I didn't actually have to move this review up out of order because it was the next thing to come out in theaters - Hundreds of Beavers was next on my list of Fantasia reviews - but finishing the Film Rolls is taking longer than expected, so I'm just going to put this first entry in the next post up right now. Hundreds of Beavers is at the Somerville Theatre this weekend - including a midnight show in the big room on Saturday that I'm sure will be a blast if a bunch of people show up.
Anyway: I'll probably delete this and replace it with something that includes everything else I saw in Montreal on 31 July 2023 (good lord!) sometime in the next week, maybe updated a little with thoughts from a second viewing, but for now - Hundreds of Beavers is at the Somerville Theatre this weekend. It's probably the most purely hilarious movie you'll see all year. Buy tickets, and support it!
Hundreds of Beavers
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Underground, DCP)
When I saw this at Fantasia, I immediately thought that I wanted a major studio to pick this up and use it to fill some Covid/strike-related holes in their schedule with a big flashy, release, just so that every major movie critic in America would have to write a half-dozen paragraphs like this is some kind of sensible movie. Of course, it wound up going the self-distributed route, because large companie are by and large run by cowards, but no matter how you see it, it's a delightfully bonkers live-action cartoon that absolutely commits to the bit.
Said bit is the misadventures of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), who is drinking all much as much applejack as he is serving fur-trappers in the 19th Century upper midwest, only to have everything fall apart when beavers gnawing at logs cause a snowball effect that wipes out his house, business, and everything, forcing him to get into beaver trapping himself, both for funds and revenge! Unfortunately, he is not very bright, and the beavers and other woodland creatures are likely not just smarter, but have numbers on their side.
When director Mike Cheslik and his friends set out to make a live-action cartoon, they don't mess around - the beavers, dogs, raccoons, wabbits, etc., are all folks in suits, the characters mainly communicate through pantomime and body language, and the mostly-white background of snowy, overcast Wisconsin means that they can fill it with simple props and effects that often place it right on the edge of the uncanny valley, using that unreality in a way that lets the audience now that any sort of ridiculous mayhem might happen at any second. It's clearly done on a budget, which isn't to say cheap: Cheslik has a very good idea of where things need to be perfect and where you just need to know they're crazy instead of lazy.
It's the sort of thing that could probably wear an audience out quickly, reminding them that there's a reason most cartoons run about five or ten minutes while this hits the hundred mark. It is, fortunately, able to change things up every once in a while; it may be almost 100% pure slapstick, but it occasionally takes a break from Looney Tunes to do Buster Keaton, and then for a while the gag is basically playing things out like a Super Nintendo game. It's all more or less of a piece but at least feels like it's switching gears every once in a while, rather than seeing just how much of the exact same thing different members of the audience can endure. And, thankfully, the jokes are good, from the opening musical number to the dogs playing poker to the giant gaudy bits of slapstick that had me writing things like "beaver Voltron!" in my notebook.
It somehow works, keeping the energy level up in a way the team's Lake Michigan Monster never quite managed for me, in part because it's never arch. It just goes for the best joke available every minute or so, hits far more often than not, and never forgets that doing the silly thing is almost always funnier than winking at the audience about what a silly thing they're doing. .
Showing posts with label Fantasia 2023. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasia 2023. Show all posts
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Saturday, January 13, 2024
Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.11: "Innermost", Motherland, "Architect A", The Concierge, Tokyo Revengers 2 - Part 2, "The Influencer", and Late Night with the Devil.
Huh, did the Tokyo Revengers guys go home after part 2.1? I have no photos or notes from a Q&A. Weird!
I did get pictures of some guests from Japan, with The Concierge director Yoshimi Itazu and character designer Chie Morita between the hosts. Amazingly, their film showed up at the festival three months coming out in Japan, and I'm hoping it does pretty well. It's a cute little movie and everybody seems to have had a good time making it.
The makers of Late Night with the Devil didn't come from Australia, but the folks who made the short before it, "The Influencer", did, with director Lael Rogers and several members of the cast & crew.
It was a relatively short day for a weekend - usually there's something early - so I could use the morning to rest up. Next up: Hundreds of Beavers, What You Wish For, Kurayukaba, People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind, and #Manhole.
"Innermost"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)
Maing Caochong just mashes a whole bunch of my favorite things together in his short, being a stop-motion post-apocalyptic sci-fi martial-arts adventure, which is not necessarily a guarantee that I'll love something, but this is a ton of fun. Maing and his crew build a bunch of distinctive fighters with fun weapons and fighting styles. It feels like folks playing with their custom action-figures, throwing them all together and imagining a crazy story.
It's dialogue-free, which often has the odd effect of the story leaning heavily on familiar tropes so that a viewer will quickly recognize the shape of it, especially since the characters tend to be stoic even beyond fixed expressions, and it still can feel like one has missed something that's meant to give the film a little more weight than "cool!" on occasion. Mostly, it strikes a good balance between implying lore and putting too much weight on the story that really isn't why you're watching.
And the stuff you did come for is pretty spiffy, with neat choreography that uses the sci-fi stuff well, and the world-building is full of cool environments and kind of nasty body horror, as transplant organs are apparently both much-needed and hard to come by I'd love to see Maing do more in this vein.
Eommaui Ttang (Mother Land)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)
A lot of Mother Land's story is familiar - indigenous people maintaining a traditional way of life despite encroachment, a quest to gain the favor of a creature of myth, an idiot tag-along kid brother. Add a cute animal and it ticks a lot of boxes. It does well by them, though, and it's the sort of animation where the filmmakers recognize how precious every second is and squeeze all they can out of each.
It follows a family of Yates, nomadic reindeer hunters of Siberia - father Tokchya (voice of Kang Gil-woo), mother Shoora (voice of Kim Yu-Eun), daughter Krisha (voice of Lee Yun-ji), son Kelyon, and grandmother/shaman (voice of Lee Yong-nyeo) - who find themselves imperiled when Shoora is injured after their tent collapses. Tokchya opts to make his way to the city to find medicine, while Krisha and her baby reindeer Seradeto disobey him to seek the "Master of the Forest", a legendary and all-powerful red bear. Kelyon inevitably tags along, but there are others looking for this beast: Soviet officer Vladimir (voice of Lee Gwan-mok) and Yates hunter Bazaq (voice of Song Cheol-ho) also seek the bear, with Vladimir feeling that this will help solidify the USSR's control of the area.
It's a simple-seeming story but writer/director Park Jae-beom tells it well, taking a child's point of view and presenting things in uncomplicated fashion without ever feeling like the story is being over-simplified. As much as Krisha's quest is in many ways as straightforward as possible ("follow Polaris") and the pieces are familiar, Park makes the hardships clear and presents the various points of view in such a way that young viewers can see what drives each character. Though often tending toward the spiritual, Park is restrained with his use of the supernatural for much of the film, and even when the story does become more fantastical, magic is presented as being both as fragile and powerful as nature when faced with humanity's very focused science and technology.
Park animates his film using stop-motion, and a thing I like about the medium is that style often comes about as a problem-solving necessity, emerging in different ways as various animators solve the problem of building these characters so they can emote and talk. Here, there's a big seam across the face, which on the one hand marks them as artificial but also suggests the cracking and weathering that even children will endure in the tundra, as well as some stoicism. I wonder if this crew would design their puppets differently for a different setting.
The film is generally out together well, with voice acting that mostly sounds like kids who are smart enough to know their world is dangerous but childishly brave regardless of that and adults with personality despite being quietly capable. The animation looks great, even things like an unstable swamp that, when you think about it, are likely tricky, while things like the smoke belched by Vladimir's armored truck seem especially unnatural. The empty tundra provides scale and it getting busier toward the end is enjoyably striking.
As is often the case with movies in this medium, Mother Land is in many ways something very familiar produced in a manner that makes it utterly unique. It's well worth checking out for fans of the medium and would probably do very well if someone like GKids picks it up and does a quality English dub.
"Architect A"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)
Lee Jonghoon plays with a bunch of really delightful concepts here - the home as the representation of one's life, building the new upon the remains of the old, ultimately being unable to abandon one's calling and how, ultimately, something like a house will inevitably be drawn from both the commissioner and the builder. At least, that's why I get out of this story about an architect who is called out of retirement to build a new house for an old lady who is finding her last home after a big, adventurous life, insisting upon the titular Architect A, though he is now working as a delivery man after the loss of his wife.
There's a nifty set of contrasts here, as Lee places in A in a fantastic world, where buildings are already representational of their purpose, which means that what is shown both as we dig into the characters' memories (in this world, an important part of planning construction) and when A finally builds the dream house must be truly spectacular, and it is, especially since Lee doesn't opt to change styles or depict an alternate environment as clearly digital. The characters, meanwhile, are nicely understated, designed to be part of their world in such a way as to treat it as normal without seeming blasé. A, especially, is impressively likable but sad, clearly less than he could be but not a walking dark cloud.
The film goes by at a comfortable pace, too, never seeming small nor rushed but never leaving the audience taking its visual wonders for granted even after 25 minutes, even as the filmmakers opts to ground things a bit. It's a careful balancing act that makes this vilm a real delight.
Hokkyoku Hyakkaten no Concierge San (The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store aka The Concierge)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, DCP)
The Concierge is a a quickly-watched movie that can easily break down into even smaller segments, presumably ideal for a small child up for some cute anmals and gentle slapstick but maybe not up for a terribly complex story. It shouldn't frustrated adults too terribly much, though, although it is potentially one that kids will watch on loop, at which point all bets are off, though the first few times should strike parents as cute and plenty enjoyable.
It centers around the sort of old-fashioned department store that not only has everything, from casual clothing to top-class jewelry, with restaurants, cafés, and uniformed staff who can answer specialized questions or simply help one find the proper department in the sprawling maze. Akino (voice of Natsumi Kawaida), whom the audience meets on her first day of work, is one who does the latter, a young woman eager to help but easily intimidated and overwhelmed. Making Hokkyoku Department Store even stranger is that despite its mostly-human staff, it caters the extinct animals, which means Aiko must help a sea mink model find a gift for her down to earth father (and vice versa) without their seeing each other, or a Japanese fox nervous about proposing to his girlfriend, on top of the store having to occasionally accomodate customers from rodents to mammoths.
A adult or older child may ask how all this works - does this take place in some sort of afterlife limbo, or are we to presume that anthropomorphic creatures in funny-animal world die out at the same time they do on Earth (dark!). Indeed, there's a moment in the middle of The Concierge where one character basically points out that this whole situation is messed up, since these animals going extinct and the rise of department stores are linked to the same rise in consumerism, and then the whole movie basically shrugs and goes "anyway..." Weird, right?
Anyway... Once you get past that (and the kids for whom it's made probably won't worry too much about this, even with it explicitly brought up), It's a really charming little movie that does a nice job of taking what were probably one-off stories in the manga and building a narrative out of them, spending enough time on one thing or another to give the movie an enjoyably episodic feel rather than jumping back and forth, though things eventually come together in satisfying ways. It's also something that is deliberately open-ended enough that kids can continue imagining and making up new stories after the movie ends, whether about Akio, her human co-workers, the various animals she meets, or any of the other extinct creatures in the background or that they otherwise learn about.
It's also downright entertaining. The physical comedy is a delight, the characters are mostly very nice, with Mr. Elulu (voice of Takeo Otsuka), the kindly member of senior management who would rather ask Akino for a firm push with her foot so that he can slide where he was going on his stomach via thae waxed floors than make her feel bad about clumsily knocking him over (even if she does mistake him for a penguin). Visually, it will likely remind American audiences of Richard Scarry and other children's books more than much of the manga and anime that reaches these shores. It is incredibly fun to look at, with a whimsical score to boot.
I'm not sure how I would go about giving a copy of this to my three-year-old nephew, now that his family no longer has something that plays discs hooked to their television. I'd like to try, though - it's a genuine delight worth sharing.
Tokyo ribenjazu 2: Chi no Haroin hen - Kessen (Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween - Decisive Battle)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
The funny thing about splitting the "Bloody Halloween" arc of the Tokyo Revengers manga into two 90-minute movies is that I can easily imagine them not necessarily being edited into one when they show up in American theaters for midweek Fathom Events-type screenings, but maybe being presented as a double feature. It probably plays well that way, too, as the first ended on the sort of cliffhanger that is a great spot for an intermission but doesn't play as the climax for what came before.
What came before is fairly convoluted - .after seeing the girl he'd somehow time-traveled back ten ten years to save killed in a car bomb, well-intentioned dork Takamichi (Takumi Kitamura) intends to prevent the gang of mostly-harmless brawlers he'd idolized from becoming the bona-fide criminal organization they are in the present. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who know what happened to cause this are dead, and Takomichi only remembers the events of the original timeline. So he returns to the past, only knowing that his idol Mikey (Ryo Yoshizawa) was killed in a massive rumble on Halloween, and that Mikey's best friend Baji (Kento Nagayama), who defected to another gang with the guilt-ridden Izaki, and Tetta Kisaki (Shotaro Mamiya), the leader of the present-day group.
I don't know that what anybody in this movie does makes any sense at all, but then, these guys all get hit in the head a lot.
Okay, that's not entirely true, but this really isn't complicated enough to be two movies, especially considering that the hero, who has traveled back in time to have an effect on the past, really doesn't wind up actually doing much of anything that would have a clear effect on the future, which could be an interesting story, with his small but well-intentioned actions at the margins having a big effect positive or negative, depending how important the fact that he's a dimwit who doesn't really know what's going on is, but screenwriter Izumi Takahashi and director Rsutomu Hanabusa don't particularly emphasize that. There's a fair story of loyalty and brotherhood here, but it's competing for time with the one that actually involves the nominal protagonist, and is still very reliant on dumb-guy logic.
Of course, this isn't really a time-travel story at heart so much as it's a street-fighting story, and the second half is anchored by the "Bloody Halloween" brawl that's been teased since the beginning, and it's kind of worth waiting two movies for: It's big, but also perfectly fitted to the junkyard environment where it takes place so that it's swarming with people but giving them room to move and make big swings; the piles of junk give them a little terrain to work with and corners to hide in, and the fact that it's a brawl means that the cast letting their characters' big, deranged, not-too-bright personalities fly feels more natural. Sure, these guys are going to be like this all the time anyway, but the testosterone overdose works better in this context.
It's just enough for the film to send the audience out on a high and set a jumping-off point for the next arc of the manga to be adapted. Maybe that will be the one where they do something with how Kisaki has to also be time-traveling, right, even though they don't even seem to be hinting at it. Anyway, it's fun enough, although I imagine that the various versions of this franchise must have inspired a whole ton of slash fan fiction which probably makes a lot more sense.
"The Influencer"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
"The Influencer" is listed as "horror", because it technically does horror-movie things and likely feels like a horror movie on the page, but is so banter-y and good at zippy comedy in the first stretch that when it does take a turn for the violent and gross, it almost feels like a parody of movies that start comedic and jump genres. The horror material isn't bad, at all, so much as the start of the movie being good enough to resist the switch.
And that's kind of impressive, because the start is the sort of fast-paced, overlapping dialogue that I can find hard to parse, while the Instagram influencer material that kind of bounces off me because I have more or less curated my internet experience to avoid such things by chance but often still sense that the spoofs are too broad. It's got an entertaining, chatty dynamic that still plays these characters as shallow and awful in a familiar way that doesn't quite push one away, and the switch to horror is just off-putting that even when one doesn't really feel like the genre is doing a complete swerve, there's a good, uncertain sense of not knowing just where writer/director Lael Rogers is going with it.
It's often the case that one looks at a short that works this well and say one would like to see more, but truth be told, ten minutes is the right length and it would die going longer. Still, if director Lael Rogers wants to do something longer, I'm interested to see what it is.
Late Night with the Devil
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Late Night with the Devil is a minor miracle of a movie: A dead-on recreation of something kind of silly that starts out looking like high-concept parody but excels because nearly every character is not just very funny, but also fits into the horror-story and drama parts of the movie seamlessly. That's a thing that not a lot of horror-comedies manage, usually having one side undercut the other, and fitting it into note-perfect pastiche is almost showing off.
The film gives us Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) as a former disc jockey who in the 1970s became the host of UBC's "Night Owl", a late-night talk that for a white rivaled that of Johnny Carson, though he spiraled between questions about his involvement in a mysterious mens-only club ("The Grove") and the loss of his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) in 1976, and was facing cancellation a year later. For Halloween, he's doing a special live show, as he and sidekick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) welcome illusionist and skeptic Carmichael Hunt (Ian Bliss), traveling medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), psychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), and her ward, Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli), the sole survivor of her father's Church of Abraxas cult, said to have been possessed and the subject of June's book Conversations with the Devil. Putting them all on stage together should make for great television. But is Jack more motivated to save his show or contact his wife, and how much of what he's doing is real?
Brothers Cameron & Colin Cairnes play with that sense of reality, nesting the events a couple layers deep, as Late Night is presented as recovered footage of the fateful broadcast that has had some documentary material prepended and also shows the camera continuing to run during commercial breaks, with the whole thing playing like an exposé from the 1990s even as the main footage is a dead-on recreation of the mid-1970s. It's impressive just how straight they play it, though - for all that the guests map to common types from the era (or specific people) and the set features just the right sort of garish coloring, the film never points and laughs. It works in part because there were all these different sorts of fascination with the paranormal and occult at the time. The whole thing is kind of silly in retrospect, but was done sincerely.
The other thing that works is that David Dastmalchian is really terrific here, which isn't necessarily surprising - he's been a reliable presence giving genre films a little more than expected for a decade, but often in the sort of supporting role where that effort makes things smoother rather than standing out. Here, though, he's always got a camera pointed at him, and captures this really terrific spot where jack's intentions are believably muddled, more and more nervous about how what is going on may actually work once he's in it, the sort of antihero this genre thrives on but seldom offers its audience. He and Laura Gordon play off each other especially well; there's a spark of attraction there and also seemingly-complementary bits of ambition that develop friction as the broadcast goes on; they're genuinely interesting characters who come across as having more to them than what the story needs.
I don't necessarily love the finale completely, but that is probably down to my personal preferences for people being accused of possession over actual supernatural entities than any failure of execution. And the Cairnes brothers do execute very well, leaning into the period trappings to make what happens feel more real because one's brain is thinking in terms of what live television could do in 1977 rather than what a movie can do 45 years later, making the violence nasty and indiscriminate, and always linking the supernatural strongly enough to something in Jack's psyche that the audience can feel the connection to what's going on even if it could all be in his head.
It makes for a heck of a ride, and it's a rare horror movie that transcends its gimmick the way this one does without abandoning it.
It was a relatively short day for a weekend - usually there's something early - so I could use the morning to rest up. Next up: Hundreds of Beavers, What You Wish For, Kurayukaba, People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind, and #Manhole.
"Innermost"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)
Maing Caochong just mashes a whole bunch of my favorite things together in his short, being a stop-motion post-apocalyptic sci-fi martial-arts adventure, which is not necessarily a guarantee that I'll love something, but this is a ton of fun. Maing and his crew build a bunch of distinctive fighters with fun weapons and fighting styles. It feels like folks playing with their custom action-figures, throwing them all together and imagining a crazy story.
It's dialogue-free, which often has the odd effect of the story leaning heavily on familiar tropes so that a viewer will quickly recognize the shape of it, especially since the characters tend to be stoic even beyond fixed expressions, and it still can feel like one has missed something that's meant to give the film a little more weight than "cool!" on occasion. Mostly, it strikes a good balance between implying lore and putting too much weight on the story that really isn't why you're watching.
And the stuff you did come for is pretty spiffy, with neat choreography that uses the sci-fi stuff well, and the world-building is full of cool environments and kind of nasty body horror, as transplant organs are apparently both much-needed and hard to come by I'd love to see Maing do more in this vein.
Eommaui Ttang (Mother Land)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)
A lot of Mother Land's story is familiar - indigenous people maintaining a traditional way of life despite encroachment, a quest to gain the favor of a creature of myth, an idiot tag-along kid brother. Add a cute animal and it ticks a lot of boxes. It does well by them, though, and it's the sort of animation where the filmmakers recognize how precious every second is and squeeze all they can out of each.
It follows a family of Yates, nomadic reindeer hunters of Siberia - father Tokchya (voice of Kang Gil-woo), mother Shoora (voice of Kim Yu-Eun), daughter Krisha (voice of Lee Yun-ji), son Kelyon, and grandmother/shaman (voice of Lee Yong-nyeo) - who find themselves imperiled when Shoora is injured after their tent collapses. Tokchya opts to make his way to the city to find medicine, while Krisha and her baby reindeer Seradeto disobey him to seek the "Master of the Forest", a legendary and all-powerful red bear. Kelyon inevitably tags along, but there are others looking for this beast: Soviet officer Vladimir (voice of Lee Gwan-mok) and Yates hunter Bazaq (voice of Song Cheol-ho) also seek the bear, with Vladimir feeling that this will help solidify the USSR's control of the area.
It's a simple-seeming story but writer/director Park Jae-beom tells it well, taking a child's point of view and presenting things in uncomplicated fashion without ever feeling like the story is being over-simplified. As much as Krisha's quest is in many ways as straightforward as possible ("follow Polaris") and the pieces are familiar, Park makes the hardships clear and presents the various points of view in such a way that young viewers can see what drives each character. Though often tending toward the spiritual, Park is restrained with his use of the supernatural for much of the film, and even when the story does become more fantastical, magic is presented as being both as fragile and powerful as nature when faced with humanity's very focused science and technology.
Park animates his film using stop-motion, and a thing I like about the medium is that style often comes about as a problem-solving necessity, emerging in different ways as various animators solve the problem of building these characters so they can emote and talk. Here, there's a big seam across the face, which on the one hand marks them as artificial but also suggests the cracking and weathering that even children will endure in the tundra, as well as some stoicism. I wonder if this crew would design their puppets differently for a different setting.
The film is generally out together well, with voice acting that mostly sounds like kids who are smart enough to know their world is dangerous but childishly brave regardless of that and adults with personality despite being quietly capable. The animation looks great, even things like an unstable swamp that, when you think about it, are likely tricky, while things like the smoke belched by Vladimir's armored truck seem especially unnatural. The empty tundra provides scale and it getting busier toward the end is enjoyably striking.
As is often the case with movies in this medium, Mother Land is in many ways something very familiar produced in a manner that makes it utterly unique. It's well worth checking out for fans of the medium and would probably do very well if someone like GKids picks it up and does a quality English dub.
"Architect A"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)
Lee Jonghoon plays with a bunch of really delightful concepts here - the home as the representation of one's life, building the new upon the remains of the old, ultimately being unable to abandon one's calling and how, ultimately, something like a house will inevitably be drawn from both the commissioner and the builder. At least, that's why I get out of this story about an architect who is called out of retirement to build a new house for an old lady who is finding her last home after a big, adventurous life, insisting upon the titular Architect A, though he is now working as a delivery man after the loss of his wife.
There's a nifty set of contrasts here, as Lee places in A in a fantastic world, where buildings are already representational of their purpose, which means that what is shown both as we dig into the characters' memories (in this world, an important part of planning construction) and when A finally builds the dream house must be truly spectacular, and it is, especially since Lee doesn't opt to change styles or depict an alternate environment as clearly digital. The characters, meanwhile, are nicely understated, designed to be part of their world in such a way as to treat it as normal without seeming blasé. A, especially, is impressively likable but sad, clearly less than he could be but not a walking dark cloud.
The film goes by at a comfortable pace, too, never seeming small nor rushed but never leaving the audience taking its visual wonders for granted even after 25 minutes, even as the filmmakers opts to ground things a bit. It's a careful balancing act that makes this vilm a real delight.
Hokkyoku Hyakkaten no Concierge San (The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store aka The Concierge)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, DCP)
The Concierge is a a quickly-watched movie that can easily break down into even smaller segments, presumably ideal for a small child up for some cute anmals and gentle slapstick but maybe not up for a terribly complex story. It shouldn't frustrated adults too terribly much, though, although it is potentially one that kids will watch on loop, at which point all bets are off, though the first few times should strike parents as cute and plenty enjoyable.
It centers around the sort of old-fashioned department store that not only has everything, from casual clothing to top-class jewelry, with restaurants, cafés, and uniformed staff who can answer specialized questions or simply help one find the proper department in the sprawling maze. Akino (voice of Natsumi Kawaida), whom the audience meets on her first day of work, is one who does the latter, a young woman eager to help but easily intimidated and overwhelmed. Making Hokkyoku Department Store even stranger is that despite its mostly-human staff, it caters the extinct animals, which means Aiko must help a sea mink model find a gift for her down to earth father (and vice versa) without their seeing each other, or a Japanese fox nervous about proposing to his girlfriend, on top of the store having to occasionally accomodate customers from rodents to mammoths.
A adult or older child may ask how all this works - does this take place in some sort of afterlife limbo, or are we to presume that anthropomorphic creatures in funny-animal world die out at the same time they do on Earth (dark!). Indeed, there's a moment in the middle of The Concierge where one character basically points out that this whole situation is messed up, since these animals going extinct and the rise of department stores are linked to the same rise in consumerism, and then the whole movie basically shrugs and goes "anyway..." Weird, right?
Anyway... Once you get past that (and the kids for whom it's made probably won't worry too much about this, even with it explicitly brought up), It's a really charming little movie that does a nice job of taking what were probably one-off stories in the manga and building a narrative out of them, spending enough time on one thing or another to give the movie an enjoyably episodic feel rather than jumping back and forth, though things eventually come together in satisfying ways. It's also something that is deliberately open-ended enough that kids can continue imagining and making up new stories after the movie ends, whether about Akio, her human co-workers, the various animals she meets, or any of the other extinct creatures in the background or that they otherwise learn about.
It's also downright entertaining. The physical comedy is a delight, the characters are mostly very nice, with Mr. Elulu (voice of Takeo Otsuka), the kindly member of senior management who would rather ask Akino for a firm push with her foot so that he can slide where he was going on his stomach via thae waxed floors than make her feel bad about clumsily knocking him over (even if she does mistake him for a penguin). Visually, it will likely remind American audiences of Richard Scarry and other children's books more than much of the manga and anime that reaches these shores. It is incredibly fun to look at, with a whimsical score to boot.
I'm not sure how I would go about giving a copy of this to my three-year-old nephew, now that his family no longer has something that plays discs hooked to their television. I'd like to try, though - it's a genuine delight worth sharing.
Tokyo ribenjazu 2: Chi no Haroin hen - Kessen (Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween - Decisive Battle)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
The funny thing about splitting the "Bloody Halloween" arc of the Tokyo Revengers manga into two 90-minute movies is that I can easily imagine them not necessarily being edited into one when they show up in American theaters for midweek Fathom Events-type screenings, but maybe being presented as a double feature. It probably plays well that way, too, as the first ended on the sort of cliffhanger that is a great spot for an intermission but doesn't play as the climax for what came before.
What came before is fairly convoluted - .after seeing the girl he'd somehow time-traveled back ten ten years to save killed in a car bomb, well-intentioned dork Takamichi (Takumi Kitamura) intends to prevent the gang of mostly-harmless brawlers he'd idolized from becoming the bona-fide criminal organization they are in the present. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who know what happened to cause this are dead, and Takomichi only remembers the events of the original timeline. So he returns to the past, only knowing that his idol Mikey (Ryo Yoshizawa) was killed in a massive rumble on Halloween, and that Mikey's best friend Baji (Kento Nagayama), who defected to another gang with the guilt-ridden Izaki, and Tetta Kisaki (Shotaro Mamiya), the leader of the present-day group.
I don't know that what anybody in this movie does makes any sense at all, but then, these guys all get hit in the head a lot.
Okay, that's not entirely true, but this really isn't complicated enough to be two movies, especially considering that the hero, who has traveled back in time to have an effect on the past, really doesn't wind up actually doing much of anything that would have a clear effect on the future, which could be an interesting story, with his small but well-intentioned actions at the margins having a big effect positive or negative, depending how important the fact that he's a dimwit who doesn't really know what's going on is, but screenwriter Izumi Takahashi and director Rsutomu Hanabusa don't particularly emphasize that. There's a fair story of loyalty and brotherhood here, but it's competing for time with the one that actually involves the nominal protagonist, and is still very reliant on dumb-guy logic.
Of course, this isn't really a time-travel story at heart so much as it's a street-fighting story, and the second half is anchored by the "Bloody Halloween" brawl that's been teased since the beginning, and it's kind of worth waiting two movies for: It's big, but also perfectly fitted to the junkyard environment where it takes place so that it's swarming with people but giving them room to move and make big swings; the piles of junk give them a little terrain to work with and corners to hide in, and the fact that it's a brawl means that the cast letting their characters' big, deranged, not-too-bright personalities fly feels more natural. Sure, these guys are going to be like this all the time anyway, but the testosterone overdose works better in this context.
It's just enough for the film to send the audience out on a high and set a jumping-off point for the next arc of the manga to be adapted. Maybe that will be the one where they do something with how Kisaki has to also be time-traveling, right, even though they don't even seem to be hinting at it. Anyway, it's fun enough, although I imagine that the various versions of this franchise must have inspired a whole ton of slash fan fiction which probably makes a lot more sense.
"The Influencer"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
"The Influencer" is listed as "horror", because it technically does horror-movie things and likely feels like a horror movie on the page, but is so banter-y and good at zippy comedy in the first stretch that when it does take a turn for the violent and gross, it almost feels like a parody of movies that start comedic and jump genres. The horror material isn't bad, at all, so much as the start of the movie being good enough to resist the switch.
And that's kind of impressive, because the start is the sort of fast-paced, overlapping dialogue that I can find hard to parse, while the Instagram influencer material that kind of bounces off me because I have more or less curated my internet experience to avoid such things by chance but often still sense that the spoofs are too broad. It's got an entertaining, chatty dynamic that still plays these characters as shallow and awful in a familiar way that doesn't quite push one away, and the switch to horror is just off-putting that even when one doesn't really feel like the genre is doing a complete swerve, there's a good, uncertain sense of not knowing just where writer/director Lael Rogers is going with it.
It's often the case that one looks at a short that works this well and say one would like to see more, but truth be told, ten minutes is the right length and it would die going longer. Still, if director Lael Rogers wants to do something longer, I'm interested to see what it is.
Late Night with the Devil
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Late Night with the Devil is a minor miracle of a movie: A dead-on recreation of something kind of silly that starts out looking like high-concept parody but excels because nearly every character is not just very funny, but also fits into the horror-story and drama parts of the movie seamlessly. That's a thing that not a lot of horror-comedies manage, usually having one side undercut the other, and fitting it into note-perfect pastiche is almost showing off.
The film gives us Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) as a former disc jockey who in the 1970s became the host of UBC's "Night Owl", a late-night talk that for a white rivaled that of Johnny Carson, though he spiraled between questions about his involvement in a mysterious mens-only club ("The Grove") and the loss of his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) in 1976, and was facing cancellation a year later. For Halloween, he's doing a special live show, as he and sidekick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) welcome illusionist and skeptic Carmichael Hunt (Ian Bliss), traveling medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), psychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), and her ward, Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli), the sole survivor of her father's Church of Abraxas cult, said to have been possessed and the subject of June's book Conversations with the Devil. Putting them all on stage together should make for great television. But is Jack more motivated to save his show or contact his wife, and how much of what he's doing is real?
Brothers Cameron & Colin Cairnes play with that sense of reality, nesting the events a couple layers deep, as Late Night is presented as recovered footage of the fateful broadcast that has had some documentary material prepended and also shows the camera continuing to run during commercial breaks, with the whole thing playing like an exposé from the 1990s even as the main footage is a dead-on recreation of the mid-1970s. It's impressive just how straight they play it, though - for all that the guests map to common types from the era (or specific people) and the set features just the right sort of garish coloring, the film never points and laughs. It works in part because there were all these different sorts of fascination with the paranormal and occult at the time. The whole thing is kind of silly in retrospect, but was done sincerely.
The other thing that works is that David Dastmalchian is really terrific here, which isn't necessarily surprising - he's been a reliable presence giving genre films a little more than expected for a decade, but often in the sort of supporting role where that effort makes things smoother rather than standing out. Here, though, he's always got a camera pointed at him, and captures this really terrific spot where jack's intentions are believably muddled, more and more nervous about how what is going on may actually work once he's in it, the sort of antihero this genre thrives on but seldom offers its audience. He and Laura Gordon play off each other especially well; there's a spark of attraction there and also seemingly-complementary bits of ambition that develop friction as the broadcast goes on; they're genuinely interesting characters who come across as having more to them than what the story needs.
I don't necessarily love the finale completely, but that is probably down to my personal preferences for people being accused of possession over actual supernatural entities than any failure of execution. And the Cairnes brothers do execute very well, leaning into the period trappings to make what happens feel more real because one's brain is thinking in terms of what live television could do in 1977 rather than what a movie can do 45 years later, making the violence nasty and indiscriminate, and always linking the supernatural strongly enough to something in Jack's psyche that the audience can feel the connection to what's going on even if it could all be in his head.
It makes for a heck of a ride, and it's a rare horror movie that transcends its gimmick the way this one does without abandoning it.
Wednesday, October 04, 2023
Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.10: Ms. Apocalypse, New Normal, Tokyo Revengers 2 - Part 1, and Empire V
Always awkward when the official account for a movie follows you on social media, faves and retweets all your posts about the festival, gets a lot of buzz from very enthusiastic programmers, and then you show up and just don't like the movie much at all. Figure I'll get an unfollow for it.
Not from Ms. Apocalypse writer/director Lim Sun-ae, though, there for her second day and had a pretty good film with her. One issue that was brought up was that there isn't a whole lot of representation for the disabled in Korean film (see also: everywhere), although one thing that I found kind of interesting was that I don't think Cho Yu-jin's affliction was ever actually named in the film, although Lim did specify muscular dystrophy in the Q&A. Interesting choice, that; I wonder if it was just a case of not wanting her to explain her condition when there are other, less sympathetic but more individual parts of her personality to highlight, or if it gave the filmmakers a little wiggle room with diagnoses.
I skipped a slot in the middle of the afternoon to get some fish & chips at McKibbins, amused by how, despite their being the official pub of the festival at least since The Irish Embassy burned down and my seeing their same promo before films at least 300 times, conservatively, I had never stepped foot in the place. I may not do so again, as I'm not a drinker and the food was just fne, but I can at least cross it off the list.
(I was kind of surprised to see another location, apparently larger, near the hotel/dorm where I was staying; I'd assumed it was a neighborhood business and now, like, did they expand from the one near Concordia to the one near UQÃM or vice versa, or is this a place that has locations all over Canada/Québec/Montréal and I just thought it was local? That sort of thing can throw you!)
The thing I skipped was A Disturbance in the Force, the documentary about the Star Wars Holiday Special; I've seen too many fandom-oriented documentaries at Boston Sci-Fi and music docs at IFFBoston that were fine but not really interesting, esecially if the subject matter doesn't, and I can't say this thing held any fascination for me, no matter how much I enjoy Star Wars. So I sat down to eat and ran some errands to make sure I had breakfast stuff on-hand at the hotel room instead. My friend Paul, who programs a theater in upstate New York, saw it and shrugged, saying it wasn't great, but he figured he could sell some tickets, although he was kid of surprised that the screening wasn't better-attended, but it's a different world than when we were younger - where once folks may have sought this out from vague memories and the desire to have even a little more material, there is now so much Star Wars that you have to choose what to care about, and the Holiday Special can properly be regarded as a memory-holed dead end.
No guests for the next movie, because it was a last-minute substitution - My Worst Neighbor was, for one reason or another, no longer able to play the festival, so another Korean film, New Normal played in its place (there were noteworthy sponsors for the Korean film series this year, so there are likely reasons for not just treating it as a free slot). This was fine by me; I hadn't been able to fit it in earlier in the week and it looked to have roughly the same vibe. Made for a relatively small crowd in Hall, though, as I figure most folks who wanted to see it had six days earlier.
(The online program shows a short, "Uberlinks", as playing with the film, but my notes have no record of it; maybe it only played with the first screening.)
Director Tsutomu Hanabusa and prodcuer Naohito Inaba (second and third from left) were there for Tokyo Revengers 2 - Part 1, and as you might expect, there wasn't necessarily that much to say afterward, what with Part 2 scheduled for the next night.
Finally, Mitch Davis and Viktor Kinzburg toalking about EMPIRE V, which fills out that big Russia-shaped space on one's Letterboxd map nicely, and which had gotten a hard,enthusiastic push from Mitch in particular and certainly worked to attract some attention, especially with talk about how it had been banned for being too enthusiastic about taking on the oligarchs, but, man, you could feel Mitch's boundless enthusiasm clash with the reality of just how tough a slog this movie can be. One can absolutely see where a programmer's enthusiasm would develop - when watching the screener on a small screen, you would absolutely want to see some of it blown up to the size of a small building, and it's certainly got more ideas up its sleeve than the average blockbuster, but it can be dull to the point of sapping more life than its vampiric characters.
Which does not, oddly enough, make for a bad Q&A! Mitch's enthusiasm was still there after the film, and it is sufficiently strange that Kinzburg couldn't help but have interesting stories, starting with actually having a grant from the cultural ministry that got yanked(*) to and having to make up the rest with crowdfunding and other investors. They also wound up doing some guerrilla-style filmmaking in that they got drone shots in places where even much less paranoid cities than Moscow would prefer you not fly drones; if you want aerial footage of the Kremlin and Red Square, you just have to factor losing a few octocopters into your budget. One of the signals to Russian viewers that these vampire oligarchs have incredible power was apparently that they regularly drove in special lanes meant to be reserved for the military, and, no they did not get permission to do this. More prosaically, the film needed poetry at its climax, and though the source novel was written by a famous poet, he made a show of not wanting to interfere with Kinzburg's vision… and then sent verses in at the last minute.
(*) This was actually a pretty important issue for the festival; during the introduction Mitch noted that they said no to several Russian films, some I believe from folks who had previously had work in the festival, because they had received government funding and they could not, in good conscience, be responsible for money going back to the Russian government.
An interesting day, all around. Next up: A Sunday featuring Motherland, The Concierge, Tokyo Revengers 2 - Part 2, and Late Night with the Devil.
Segimalui Sarang (Ms. Apocalypse, aka Love at the End of the World
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Lim Seon-ae's Ms. Apocalypse winds up being quite a nice film about people who find themselves taken advantage of, either because it's their nature or a means of survival, stopping short of being cynical but remaining quite clear-eyed In some ways, the vibe is that of a found-family story where everyone is painfully aware of just how fragile and conditional those sorts of bonds can be bonds can be.
Consider Kim Young-mi (Lee You-young) as she is in the late 1990s, a bookkeeper at a local factory who werks apart from the rest in an unheated office, while her home life has her effectively the sole caretaker of an aunt suffering from dementia, with cousin Kyu-tae no help. About the only person who seems to see her is co-worker Koo Do-yeong (Roh Jae-won), to the point where she cooks the books to temporarily cover for his shortfalls, which eventually lands them both in jail. Young-mi is released first, in 1999, and the only people meeting her at the jail are Koo's wife Cho Yu-jin (Lim Sun-woo) and her hairdresser/driver Jun. Her aunt's house gone and Kyu-tae nowhere to be found, house demolished and Kyu-tae nowhere to be found, Young-mi winds up moving in with Yu-jin, who may be thoroughly unpleasant but has a spare room and, given her severe neuromuscular disorder, probably needs live-in help.
Yu-jin is, at one point, described as having a terrible personality while being a reasonable person, and there's something interesting about that because it's often a bit of freedom that being disabled takes from a person. The film seldom sets them up in direct opposition to each other, or has them in the same frame, but it's worth noting that Kyu-tae is, more or less, able to get away with being a selfish, unreasonable person, even if the audience despises him, but Yu-jin has to have some sort of heart of gold underneath it all, even if she's got far more reason to be angry at the world than he does, because otherwise the home-care people will refuse to come or they'll feel free to steal, and she's got to hold her tongue even though the world has already kicked her around but good.
Lim Sun-woo takes that part and runs with it, knowing Yu-jin cannot back down until confronted directly, but she and director Lim have a very good sense of where the line is between her harsh words for those around her being darkly comic and it being kind of pathetic, making the moments when she steps over mean something. It's a flashy performance that often outshines that of Lee Yoo-young as Young-mi, by design, but in some ways, that makes Young-mi's efforts to find the happy medium between the people-pleasing nature that has allowed people to walk all over her and the desire to lash out all the more interesting to watch. Lee captures how she knows she wants to be stronger but doesn't necessarily want to be like this without looking indecisive or excessively blank.
One thing that's interesting here is that the filmmakers seem quite conscious of how the characters are using bright colors and style to deflect, but it's very present here without quite becoming tacky. Yes, there's something obvious going on where Young-mi's world is black & white before her arrest and in color afterward, as she's introduced to Yu-jin, Jun, and their bolder personalities, but Lim gets the audience to look closer. Even the new red dye job Young-mi gets early on looks almost instantly faded, and there are other signals that the idea is to remind a viewer of movies with colorful and bright production design where characters can unveil new versions of themselves that reflect what vibrant people they are underneath while also saying that it doesn't exactly work that way. Yu-jin is always making sure she is immaculately turned out, but the audience sees her doing it, and it represents not as much her being strong as her desperate to project strength.
Which doesn't make the movie a downer. It's realistic but doesn't look at its helpful main character as a sap for her good nature, even when she's taken advantage of. In the end, she's still a bookkeeper, but she's maybe learned that keeping the books balanced means being fair to yourself.
New Normal
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Intersecting-story movies like, say, Pulp Fiction, can sometimes be fascinating for how various threads come together, or how shifting perspectives helps reassess each one, but that's a best-case scenario. Often, it kind of feels like someone emptying out a notebook of ideas that didn't necessarily work elsewhere and tying them together as best they could to mixed results, because the connections do not necessarily strengthen them so much as justify them being features rather than shorts.
In the first of six stories from writer/director Jung Beom-sik, "M", Hung-jun (Choi Ji-woo) must put her guard up when a man knocks on her door, saying he is there to inspect her fire alarms despite it being an odd hour and no email from the building management, while the second, "Do the Right Thing", has high school slacker Seung-jin (Jung Dong-won) finds helping an elderly lady get her groceries home much more involved than the minor good deed he thought it would be; third "Dressed to Kill" has Hyun-su (Lee Yu-mi) on a terrible blind date, only to see another girl in the restaurant wearing a similar outfit become the latest victim of a serial killer. They are, individually, solid enough short films, and the connecting threads that start to appear are fun, although this stretch of the movie does tend to run into the issue where, if every entry in an anthology takes a dark turn, the amount of surprise and suspense can start to wane. There's fun to be had here; "M" is a tight little one-location thriller and Choi Ji-woo is great in it, apparently returning from a bit of a hiatus, and if Jung Dong-won feels a bit off in "Do the Right Thing", it's got a fine comic premise, as does "Dressed to Kill", although the latter winds up functioning more as a nexus of the other stories than being able to focus on its own premise.
After that, "Be With You" sees Yoo-hoon (Choi Min-ho) receive instructions from vending machines leading him to what he hopes is the girl of his dreams; while "Peeping Tom" has Gee-jin (P.O.), an obsessed creep, sneaking into the apartment of his sexy flight attendant neighbor (Hwang Seung-eon?) only to discover he may not be alone. "Be With You" might be the most purely pleasurable segment of the film, as the previous three create expectations that Choi Min-Ho's character seems to be blithely ignoring, and he sets up an entertaining, linear tale that moves quick and benefits from that tension without seeming trapped by it. "Peeping Tom" isn't quite so cheerful; P.O. is playing a perv and filmmaker Jung doesn't quite find the angle that has the audience with him as the twists happen, or even to make the reversals seem clever rather than something to be shrugged off.
The last piece, "My Life as a Dog", has convenience store clerk Yeon-jin (Ha Da-in) - who really thought she'd be playing rock gigs by now - blow off steam online (she'd previously been glimpsed taunting Gee-jin) and find that some folks asking how to dispose of bodies on Reddit maybe aren't just pretending. Yeon-jin is probably the most fully-realized protagonist of the film, and that happens in part because Jung spends a little time hanging back, watching her steadily lose her patience with the rude group she must deal with in the job before a long bike ride to the suburbs, allowing the audience to get to know her and sort of feel how life can grind people down in mundane ways, with Ha Da-in doing quite well to grab the audience's favor despite all of that.
There's the germ of a pretty good idea in each of these segments, and in most cases Jung attacks it, ready to squeeze the most out of it, and by and large he meets the challenges he sets for himself. The fourth and fifth segments are the most darkly funny, in the way that they really lead to nasty punchlines, and the interconnectedness of it is often fun, because once it's established that all these stories are happening at once, having an eye out for easter eggs or convergences Jung edits on top of writing and directing, and for being a film that stops and restarts a few times, it moves forward very well indeed.
There's a certain nihilism to these interconnected murder stories, even beyond the "always expect the worst" factor, that keeps the movie from having a real climax and gut punch as a whole; Jung arguably highlights digital acquaintanceship and matchmaking alongside his transgressions, but doesn't necessarily have much to say about them or any possible connection. For a much fun as the soundtrack's utter lack of subtlety is, you can't use some of the tracks dropped in without earning comparison to the movie they're lifted from, and the same goes with the chapter titles: Your serial killer story should be a bit better than this to be called "M", for instance.
Many movies can be unsatisfying in spots but still worth recommending because pieces are good, and that's obviously more true with something like New Normal. Some segments are terrific, and some elements of others are able to be seen clearly enough to pop. As a whole, it maybe doesn't entirely come together, but those good bits are really good.
Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween - Destiny
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Yep, this is very much half a movie, the sort that has me taking lots of notes of character names and motivations for when I write this review (or watch part 2), but not a whole lot of "wow, that was cool, make sure to mention that". With each half of this movie being right around ninety minutes, I strongly suspect that there's a good epic-size picture to be found in the story if the studios didn't figure they could sell two tickets instead of one. It is also full of actors who are just not plausibly 17 during the time travel to 10 years ago, let alone 15 in the flashbacks.
After the events of Tokyo Revengers, Takemichi "Michi" Hanagaki (Takumi Kitamura) has prevented the murder of Hinata Tachibana (Mio Imada) in the past, only to see her murdered once again, this time in the present, apparently on the behest of Tetta Kisaki (Shotaro Mamiya), who intends to destroy everyone Majiro "Mikey" Sano (Ryo Yoshizawa) held dear. The seeds for all of this were planted fifteen years ago, when the Toman gang was founded, but Hinata's brother Naoto (Yosuke Sugino) can only send Michi back ten years, but that appears to be a critical time, with Mikey's best friend and co-founder of Toman Baji Keisuke (Kento Nagayama) being released from jail but splitting with Mikey, while Kisaki has recently joined Toman after having been a member of the defeated Moebius gang. Michi vaguely knows there's a brawl coming, but ten years ago, he was little more than a hanger-on and mascot - he'll have to rise in the ranks quickly if he stands any chance of preventing "Bloody Halloween".
Though I grumble about this sort of split seeming to be designed to sell more tickets, there's logic to it; subsequent books (or, in this case, manga storylines) tend to be longer than their predecessors but the "right" length for a movie is more constrained than that of other media, so a split may be the only way to preserve the pacing of the first successful adaptation while maintaining the same level of fidelity to the source. You can see that being the case here, with a lot that needs to happen leading up to Bloody Halloween and flashbacks even further back to flesh it out. The film is pretty enjoyable on those terms, though - it throws new mysteries at the audience pretty much constantly while offsetting it with useful background information, and punctuates the melodrama of these youth-gang vendettas with brutal beatdowns.
As before, the film has an appealingly earnest dope at the center, although Takumi Kitamura gets stuck in a rough spot there - as much as Michi is the protagonist, the story is really not about him in any way: The character is not bright enough to really solve this mystery (and can only occasionally consult with the brains of the operation), and even the thin story about a loser revisiting his high school peak is even less of a factor here. He's highly watchable, though, and Kento Nagayama is a great addition to the cast as the bombastic Baji. Ryo Yoshizawa is a fine combination of bluster and fragility, and Shotaro Mamiya solidifies his position as the series's villain.
This movie ultimately lands right on the border of the split seeming like a good idea and it perhaps being wiser to make one movie, but ends on a cliffhanger good enough to make me glad the festival had part 2 the next night.
Ampir V (Empire V)
* * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, digital)
So much world-building and exposition and philosophy, so little actually doing anything. Empire V is the sort of film that looks like it should be exciting, a combination of weird horror melodrama and satirical humor elevated by striking visuals, but can't quite manage it. Its secret rulers of the world never seem to do much ruling the world, and no amount of detail makes their internal squabbles more interesting.
It starts by introducing slacker Muscovite Roman (Pavel Tabakov), who certainly gives the impression of being vampire food, but is instead recruited by vampire Brama (Vladimir Epifantsev), the current avatar of Rama to receive his "tongue" and take his position. He naturally catches the eye of another recent convert, Hera (Taya Radchenko), especially as they are trained in their new abilities and positions by instructor Loki (Bronislav Vinogrodkiy). Rama has a rival for Hera in her master Mithra (Miron Federov), and he's a formidable one, likely behind the deteriorating condition that led Brama to pass his tongue on.
The aim is apparently to take aim at the oligarchs who have outsized power in society, especially in the film's home territory of Russia, portraying them as vampires draining society. Writer/director Victor Ginzburg (working from a novel by Viktor Pelevin) carefully emphasizes that these creatures don't subsist entirely on blood, but actually prefer a "milk" that is distilled from money. It's here that one can feel Ginzburg getting particularly caught in the weeds, especially as the wise old vampires start musing that money is just an idea that people made up and yet it is so powerful that… Well, they go on, and the strangeness of how this is actually implemented does not make it resonate more. Perhaps what it does of that is full of references that Russian audiences will understand immediately, but it can be opaque to other audiences.
Instead, it becomes a sort of romance between two characters that don't have much to them. Rama and Hera are given very little specific background and for most of the movie, Pavel Tabakov and Taya Radchenko are kind of capably bland - never so completely unreactive as to feel wooden but also never finding a hook that suggests there's more going on than them being reasonably good-looking people of a similar age. There's maybe an angle about addiction, but aside from Roman's mother calling him one, there's not much indication; he feels aimless more as opposed to being someone searching for the next high, at least until the movie introduces the milk and makes it sound so impossibly addictive that no human could resist it (and, credit where it's due, Tabakov and Radchenko sell the idea that introducing people who had been addicts as humans to this stuff is probably a Bad Idea). As a result, this story winds up being more about dynasties collapsing through decadence than oligarchs being entrenched. That it's not what the movie was sold as is no big deal, but the way it comes about is not worth the amount of detailed set-up.
It's very fun to look at, though, with imaginative production design, effects shots where I immediately knew what the credits for "fractal art" meant, and the sort of willingness to go big that can paper over some less than photo-real visual effects. Empire V is, at its best moments, deeply weird, offering up more convolutions and creature effects than it comes close to needing and making it all work because Ginzburg puts it all up on screen or has characters drop long tracts of exposition with utter confidence. That's not always enough - he'll keep explaining even when the audience has absorbed what they need to know and enough ancillary details to give it flavor, or he'll serve up a poetry slam when a viewer might be expecting a fight (though maybe it's a great poetry slam for those who speak Russian; the subtitles are just okay).
That is how you make an epic fantasy into a slog: Ginzburg introduces a grand, swooping setting filled with eccentric style and boils it to as bland and small a story as possible.
(I was kind of surprised to see another location, apparently larger, near the hotel/dorm where I was staying; I'd assumed it was a neighborhood business and now, like, did they expand from the one near Concordia to the one near UQÃM or vice versa, or is this a place that has locations all over Canada/Québec/Montréal and I just thought it was local? That sort of thing can throw you!)
The thing I skipped was A Disturbance in the Force, the documentary about the Star Wars Holiday Special; I've seen too many fandom-oriented documentaries at Boston Sci-Fi and music docs at IFFBoston that were fine but not really interesting, esecially if the subject matter doesn't, and I can't say this thing held any fascination for me, no matter how much I enjoy Star Wars. So I sat down to eat and ran some errands to make sure I had breakfast stuff on-hand at the hotel room instead. My friend Paul, who programs a theater in upstate New York, saw it and shrugged, saying it wasn't great, but he figured he could sell some tickets, although he was kid of surprised that the screening wasn't better-attended, but it's a different world than when we were younger - where once folks may have sought this out from vague memories and the desire to have even a little more material, there is now so much Star Wars that you have to choose what to care about, and the Holiday Special can properly be regarded as a memory-holed dead end.
No guests for the next movie, because it was a last-minute substitution - My Worst Neighbor was, for one reason or another, no longer able to play the festival, so another Korean film, New Normal played in its place (there were noteworthy sponsors for the Korean film series this year, so there are likely reasons for not just treating it as a free slot). This was fine by me; I hadn't been able to fit it in earlier in the week and it looked to have roughly the same vibe. Made for a relatively small crowd in Hall, though, as I figure most folks who wanted to see it had six days earlier.
(The online program shows a short, "Uberlinks", as playing with the film, but my notes have no record of it; maybe it only played with the first screening.)
Which does not, oddly enough, make for a bad Q&A! Mitch's enthusiasm was still there after the film, and it is sufficiently strange that Kinzburg couldn't help but have interesting stories, starting with actually having a grant from the cultural ministry that got yanked(*) to and having to make up the rest with crowdfunding and other investors. They also wound up doing some guerrilla-style filmmaking in that they got drone shots in places where even much less paranoid cities than Moscow would prefer you not fly drones; if you want aerial footage of the Kremlin and Red Square, you just have to factor losing a few octocopters into your budget. One of the signals to Russian viewers that these vampire oligarchs have incredible power was apparently that they regularly drove in special lanes meant to be reserved for the military, and, no they did not get permission to do this. More prosaically, the film needed poetry at its climax, and though the source novel was written by a famous poet, he made a show of not wanting to interfere with Kinzburg's vision… and then sent verses in at the last minute.
(*) This was actually a pretty important issue for the festival; during the introduction Mitch noted that they said no to several Russian films, some I believe from folks who had previously had work in the festival, because they had received government funding and they could not, in good conscience, be responsible for money going back to the Russian government.
An interesting day, all around. Next up: A Sunday featuring Motherland, The Concierge, Tokyo Revengers 2 - Part 2, and Late Night with the Devil.
Segimalui Sarang (Ms. Apocalypse, aka Love at the End of the World
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Lim Seon-ae's Ms. Apocalypse winds up being quite a nice film about people who find themselves taken advantage of, either because it's their nature or a means of survival, stopping short of being cynical but remaining quite clear-eyed In some ways, the vibe is that of a found-family story where everyone is painfully aware of just how fragile and conditional those sorts of bonds can be bonds can be.
Consider Kim Young-mi (Lee You-young) as she is in the late 1990s, a bookkeeper at a local factory who werks apart from the rest in an unheated office, while her home life has her effectively the sole caretaker of an aunt suffering from dementia, with cousin Kyu-tae no help. About the only person who seems to see her is co-worker Koo Do-yeong (Roh Jae-won), to the point where she cooks the books to temporarily cover for his shortfalls, which eventually lands them both in jail. Young-mi is released first, in 1999, and the only people meeting her at the jail are Koo's wife Cho Yu-jin (Lim Sun-woo) and her hairdresser/driver Jun. Her aunt's house gone and Kyu-tae nowhere to be found, house demolished and Kyu-tae nowhere to be found, Young-mi winds up moving in with Yu-jin, who may be thoroughly unpleasant but has a spare room and, given her severe neuromuscular disorder, probably needs live-in help.
Yu-jin is, at one point, described as having a terrible personality while being a reasonable person, and there's something interesting about that because it's often a bit of freedom that being disabled takes from a person. The film seldom sets them up in direct opposition to each other, or has them in the same frame, but it's worth noting that Kyu-tae is, more or less, able to get away with being a selfish, unreasonable person, even if the audience despises him, but Yu-jin has to have some sort of heart of gold underneath it all, even if she's got far more reason to be angry at the world than he does, because otherwise the home-care people will refuse to come or they'll feel free to steal, and she's got to hold her tongue even though the world has already kicked her around but good.
Lim Sun-woo takes that part and runs with it, knowing Yu-jin cannot back down until confronted directly, but she and director Lim have a very good sense of where the line is between her harsh words for those around her being darkly comic and it being kind of pathetic, making the moments when she steps over mean something. It's a flashy performance that often outshines that of Lee Yoo-young as Young-mi, by design, but in some ways, that makes Young-mi's efforts to find the happy medium between the people-pleasing nature that has allowed people to walk all over her and the desire to lash out all the more interesting to watch. Lee captures how she knows she wants to be stronger but doesn't necessarily want to be like this without looking indecisive or excessively blank.
One thing that's interesting here is that the filmmakers seem quite conscious of how the characters are using bright colors and style to deflect, but it's very present here without quite becoming tacky. Yes, there's something obvious going on where Young-mi's world is black & white before her arrest and in color afterward, as she's introduced to Yu-jin, Jun, and their bolder personalities, but Lim gets the audience to look closer. Even the new red dye job Young-mi gets early on looks almost instantly faded, and there are other signals that the idea is to remind a viewer of movies with colorful and bright production design where characters can unveil new versions of themselves that reflect what vibrant people they are underneath while also saying that it doesn't exactly work that way. Yu-jin is always making sure she is immaculately turned out, but the audience sees her doing it, and it represents not as much her being strong as her desperate to project strength.
Which doesn't make the movie a downer. It's realistic but doesn't look at its helpful main character as a sap for her good nature, even when she's taken advantage of. In the end, she's still a bookkeeper, but she's maybe learned that keeping the books balanced means being fair to yourself.
New Normal
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Intersecting-story movies like, say, Pulp Fiction, can sometimes be fascinating for how various threads come together, or how shifting perspectives helps reassess each one, but that's a best-case scenario. Often, it kind of feels like someone emptying out a notebook of ideas that didn't necessarily work elsewhere and tying them together as best they could to mixed results, because the connections do not necessarily strengthen them so much as justify them being features rather than shorts.
In the first of six stories from writer/director Jung Beom-sik, "M", Hung-jun (Choi Ji-woo) must put her guard up when a man knocks on her door, saying he is there to inspect her fire alarms despite it being an odd hour and no email from the building management, while the second, "Do the Right Thing", has high school slacker Seung-jin (Jung Dong-won) finds helping an elderly lady get her groceries home much more involved than the minor good deed he thought it would be; third "Dressed to Kill" has Hyun-su (Lee Yu-mi) on a terrible blind date, only to see another girl in the restaurant wearing a similar outfit become the latest victim of a serial killer. They are, individually, solid enough short films, and the connecting threads that start to appear are fun, although this stretch of the movie does tend to run into the issue where, if every entry in an anthology takes a dark turn, the amount of surprise and suspense can start to wane. There's fun to be had here; "M" is a tight little one-location thriller and Choi Ji-woo is great in it, apparently returning from a bit of a hiatus, and if Jung Dong-won feels a bit off in "Do the Right Thing", it's got a fine comic premise, as does "Dressed to Kill", although the latter winds up functioning more as a nexus of the other stories than being able to focus on its own premise.
After that, "Be With You" sees Yoo-hoon (Choi Min-ho) receive instructions from vending machines leading him to what he hopes is the girl of his dreams; while "Peeping Tom" has Gee-jin (P.O.), an obsessed creep, sneaking into the apartment of his sexy flight attendant neighbor (Hwang Seung-eon?) only to discover he may not be alone. "Be With You" might be the most purely pleasurable segment of the film, as the previous three create expectations that Choi Min-Ho's character seems to be blithely ignoring, and he sets up an entertaining, linear tale that moves quick and benefits from that tension without seeming trapped by it. "Peeping Tom" isn't quite so cheerful; P.O. is playing a perv and filmmaker Jung doesn't quite find the angle that has the audience with him as the twists happen, or even to make the reversals seem clever rather than something to be shrugged off.
The last piece, "My Life as a Dog", has convenience store clerk Yeon-jin (Ha Da-in) - who really thought she'd be playing rock gigs by now - blow off steam online (she'd previously been glimpsed taunting Gee-jin) and find that some folks asking how to dispose of bodies on Reddit maybe aren't just pretending. Yeon-jin is probably the most fully-realized protagonist of the film, and that happens in part because Jung spends a little time hanging back, watching her steadily lose her patience with the rude group she must deal with in the job before a long bike ride to the suburbs, allowing the audience to get to know her and sort of feel how life can grind people down in mundane ways, with Ha Da-in doing quite well to grab the audience's favor despite all of that.
There's the germ of a pretty good idea in each of these segments, and in most cases Jung attacks it, ready to squeeze the most out of it, and by and large he meets the challenges he sets for himself. The fourth and fifth segments are the most darkly funny, in the way that they really lead to nasty punchlines, and the interconnectedness of it is often fun, because once it's established that all these stories are happening at once, having an eye out for easter eggs or convergences Jung edits on top of writing and directing, and for being a film that stops and restarts a few times, it moves forward very well indeed.
There's a certain nihilism to these interconnected murder stories, even beyond the "always expect the worst" factor, that keeps the movie from having a real climax and gut punch as a whole; Jung arguably highlights digital acquaintanceship and matchmaking alongside his transgressions, but doesn't necessarily have much to say about them or any possible connection. For a much fun as the soundtrack's utter lack of subtlety is, you can't use some of the tracks dropped in without earning comparison to the movie they're lifted from, and the same goes with the chapter titles: Your serial killer story should be a bit better than this to be called "M", for instance.
Many movies can be unsatisfying in spots but still worth recommending because pieces are good, and that's obviously more true with something like New Normal. Some segments are terrific, and some elements of others are able to be seen clearly enough to pop. As a whole, it maybe doesn't entirely come together, but those good bits are really good.
Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween - Destiny
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Yep, this is very much half a movie, the sort that has me taking lots of notes of character names and motivations for when I write this review (or watch part 2), but not a whole lot of "wow, that was cool, make sure to mention that". With each half of this movie being right around ninety minutes, I strongly suspect that there's a good epic-size picture to be found in the story if the studios didn't figure they could sell two tickets instead of one. It is also full of actors who are just not plausibly 17 during the time travel to 10 years ago, let alone 15 in the flashbacks.
After the events of Tokyo Revengers, Takemichi "Michi" Hanagaki (Takumi Kitamura) has prevented the murder of Hinata Tachibana (Mio Imada) in the past, only to see her murdered once again, this time in the present, apparently on the behest of Tetta Kisaki (Shotaro Mamiya), who intends to destroy everyone Majiro "Mikey" Sano (Ryo Yoshizawa) held dear. The seeds for all of this were planted fifteen years ago, when the Toman gang was founded, but Hinata's brother Naoto (Yosuke Sugino) can only send Michi back ten years, but that appears to be a critical time, with Mikey's best friend and co-founder of Toman Baji Keisuke (Kento Nagayama) being released from jail but splitting with Mikey, while Kisaki has recently joined Toman after having been a member of the defeated Moebius gang. Michi vaguely knows there's a brawl coming, but ten years ago, he was little more than a hanger-on and mascot - he'll have to rise in the ranks quickly if he stands any chance of preventing "Bloody Halloween".
Though I grumble about this sort of split seeming to be designed to sell more tickets, there's logic to it; subsequent books (or, in this case, manga storylines) tend to be longer than their predecessors but the "right" length for a movie is more constrained than that of other media, so a split may be the only way to preserve the pacing of the first successful adaptation while maintaining the same level of fidelity to the source. You can see that being the case here, with a lot that needs to happen leading up to Bloody Halloween and flashbacks even further back to flesh it out. The film is pretty enjoyable on those terms, though - it throws new mysteries at the audience pretty much constantly while offsetting it with useful background information, and punctuates the melodrama of these youth-gang vendettas with brutal beatdowns.
As before, the film has an appealingly earnest dope at the center, although Takumi Kitamura gets stuck in a rough spot there - as much as Michi is the protagonist, the story is really not about him in any way: The character is not bright enough to really solve this mystery (and can only occasionally consult with the brains of the operation), and even the thin story about a loser revisiting his high school peak is even less of a factor here. He's highly watchable, though, and Kento Nagayama is a great addition to the cast as the bombastic Baji. Ryo Yoshizawa is a fine combination of bluster and fragility, and Shotaro Mamiya solidifies his position as the series's villain.
This movie ultimately lands right on the border of the split seeming like a good idea and it perhaps being wiser to make one movie, but ends on a cliffhanger good enough to make me glad the festival had part 2 the next night.
Ampir V (Empire V)
* * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, digital)
So much world-building and exposition and philosophy, so little actually doing anything. Empire V is the sort of film that looks like it should be exciting, a combination of weird horror melodrama and satirical humor elevated by striking visuals, but can't quite manage it. Its secret rulers of the world never seem to do much ruling the world, and no amount of detail makes their internal squabbles more interesting.
It starts by introducing slacker Muscovite Roman (Pavel Tabakov), who certainly gives the impression of being vampire food, but is instead recruited by vampire Brama (Vladimir Epifantsev), the current avatar of Rama to receive his "tongue" and take his position. He naturally catches the eye of another recent convert, Hera (Taya Radchenko), especially as they are trained in their new abilities and positions by instructor Loki (Bronislav Vinogrodkiy). Rama has a rival for Hera in her master Mithra (Miron Federov), and he's a formidable one, likely behind the deteriorating condition that led Brama to pass his tongue on.
The aim is apparently to take aim at the oligarchs who have outsized power in society, especially in the film's home territory of Russia, portraying them as vampires draining society. Writer/director Victor Ginzburg (working from a novel by Viktor Pelevin) carefully emphasizes that these creatures don't subsist entirely on blood, but actually prefer a "milk" that is distilled from money. It's here that one can feel Ginzburg getting particularly caught in the weeds, especially as the wise old vampires start musing that money is just an idea that people made up and yet it is so powerful that… Well, they go on, and the strangeness of how this is actually implemented does not make it resonate more. Perhaps what it does of that is full of references that Russian audiences will understand immediately, but it can be opaque to other audiences.
Instead, it becomes a sort of romance between two characters that don't have much to them. Rama and Hera are given very little specific background and for most of the movie, Pavel Tabakov and Taya Radchenko are kind of capably bland - never so completely unreactive as to feel wooden but also never finding a hook that suggests there's more going on than them being reasonably good-looking people of a similar age. There's maybe an angle about addiction, but aside from Roman's mother calling him one, there's not much indication; he feels aimless more as opposed to being someone searching for the next high, at least until the movie introduces the milk and makes it sound so impossibly addictive that no human could resist it (and, credit where it's due, Tabakov and Radchenko sell the idea that introducing people who had been addicts as humans to this stuff is probably a Bad Idea). As a result, this story winds up being more about dynasties collapsing through decadence than oligarchs being entrenched. That it's not what the movie was sold as is no big deal, but the way it comes about is not worth the amount of detailed set-up.
It's very fun to look at, though, with imaginative production design, effects shots where I immediately knew what the credits for "fractal art" meant, and the sort of willingness to go big that can paper over some less than photo-real visual effects. Empire V is, at its best moments, deeply weird, offering up more convolutions and creature effects than it comes close to needing and making it all work because Ginzburg puts it all up on screen or has characters drop long tracts of exposition with utter confidence. That's not always enough - he'll keep explaining even when the audience has absorbed what they need to know and enough ancillary details to give it flavor, or he'll serve up a poetry slam when a viewer might be expecting a fight (though maybe it's a great poetry slam for those who speak Russian; the subtitles are just okay).
That is how you make an epic fantasy into a slog: Ginzburg introduces a grand, swooping setting filled with eccentric style and boils it to as bland and small a story as possible.
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.08: "Lollygag", Hippo, Baby Assassins 2, "Every House is Haunted", and Where the Devil Roams
Although there are days when I look at the shorts before a feature as something tightening a schedule unnecessarily, and others where you go, well, that ten minutes or so made the ticket/slot worth it.
Kind of a late start, in part by design - the first show in De Sève was Blackout, which I saw opening night because I could see The White Storm 3 in regular theaters the next day and because my day-job work schedule; the second from catching the first show of Becomers on a rare De Sève evening because I had seen Divinity at BUFF (and may wind up expanding that Letterboxd entry at some point,. So I arrived at the festival relatively late in the day.
Which means the first feature was Hippo, featuring (left to right) cast members Eliza Roberts, Kimball Farley, Jesse Pimentel, and Lilla Kizlinger; writer/director/producer Mark H. Rapaport; cinematographer William Babcock; and executive producers Julian Lawitschka & Charmaine Kowalski. I was a bit surprised to see pretty much the whole cast on stage, because while it's not a big movie by any means at all, a reasonably noteworthy production company is involved ("Rough House Pictures" is executive producers David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Jody Hill), but I guess it's not an issue until it's distributed by an ATMTP company, maybe.
At any rate, I gather a lot of these folks have worked before, although this was Lilla Kizlinger's first North American film, but she's great; maybe some of her Hungarian work will make it to festivals next year.
There were no guests for Baby Assassins 2, but plenty for Where the Devil Roams, with Mitch Davis welcoming The Adams Family - mother Tobey Poser, sisters Lulu & Zelda Adams, and Father John Adams. It's kind of a reminder of how the films that play these festivals fall in and out of favor: Fantasia used to play a ton of movies like Baby Assassins, indy or "V-Cine" Japanese genre movies that have really tight budgets but some folks involved who are absurdly talented at one thing, whether it be Yoshihiro NIshimura's effects makeup or Yudai Yamaguchi's action, but there are fewer recently. There was a recent period when every genre festival and event was including "Wakaliwood" movies from Uganda, and now this is the Adams's third movie to play this festival in five years, even more impressive when you consider just how independent they are and that there was a plague during that period. When I saw The Deeper You Dig back in '19, I mostly treated it as a novelty. Three straight films accepted to the festival suggests the family is more, but I don't know. Davis seemed genuinely enthusiastic and the movie filled the big room and the family led a long Q&A, so there was some enthusiasm, but even as this is a more ambitious, I don't know that they've made the leap from novelty act to folks you have to watch.
And don't get me wrong - I love that there are folks like this family (or the Schmidts, who sent the differently-bonkers Island of Lost Girls to the festival last year) out there making movies, screening them locally, putting them up on various sites, and occasionally poking through to festivals like this. But it hits differently when played in a featured slot with expectations around it than as an underground discovery on the smaller screen.
There was also a projection issue, the sort where you remind yourself that 35mm film is an optical/mechanical process where a capable and attentive projectionist can usually figure out what's off, whereas digital has the picture looking blue with a discolored bit in the center and there's not a whole lot you can easily do about it. I've got a "too green?" note for the short film, but by the time it started being an issue with the second, I was kind of checked out.
So, that was the start of week 2, which continued on Friday with Aporia, Pett Kata Shaw, River, and The Sacrifice Game.
"Lollygag"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)
"Lollygag" is an enjoyable, off-kilter short on its own, but it's especially intriguing paired with Hippo; it's arch and artificial in some of the same ways, but there's a central thought and a broad sort of sympathy here that's very easy to lose. "Lollygag" is quite affected, yes, but there's at least something there.
Narrated in Greek even though it appears to take place in an American suburb, it features a woman looking back on her teen years discussing how she doesn't remember the first time she saw the Boy Next Door (Isaac Powell), but did remember the last. Her bedroom had a view of his pool, and both he and the backyard were beautiful, even if she had come to realize boys didn't actually interest her. He was apparently bisexual, though, with various young men and women joining him, while on other days, he sat there picking at a Whiteman's sampler, until…
Well, that's where it gets interesting, especially once she crosses the fence. The Girl (Gaby Slape) does not become sentimental, but her detachment is not contemptuous, though it walks right up to the line for some dark comedy. There's callousness here, especially from the perspective of youth, but the narration is built to highlight the distance from this story which started with a VHS-blue screen and implies she has become a different person in the meantime, one who perhaps recognizes that the Boy Next Door had a hollow life, even if it isn't the trappings that caused it.
Hippo
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Say this about Hippo: I could at least feel and share in one character's well-earned distaste for the rest. It's not really much to hang onto in terms of vibing with a movie, but it's at least something.
That character would be Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger), who was adopted Ethel (Eliza Roberts) and her husband after her family in Hungary was killed, but her foster father also died some years ago, leaving her and her foster brother Hippo (Kimball Farley) to be raised by Eliza, and as they have been homeschooled, they are not well-socialized at all. Hippo is just generally hostile to everyone in the world except his mother, while Buttercup doesn't imagine anything more to her life than motherhood, and no ideas for potential fathers than Hippo.
What director Mark H. Rapaport and his co-writer/star Kimball Farley are doing here is interesting, in that even as the narration points out that Hippo and Buttercup are homeschooled and that there's an content filter on their internet, it can take a while before it really sinks in that this family has been cut off from common American culture in a way that has analogs beyond this particular tiny enclave. Between cinematographer William Babcock's monochrome photography and Eric Roberts's narration that hint at documentary tropes without actually imitating that sort of film, the filmmakers create a sort of counter to their isolation: The family is outsiders, but the viewer is also outside of them and looking in, shifting them from eccentric to hidden, folks who have seemingly had their brains deliberately poisoned rather than being eccentric by circumstance.
That's what makes Lilla Kizlinger's Buttercup the soul of the movie; she's both insider and outsider at once time, and if she's been captured by this situation, she's at least sensible enough to feel something is amiss and perhaps holding on to something else. Kizlinger is really terrific here, the person who always draws one's attention even when Kimball Farley's Hippo is built to be more eye-catching and more outrageous in his behavior; she and Rapaport almost never fail to make her withering disdain both very funny and sad. Farley and Eliza Roberts are never quite able to forge that connection; they make their ridiculous characters believable in that most of us have probably met people with the same sort of abrasive and deluded personalities, and they can deliver something bizarre with conviction, but one doesn't necessarily quite believe in them.
Because of that, sharing Buttercup's frustration at being trapped with these people was more or less all the movie seemed to have for me. Its stupid and mean characters never felt like they could be anything other than stupid and mean in other circumstances, and the arch narration from Eric Roberts adds a level of smugness. It's a sort of demonstration that even the darkest comedy often comes from a sort of empathy, especially if the ability to relate to horrible people catches a viewer off guard, rather than just pointing and sneering. And so, Hippo winds up a movie where the cast is good and the gags are executed well enough, but I never found myself in a mood to laugh.
Baby Assassins 2 Babies
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
I was not a particular fan of the first Baby Assassins, and I was prepared to be unimpressed with this one, especially as it seems to be the sort of sequel that is by and large more of what was going on in the first movie rather than an expansion or continuation. Fortunately, the formula has been tweaked so that the parts in between the action scenes works a lot better. There still seems to be a lot of stretching the time between action scenes out, but everybody seems to have gotten better with practice.
The film opens by introducing a new pair of young assassins, brothers Makoto (Tatsuomi Hamada) and Yuri (Joey Iwanaga), who aren't getting choice jobs because they aren't part of the "official" underground economy, and also because Makoto especially is kind of sloppy. Their agent (Junpei Hashino) suggests that perhaps they can move up by eliminating some competition. Meanwhile, Mahiro (Saori Izawa0 and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) are on probation because they are behind on their bills and intervened in a bank robbery that was preventing them from paying them on time, so they're back to working part-time jobs, seemingly easy marks for the up-and-comers.
In a lot of ways, the plot here is awfully close to the same as last year, but it's also a good example of how seemingly small tweaks can make a big difference. The story is streamlined in that each new situation Chisato and Mahiro find themselves in seems to flow fairly directly from the last, rather than being arbitrary directives and detours, while Yuri and Makoto are less complicated adversaries than the yakuza family in the first. On top of that, writer/director Yugo Sakamoto recognizes that his two main characters work because they complement each other, so the girls banter more than they fight. As a result of all that, the pacing seems a little zippier; this story may be slight, but it's a straight line delivering a viewer to the next piece of screwball comedy or well-staged fights.
And, the action is still pretty great - as with the previous movie, the main complaint here is that there's not really enough of it. They work in large part because Saori Izawa is a potential breakout star as a screen fighter and Joey Iwanaga is surprisingly solid himself. The film builds to the pair of them squaring off, and it's well worth the wait: Izawa is light on her feet but explosive, so capable of doing something physically incredible at any moment that the final showdown can get little adrenaline rushes from Mahiro and Yuri feinting at each other. The fights get a little better when Izawa is in then, and even if most are relatively quick and spread with stretches in between, they've got a ton of energy.
Akari Takaishi is a bit stronger as the more comedic half of the pair, where the last film often played Chisato as a girl-next-door type who could thrive in normie scenarios where Mahiro stuck out, here she's more often depicted as a weird psycho who probably wouldn't be great at much else. Takaishi goes from airhead to dead serious without much transition and makes you believe in both so that Chisato can be both ridiculous and dangerous. I suspect that many of the actual jokes land better the more one is immersed in Japanese youth culture (to the extent that the inanities the characters talk about might be deliberately maddening to those who aren't), but the cast in general and Takaishi in particular sell the absurdity of it well.
I never thought I'd want a Baby Assassins 3 after the first, but this is a marked improvement, and I'd like to see what this crew could do with the resources to go a little bigger.
"Every House is Haunted"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, digital)
A really delightfully clever, almost gentle short film that starts out drily humorous, with a realtor telling young couple Maya (Kate Cobb) and Danny (Kevin Bigley) that "the ghosts are mostly harmless" and that the previous owners of the house barely ever saw them. Maya is skeptical, but she eventually sees Kevin (Emmanuel Wood), seven years old when he died, mostly wanting to play. She has a reason to see a child, as it turns out, but is soon befriending the house's other spirits, though Danny doesn't see them.
Tragedy unites people, even if it's not the same tragedy, and filmmaker Bryce McGuire recognizes this as natural as opposed to something to be scared, but still deeply weird, and that's the vibe of the film, Maya realizing that she's not alone and has people to share it with, even if they aren't actually talking about that all the time, even if she can't fully share it with her husband Kate Cobb and the rest are just what the film needs, able to inhabit this odd space and make it feel real.
There's not a huge amount of story here, mostly just observing, but there's a pointed use of the word "us" that hints at more. McGuire is already expanding one short to a feature, and I don't know that I'd necessarily want this to just be setup for a larger story, but I'd still be interested to find out where things would go next.
Where the Devil Roams
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Like a lot of films with this sort of background, including the rest of the Adams Family's work, what's interesting about Where the Devil Roams is that it exists at all and is as good as it is. For a movie made by folks who are basically amateurs, well away from most hotbeds of film production, it's ambitious and generally capable of realizing those ambitions. It's as much a novelty as it is a genuinely good movie, but it's watchable enough, rather than the complete disaster of similar projects.
Taking place during the Great Depression, it follows the members of a carnival sideshow on tour, particularly one family: Steven (John Adams) and Maggie (Toby Poser) are a magic act, although not so popular as Mr. Tips, whose gruesome self-mutilation is somehow reversed every night. Leigh (Zelda Adams), their daughter, is a beautiful and ethereal singer, but mute in all other circumstances. John was once a doctor, but since his service in World War I he can't stand the sight of blood, which would seem to make him an odd match for Maggie's murderous rages. That frequently emerges as they travel from town to town separately from the rest of the carnival, until they bite off more than they can chew. Fortunately, Leigh knows how Mr. Tips manages his trick.
Gruesome and boring is a tough combination, and there's a stretch or two in this movie where this family of carnies just seems to cycle through driving down a dirt road, stopping at a house where Maggie will kill its occupant (and Leigh takes a picture), while they blindfold Steven because his PTSD is apparently so very specific that only the sight of blood triggers it, three or four times in a row. The film is already well past the point of being shocking, and it hasn't really gotten to its big idea, even halfway through. It feels like they've promised all their friends and collaborators that they'll get to be immortalized dying on screen, no matter how much time it gives the audience's mind to wander about whether Leigh constructs a darkroom in the corner of their tent or if she knows which photography shops don't raise their eyebrows at this sort of thing.
This family has been making feature-length films and shorts as a collaborative unit for at least ten years, since younger daughter Zelda was about ten, breaking through on the festival circuit five years ago with The Deeper You Dig, and they've got some talent for it. They know their tools and their outside-the-box choices don't feel like things professionals avoid for a reason, and for the most part any roughness in the acting feels like it fits into the heightened, weirdo-attracting world of the carnival. There are some decisions that seem influenced by what they can scrounge up as opposed to necessity - although I suppose the family traveling alone in the one period automobile they have access to rather than in a caravan is both - but they and their team are good at doing that scrounging and making the most of it.
But then there's the story, and I'm not sure that this movie really has a big idea, rather than a plot device and a desire to make a homemade period horror flick. The filmmakers talked about going into scenes with a "template" in the Q&A, but the movie really feels like it could use a tight script, because there's no real suspense to it; they know how to shoot and cut but don't give scenes much purpose beyond the plot. The film is seldom driving at anything, and there is little that resonates in the ideas. It's horror fans imagining scenes and scenarios and figuring out what they can do with the resources they have.
And, fine. I don't want to discourage this sort of homemade film; the Adams Family productions are decent achievements where fellow fans can feel proud of what they've created. But this one isn't much more, and if you're looking through the vast Tubi archives for something that can thrill and excite, this probably won't be your best choice.
Kind of a late start, in part by design - the first show in De Sève was Blackout, which I saw opening night because I could see The White Storm 3 in regular theaters the next day and because my day-job work schedule; the second from catching the first show of Becomers on a rare De Sève evening because I had seen Divinity at BUFF (and may wind up expanding that Letterboxd entry at some point,. So I arrived at the festival relatively late in the day.
At any rate, I gather a lot of these folks have worked before, although this was Lilla Kizlinger's first North American film, but she's great; maybe some of her Hungarian work will make it to festivals next year.
And don't get me wrong - I love that there are folks like this family (or the Schmidts, who sent the differently-bonkers Island of Lost Girls to the festival last year) out there making movies, screening them locally, putting them up on various sites, and occasionally poking through to festivals like this. But it hits differently when played in a featured slot with expectations around it than as an underground discovery on the smaller screen.
There was also a projection issue, the sort where you remind yourself that 35mm film is an optical/mechanical process where a capable and attentive projectionist can usually figure out what's off, whereas digital has the picture looking blue with a discolored bit in the center and there's not a whole lot you can easily do about it. I've got a "too green?" note for the short film, but by the time it started being an issue with the second, I was kind of checked out.
So, that was the start of week 2, which continued on Friday with Aporia, Pett Kata Shaw, River, and The Sacrifice Game.
"Lollygag"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)
"Lollygag" is an enjoyable, off-kilter short on its own, but it's especially intriguing paired with Hippo; it's arch and artificial in some of the same ways, but there's a central thought and a broad sort of sympathy here that's very easy to lose. "Lollygag" is quite affected, yes, but there's at least something there.
Narrated in Greek even though it appears to take place in an American suburb, it features a woman looking back on her teen years discussing how she doesn't remember the first time she saw the Boy Next Door (Isaac Powell), but did remember the last. Her bedroom had a view of his pool, and both he and the backyard were beautiful, even if she had come to realize boys didn't actually interest her. He was apparently bisexual, though, with various young men and women joining him, while on other days, he sat there picking at a Whiteman's sampler, until…
Well, that's where it gets interesting, especially once she crosses the fence. The Girl (Gaby Slape) does not become sentimental, but her detachment is not contemptuous, though it walks right up to the line for some dark comedy. There's callousness here, especially from the perspective of youth, but the narration is built to highlight the distance from this story which started with a VHS-blue screen and implies she has become a different person in the meantime, one who perhaps recognizes that the Boy Next Door had a hollow life, even if it isn't the trappings that caused it.
Hippo
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Say this about Hippo: I could at least feel and share in one character's well-earned distaste for the rest. It's not really much to hang onto in terms of vibing with a movie, but it's at least something.
That character would be Buttercup (Lilla Kizlinger), who was adopted Ethel (Eliza Roberts) and her husband after her family in Hungary was killed, but her foster father also died some years ago, leaving her and her foster brother Hippo (Kimball Farley) to be raised by Eliza, and as they have been homeschooled, they are not well-socialized at all. Hippo is just generally hostile to everyone in the world except his mother, while Buttercup doesn't imagine anything more to her life than motherhood, and no ideas for potential fathers than Hippo.
What director Mark H. Rapaport and his co-writer/star Kimball Farley are doing here is interesting, in that even as the narration points out that Hippo and Buttercup are homeschooled and that there's an content filter on their internet, it can take a while before it really sinks in that this family has been cut off from common American culture in a way that has analogs beyond this particular tiny enclave. Between cinematographer William Babcock's monochrome photography and Eric Roberts's narration that hint at documentary tropes without actually imitating that sort of film, the filmmakers create a sort of counter to their isolation: The family is outsiders, but the viewer is also outside of them and looking in, shifting them from eccentric to hidden, folks who have seemingly had their brains deliberately poisoned rather than being eccentric by circumstance.
That's what makes Lilla Kizlinger's Buttercup the soul of the movie; she's both insider and outsider at once time, and if she's been captured by this situation, she's at least sensible enough to feel something is amiss and perhaps holding on to something else. Kizlinger is really terrific here, the person who always draws one's attention even when Kimball Farley's Hippo is built to be more eye-catching and more outrageous in his behavior; she and Rapaport almost never fail to make her withering disdain both very funny and sad. Farley and Eliza Roberts are never quite able to forge that connection; they make their ridiculous characters believable in that most of us have probably met people with the same sort of abrasive and deluded personalities, and they can deliver something bizarre with conviction, but one doesn't necessarily quite believe in them.
Because of that, sharing Buttercup's frustration at being trapped with these people was more or less all the movie seemed to have for me. Its stupid and mean characters never felt like they could be anything other than stupid and mean in other circumstances, and the arch narration from Eric Roberts adds a level of smugness. It's a sort of demonstration that even the darkest comedy often comes from a sort of empathy, especially if the ability to relate to horrible people catches a viewer off guard, rather than just pointing and sneering. And so, Hippo winds up a movie where the cast is good and the gags are executed well enough, but I never found myself in a mood to laugh.
Baby Assassins 2 Babies
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
I was not a particular fan of the first Baby Assassins, and I was prepared to be unimpressed with this one, especially as it seems to be the sort of sequel that is by and large more of what was going on in the first movie rather than an expansion or continuation. Fortunately, the formula has been tweaked so that the parts in between the action scenes works a lot better. There still seems to be a lot of stretching the time between action scenes out, but everybody seems to have gotten better with practice.
The film opens by introducing a new pair of young assassins, brothers Makoto (Tatsuomi Hamada) and Yuri (Joey Iwanaga), who aren't getting choice jobs because they aren't part of the "official" underground economy, and also because Makoto especially is kind of sloppy. Their agent (Junpei Hashino) suggests that perhaps they can move up by eliminating some competition. Meanwhile, Mahiro (Saori Izawa0 and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) are on probation because they are behind on their bills and intervened in a bank robbery that was preventing them from paying them on time, so they're back to working part-time jobs, seemingly easy marks for the up-and-comers.
In a lot of ways, the plot here is awfully close to the same as last year, but it's also a good example of how seemingly small tweaks can make a big difference. The story is streamlined in that each new situation Chisato and Mahiro find themselves in seems to flow fairly directly from the last, rather than being arbitrary directives and detours, while Yuri and Makoto are less complicated adversaries than the yakuza family in the first. On top of that, writer/director Yugo Sakamoto recognizes that his two main characters work because they complement each other, so the girls banter more than they fight. As a result of all that, the pacing seems a little zippier; this story may be slight, but it's a straight line delivering a viewer to the next piece of screwball comedy or well-staged fights.
And, the action is still pretty great - as with the previous movie, the main complaint here is that there's not really enough of it. They work in large part because Saori Izawa is a potential breakout star as a screen fighter and Joey Iwanaga is surprisingly solid himself. The film builds to the pair of them squaring off, and it's well worth the wait: Izawa is light on her feet but explosive, so capable of doing something physically incredible at any moment that the final showdown can get little adrenaline rushes from Mahiro and Yuri feinting at each other. The fights get a little better when Izawa is in then, and even if most are relatively quick and spread with stretches in between, they've got a ton of energy.
Akari Takaishi is a bit stronger as the more comedic half of the pair, where the last film often played Chisato as a girl-next-door type who could thrive in normie scenarios where Mahiro stuck out, here she's more often depicted as a weird psycho who probably wouldn't be great at much else. Takaishi goes from airhead to dead serious without much transition and makes you believe in both so that Chisato can be both ridiculous and dangerous. I suspect that many of the actual jokes land better the more one is immersed in Japanese youth culture (to the extent that the inanities the characters talk about might be deliberately maddening to those who aren't), but the cast in general and Takaishi in particular sell the absurdity of it well.
I never thought I'd want a Baby Assassins 3 after the first, but this is a marked improvement, and I'd like to see what this crew could do with the resources to go a little bigger.
"Every House is Haunted"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, digital)
A really delightfully clever, almost gentle short film that starts out drily humorous, with a realtor telling young couple Maya (Kate Cobb) and Danny (Kevin Bigley) that "the ghosts are mostly harmless" and that the previous owners of the house barely ever saw them. Maya is skeptical, but she eventually sees Kevin (Emmanuel Wood), seven years old when he died, mostly wanting to play. She has a reason to see a child, as it turns out, but is soon befriending the house's other spirits, though Danny doesn't see them.
Tragedy unites people, even if it's not the same tragedy, and filmmaker Bryce McGuire recognizes this as natural as opposed to something to be scared, but still deeply weird, and that's the vibe of the film, Maya realizing that she's not alone and has people to share it with, even if they aren't actually talking about that all the time, even if she can't fully share it with her husband Kate Cobb and the rest are just what the film needs, able to inhabit this odd space and make it feel real.
There's not a huge amount of story here, mostly just observing, but there's a pointed use of the word "us" that hints at more. McGuire is already expanding one short to a feature, and I don't know that I'd necessarily want this to just be setup for a larger story, but I'd still be interested to find out where things would go next.
Where the Devil Roams
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Like a lot of films with this sort of background, including the rest of the Adams Family's work, what's interesting about Where the Devil Roams is that it exists at all and is as good as it is. For a movie made by folks who are basically amateurs, well away from most hotbeds of film production, it's ambitious and generally capable of realizing those ambitions. It's as much a novelty as it is a genuinely good movie, but it's watchable enough, rather than the complete disaster of similar projects.
Taking place during the Great Depression, it follows the members of a carnival sideshow on tour, particularly one family: Steven (John Adams) and Maggie (Toby Poser) are a magic act, although not so popular as Mr. Tips, whose gruesome self-mutilation is somehow reversed every night. Leigh (Zelda Adams), their daughter, is a beautiful and ethereal singer, but mute in all other circumstances. John was once a doctor, but since his service in World War I he can't stand the sight of blood, which would seem to make him an odd match for Maggie's murderous rages. That frequently emerges as they travel from town to town separately from the rest of the carnival, until they bite off more than they can chew. Fortunately, Leigh knows how Mr. Tips manages his trick.
Gruesome and boring is a tough combination, and there's a stretch or two in this movie where this family of carnies just seems to cycle through driving down a dirt road, stopping at a house where Maggie will kill its occupant (and Leigh takes a picture), while they blindfold Steven because his PTSD is apparently so very specific that only the sight of blood triggers it, three or four times in a row. The film is already well past the point of being shocking, and it hasn't really gotten to its big idea, even halfway through. It feels like they've promised all their friends and collaborators that they'll get to be immortalized dying on screen, no matter how much time it gives the audience's mind to wander about whether Leigh constructs a darkroom in the corner of their tent or if she knows which photography shops don't raise their eyebrows at this sort of thing.
This family has been making feature-length films and shorts as a collaborative unit for at least ten years, since younger daughter Zelda was about ten, breaking through on the festival circuit five years ago with The Deeper You Dig, and they've got some talent for it. They know their tools and their outside-the-box choices don't feel like things professionals avoid for a reason, and for the most part any roughness in the acting feels like it fits into the heightened, weirdo-attracting world of the carnival. There are some decisions that seem influenced by what they can scrounge up as opposed to necessity - although I suppose the family traveling alone in the one period automobile they have access to rather than in a caravan is both - but they and their team are good at doing that scrounging and making the most of it.
But then there's the story, and I'm not sure that this movie really has a big idea, rather than a plot device and a desire to make a homemade period horror flick. The filmmakers talked about going into scenes with a "template" in the Q&A, but the movie really feels like it could use a tight script, because there's no real suspense to it; they know how to shoot and cut but don't give scenes much purpose beyond the plot. The film is seldom driving at anything, and there is little that resonates in the ideas. It's horror fans imagining scenes and scenarios and figuring out what they can do with the resources they have.
And, fine. I don't want to discourage this sort of homemade film; the Adams Family productions are decent achievements where fellow fans can feel proud of what they've created. But this one isn't much more, and if you're looking through the vast Tubi archives for something that can thrill and excite, this probably won't be your best choice.
Friday, August 11, 2023
Fantasia 2023 in theaters: Aporia and Mad Fate
I try to go through festivals as I see them, figuring they might fall out the back of my head by the time I get to them, but two films from the festival are opening in Boston this weekend. Near as I can tell, that's all, and nothing is coming out on disc, VOD, or any streaming service in the next week, but that can be tough to find good information on until they're available.
Anyway, more info on visitors and atmosphere when I get to the movies in the "Fantasia Daily" posts; for now, I'll just say that if you've only got time for one of these movies this weekend, I would recommend Mad Fate.
Aporia
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
I can't speak to what sort of genre material writer/director Jared Moshe consumes in his spare time, or what unproduced scripts he has on his laptop, but Aporia has the feel of a movie made by someone who has an idea for a speculative fiction story but who doesn't really familiarize themselves with the genre because they figure it's not really important: Their movie, after all, is really about human relationships as opposed to that sci-fi stuff. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you wind up reinventing what Ray Bradbury figured out seventy years ago and fumbling the fallout.
The film starts with Sophie (Judy Greer), an overworked assisted-care nurse whose daughter Riley (Faithe Herman) has been in an even bigger spiral since the death of her father, and when she's suspended for skipping class, Sophie reaches out to Jabir (Payman Maadi), one of her late husband mal's closest friends, for help. Jabir, once a physicist in his home country before immigrating, reveals that he's been working on a machine that can send "abstract" particles back in time - and if you send them back to where and when a person's head is, nobody will be able to explain the stroke. They figure out a "safe" moment to remove the drunk driver who killed Mal, and it's a success - Mal (Edi Gathegi) is back, and only Sophie and Jabir know anything is different. But they soon discover that they've made life worse for the driver's widow Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) and her daughter Aggie (Veda Clenfuegos), which means they've got to intervene again. Oh, and Jabir has a whole file cabinet full of serial killers and child abusers.
So, I know this isn't really that kind of movie, but once you lay this all out, I can't help but think that roughly ten years before it's possible to build a retroactive murder machine on a hobbyist budget, something like 20% of the world population would suddenly have a stroke. Maybe more, because the folks who survive to that new future would piss someone off, and so on. That's the peril of having your production designer build a machine that looks like it's put together with spare parts and scrap metal - and, yeah, it's a really great-looking machine - you can't exactly presume there's ever just going to be one Jabir who figures this sort of thing out. On top of that, science-fiction fans are going to rescue the central dilemma as a butterfly effect (articulated by Arthur C. Clarke in "A Sound of Thunder" back in 1952 and named by Edward Norton Lorenz in 1972) and perhaps be skeptical that this can be fixed by stomping on more butterflies, and you'd better hope that they haven't read Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past" (1956) and put together than what Jabir has built actually works even better as an untraceable murder weapon if you know where someone was one second ago (relevant, because we're already dealing with Jabir's kill list). The big ideas Moshe is playing with are decades old and well-known tropes by now.
But, again, this is not that sort of movie. It's okay for what it is, especially once it starts piling multiple changes on top of one another, and the point is arguably to give the cast a chance to show their characters wrestling with the weight of the decision, and they mostly do okay by that. It's kind of nice to see Judy Greer actually get a lead role, and one that gives her something to work with as Sophie is overwhelmed by her grief and has strong feelings about both how she must make things right or feels addled by the world around her suddenly changing (or learning that it has changed without her knowledge). Payman Maadi makes an interesting counter, carrying the tragedy of Jabir's lost family but also able to make the scientist's cool calculation a bit unnerving.
The script often doesn't seem to know how to get out of its own way, though - a scene where one character tells another about the machine is weird in how it comes out of nowhere, for instance, like Moshe saw a hole that needed patching and did it in the oddest-feeling way possible. The big fault, though, even beyond how the usual tropes haven't been thought through, is that for a movie that wants to emphasize characters' emotional decisions over sci-fi what-ifs, its moral compass is really all over the place. These characters are playing god but seldom have any vision outside their own narrow desires, and the decisions made in the home stretch are framed as brave self-sacrifice but are, in effect, ways to shed responsibility for what the characters have done.
Honestly, I think I might find the end of this movie uglier the more I think about it. Aporia is well done in a lot of ways, but kind of misbegotten in others, and a defense that it makes you think isn't going to make one think better of it.
Ming'on (Mad Fate)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
For all that I've seen horoscopes, fate, feng shui, and a number of similar things off that ilk used in Chinese films before, it's almost always been in fantasies, or a sign of comedic superstition or eccentricity, generally for older female characters - or at least easily dismissed as such from my western point of view. Mad Fate feels like the first time I've seen characters really take that sort of thing dead seriously, such that even if they're nuts for doing so, the film has to do so as well. And, boy, does that make the film a ride.
May (Birdy Wong Ching-Yan) seems to fit the stereotype, at first, as she's allowing herself to be buried in a cemetery for a couple of hours because her astrologer (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung) is predicting a disaster for her in that timeframe - one that being buried alive in a thunderstorm could maybe cause. Instead, she returns home to a building that houses a lot of other prostitutes, whom a veteran detective (Berg Ng Ting-Yip) has been warning about a serial killer (Peter Chan Charm-Man) in the area. In a twist of fate, the rain smears the number on an order of noodles being delivered by Siu-Tung (Yeung Lok-Man) - who looks on the killer's work with fascination rather than revulsion. The detective has had his eye on Siu-Tung since childhood - he has a history of killing animals and scarred his sister - and the chart the astrologer creates for him has murder in his future, But, the man claims, it is possible to change one's luck and fate by changing one's habits and environment.
It's madness, of course, but a specific sort, as both Siu-Tung and "The Master" are likely insane and a danger to others, but the idea that you can read the stars and adjust your living space to somehow change your destiny is no less a lifeline than anything that psychiatry can offer. It at least offers something concrete you can do, and perhaps just committing to doing that can change your habits. The desperation of these two to avoid the urges that threaten to overwhelm them is something so compelling that it's easily able to muscle a more conventional serial killer story off to the side.
And it is an awful lot of fun to watch Gordon Lam and Yeung Lok-Man work here. Lam is a Hong Kong veteran who may be doing the best work in a busy career here, creating a character who seems desperately heroic at the start, striving to save people that the system doesn't care about or believe are in danger, but that's a thin layer over his own desperation to believe that he can defy what the stars have in store for him, especially when the audience gets a glimpse of what he was and could be again if he doesn't fight what the stars have in store for him. Yeung, meanwhile, does nice work riding the line of someone who may be a sociopath but still has the idea that it would be better if he wasn't, giving little hints as the movie goes on that Siu-Tung wants to be better but is still a volatile ball of rage and violence that wants to cut things open. The performances get bigger and bolder as the film goes on, unrelenting but compelling madness. The same goes for Berg Ng Ting-Yip as the cop who is mostly professional but can't get past his fear of Siu-Tung and Peter Chan, whose killer is seemingly unburdened by worry about what he is but is still made more volatile by the sheer nuisance of the others.
Is there something to this so-called madness? Perhaps; Siu-Tung and the Master do keep crossing the paths of this killer after all, and the script by Yau Nai-Hoi and Lee Chun-Fai seems to revel in creating convincing coincidences - not so much unlikely random events, but there's a sort of gravity to the way that the paths of these four characters (or five, once Ng Wing-Sze's prostitute-with-a-gambling-problem Jo relocates from the building where a bunch of her colleagues have died to the one where Siu-Tung has taken up residence) keep bending toward each other in ways that individually seem reasonable but are a lot when added together. Director Cheang Pou-Soi does really nice work of keeping this sort of thing feeling deft and natural even as the film erupts into bloody violence when these threads do cross, making sure that the darkly comic absurdity of the premise and the dangerous mania of the execution are present in almost every scene, teaming with frequent collaborator Jack Wong Wai-Leung to make sure that the action is hard-hitting.
It's also a terrifically stylish movie, with great locations from the cemetery in the opening to the rooftop where much of the later film takes place, with the city in between often ugly and seedy in a way that seems to be trying to mire everyone in quicksand. And don't look up for hope - I don't know that there's a sky in the movie that hasn't been digitally augmented or re-composited in such a way that suggests a capricious God tormenting them with madness and danger. The film never lets up with this sort of thing, aiming to make the audience as paranoid as what they're watching. It's a more colorful hell than Cheang's previous film Limbo, but no easier to escape.
(Looking at his credits, it's no wonder that Monkey King trilogy just didn't play right!)
It is, if nothing else, as mad as the title promises, pulling the viewer along through a cosmology that is maybe not rational but does, for these two hours anyway, operate with a strange alternate logic that is just as compelling, making for one heck of a ride.
Anyway, more info on visitors and atmosphere when I get to the movies in the "Fantasia Daily" posts; for now, I'll just say that if you've only got time for one of these movies this weekend, I would recommend Mad Fate.
Aporia
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
I can't speak to what sort of genre material writer/director Jared Moshe consumes in his spare time, or what unproduced scripts he has on his laptop, but Aporia has the feel of a movie made by someone who has an idea for a speculative fiction story but who doesn't really familiarize themselves with the genre because they figure it's not really important: Their movie, after all, is really about human relationships as opposed to that sci-fi stuff. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you wind up reinventing what Ray Bradbury figured out seventy years ago and fumbling the fallout.
The film starts with Sophie (Judy Greer), an overworked assisted-care nurse whose daughter Riley (Faithe Herman) has been in an even bigger spiral since the death of her father, and when she's suspended for skipping class, Sophie reaches out to Jabir (Payman Maadi), one of her late husband mal's closest friends, for help. Jabir, once a physicist in his home country before immigrating, reveals that he's been working on a machine that can send "abstract" particles back in time - and if you send them back to where and when a person's head is, nobody will be able to explain the stroke. They figure out a "safe" moment to remove the drunk driver who killed Mal, and it's a success - Mal (Edi Gathegi) is back, and only Sophie and Jabir know anything is different. But they soon discover that they've made life worse for the driver's widow Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) and her daughter Aggie (Veda Clenfuegos), which means they've got to intervene again. Oh, and Jabir has a whole file cabinet full of serial killers and child abusers.
So, I know this isn't really that kind of movie, but once you lay this all out, I can't help but think that roughly ten years before it's possible to build a retroactive murder machine on a hobbyist budget, something like 20% of the world population would suddenly have a stroke. Maybe more, because the folks who survive to that new future would piss someone off, and so on. That's the peril of having your production designer build a machine that looks like it's put together with spare parts and scrap metal - and, yeah, it's a really great-looking machine - you can't exactly presume there's ever just going to be one Jabir who figures this sort of thing out. On top of that, science-fiction fans are going to rescue the central dilemma as a butterfly effect (articulated by Arthur C. Clarke in "A Sound of Thunder" back in 1952 and named by Edward Norton Lorenz in 1972) and perhaps be skeptical that this can be fixed by stomping on more butterflies, and you'd better hope that they haven't read Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past" (1956) and put together than what Jabir has built actually works even better as an untraceable murder weapon if you know where someone was one second ago (relevant, because we're already dealing with Jabir's kill list). The big ideas Moshe is playing with are decades old and well-known tropes by now.
But, again, this is not that sort of movie. It's okay for what it is, especially once it starts piling multiple changes on top of one another, and the point is arguably to give the cast a chance to show their characters wrestling with the weight of the decision, and they mostly do okay by that. It's kind of nice to see Judy Greer actually get a lead role, and one that gives her something to work with as Sophie is overwhelmed by her grief and has strong feelings about both how she must make things right or feels addled by the world around her suddenly changing (or learning that it has changed without her knowledge). Payman Maadi makes an interesting counter, carrying the tragedy of Jabir's lost family but also able to make the scientist's cool calculation a bit unnerving.
The script often doesn't seem to know how to get out of its own way, though - a scene where one character tells another about the machine is weird in how it comes out of nowhere, for instance, like Moshe saw a hole that needed patching and did it in the oddest-feeling way possible. The big fault, though, even beyond how the usual tropes haven't been thought through, is that for a movie that wants to emphasize characters' emotional decisions over sci-fi what-ifs, its moral compass is really all over the place. These characters are playing god but seldom have any vision outside their own narrow desires, and the decisions made in the home stretch are framed as brave self-sacrifice but are, in effect, ways to shed responsibility for what the characters have done.
Honestly, I think I might find the end of this movie uglier the more I think about it. Aporia is well done in a lot of ways, but kind of misbegotten in others, and a defense that it makes you think isn't going to make one think better of it.
Ming'on (Mad Fate)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
For all that I've seen horoscopes, fate, feng shui, and a number of similar things off that ilk used in Chinese films before, it's almost always been in fantasies, or a sign of comedic superstition or eccentricity, generally for older female characters - or at least easily dismissed as such from my western point of view. Mad Fate feels like the first time I've seen characters really take that sort of thing dead seriously, such that even if they're nuts for doing so, the film has to do so as well. And, boy, does that make the film a ride.
May (Birdy Wong Ching-Yan) seems to fit the stereotype, at first, as she's allowing herself to be buried in a cemetery for a couple of hours because her astrologer (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung) is predicting a disaster for her in that timeframe - one that being buried alive in a thunderstorm could maybe cause. Instead, she returns home to a building that houses a lot of other prostitutes, whom a veteran detective (Berg Ng Ting-Yip) has been warning about a serial killer (Peter Chan Charm-Man) in the area. In a twist of fate, the rain smears the number on an order of noodles being delivered by Siu-Tung (Yeung Lok-Man) - who looks on the killer's work with fascination rather than revulsion. The detective has had his eye on Siu-Tung since childhood - he has a history of killing animals and scarred his sister - and the chart the astrologer creates for him has murder in his future, But, the man claims, it is possible to change one's luck and fate by changing one's habits and environment.
It's madness, of course, but a specific sort, as both Siu-Tung and "The Master" are likely insane and a danger to others, but the idea that you can read the stars and adjust your living space to somehow change your destiny is no less a lifeline than anything that psychiatry can offer. It at least offers something concrete you can do, and perhaps just committing to doing that can change your habits. The desperation of these two to avoid the urges that threaten to overwhelm them is something so compelling that it's easily able to muscle a more conventional serial killer story off to the side.
And it is an awful lot of fun to watch Gordon Lam and Yeung Lok-Man work here. Lam is a Hong Kong veteran who may be doing the best work in a busy career here, creating a character who seems desperately heroic at the start, striving to save people that the system doesn't care about or believe are in danger, but that's a thin layer over his own desperation to believe that he can defy what the stars have in store for him, especially when the audience gets a glimpse of what he was and could be again if he doesn't fight what the stars have in store for him. Yeung, meanwhile, does nice work riding the line of someone who may be a sociopath but still has the idea that it would be better if he wasn't, giving little hints as the movie goes on that Siu-Tung wants to be better but is still a volatile ball of rage and violence that wants to cut things open. The performances get bigger and bolder as the film goes on, unrelenting but compelling madness. The same goes for Berg Ng Ting-Yip as the cop who is mostly professional but can't get past his fear of Siu-Tung and Peter Chan, whose killer is seemingly unburdened by worry about what he is but is still made more volatile by the sheer nuisance of the others.
Is there something to this so-called madness? Perhaps; Siu-Tung and the Master do keep crossing the paths of this killer after all, and the script by Yau Nai-Hoi and Lee Chun-Fai seems to revel in creating convincing coincidences - not so much unlikely random events, but there's a sort of gravity to the way that the paths of these four characters (or five, once Ng Wing-Sze's prostitute-with-a-gambling-problem Jo relocates from the building where a bunch of her colleagues have died to the one where Siu-Tung has taken up residence) keep bending toward each other in ways that individually seem reasonable but are a lot when added together. Director Cheang Pou-Soi does really nice work of keeping this sort of thing feeling deft and natural even as the film erupts into bloody violence when these threads do cross, making sure that the darkly comic absurdity of the premise and the dangerous mania of the execution are present in almost every scene, teaming with frequent collaborator Jack Wong Wai-Leung to make sure that the action is hard-hitting.
It's also a terrifically stylish movie, with great locations from the cemetery in the opening to the rooftop where much of the later film takes place, with the city in between often ugly and seedy in a way that seems to be trying to mire everyone in quicksand. And don't look up for hope - I don't know that there's a sky in the movie that hasn't been digitally augmented or re-composited in such a way that suggests a capricious God tormenting them with madness and danger. The film never lets up with this sort of thing, aiming to make the audience as paranoid as what they're watching. It's a more colorful hell than Cheang's previous film Limbo, but no easier to escape.
(Looking at his credits, it's no wonder that Monkey King trilogy just didn't play right!)
It is, if nothing else, as mad as the title promises, pulling the viewer along through a cosmology that is maybe not rational but does, for these two hours anyway, operate with a strange alternate logic that is just as compelling, making for one heck of a ride.
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.07: A Chinese Ghost Story, "How to Get Rid of Your Cheating Husband", Booger, Insomniacs After School, Things That Go Bump in the East, and Devils
Next up: A quick detour into Fantasia stuff coming out over the next week, and then Hippo, Baby Assassins 2, and Where the Devil Roams as part of the next "regular update". As I post this, the festival is over, but I've got plenty of Letterboxd entries to expand and shorts to write up.
Sien lui yau wan (A Chinese Ghost Story)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, 35mm)
This movie really is just a classic of pulling one crazy thing on top of another that looks like just another briskly zany Hong Kong horror-fantasy-comedy, although if that these things were a dime a dozen I've admittedly got to rack my brains a little as I consider how many of the similar movies I'm thinking about came afterward and tried to imitate what this team did exceptionally well. If this movie's not best-in-class, it's right up there.
After an opening where a scribe meets his end at the hands of a ghostly dancing woman, the film introduces Ling Choi San (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing), a shabby traveler who just barely passes a number of dangers and indignities as he makes his way to a town where he's expected to collect a number of debts, as well as swordsmen Yin Chek Ha (Wu Ma) and Hsia Hou (Lam Wai), who have a long rivalry and have chosen the haunted grounds of the Lan Po temple on which to duel. When the broke Choi-San is directed to the temple as a place to sleep without paying, they expect he won't return, but he serendipitously evades some ghosts and throws another, Lip Siu-Sin (Joey Wong Cho-Yin), off with his general decency, to the point where she finds herself unwilling to murder him. Of course, she is by far the most sweet-natured supernatural entity on the premises.
Of all the things that work just a little bit better than could be expected, the not-so-secret weapon is Leslie Cheung, who takes the stock character of the nice but inept twit stumbling through the crazy situation and makes him a genuine heart of the movie hero even though Yuen Kai-Chi's script never actually makes him better at fighting or doing the sort of magic that dispatches supernatural villains. That is a lot more rare than you'd think for the number of these movies that have this naif at their center, but Cheung has the sort of natural sweetness the part needs and an ability to handle tragedy when it becomes clear that Siu-Sin's best ending might be reincarnation rather than resurrection. He and Joey Wong play off each other very nicely at that, she's believably a reluctant monster. Wu Ma, meanwhile, is a counterpart to them falling for each other with bombastic delivery and pragmatism about how she's a ghost and part of something that could cause disaster and he's just a goober who will likely be no help at all.
It's also got some really nifty monster effects in its dessicated mummies, who maybe don't always look great when seen in full, but the filmmakers really maximize their effect when they are introduced, making a scene organized more around comic beats than actual scares still feel sinister and dangerous. The delight taken in the film's special effects work is probably a big part of why the film is often associated as much with producer Tsui Hark as director Tony Ching Siu-Tung, although his work is nothing to sneeze at; he The film is full of fun bits of supernatural madness, including demon weddings and the confidence to do almost zero effects when characters open a portal to another world because there doesn't really need to be something cool there and it would just distract from the thing that's going on and what's up next.
And, yes, there's flying martial arts; Tony Ching started his career as a director with Duel to the Death and is one of the action directors here, and the action always plays as pretty substantial: Even as Wu Man, Lam Wai, Lau Siu-Ming and others are leaping at each other and trading blows with swords as they go by, it seldom feels like there isn't effort behind these impossible showdowns, as opposed to people flying and posing at each other for energy blasts.
All in all, It's a confident, entertaining movie that really nails what makes the genre work at its best.
"How to Get Rid of Your Cheating Husband"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)
There's an "oblivious-influencer" dynamic to this movie that I don't quite get - insert humblebrag about not watching the kind of short internet videos in question here - but which is kind of amusing regardless, like these two are so far up their own tails that the fact that one friend's husband was another's boyfriend even registers as weird and uncomfortable. Like, it's not so much that they should hate each other rather than him, but that they don't even seem capable enough of extending their awareness that far from their individual selves.
It's kind of the most memorable thing about the short, really; that vibe (combined with German actors who I suspect are exaggerating odd accents when speaking English) is far more memorable than any twist or line that arises out of it.
Booger
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, DCP)
On the one hand, I always feel embarrassed during this festival about taking days or weeks to get reviews posted. On the other, circling back a week later and comparing what stuck with me to what is in my notes and quick entry on Letterboxd is often clarifying and an odd contrast: For example, a week and a half away from Booger, I had almost completely forgotten that there was a fantasy/horror component to the movie, which speaks to how well the rest of it is done, considering the festival where I watched it.
"Booger" is the name Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin) gives to a stray cat that showed up in the apartment she shared with longtime best friend Anna (Grace Glowicki) a couple years back and decided to stay over Anna's initial objections. But now Izzy has died, and while Anna is trying real hard to hold it together, she can't afford the rent on her own, Izzy's mother Joyce (Marcia DeBonis) is in and out to pack up her daughter's things, and Anna's boyfriend Max (Garrick Bernard) is kind of pissing her off by acting even more broken up about Izzy even though they were never really friends without Anna as an intermediate. On top of that, when Anna tries to get Booger to stop gnawing on a plant, the cat bites her and bolts out an open window, and if it wasn't bad enough that Anna lost Izzy's cat, it's starting to look like that bite is making Anna take on some feline characteristics.
So, if I don't remember much of the whole "turning into a cat person" thing, what did stick in my mind. Well, Grace Glowicki as Anna, mainly; she's in nearly every scene of the movie and gives a performance that stacks all of Anna's emotions rather than switching between them: Weird cat stuff on top of her clearly using her lost cat to keep from collapsing from the loss of her friend on top of the sort of grief that leads to other forms of denial to how she was maybe not entirely sure of herself before all this. She's sort of on her own for much of the movie, although one noteworthy element is just how well she pairs with Marcia DeBonis in navigating the empty space that's supposed to link them; DeBonis's Joyce is obviously devastated while also giving the impression that, at her age, she's encountered death a little more and understands the emotions around it better. It's also impressive just how strong an impression Sofia Dobrushin makes as Izzy in quick bits of random vertical video from the girls' phones, enough to get the impression Anna kind of orbited around her and make other remembrances ring true.
The cat-person story is what sells the movie, though, and even if it falls away when considering what makes this a noteworthy film, in the present one may find oneself wondering if maybe writer/director Mary Dauterman over-committed to the bit, just a little? For as much as I loved the central performance and the sharp way that it looks at grief, there comes a point where I'm a little more tempted to groan and wonder just how many things along these lines that they intended to do, especially when the expressions of it get a little more grotesque than just Anna's habit of licking at the hair that dangles to her mouth. It's not just kind of nasty, but a viewer can kind of feel early on that this isn't really going to be a film where the end is a complete physical transformation or Anna otherwise losing her humanity.
The execution of those things is often pretty strong, though, almost all done with body language and just unwavering dedication to doing this thing, no matter how weird or gross it may be. Still, I think the line which stands out the most is "she was going to leave me?", which changes the grief in a way the audience immediately understands and makes both Anna and Izzy more imperfectly human without ever having to tear either down, even if there's another, more consequential moment that upends the story more.
It's a really impressive little movie in a lot of ways, even if I do worry that the next person I recommend it to won't realize what they're in for.
Kimi wa Hokago Insomnia (Insomniacs After School)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, DCP)
Is there something about the manga magazine to movie pipeline that enables Japan to send two or three pretty darn good coming of age stories to this festival (which mainly features genre cinema) every year when it seems like this is a genre we barely do in America? Do these movies play theatrically and do well? I'm so curious, because even something as specific in its details as Insomniacs After School is going to be universal to some extent.
It opens with high-school student Ganta Nakami (Daiken Okudaira), who wanders around at night unable to sleep, only to find himself crashing during school hours, thinking he's the only one like this until, sent up to the school's disused observatory on an errand, he discovers Isaki Magari (Nana Mori), a bubbly, popular girl, napping there in a storage locker. They quickly bond over their shared affliction, though school nurse Kurashiki (Yuki Sakurai) informs them that 1 in 4 Japanese have some sort of sleeping disorder, and suggests they re-start an astronomy club to legitimize the use of the room, putting them in contact with graduate Yui Shiromaru (Minori Hagiwara), who led the club the last time it existed and won an award for her astrophotography, though Isaki doesn't take to the technique nearly as well as Ganta.
One thing that I particularly like is that, despite what that last sentence may imply, it's not long after the moment when one recognizes that the movie is kind of built around the boy's perspective and interest that it finds a way to give the girl something that could, eventually, be more hers than his. In some ways, that's the bare minimum, but it's important: A lot of movies don't manage that, and it's very welcome, especially when a person has seen a lot of them and can sort of spot the point where one character may wind up the means for the others to learn a valuable lesson, which is fairly adroitly handled here.
The very appealing leads are a big part of why this is another strong entry in the genre: Daiken Okudaira, for instance, is likable and earnest enough as Ganta but does capture that even a genuinely decent-hearted person can tend to make things about himself, both in terms of being a bit selfish and overreacting when things go wrong, while Nana Mori brings the stubbornness and perhaps desperation behind Isaki's cheerfulness. There are also a bunch of supporting characters who carve out individual places and personalities in pretty limited time, particularly Minori Hagiwara as the nurse one suspects has some sort of similar issues of her own and Haruka Kudo as Isaki's sister Saya, who feels more like a genuine sibling with whom one has a complicated relationship than is often the case in Japanese films (often, there seems to be an age gap or implication that brothers and sisters inhabit different worlds that isn't present here). That includes parents who, even when they're not around much, at least feel like a daily, concerned part of their kids' lives.
Co-writer/director Chihiro Ikeda, for the most part, avoids much in the way of filigree; the film is cleanly shot and generally opts for characters telling each other things rather than flashbacks, because in most cases the fact of someone opening up about what happened is actually more important than its details. They're good at making the quiet emptiness of these towns at night beautiful but also just a bit off; it's nice for Ganta and Isaki to have special space, but less so that they need it. The locations, from the high school with the unlikely observatory to the old ruin Ganta uses as background for a photograph (one of the few times the film gets fancy or clever with its shooting), are enjoyably specific.
It is, as per usual, a very direct film aimed at teenagers like its characters, but it does that very well indeed.
"Sarangi"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
A young man wanders through an empty school building, inescapable music in the air, but when he finds the person playing it, it only makes things scarier.
Filmmaker Tarun Thind jumps on some pretty common nightmare elements and executes them well, from the unnerving setting with endless hallways that never seem to lead outside to how discovering a musician rather than just something on the PA only makes it worse to the final overload. I suspect that it might have worked even better for me if I had recognized "God Save the Queen" as the tune being played on Indian instruments; knowing that, it works even better as an idea that this definitionally British thing is pervasive even now, having wormed its way into South Asian culture even where it's incompatible and done damage whether one tries to resist or not.
"Two Side"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
What initially simply looks like a case of school bullying reveals itself as something more sinister, the student at the center starts cracking up.
This is a really nifty short that, perhaps, hints at a sort of cycle of predation on top of the main character just losing his mind, as its animation piles symbol upon ambiguous symbol, with mirrors and masks, the latter literally having two faces. The crime at the center definitely happened, of course, but the implication is that the victim had done the same thing at some point, and so on up and down the line; it just turned out worse. Visually, the film is a treat - all that imagery is great to look at and director Luo Mingyang is terrific about jumping from one perspective to another in both smooth and abrupt fashions.
"English Tutor"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
Looking to earn some extra money, a college student (Lee Do-Eun) takes a job tutoring So-yeong (Oh Chae-A), but both the student herself and the obsession of her mother (Seo Hye-In) to hear "just one word in English" soon becomes exceptionally unnerving.
Overall, an impressive horror story that doesn't really mess around with subtlety - both So-yeong and her mother are creepy from the start, both made miserable in their own ways from the pressure put upon them, and Lee Do-Eun has a quick descent from someone approaching a job casually to realizing that when you are brought into someone's home, there's a good chance that you'll encounter all the associated issues within. Writer/director Koo Jaho escalates quickly, so that it's quickly chasing the Tutor outside and offering up a bloody result.
"Foreigners Only"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
A man looking for an apartment (Mostafa Monwar) in Bangladesh finds himself thwarted by numerous openings that are apparently available only to foreigners, building to an obvious solution.
Well, maybe not the obvious solution, as the ads for "Fairosol" skin lightener in the background are apparently only slightly exaggerated from the real projects on offer in South Asia, but the obvious horror movie one. Writer/director Nuhash Humayun is not particularly subtle here, but given how pervasive some of this is, subtlety is not really called for: Between the pervasive advertising and a landlord (Iresh Zaker) making sure that he explains his rationale in clear English (as opposed to Bangala), presenting it as an aspirational issue that nevertheless reveals the sort of combination of snobbery and self-disdain that leads people to diminish themselves. The ultimate solution is gruesome and should logically be fooling nobody, but that's the sick humor of it - people will respond to a surface trait no matter how nasty what's underneath is.
"Tang"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
Well-enough made to feel closer to "a real movie" than machinima (I've seen Unreal Engine credited in enough actual features to recognize how blurred that line can become), although its basic survival-horror material, short runtime, and lack of dialogue tend to leave it open to interpretation while not giving one a whole lot to interpret. I think it's mostly a nightmare of a woman who feels she is somehow inauthentic after losing a lot of weight or otherwise re-shaping her body being chased down by grotesque, fatty monsters and shed skins, though this doesn't seem to be as prevalent a theme in Korean cinema as it had been in previous years. It's fine, and I suspect younger audiences who can engage more emotionally when they see something that looks like a videogame will probably enjoy it more than I.
"You Will See"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
In this one, Gwyn (Chng Min Si) comes into possession of a camera that seems to have a mind of its own as she pushes herself further to capture something meaningful.
The thing that resonates me here is the way that carrying a camera around can mess with your mind in a way that having one as part of your phone doesn't; you're constantly looking for a shot rather than capturing one opportunistically, but also often feeling that you don't necessarily have the right to it, that the striking image you've chosen to capture and save and maybe sell or present often comes from someone else. That's the thing that writer/director Kathleen Bu and actress Chng Min Si capture very well here, from Gwyn's nervousness and urgency to things like the camera straps digging into her shoulders, like it's enslaving or capturing her rather than just functioning as a tool.
"Night of the Bride"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
"Night of the Bride" is a premise that could turn into black comedy with relatively little effort - a young woman (Gurleen Arora) has been kidnapped with the intent to marry her to a desperate mother's son - but writer/director Virat Pal mostly chooses to be relentlessly straightforward in the film's grimness, even if it starts with the odd image of a woman being made up while tied up, like all the questioning and trying to talk one's way out of it happened before that point and now there's just desperate pleading.
Still, that doesn't make Arora's portrayal any less compelling or Harrdeep Kaur any less insane as the mother, and Pal does a nice job of keeping the noose tight, with most of the short taking place within one or two rooms, a wall of resignation among the rest of the cast that seems harder to fight than active cruelty, and a revelation or two that doesn't necessarily surprise but certainly highlights just how difficult these forces can be to resist, even when folks know they are wrong.
"Wang Shen Zhi Ye" ("A Night with Moosina")
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, digital)
A busy animated film in which a kid ventures into the forest after seeing a friend emerge changed, but there's a twisting path to getting out of both the forest and a trans stage with one's life.
Director Tsai Shiu-Cheng offers a sumptuous feast of animation, with screens full of bright colors, often crowded with objects meant to keep humans safe from all the spirits in the forest, even as the colors mute as heroine Chun Mei pushes deeper into darkness. It's an adventurous, often riotous spookshow, but Tsai has the knack for letting all that happen at a pace where the next thing is always a few seconds later than it might otherwise be, just enough to make the audience dread what comes next a little bit more.
Devils
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
As much as yelling "plot hole!" is bad film criticism most of the time, there is some real "we put a lot of effort into showing that something is hard before having it be easy in the home stretch" nonsense going on here that is going to draw that complaint a lot. It maybe shouldn't really matter, because it's mostly in the service of gratuitous last-minute twists which are already kind of a lot, but it does get a "hey!" or at least should.
Two years ago, homicide detective Jae-hwan (Oh Dae-hwan) and partner Gi-nam (Kim Won-hae) thought they had tracked down a ring of serial killers, but things turned sour at the last moment. Now, Jae-hwan has a new partner in Min-seong (Jang Jae-ho), and is determined not to let history repeat when they corner the killers again after a tip from inside the group. During the chase, Jae-hwan and quarry Jin-hyeok (Jang Dong-yoon) vanish when they fall over a ridge, but Jae-hwan's car is soon found with the pair unconscious inside. When he awakes inside the hospital, though, Jae-hwan discovers that he is inside Jin-hyeok's body and vice versa, with the killer threatening to kill his family unless he tracks down Jin-hyeok's partners, so that he can extract revenge for their betrayal.
It doesn't really matter that the end is especially stupid because the film mostly runs on taking a nutty premise and then having something even crazier behind it, and that's executed in such a way to make one kind of admire the sheer audacious nature of it. The cast comes to play, with Jang Dong-yoon making meals of both Jin-hyeok's mad sadism and Jae-hwan's panic while Oh Dae-hwan makes a great leap from "cop on the edge" to sadistic manipulator; if they're not hitting the crazy heights of Travolta and Cage in Face/Off, they're in the same ballpark.
And yet, beyond the high concept, the filmmakers often seem to just go harder instead of enjoying the bold choices they make from the very start. For example, if your serial killers are already painting their victims in weird paint that glows in UV light, why also dismember them? That's taking something that could be uniquely twisted - taunting messages to the forensics guys, for instance - and replacing it with plain gore. There are a half dozen cops in the squad, but none are really memorable, and, heck, even new partner Min-seong is more or less the same guy as Gi-nam, right down to potential family connection. It's bloody, but maybe not that creative in such things aside from the one big idea that carries it for a while, when the plot gives writer/director Kim Jae-Hoon all sorts of opportunity to play with how the line between the cop and killer mindsets can be twisted. Kim's got a story that needs to be very cynical about its cops but doesn't quite manage it.
Kim does have an impressive mean streak, though which manifests itself in impressively staged action as much as so much maniacal laughter. Fights give the characters some room to move and whale on each other, and everything gets bigger and harder without hesitation when it's called for. Big storytelling swings must be accompanied by big action, and he never shrinks from that.
The movie goes from clever to dumb in a big hurry at points, obviously enough to be visible in real time rather than just on further reflection. It's manic enough to keep things going - and at 106 minutes, lean by Korean standards - but sometimes going for broke means falling short even if it's an impressive effort.
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