which highlight her troubles with self-image and compulsion; she's good enough to overshadow the supporting characters who will have a big effect on her actions, although not by too much.
Rumley's script does get a little too cute at times as it moves toward the end, not just when it reveals that certain incongruous scenes throughout the movie have been part of a metaphor for reinvention that maybe doesn't necessarily serve our understanding of April as well as it could, but as the more monstrous activities of her new lover come to light. It's not that they can't go big, but they don't seem to fit quite as well as, say, the similar ending of Most Beautiful Island.
Bunches of guests, though, with an unexpectedly packed house for Attraction because the preceding short was from Quebec. I kind of hoped it would clear out a bit after that, give me a little more breathing room, but that didn't happen. Good for them!
Next up were Toshihisa Yokoshima and Park Hyemi, directors of "Cocolors" and "Scarecrow Island", respectively, here seen as if consulting with their translators because that was the best picture I got where the faces weren't right behind their microphone stands. The director of the third short in the collection sent a video greeting, so that's a lot of people really happy to be in Fantasia. Heck, after the Q&A, Yokoshima set up a desk in the lobby and autographed a souvenir for everyone who came.
I didn't get a picture of Louisa Phung when she introduced her film before Jailbreak, but she was pretty enthusiastic and animated, joking about how she was from Vancouver, where DC-based action projects are half their work, so this film was Canadian content, on top of getting another female and Asian filmmaker into the lineup, to applause. She also ran up to get a selfie with the audience, saying she didn't get a chance to do it the first time because that was justifiably more about Jailbreak with those filmmakers in town from Cambodia, which only made sense.
Last up, Simon Rumley (c) and Amanda Fuller (r) in town to support Fashionista, which Rumley said started off being much more about consumerism than addiction, but that script eventually got scrapped and changed for the better. Fuller talked about how costuming went amazingly well, considering she had something like a hundred outfits in a 108-minute movie, and they were pulling liberally from both her own wardrobe and that of the costume designer, who had a very different body type but somehow still got stuff to fit. At the end, they joked about how it took Rumley roughly ten seconds to decide what he was going to wear to the screening and Fuller, well, somewhat longer.
Also, I bet the Q&A went on for twice as long at Fantastic Fest despite likely having fewer questions because there would have been a standing ovation every time Rumley said he liked Austin. Part of that was praising the friend whose apartment they were able to use to shoot the movie, as an offshoot of someone in the audience asking about the great movie posters you see in the background, although I suspect I would have framed the question in terms of "what's up with all the Nazi stuff on those posters".
Sunday is for Geek Girls, Mumon: The Land of Stealth, Bushwick, and Mayhem. Bad Genius is pretty great, Extraordinary Mission has some good action, but they'll have already started by the time this is posted.
"Past and Future Kings"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Fantastique Week-Ends, DCP)
At half an hour long, "Past & Future Kings" is kind of long for a short but still not quite long enough for the breadth of its ambition - its long fast-forward, in which a would-be king (Jason Cavalier) convinces the mage (Elias Varoutsos) bound to his new crown to show him his future, is all major events but very little motivating him to get from one spot to another. It's fine as things start - at that point, the film is drawing on pseudo-Arthurian themes, and you just kind of expect that a noble knight will become a compromised king with enemies in his court, because that's the natural way of things, but as things become more fantastical, it feels like "that's how these stories work" is covering a lot more ground. By the time we get to the end, there's a twist or two, but it seems like a lot of time but not a lot of work to get there, story-wise.
The writing may presume things, but the execution is impressively hard-working, putting Cavalier in a lot of different scenarios, all of which look fairly good, including fine action choreography at times when it calls for that. Though the film starts with people saying "look at all this carnage" in a way that calls attention to how the filmmakers really couldn't manage a huge medieval army with their resources, the later, tighter scenes work quite well. Cavalier is chameleonic enough to make his multiple iterations of the same character work, and Varoutsos seems to be having a great time as the mage who, seeing the future, is perhaps not terribly interested in his age's stuffy formality.
Prityazhenie (Attraction)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It's something of a pleasant surprise that Attraction is more of a Russian take on The Day the Earth Stood Still than War of the Worlds or Independence Day, although I suspect that few looked at The Day the Earth Stood Still and thought that the movie needed more dumb teenagers, although it's possible. It makes the constantly changing impulses a bit more believable, at least.
That is where the movie tends to fall over, as its heroine Yulia actually manages to grab hold of the movie once it had settled on her being basically decent and wanting to help, albeit in a somewhat entitled way (she is the type that rebels against her military father while still being comfortable throwing his weight around) but takes a long time selling her into that role, and in the meantime tends to change character direction for everybody at the drop off a hat. It's also a funny thing that how weak and clichéd much of the characterization is (and the focus on the teenage characters) manages to undermine one of the film's more interesting choices, where the military folks who maybe have some idea how well attacking a technologically superior opponent would go tend to be cautious while the civilian authorities are hotheads. It's just that the movie as a whole is not clever enough for the audience to expect subversion there.
This apparently got a big Imax release in Russia, although it probably wouldn't make the cut elsewhere; it's got some nice design, and looks nice when things are holding still, but action often looks like a video game, weightless and not really pay off the world around it.
"Valley of the White Birds"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)
Quite the beautiful animated fantasy from Cloud Yang and Wolf Smoke Studio, "Valley of the White Birds" shows a knack for using design to indicate character early on, as the young man seen moving through the woods is visually closed off by robes that cover half his face and swallow his arms, hair in a tight bun and eyes piercing, a complete contrast to the older man he meets, round and shaggy, approaching the white birds of the title with friendship while the birds turn to dried leaves in the younger man's hands.
It's a nifty bit of visual characterization that immediately makes "Valley" more impressive than the simple fantasy about a man confronting some sort of spirit in combat that it could have been; combine what we infer about this guy with his visions of a younger, more open version of himself as the characters wander an abandoned village, decay accelerating as the birds whither at his touch,, and the obvious question is how misguided his quest may be, though he doesn't read as the villain. It's great characterization matched by impressive animation that blends a traditional look with the occasional subtle three-dimensional effect, all on top of a nice, atmospheric soundtrack.
"Scarecrow Island"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)
Park Hye-mi's follow-up to Crimson Island is a bit smaller in scale both for being a short and in its basic story, though it builds a fairly full world in its introduction, quickly getting the audience up to speed about how an atomic war 180 years ago left the bulk of the world uninhabitable and full of mutants, which the island-based survivors attempt to eradicate on bombing missions - at least, until the narrator discovers an island with green vegetation that seems to be inhabited by an old woman who has built herself scarecrows for company, leading him to start dropping supplies.
Park tells a nifty little story here, using the playful arrangements of the scarecrows and how the pilot sneaks around to find discarded clothing to contrast the propaganda images and unnerving indications that the "monsters" being bombed may not be far from human on the plane's screens, making it feel like a small act of rebellion that could potentially lead to more, especially when the voice-over indicates that he is becoming more interested than this than his actual job. I like the design for the hero, too, freckled and young even if his flight suit doesn't quite seem too large for him.
I still must admit that the design and the present-day voice-work had me thinking he was a girl at first, especially since some of the other narration seemed to be a different, more masculine-sounding voice. I suspect the confusion was mostly on my part, although I'd be a little interested in whether Park has more story to fill out the gap.
"Cocolors"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)
The main event of this shorts triple-feature is pretty terrific, mostly taking place in a busy underground city where the population has retreated after a cataclysm, although the contamination in the air is still so dangerous that you never see the people without their helmets and environmental protection suits. It is, to us looking in, a supremely isolating way to live, especially as the lighting and reflection often makes the helmets look like giant eyes, but the people in the movie don't seem to think so - those suits are what they need to live, there's plenty of customization so you can tell who is who, and on festival days, they put on skeletal designs with phosphorescent paint.
It's a haunting world that feels familiar through the efforts of director Toshihisa Yokoshima and the Kamikaze Douga team, using CGI to give the underground city a busy appearance lit by dozens of sources, not quite cheery compared to the hellish surface we see once some characters start going on salvage missions, but home enough that the audience can feel it dying as those lights slowly become fewer and the crowd scenes less crowded. There are twists to it as the world distorts in nightmares as the characters we meet as kids - pushy Shu, meek Aki, and sickly mute Fuyu - become adults and find that this means losing people.
And yet, amid all that, there's something not quite hopeful, but powerful in its truth as Fuyu develops into an artist, rediscovering printing so that his drawings can be preserved, and the rest of the community seems to instinctively know that this is important. There would usually be a character who characterizes the ailing runt as a drain on their resources, but there seems to be a tacit understanding that getting Fuyu colored rocks with which to make paints is a useful part of the salvage missions, and a scene of his art being destroyed in a fit of anger is among the most frightening despite more obviously horrific events. It's not necessarily what the movie is about - the main beats at the end are about being committed to your friends even if there's a barrier of abstraction between you - but that it's an important part of the film gives it an extra level that makes it all the more impressive.
Stealth&Silence: DC Comic Fan Film
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Action!, Blu-ray)
Writer/director Louisa Phung joked before the film about the various levels of nerdery you would have to be to catch certain references, and I kind of wonder at what level you're saying "this seems more like a Huntress story than a Catwoman story" is. Probably "you're a big giant nerd but also kind of an ass". Hopefully noting that I and the rest of the theater perked up at the appearance of a character who was obviously Cassandra Cain and wondering why DC seems to have no idea how to use a character that people really like a lot.
That aside, it's a fun little fan film with some impressive action, really feeling like it's cutting loose when the characters get to start throwing down; the various screen fighters know their stuff. It's also when the DC stuff starts become less like Easter egg material and more like things the filmmakers genuinely like - they made a pretty good Black Mask prop, for instance.
Jailbreak
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Action!, DCP)
Like a lot of action movies from places that really don't have that sort of industry, Jailbreak shows that there are a lot of folks in Cambodia who know some martial arts and aren't particularly concerned with the safety standards other places have in place. Whether it will translate into something that lasts or not, time will tell, but this first foray into it is a high-energy hoot.
It's not exactly a lot but action; once things get started, the movie is basically one brawl after another, as the cops transferring gangster "Playboy" into a maximum-security prison are constantly outnumbered by less-skilled but more numerous prisoners, and they just keep going, knocking each other around, throwing the occasional knife into it, and every once in a while going for a one-on-one with a featured heavy. It's not the detailed, obviously creative choreography you'd see from Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen, but it's busy and exciting without overloading.
And sometimes, the fact that there aren't a whole lot of established rules here work in their favor. Sure, it's easy enough to snort at the all-female gang that goes in for more spike heel/push-up/leather pants combos than really makes sense for their work, but a lot of it plays as enthusiastic pulp rather than our exploitation. Plus, the camera work is kind of nuts, weaving in and out of fights, sometimes being bowled over and having to right itself, but eventually feeling like it's being improvised well. Eventually, they'll probably figure out how everyone else does things, and their best talent will get poached by Hollywood or China, but for now, Jailbreak is an action flick quite unlike even those that share its basic plot, and that's always a neat discovery.
Fashionista
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Roughly a minute or so into Fashionista, I could feel my eyes start to roll as the opening credits not only cut to a similarly-framed shot of Amanda Fuller's April with a different outfit for each new name put up, but the soundtrack changed as well (my notes say something along the lines of "oh, this is just precious!"). I works, I suppose, as shock therapy to get the audience used to the way director Simon Rumley puts his movie together, taking a lot of distinct moments and putting them next to each other without obvious transitions and trusting that the audience will see the through-line even on the first time through.
It works, mostly; the big idea at the center, how April's creative fashion sense comes across as fun and cool and hides a tendency toward hoarding and addiction, is kind of fascinating. Lots of movies link creativity and addiction or mental illness in a way that positions the latter as the necessary side-effect of the former, because it's tough for an artist to say that the way that a person expresses himself or herself may be hurting that person or those he or she cares about. Fuller is really great at bringing this out - as much as she's a fun character at the start, before a yuppie monster pulls her into the dark side of memorable attire, she always hits the notes which highlight her troubles with self-image and compulsion; she's good enough to overshadow the supporting characters who will have a big effect on her actions, although not by too much.
Rumley's script does get a little too cute at times as it moves toward the end, not just when it reveals that certain incongruous scenes throughout the movie have been part of a metaphor for reinvention that maybe doesn't necessarily serve our understanding of April as well as it could, but as the more monstrous activities of her new lover come to light. It's not that they can't go big, but they don't seem to fit quite as well as, say, the similar ending of Most Beautiful Island.
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