So, remember what I said in the last Fantastic Fest catch-up about how it can be pretty easy to finish a review even a couple months later if you did the capsule at the time? Sorry, Local God. Back in September, I wrote that you had some memorable scenes, but come December? Well, as I like to say when I'm trying to get festival reviews done as quickly as possible, sometimes things fall out the back of your brain.
I'd feel worse about it if I had attended on a Press Badge, but that wasn't the case; I was the third person to apply for one from my outlet and we're not exactly big enough to merit that. As it turns out, I wound up being the only one who posted any Fantastic Fest stuff to eFilmCritic, and while that kind of stings a little - there was an anxious week or two where fan badges sold out while I was waiting to hear if I would get a press badge - I'm not going to be bitter about it. Going to film festivals and writing reviews is half vacation and half avocation for me, and I am not in a situation where I can't afford to pay for my time off and hobbies. Plus, I would have felt bad if me getting a press pass meant that someone who needs it to do a job went without. Fantastic Fest is a big enough festival these days that freelancers - which, basically, is everyone writing about movies online - probably have to list their entire potential reach at every outlet they work for to qualify for a badge, and if they don't generate material for every one, well, that just may not have worked out.
(The need to freelance for multiple outlets is why, as much as I love seeing and writing about movies and idly dream of doing this for a living, it will only ever be just a hobby for me. The idea of having to put together five employers means I'm much better off financially writing SQL code from nine to five and then writing when I really should be sleeping. I'd probably be better if I had an editor and had to hone my skills in competition, but I'm not built for that.)
Besides, I'm as bad as anyone - when they couldn't give me a FF badge, the good folks at the festival offered me one for MondoCon, and my reply was along the lines of "wouldn't say no", even though I strongly suspected that I wouldn't get near the poster art festival running in parallel with Fantastic Fest unless I had some pretty terrible luck with the lottery system for movie tickets.
So, anyway, here are the links to the six reviews: Purgatory, From the Dark, The Guest, The Absent One, Haemoo, and It Follows.
I'll probably be one-and-done with Fantastic Fest; the way that these reviews wound up getting put on hold and dragged out of me doesn't indicate a lack of enthusiasm, but does show how busy fall gets, movie-and-other-things-wise. If I feel like bulking up on genre film festivals next year, there's the New York Asian Film Festival before Fantasia and Sitges around my early-October birthday (and let's face it, as much as folks like Austin, if your two options are a week there and a week on the coast of Spain...).
Now to try and catch up on everything else before the New Year!
Purgatorio
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Though it's not uncommon to encounter one that makes a good case for its greater length at all, most horror movies would be best served running seventy-five to eighty minutes, long enough to set a story up, make the audience jump a few times, and stick a twist or two in without giving them the chance to realize that what's going on makes no sense. So let's give a cheer to Purgatorio, a nifty little thriller that doesn't have an ounce of fat on it.
It starts as any number of scary movies do, with Marta (Oona Chaplin) and her husband Luis (Andrés Gertrúdix) moving into a new apartment in a recently renovated building. Luis works the night shift, so Marta is unpacking on her own until Ana (Ana Fernandez), one of the very few other neighbors, is unexpectedly called into work herself and asks Marta to watch her son Daniel (Sergi Mendez). It doesn't take long for the kid to reveal himself to be more than a bit of a brat, with a taste for creepy and tasteless pranks. And if any of the weird goings-on are for real...
I didn't think much of Purgatorio for much of its first third or so; it starts off on a fairly slow burn, holding the sort of information that might normally be used as foreshadowing or myth-building back, so there didn't seem to be much story. The cast was doing the best that they could with artificial constraints, making for a few good moments, but it was looking kind of forgettable.
Full review on EFC
From the Dark
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
From the Dark has the feel of the first movie from a new horror talent, but Conor McMahon has actually been doing for a while, never quite having the same sort of breakout as others in the Irish horror scene. This probably won't be the one that leads a producer to give him a still-modest ten or twenty times the money something like this costs for his next project, but it's decent fodder for genre fans, with a couple high points worth recommending.
It's got a familiar starting point - young couple Mark (Stephen Cromwell) and Sarah (Niamh Algar) are driving to some relative via the back roads of Ireland when their car breaks down. It is, of course, the middle of a mobile phone dead zone. Mark sets out to find someone with a landline; after a while Sarah follows. Darkness falls, which is too bad, because whatever the owner of the farmhouse they found unearthed while digging peat greatly prefers the dark to the light.
Give McMahon credit for building a reasonably solid horror movie out of almost nothing here, but it really strains against its tiny budget. The premise of it - a light-averse peat bog zombie thing - requires darkness, but there are long stretches of this movie where I felt like I couldn't see anything either because of the dark or because there were lights being shone directly in my eyes, and it was more aggravating than eerie. McMahon and cinematographer Michael Lavelle could have shown much more of what was going on without losing the visceral sensation of stumbling around in the dark except for the blinding moments and reduced the frustration immensely.
Full review on EFC
The Guest
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Initially, The Guest almost seemed like a step back for the team of writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard. It introduced a pleasant enough cast and set up a kind of familiar "stranger in the house is more dangerous than anyone knows" situation which the group was good enough to make go well, but it lacked the zing of You're Next. And then a thoroughly unremarkable scene starts a chain that gets Lance Reddick involved. After that, it's still the same movie in a lot of ways, but it gets bigger and crazier, just flat-out exciting.
The stranger is David (Dan Stevens), who introduces himself to the Petersen family as a comrade-in-arms of the son that died in the Middle East, saying he'd check in on them if he was ever in the area. The family - mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), bullied younger brother Luke (Brendan Meyer), and sister Anna (Maika Monroe) - react with the expected mixed emotions, but he seems sincere and helpful, though most don't realize how violently helpful he has been. So Anna isn't entirely suspicious when she calls the Army looking for a little more information, but David's name gets the called flagged and sent to a mysterious defense contractor, who dispatch a no-nuance troubleshooter (Reddick) to the area immediately.
And that's when the movie becomes a real kick, to be honest. It wasn't bad before, but it looked like it was going to be as close to a typical indie thriller as to team is capable of (or one of the things pointed at young adults built around the star's handsomeness, often just as bad), a very familiar story told competently but forgetably. Thankfully, it doesn't stop there; it gets just big, nuts, and self-aware enough to drop jaws in a good way. The kills are neither treated as a perfunctory narrative necessity nor something the audience is meant to whoop and cheer for, and while the filmmakers go for a very familiar plot point, the portion size is just enough that the action becomes bigger than life but not big enough for the audience to check out.
Full review on EFC
Fasandræberne (The Absent One)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I swear I've heard of the Department Q books from somewhere, even though I haven't really been keeping up on detective fiction as much as I'd like. If they're going to keep cranking out movies this good in adapting them, I hope they make it over here as well as the Dragon Tattoo series briefly did. This second movie based on the series is a nifty, intense little thriller.
Department Q is a desk in the Copenhagen police department manned by two people, Carl (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Assad (Fares Fares), that investigates cold cases. The one they had just been dropped on their desk is a doozy, a cop's kid who was murdered twenty years ago, with the dead girl's father always thinking that some of the evidence used to put the now-released Bjarne Thøgersen (Kristian Høgh Jeppesen) away as a juvenile didn't add up. As Carl and Assad reopen the investigation, they find the investigation leading in two very different directions - one toward rich and powerful Ditlev Pram (Pilou Asbæk) & Ulrik Dybbøl (David Dencik), the other toward homeless Kimmie Lassen (Danica Curcic).
It is kind of a familiar sort of detective story set-up - the too-intense sleuth with the partner who grounds him, the case that leads into decadence among the elite going all the way back to boarding school, the finale that, let's face it, involves a lot of things that would get these guys fired from the police force. The script by Nikolaj Arcel & Rasmus Heisterberg (adapted from Jussi Adler-Olsen's novel) is not exactly a mystery story much of the time - while Carl & Assad do have to do some digging to figure out what happened, it's laid out fairly clearly for the audience, enough that the wave of details and subplots is appreciated for more than just filling time.
Full review on EFC
Haemoo
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
This one has received a lot of notice in part because of Bong Joon-ho's involvement as a producer and co-writer for long-time collaborator Shim Sung-bo, and if that helps it out, that's great. It's a nifty little movie, the sort of thriller that South Korea seems to do better than anyone else right now - the type that plunges the audience into much darker than expected territory and still keeps one on the edge of his or her seat out of genuine excitement.
It takes place in 1998, and times are tough in the port city of Yeosu, South Korea. Kang Chul-joo (Kim Yun-seok), the captain of a small fishing boat, has just been told that the owners intend to sell the old ship for scrap, putting him and his crew out of work. He would like to buy the Jeonjiho, but fish won't let them make that sort of money fast enough. Smuggling people in from the North will do it, but it's a job for which these grizzled fishermen are ill-suited; they almost lose young and idealistic hand Dong-sik (Park Yoo-chun) when he dives into the sea to rescue Hong-mae (Han Ye-ri), one of just a couple women in the group. Still, what happens when a Coast Guard ship stops them for an inspection is far worse.
Haemoo is based upon a real incident, and comes to the screen by way of the stage, but those looking for an introspective film built around the characters talking about the moral dilemmas they face are in for a few shocks. There is not much opportunity for big, memorable speeches at all, and if Bong & Shim have done much to make the dialog of their (generally) unrefined working-class characters snappier, it doesn't make it to the subtitles. And that's probably good, because the film becomes a quite starkly horrifying thing in the blink of an eye, and it would not do for a glib or self-satisfied impression to come through.
Full review on EFC
It Follows
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It Follows is genuinely weird in a few places, and there are moments when I think writer/director David Robert Mitchell had a great idea for a horror movie without any idea of how he would finish it. This thing is pure distilled "stalker who won't stop and whom nobody will believe exists" without much worry about mythology, and that's okay - it lets Mitchell really get at the emotion of never feeling safe again, and the ending he comes up with is, in its own way, kind of fantastic.
The premise is simple - as soon as Jamie "Jay" Height (Maika Monroe) has sex with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary), his curse - a strange pursuer that only he could see - is passed on to her. It can take any form, but it is always coming, its intentions are not good, and it never stops. Soon Jay isn't sleeping, and is otherwise acting weirder than her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), their friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist), or neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto) can ever recall.
What is "It"? Mitchell doesn't say, and in some ways that's terrific. His heroes are teenagers who don't know anything, and the setting - basically 1980s Michigan, although cars and some electronics are present-day models - doesn't give them instant access to information. It is a set-up that minimizes the importance of mythology while leaving plenty of room for the characters to try and figure stuff out. It is an impressively clever way of concentrating the story and with it the audience's attention in specific areas: Not just how good they are at figuring out puzzles, but how committed they are to doing the right thing. There's an easy out if Jay is willing to just think of her own safety, but the movie has been built to make that seem unlikely.
Full review on EFC
Showing posts with label Fantastic Fest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantastic Fest. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Fantastic Fest Catch-up, First Half: Over Your Dead Body, Wyrmwood, Tommy, The World of Kanako, The Tribe, and Tokyo Tribe
Two months later, I've finally finished half the reviews I opted to save until later during Fantastic Fest. It has been a busy time, and during the burst over the past couple of weeks, I've been tremendously glad that I (a) kept notes while watching the movies and (b) wrote short reviews for the blog the day of/next morning; a whole bunch of the stuff below and on eFilmCritic is basically those things expanded. Some by a little, some by a lot.
Also, it's worth noting that my TWIT entry on those week is fairly heavy on the things that I didn't love, and as such omits thanks to a lot of people who deserve it: Alex Johnson, who sold me the pass he couldn't use when I found myself without one just a couple of weeks out; Adrian Charlie, who got me in contact with Mr. Johnson; Jason Whyte, who has been encouraging me to go for years (that means he owes me a trip to Fantasia, right?); William Goss, who said hi and whom I wished I'd had a chance to hang and chat with more; Mike Snoonian & Izzy Lee, other Boston folks who gave me something to grab on to when the crowd was more than I could handle; and all the great people at the festival, who worked their butts off to make a festival whose energy and playlist certainly cannot be denied.
There. I feel much better now. Follow them all.
And now, the movies: Takashi Miike's Over Your Dead Body, crazy Aussie zombie movie Wyrmwood, Swedish thriller Tommy, Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako, gut-wrenching sign-language drama The Tribe, and Sion Sono's hip-hop action opus Tokyo Tribe.
There. Having hit the halfway point (both in terms of days and unfinished reviews), I believe I am allowed to drink one of the not-available-in-Boston sodas that I purchased on the way out of Texas.
Kuime (Over Your Dead Body)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
In addition to his film work, Takashi Miike has directed a few stage productions, experience that he likely dipped into for Over Your Dead Body (Kuime in Japanese). At times, I kind of wish that was where the film stayed; it has all the material for an intriguing backstage drama and the diversion into horror is kind of all over the place.
The play being staged is Yotsuya Kaiden, a classic kabuki tale of a poor samurai scheming to improve his position, even if it involves shedding a wife who has brought him as far as she can. Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizo Ickikawa) plays Iemon the samurai on the stage, co-starring with real-life girlfriend Miyuki Goto (Kou Shibasaki) as Iwa. Given the drama between rehearsals - another cast member, Miyuki's married former boyfriend Jun (Hideaki Ito), would like to start an affair; the young actress (Miho Nakanishi) playing a supporting role is the type who professes her desire to follow in Miyuki's footsteps and then does so by sleeping with Kosuke; and cheerful stage assistant Kayo (Hitomi Katayama) knows every part just in case someone needs her to fill in - it's no wonder that the supernatural themes of the play seem to be bleeding into the world around Miyuki.
If there's one thing you can count on from Miike, it's that he will go to weird places and present what he finds in a memorable way, and that's certainly the case here. It's just that, as is often the case, he, writer Kikumi Yamagishi, and the film itself go to so many different strange places that the story starts to seem random once the supernatural becomes involved. Strict rules aren't necessary but not having every scare pulling in different directions would probably help, and while there's there's a clear connection between the creepy dolls and the movie's most obviously horrific sequence, childlessness doesn't seem to be the strong motivator for Miyuki that it is for Iwa, and some of the other moments just feel random. The individual results are certainly disgusting in memorable ways, at least.
Full review on EFC
Wyrmwood
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It's no bad thing, I say, that Wyrmwood feels like a season's worth of an eventful TV series packed into an hour and a half; it's an exhausting ride at times, but there's not ten or fifteen minutes anywhere in the movie that don't come across as exciting or have at least one really cool thing in them. Though making it over four years surely has brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner ready to take a break for a while, it's one of the rare movies where the audience's inevitable requests for a sequel seems like a great idea.
Things kick off quickly, with a light in the sky and something in the air kicking off a zombie apocalypse that quickly decimates Australia, leaving is with a manageable number of initial survivors: Mechanic Barry (Jay Gallagher), his wife Annie (Catherine Terracini), and daughter Meganne (Meganne West); good-natured aborigine Benny (Leon Burchill); crusty middle-aged tinkerer Frank (Keith Agius); and Barry's sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), whom the others will spend much of the movie trying to track down. Trouble is, she's already been found by some military types and a mad scientist (Berryn Schwerdt), who are never as helpful as one would hope in this sort of crisis.
Director Kiah Roache-Turner and brother/co-writer Tristan start things off with a flash-forward that establishes a tone of raucous action, which may be a little overdone as a device but is also a bit nice to have in the back of one's pocket when events take a turn toward the Walking Dead-variety "unbearable price of survival" misery factory. That doesn't last too terribly long; the Roache-Turners are soon getting past the point in the middle where it starts to run down a bit - in addition to the justifiably-depressed hero, there's a little too much "evil government/business eager to kill the remains of an already reduced population" on the other side with little in between - keeping just enough of that edge around to push everyone through the end.
Full review on EFC
Tommy (2014)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Tommy starts out looking like it might be a certain type of movie - you know, the one where the underestimated woman at the center is eventually revealed to always be three steps ahead of everyone around her (or if not quite that far ahead, still the smartest person in the room) - with a certain type of twist - seeing it all from her perspective. I'd like to see that movie someday, but this one is more about a gamble, which some may not find quite so satisfying. I dig it, though.
The woman in question is Estelle (Moa Gammel), just returned to Stockholm after fleeing the country with her husband Tommy and daughter Isabel (Inez Buckner) after a heist gone wrong left a couple of cops dead and Tommy holding the bag a year ago. Tommy, she says, will soon follow, and he wants his share when he does, something which naturally puts the other members of the crew on edge - Bobby (Ola Rapace) is doing quite well for himself and dating Estelle's sister Blanca (Lykke Li Zachrisson), Matte (Alexej Manvelov) is trying to go straight, and Estelle's godfather Steve (Johan Rabaeus) says he'll help but tends to make phone calls after she leaves.
Moa Gammel has a neat trick to accomplish in presenting Estelle as someone who could be that woman, and by the same token is someone the characters she encounters is going to underestimate. After all, she doesn't come from a family of criminal masterminds, but one of molls (her mother seemed to go for crooks too). Because the movie is necessarily keeping the details of Estelle's and/or Tommy's plans close to the vest, she doesn't get to give a great underdog performance or show Estelle as always calculating, but that's okay; there's enough going on with her outside of the step-by-step process of recovering Tommy's money to keep things interesting. The scenes with her family are especially good; it's always clear from looking at Gammel that Estelle has opinions about Blanca getting involved in the same sort of life she and their mother did, string enough the subject doesn't even have to be raised in connection with Isabel. She tension and desperation (when genuine or a put-on) well, and she does a nice job of building a relationship with the absent Tommy.
Full review on EFC
Kawaki. (The World of Kanako)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
The latest from Tetsuya Nakashima is not quite so sublime as his mid-aughts peak (Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko is a heck of a one-two punch), and it kind of stretches out too long, padded by some increasingly ugly violence. On the plus side, though, it is energetic as all heck, propelling the audience through the underworld with a protagonist that they're not supposed to like, but who makes it hard to look away.
High-school student Kanako Fukushima (Nana Komatsu) has, as of 16 August 2013, been missing for six days, making her mother Kiriko (Asuka Kurosawa) desperate enough to call her ex-husband Azikazu (Koji Yahusho), a drunken mess of an ex-cop that she had damn good reason for divorcing. Azikazu immediately shows what lost human being he could be, but he could be a dog with a bone where a case is concerned, finding through conversations with Kanako's middle-school friend Nami (Fumi Nikaido), classmate Emi (Ai Hashimoto), and more, that Kanako may have become a bigger piece of scum than he is - his quest goes through a criminal underworld where Kanako is not necessarily a victim.
Though Kanako is the character mentioned in the title, Azikazu is the guy that the audience will be spending the bulk of the movie with, and Koji Yakusho is pretty great as the title character's terrible father. He is playing something of a monster, and not the restrained variety where a tiny bit less feeling than one might expect is the signal that something is off; Yakusho tears into his material to make Azikazu a practically feral beast. It's the sort of performance that dares the audience to sympathize with him for being an honest, focused animal than the likes of his former partner Asai (Satoshi Tsumabuki in a delightfully oily turn) or how he's able to let forth an animalistic rage as he tears into progressively more vile criminals. Still, even when Azikazu is doing our saying something that sounds like the right thing for the right reasons, there's a certain sort of vacancy, like he's distilled anger that just happens to be pointed in the right direction.
Full review on EFC
Plemya (The Tribe)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Well, that's certainly something I'm glad to have seen, although I'm also sort of thankful that I'll likely never see the like again. The excited parts of that sentence are to be expected from a movie whose opening titles say it's in sign language and will not be subtitled, but maybe not the nervous ones. And yet, it's a sign of a great movie when even those are thrilling as well as horrifying.
I suspect that what we see in The Tribe - a sequestered, young population turning away from their supposed reason for being there but instead wreaking mayhem - happens at a lot of boarding schools, but seeing it happen at a Ukrainian school for the Deaf makes it hit a bit harder. Although no explanations are given, it's not hard to figure out what's going on in these kids' heads: The hearing world finds them a nuisance worthy of only grudging concessions, and this is the first time they they've been able to band together to do what they want, and with that anger it comes out as violence, crime, and sex. There is one classroom scene early on, but after that, academics seem irrelevant - the only time we see the kids doing anything resembling study later, the purpose is immediately undercut.
It's a harrowing ride, with traditional bullying at the start, lawlessness in the middle (which filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky often uses as a perverse way to show students coming together), and horrors the audience might wish to unsee at the end. It's a bleak movie that often elicits cringes, but to his credit, Slaboshpitsky never seems to just be engaging in exploitation; everything moves the story of new student Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) forward in some way, from the opening scenes where he has difficulty finding the school, to his crush on classmate Anya (Yana Novikova) - who along with roommate Svetka (Rosa Babiy) turns tricks to try and afford the papers to emigrate to Italy - to the ugly place that leads. Slaboshpitsky shows the audience much more than it wants to see at times, but it seldom feels like too much.
Full review on EFC
Tokyo Tribe
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Sion Sono has never really been the quiet, contemplative sort of art-house director, but his last few films seem to have been brimming with the sort of constant action that would make genre filmmakers jealous, with Tokyo Tribe an almost non-stop barrage of over-the-top insanity once the fighting starts. The surprising thing is that an audience can be somewhat forgiven for not registering that fact, since the veneer on top of it - a busy manga adaptation told as a hip-hop musical - is crazy enough in its way that it may be what the audience remembers.
And that's not exactly unfair. That style has Tokyo Tribe moving forward at a constant fast pace, with jokes and details packed into every corner, more characters than the audience can possibly process, and moments of jaw-dropping insanity that you can almost imagine Sono giggling as he put them into the script for how silly they are (the beatboxing server in the banquet scenes may have been my favorite thing Sono has ever gone for while she was on-screen). There's garish designs, tanks, slapstick, and other over-the-top madness.
What is going on? Well, as narrator MC Show (Shota Sometani) lays it down, every neighborhood in Tokyo is run by a themed gang kept in balance largely by the central Musashino Saru, whose leader Tera (Ryuta Sato) is all about peace and love. Another gang, the Bukuro Wu-ronz, led by Bubba (Riki Takeuchi), is looking to make a move, and by attacking Mera, sets the other gangs at each other's throats, with even Tera's friend Kai (Young Dais) looking to fight despite being hugely outmatched physically by Bubba's son Mera (Ryohei Suzuki). And if that's not enough, there's a kung fu princess (Nana Seino) hiding out in one of the prefectures, and delivering her to her clan for sacrifice would give Bubba the ally he needs to claim all of Tokyo.
Full review on EFC
Also, it's worth noting that my TWIT entry on those week is fairly heavy on the things that I didn't love, and as such omits thanks to a lot of people who deserve it: Alex Johnson, who sold me the pass he couldn't use when I found myself without one just a couple of weeks out; Adrian Charlie, who got me in contact with Mr. Johnson; Jason Whyte, who has been encouraging me to go for years (that means he owes me a trip to Fantasia, right?); William Goss, who said hi and whom I wished I'd had a chance to hang and chat with more; Mike Snoonian & Izzy Lee, other Boston folks who gave me something to grab on to when the crowd was more than I could handle; and all the great people at the festival, who worked their butts off to make a festival whose energy and playlist certainly cannot be denied.
There. I feel much better now. Follow them all.
And now, the movies: Takashi Miike's Over Your Dead Body, crazy Aussie zombie movie Wyrmwood, Swedish thriller Tommy, Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako, gut-wrenching sign-language drama The Tribe, and Sion Sono's hip-hop action opus Tokyo Tribe.
There. Having hit the halfway point (both in terms of days and unfinished reviews), I believe I am allowed to drink one of the not-available-in-Boston sodas that I purchased on the way out of Texas.
Kuime (Over Your Dead Body)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
In addition to his film work, Takashi Miike has directed a few stage productions, experience that he likely dipped into for Over Your Dead Body (Kuime in Japanese). At times, I kind of wish that was where the film stayed; it has all the material for an intriguing backstage drama and the diversion into horror is kind of all over the place.
The play being staged is Yotsuya Kaiden, a classic kabuki tale of a poor samurai scheming to improve his position, even if it involves shedding a wife who has brought him as far as she can. Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizo Ickikawa) plays Iemon the samurai on the stage, co-starring with real-life girlfriend Miyuki Goto (Kou Shibasaki) as Iwa. Given the drama between rehearsals - another cast member, Miyuki's married former boyfriend Jun (Hideaki Ito), would like to start an affair; the young actress (Miho Nakanishi) playing a supporting role is the type who professes her desire to follow in Miyuki's footsteps and then does so by sleeping with Kosuke; and cheerful stage assistant Kayo (Hitomi Katayama) knows every part just in case someone needs her to fill in - it's no wonder that the supernatural themes of the play seem to be bleeding into the world around Miyuki.
If there's one thing you can count on from Miike, it's that he will go to weird places and present what he finds in a memorable way, and that's certainly the case here. It's just that, as is often the case, he, writer Kikumi Yamagishi, and the film itself go to so many different strange places that the story starts to seem random once the supernatural becomes involved. Strict rules aren't necessary but not having every scare pulling in different directions would probably help, and while there's there's a clear connection between the creepy dolls and the movie's most obviously horrific sequence, childlessness doesn't seem to be the strong motivator for Miyuki that it is for Iwa, and some of the other moments just feel random. The individual results are certainly disgusting in memorable ways, at least.
Full review on EFC
Wyrmwood
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It's no bad thing, I say, that Wyrmwood feels like a season's worth of an eventful TV series packed into an hour and a half; it's an exhausting ride at times, but there's not ten or fifteen minutes anywhere in the movie that don't come across as exciting or have at least one really cool thing in them. Though making it over four years surely has brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner ready to take a break for a while, it's one of the rare movies where the audience's inevitable requests for a sequel seems like a great idea.
Things kick off quickly, with a light in the sky and something in the air kicking off a zombie apocalypse that quickly decimates Australia, leaving is with a manageable number of initial survivors: Mechanic Barry (Jay Gallagher), his wife Annie (Catherine Terracini), and daughter Meganne (Meganne West); good-natured aborigine Benny (Leon Burchill); crusty middle-aged tinkerer Frank (Keith Agius); and Barry's sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey), whom the others will spend much of the movie trying to track down. Trouble is, she's already been found by some military types and a mad scientist (Berryn Schwerdt), who are never as helpful as one would hope in this sort of crisis.
Director Kiah Roache-Turner and brother/co-writer Tristan start things off with a flash-forward that establishes a tone of raucous action, which may be a little overdone as a device but is also a bit nice to have in the back of one's pocket when events take a turn toward the Walking Dead-variety "unbearable price of survival" misery factory. That doesn't last too terribly long; the Roache-Turners are soon getting past the point in the middle where it starts to run down a bit - in addition to the justifiably-depressed hero, there's a little too much "evil government/business eager to kill the remains of an already reduced population" on the other side with little in between - keeping just enough of that edge around to push everyone through the end.
Full review on EFC
Tommy (2014)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Tommy starts out looking like it might be a certain type of movie - you know, the one where the underestimated woman at the center is eventually revealed to always be three steps ahead of everyone around her (or if not quite that far ahead, still the smartest person in the room) - with a certain type of twist - seeing it all from her perspective. I'd like to see that movie someday, but this one is more about a gamble, which some may not find quite so satisfying. I dig it, though.
The woman in question is Estelle (Moa Gammel), just returned to Stockholm after fleeing the country with her husband Tommy and daughter Isabel (Inez Buckner) after a heist gone wrong left a couple of cops dead and Tommy holding the bag a year ago. Tommy, she says, will soon follow, and he wants his share when he does, something which naturally puts the other members of the crew on edge - Bobby (Ola Rapace) is doing quite well for himself and dating Estelle's sister Blanca (Lykke Li Zachrisson), Matte (Alexej Manvelov) is trying to go straight, and Estelle's godfather Steve (Johan Rabaeus) says he'll help but tends to make phone calls after she leaves.
Moa Gammel has a neat trick to accomplish in presenting Estelle as someone who could be that woman, and by the same token is someone the characters she encounters is going to underestimate. After all, she doesn't come from a family of criminal masterminds, but one of molls (her mother seemed to go for crooks too). Because the movie is necessarily keeping the details of Estelle's and/or Tommy's plans close to the vest, she doesn't get to give a great underdog performance or show Estelle as always calculating, but that's okay; there's enough going on with her outside of the step-by-step process of recovering Tommy's money to keep things interesting. The scenes with her family are especially good; it's always clear from looking at Gammel that Estelle has opinions about Blanca getting involved in the same sort of life she and their mother did, string enough the subject doesn't even have to be raised in connection with Isabel. She tension and desperation (when genuine or a put-on) well, and she does a nice job of building a relationship with the absent Tommy.
Full review on EFC
Kawaki. (The World of Kanako)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
The latest from Tetsuya Nakashima is not quite so sublime as his mid-aughts peak (Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko is a heck of a one-two punch), and it kind of stretches out too long, padded by some increasingly ugly violence. On the plus side, though, it is energetic as all heck, propelling the audience through the underworld with a protagonist that they're not supposed to like, but who makes it hard to look away.
High-school student Kanako Fukushima (Nana Komatsu) has, as of 16 August 2013, been missing for six days, making her mother Kiriko (Asuka Kurosawa) desperate enough to call her ex-husband Azikazu (Koji Yahusho), a drunken mess of an ex-cop that she had damn good reason for divorcing. Azikazu immediately shows what lost human being he could be, but he could be a dog with a bone where a case is concerned, finding through conversations with Kanako's middle-school friend Nami (Fumi Nikaido), classmate Emi (Ai Hashimoto), and more, that Kanako may have become a bigger piece of scum than he is - his quest goes through a criminal underworld where Kanako is not necessarily a victim.
Though Kanako is the character mentioned in the title, Azikazu is the guy that the audience will be spending the bulk of the movie with, and Koji Yakusho is pretty great as the title character's terrible father. He is playing something of a monster, and not the restrained variety where a tiny bit less feeling than one might expect is the signal that something is off; Yakusho tears into his material to make Azikazu a practically feral beast. It's the sort of performance that dares the audience to sympathize with him for being an honest, focused animal than the likes of his former partner Asai (Satoshi Tsumabuki in a delightfully oily turn) or how he's able to let forth an animalistic rage as he tears into progressively more vile criminals. Still, even when Azikazu is doing our saying something that sounds like the right thing for the right reasons, there's a certain sort of vacancy, like he's distilled anger that just happens to be pointed in the right direction.
Full review on EFC
Plemya (The Tribe)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Well, that's certainly something I'm glad to have seen, although I'm also sort of thankful that I'll likely never see the like again. The excited parts of that sentence are to be expected from a movie whose opening titles say it's in sign language and will not be subtitled, but maybe not the nervous ones. And yet, it's a sign of a great movie when even those are thrilling as well as horrifying.
I suspect that what we see in The Tribe - a sequestered, young population turning away from their supposed reason for being there but instead wreaking mayhem - happens at a lot of boarding schools, but seeing it happen at a Ukrainian school for the Deaf makes it hit a bit harder. Although no explanations are given, it's not hard to figure out what's going on in these kids' heads: The hearing world finds them a nuisance worthy of only grudging concessions, and this is the first time they they've been able to band together to do what they want, and with that anger it comes out as violence, crime, and sex. There is one classroom scene early on, but after that, academics seem irrelevant - the only time we see the kids doing anything resembling study later, the purpose is immediately undercut.
It's a harrowing ride, with traditional bullying at the start, lawlessness in the middle (which filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky often uses as a perverse way to show students coming together), and horrors the audience might wish to unsee at the end. It's a bleak movie that often elicits cringes, but to his credit, Slaboshpitsky never seems to just be engaging in exploitation; everything moves the story of new student Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko) forward in some way, from the opening scenes where he has difficulty finding the school, to his crush on classmate Anya (Yana Novikova) - who along with roommate Svetka (Rosa Babiy) turns tricks to try and afford the papers to emigrate to Italy - to the ugly place that leads. Slaboshpitsky shows the audience much more than it wants to see at times, but it seldom feels like too much.
Full review on EFC
Tokyo Tribe
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Sion Sono has never really been the quiet, contemplative sort of art-house director, but his last few films seem to have been brimming with the sort of constant action that would make genre filmmakers jealous, with Tokyo Tribe an almost non-stop barrage of over-the-top insanity once the fighting starts. The surprising thing is that an audience can be somewhat forgiven for not registering that fact, since the veneer on top of it - a busy manga adaptation told as a hip-hop musical - is crazy enough in its way that it may be what the audience remembers.
And that's not exactly unfair. That style has Tokyo Tribe moving forward at a constant fast pace, with jokes and details packed into every corner, more characters than the audience can possibly process, and moments of jaw-dropping insanity that you can almost imagine Sono giggling as he put them into the script for how silly they are (the beatboxing server in the banquet scenes may have been my favorite thing Sono has ever gone for while she was on-screen). There's garish designs, tanks, slapstick, and other over-the-top madness.
What is going on? Well, as narrator MC Show (Shota Sometani) lays it down, every neighborhood in Tokyo is run by a themed gang kept in balance largely by the central Musashino Saru, whose leader Tera (Ryuta Sato) is all about peace and love. Another gang, the Bukuro Wu-ronz, led by Bubba (Riki Takeuchi), is looking to make a move, and by attacking Mera, sets the other gangs at each other's throats, with even Tera's friend Kai (Young Dais) looking to fight despite being hugely outmatched physically by Bubba's son Mera (Ryohei Suzuki). And if that's not enough, there's a kung fu princess (Nana Seino) hiding out in one of the prefectures, and delivering her to her clan for sacrifice would give Bubba the ally he needs to claim all of Tokyo.
Full review on EFC
Tuesday, October 07, 2014
This Those Weeks In Tickets: 15 September 2014 - 28 September 2014
Last major film festival of the year for me in Austin's Fantastic Fest, and it needs a little talking about on its own.
... but first, here's what I did before and after. And, yeesh, do I take a lousy picture.
There were a couple things I wanted to catch before heading south, and they were interesting in their own way. I caught But Always after having missed it on Sunday, and, yeesh, does it have issues. The next night, I knew A Master Builder wasn't likely to last the week, let alone past the end of the festival. Glad I saw it, because it's pretty nifty.
And what did I see there?
18 September: Hardkor Disco, As Seen by the Rest, and Cub
19 September: Force Majeure, Redeemer, Over Your Dead Body, Necrofobia, and Wyrmwood
20 September: The Duke of Burgundy, The Babadook, Tommy, The World of Kanako, and The Editor
21 September: Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and The Man in the Orange Jacket
22 September: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and I Am a Knife with Legs
23 September: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2
24 September: Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and It Follows
25 Septembe: I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, and The Treatment
Then I got back, woke up barely an hour before the Red Sox game, and made my way to Fenway. It was great; I was still in line to buy food while most of the tribute to Bud Selig was going on, so it didn't make me wretch too much, especially since it wasn't for Derek Jeter. I wasn't prepared for it to be quite so hot, like I hadn't left Texas the previous day (in contrast, the trip from Boston to Austin was a forty-degree swing in temperature). It was quickly fun, though, as Masahiro Tanaka had nothing, and that led to a forty-five minute second inning that left the Yankees behind 8-1 and the Yankees fan next to me literally slack-jawed. After getting the first refill on the day, I headed down to see if Tony & Ken were around. They were, there were free seats, so I got to see the last Red Sox victory of the year from five rows behind the home bullpen.
After that, I headed up the street to Boston Common for A Walk Among the Tombstones, and liked that quite a bit. Still kind of on Austin time, it wasn't tough for me to stay awake through The Boxer's Omen at the Brattle. Then, Sunday, the week and a half without a full night of sleep caught up with me and I didn't do a darn thing.
So, the festival. In a way, I don't really want to write about Fantastic Fest itself as an experience, because I think that doing so will badly overshadow what you can see in the eight "daily" posts and seventeen reviews (with about thirteen more to come) say: I saw a bunch of movies that I might not have had a chance to see elsewhere, most were pretty good, and even those that weren't that great were at least interesting. That's the most important thing to remember, enough to merit a repeat:
If you go to Fantastic Fest, you will see a bunch of good movies that you might not otherwise see on the big screen.
You might not know which ones ahead of time, of course; theater assignments for each "round" are determined by everyone stating preferences the day before, the VIPs being given their choices, and then the rest being drawn in random order and positioned as best they can; this is probably when they assign films to screens, a good way to match capacity to demands that prevents the occasional situation where a big auditorium winds up half-empty or a smaller one leaves a lot of people outside looking in. When I first read about this, I was prepared to hate it for how it seemed to fly in the face of what I looked about having a pass at other festivals: It made it hard to build a schedule strategically ("I'll skip A for B because A is playing against C which I don't much care about later on") or spontaneously ("I know I was planning on seeing D next, but I am in no mood for something like that, so I'll go with E"). There's some room for the latter with an hour's notice, at least.
Fortunately, I'm reasonably well-positioned to deal with that as a system; I like a broad range of genres, have no issues with subtitles, and am already going to be passing up the big spotlight screenings with Hollywood guests in favor of things that won't be playing in the multiplexes. It's easier to take what comes without strong preferences, and I tried my best to maximize that mindset during the festival - quick scans of the options, put the names into the system, and forget, this saving a lot of investment in whether I got my first choice or not. I did pretty well on that, I think, and the one time i had to swap, it was relatively painless. If I were coming in with a narrower set of interests or things marked as must-sees, it might be frustrating or never-wracking, but I found it kind of fun once I accepted it.
A side-effect of this "rounds" setup was that building the schedule that way means it can be rather stretched. Every day aside from the shorter opening and closing dates had five rounds, the first of which began at roughly 11am and the last of which went in at midnight. At other festivals, those start times indicate a six-movie day, while a five-movie schedule might mean starting the first at roughly noon and getting out of the last at roughly midnight, and those extra three hours of potential sleep can be a big deal. It also means that there are regularly long gaps between movies, sometimes as much as two hours, which gets me twitchy - I feel like I should be able to fit another one in there.
Filling those gaps is where this festival reveals itself as well-tailored to my tastes but not really my personality. I'm not particularly sociable, don't hear well in crowds, and don't drink, so I'm stuck out in the Texas sun with a vague din going on around me, and the fact that smokers aren't keeping their toxic clouds in their designated area isn't helping. I'm coughing, sweating, waiting for the next movie to be called, and then having to push through a too-dense lobby to get to it. Part of this might just be that I don't know an awful lot of people in (or visiting) Austin, and the same setup in Boston or even Montreal plays better (or if I did a few more of these, although it took me years to get to know people at Fantasia). Folks who do strike up conversations and friendships easily clearly love it, which helps explain how downright evangelical the fans are and how worried many were at the prospect of the theater's old "back porch" area being lost as it was remodeled.
As an aside about that remodel, it kind of struck me as curiously indicative of how the Alamo Drafthouse and the area around the theater have changed since I was last there in 2007 - a lobby that was once fairly utilitarian is now festooned with murals and Alamo-branded stuff hanging from the ceiling, a strip mall and parking lot has been replaced with condos, and a great big bar with themed karaoke rooms has been attached. It's become a much more upscale, specific brand in a lot of ways, and sometimes a weirdly paradoxical one with equal parts "we're ca-ray-zee" and "follow the rules or get tossed".
On a practical level, it seemed kind of screwy that they rebuilt the theater but didn't exactly make sure there were nine screens worth of toilets, although I suspect that on a regular schedule exit times are a lot more staggered. The corridors still seem rather cramped in a lot of spots, exacerbated by having "Fantastic Arcade" stations set up in a spot that was already sort of a bottleneck and initially cordoning way too much of the lobby area off for red carpets and photos. I found myself much less enamored of the cinema seats and bar setup than I was last time I visited - not only did the servers seen less unobtrusive than before (to be fair, I spent a lot more time in the front two rows), but I've gotten used to the desk-style arrangement at Fantasia and the Showcase SuperLux; at the Drafthouse, you have to kind of lean in and down to deal with your food rather than look up at the movie or move your plate to your lap.
Another thing I noticed was that the Q&As seemed very short, especially considering all the time built in between screenings. I'm kind of curious as to why that is. Many films were showing on multiple screens, with those in the smaller rooms getting a simulcast of the Q&A and having to run to another room if they had a question, which maybe served as a barrier (same with everything having two screenings, instead of one). I also kind of wonder if the set-up which had almost everyone on a pass rather than able to make plans for individual movies in advance had an effect of having the audience filled with general film fans rather than ones with a specific interest who would have more questions.
Odds are I won't be back next year - it's too soon after Fantasia for me to jump back into a festival with such a similar roster of films, there's only so much vacation time, and if I feel like something like this at that time of the year... Well, Sitges is just a week later, and takes place on the coast of Spain rather than Texas. I can see why Fantastic Fest has its fans, but I do think my time would be much better spent trying out new places than returning to this one in the future.
A Walk Among the Tombstones
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
I was buttonholed to fill out a survey when A Walk Among the Tombstones let out, which is always great fun because I genuinely enjoy skewing averages in such things (why yes, I have seen more than ten movies in the last two months). In this case, I suspect that I was one of relatively few to put down that I saw this movie primarily because of director Scott Frank, as opposed to star Liam Neeson or general timing of the show. Frank wrote one of my favorite movies in Dead Again, did the screenplay for two of the best Elmore Leonard adaptations, had a pretty good directorial debut with The Lookout, and tends to have his name on good stuff. The guy is good at his job, especially where crime is concerned, so, yes, I was expecting pretty good things from him adapting Lawrence Block with Neeson in the title role.
And I was not disappointed. Tombstones is a great introduction to unlicensed private detective Matt Scudder (Neeson) and the world he lives in, specifically starting with a story that is particularly suited to that sort of protagonist: The loved ones of drug dealers being kidnapped, ransomed, and then murdered anyway. The how of it is interesting but kept low-key enough to not be the while fulcrum on which the story rests. Instead, a character mentions Spade & Marlowe, and although 1990s New York is quite a different beast than Raymond Chandler's mid-century L.A., the feel is often the same, with Scudder and self-appointed apprentice T.J. (Brian "Astro" Bradley) plugging along, pulling threads until something unravels, meeting interesting characters along the way but not making them all so resolutely gray that villains cannot ever be summed up with "you're insane". It's a great-looking movie with some excellent performances.
There are moments when I suspect that Frank and/or Block go a little too far, getting somewhat over-enamored with words as writers are wont to do. I don't really blame them, because it works in some cases, like how the film keeps returning to an early defining moment for Scudder, transforming it from a thrilling chase (with throwback cool) to a tragedy as he grows more willing to open up to T.J. Toward the end, though, I have to admit that I was starting to develop a theory about writers developing an ironic dependency on AA and other twelve-step programs as too-easy ways to connect unrelated characters or give structure via the steps. There's also a very thorough housecleaning toward the end, past the point where it becomes a bit wearing.
Mostly good, though, and I'd like to see Frank & Neeson do more of these if they're interested. It's quality P.I. storytelling, and you hate to see a good team break up if there are more stories to tell.
... but first, here's what I did before and after. And, yeesh, do I take a lousy picture.
There were a couple things I wanted to catch before heading south, and they were interesting in their own way. I caught But Always after having missed it on Sunday, and, yeesh, does it have issues. The next night, I knew A Master Builder wasn't likely to last the week, let alone past the end of the festival. Glad I saw it, because it's pretty nifty.
And what did I see there?
18 September: Hardkor Disco, As Seen by the Rest, and Cub
19 September: Force Majeure, Redeemer, Over Your Dead Body, Necrofobia, and Wyrmwood
20 September: The Duke of Burgundy, The Babadook, Tommy, The World of Kanako, and The Editor
21 September: Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and The Man in the Orange Jacket
22 September: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and I Am a Knife with Legs
23 September: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2
24 September: Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and It Follows
25 Septembe: I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, and The Treatment
Then I got back, woke up barely an hour before the Red Sox game, and made my way to Fenway. It was great; I was still in line to buy food while most of the tribute to Bud Selig was going on, so it didn't make me wretch too much, especially since it wasn't for Derek Jeter. I wasn't prepared for it to be quite so hot, like I hadn't left Texas the previous day (in contrast, the trip from Boston to Austin was a forty-degree swing in temperature). It was quickly fun, though, as Masahiro Tanaka had nothing, and that led to a forty-five minute second inning that left the Yankees behind 8-1 and the Yankees fan next to me literally slack-jawed. After getting the first refill on the day, I headed down to see if Tony & Ken were around. They were, there were free seats, so I got to see the last Red Sox victory of the year from five rows behind the home bullpen.
After that, I headed up the street to Boston Common for A Walk Among the Tombstones, and liked that quite a bit. Still kind of on Austin time, it wasn't tough for me to stay awake through The Boxer's Omen at the Brattle. Then, Sunday, the week and a half without a full night of sleep caught up with me and I didn't do a darn thing.
So, the festival. In a way, I don't really want to write about Fantastic Fest itself as an experience, because I think that doing so will badly overshadow what you can see in the eight "daily" posts and seventeen reviews (with about thirteen more to come) say: I saw a bunch of movies that I might not have had a chance to see elsewhere, most were pretty good, and even those that weren't that great were at least interesting. That's the most important thing to remember, enough to merit a repeat:
If you go to Fantastic Fest, you will see a bunch of good movies that you might not otherwise see on the big screen.
You might not know which ones ahead of time, of course; theater assignments for each "round" are determined by everyone stating preferences the day before, the VIPs being given their choices, and then the rest being drawn in random order and positioned as best they can; this is probably when they assign films to screens, a good way to match capacity to demands that prevents the occasional situation where a big auditorium winds up half-empty or a smaller one leaves a lot of people outside looking in. When I first read about this, I was prepared to hate it for how it seemed to fly in the face of what I looked about having a pass at other festivals: It made it hard to build a schedule strategically ("I'll skip A for B because A is playing against C which I don't much care about later on") or spontaneously ("I know I was planning on seeing D next, but I am in no mood for something like that, so I'll go with E"). There's some room for the latter with an hour's notice, at least.
Fortunately, I'm reasonably well-positioned to deal with that as a system; I like a broad range of genres, have no issues with subtitles, and am already going to be passing up the big spotlight screenings with Hollywood guests in favor of things that won't be playing in the multiplexes. It's easier to take what comes without strong preferences, and I tried my best to maximize that mindset during the festival - quick scans of the options, put the names into the system, and forget, this saving a lot of investment in whether I got my first choice or not. I did pretty well on that, I think, and the one time i had to swap, it was relatively painless. If I were coming in with a narrower set of interests or things marked as must-sees, it might be frustrating or never-wracking, but I found it kind of fun once I accepted it.
A side-effect of this "rounds" setup was that building the schedule that way means it can be rather stretched. Every day aside from the shorter opening and closing dates had five rounds, the first of which began at roughly 11am and the last of which went in at midnight. At other festivals, those start times indicate a six-movie day, while a five-movie schedule might mean starting the first at roughly noon and getting out of the last at roughly midnight, and those extra three hours of potential sleep can be a big deal. It also means that there are regularly long gaps between movies, sometimes as much as two hours, which gets me twitchy - I feel like I should be able to fit another one in there.
Filling those gaps is where this festival reveals itself as well-tailored to my tastes but not really my personality. I'm not particularly sociable, don't hear well in crowds, and don't drink, so I'm stuck out in the Texas sun with a vague din going on around me, and the fact that smokers aren't keeping their toxic clouds in their designated area isn't helping. I'm coughing, sweating, waiting for the next movie to be called, and then having to push through a too-dense lobby to get to it. Part of this might just be that I don't know an awful lot of people in (or visiting) Austin, and the same setup in Boston or even Montreal plays better (or if I did a few more of these, although it took me years to get to know people at Fantasia). Folks who do strike up conversations and friendships easily clearly love it, which helps explain how downright evangelical the fans are and how worried many were at the prospect of the theater's old "back porch" area being lost as it was remodeled.
As an aside about that remodel, it kind of struck me as curiously indicative of how the Alamo Drafthouse and the area around the theater have changed since I was last there in 2007 - a lobby that was once fairly utilitarian is now festooned with murals and Alamo-branded stuff hanging from the ceiling, a strip mall and parking lot has been replaced with condos, and a great big bar with themed karaoke rooms has been attached. It's become a much more upscale, specific brand in a lot of ways, and sometimes a weirdly paradoxical one with equal parts "we're ca-ray-zee" and "follow the rules or get tossed".
On a practical level, it seemed kind of screwy that they rebuilt the theater but didn't exactly make sure there were nine screens worth of toilets, although I suspect that on a regular schedule exit times are a lot more staggered. The corridors still seem rather cramped in a lot of spots, exacerbated by having "Fantastic Arcade" stations set up in a spot that was already sort of a bottleneck and initially cordoning way too much of the lobby area off for red carpets and photos. I found myself much less enamored of the cinema seats and bar setup than I was last time I visited - not only did the servers seen less unobtrusive than before (to be fair, I spent a lot more time in the front two rows), but I've gotten used to the desk-style arrangement at Fantasia and the Showcase SuperLux; at the Drafthouse, you have to kind of lean in and down to deal with your food rather than look up at the movie or move your plate to your lap.
Another thing I noticed was that the Q&As seemed very short, especially considering all the time built in between screenings. I'm kind of curious as to why that is. Many films were showing on multiple screens, with those in the smaller rooms getting a simulcast of the Q&A and having to run to another room if they had a question, which maybe served as a barrier (same with everything having two screenings, instead of one). I also kind of wonder if the set-up which had almost everyone on a pass rather than able to make plans for individual movies in advance had an effect of having the audience filled with general film fans rather than ones with a specific interest who would have more questions.
Odds are I won't be back next year - it's too soon after Fantasia for me to jump back into a festival with such a similar roster of films, there's only so much vacation time, and if I feel like something like this at that time of the year... Well, Sitges is just a week later, and takes place on the coast of Spain rather than Texas. I can see why Fantastic Fest has its fans, but I do think my time would be much better spent trying out new places than returning to this one in the future.
A Walk Among the Tombstones
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
I was buttonholed to fill out a survey when A Walk Among the Tombstones let out, which is always great fun because I genuinely enjoy skewing averages in such things (why yes, I have seen more than ten movies in the last two months). In this case, I suspect that I was one of relatively few to put down that I saw this movie primarily because of director Scott Frank, as opposed to star Liam Neeson or general timing of the show. Frank wrote one of my favorite movies in Dead Again, did the screenplay for two of the best Elmore Leonard adaptations, had a pretty good directorial debut with The Lookout, and tends to have his name on good stuff. The guy is good at his job, especially where crime is concerned, so, yes, I was expecting pretty good things from him adapting Lawrence Block with Neeson in the title role.
And I was not disappointed. Tombstones is a great introduction to unlicensed private detective Matt Scudder (Neeson) and the world he lives in, specifically starting with a story that is particularly suited to that sort of protagonist: The loved ones of drug dealers being kidnapped, ransomed, and then murdered anyway. The how of it is interesting but kept low-key enough to not be the while fulcrum on which the story rests. Instead, a character mentions Spade & Marlowe, and although 1990s New York is quite a different beast than Raymond Chandler's mid-century L.A., the feel is often the same, with Scudder and self-appointed apprentice T.J. (Brian "Astro" Bradley) plugging along, pulling threads until something unravels, meeting interesting characters along the way but not making them all so resolutely gray that villains cannot ever be summed up with "you're insane". It's a great-looking movie with some excellent performances.
There are moments when I suspect that Frank and/or Block go a little too far, getting somewhat over-enamored with words as writers are wont to do. I don't really blame them, because it works in some cases, like how the film keeps returning to an early defining moment for Scudder, transforming it from a thrilling chase (with throwback cool) to a tragedy as he grows more willing to open up to T.J. Toward the end, though, I have to admit that I was starting to develop a theory about writers developing an ironic dependency on AA and other twelve-step programs as too-easy ways to connect unrelated characters or give structure via the steps. There's also a very thorough housecleaning toward the end, past the point where it becomes a bit wearing.
Mostly good, though, and I'd like to see Frank & Neeson do more of these if they're interested. It's quality P.I. storytelling, and you hate to see a good team break up if there are more stories to tell.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.08: I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, and The Treatment
I didn't have much time to talk about Fantastic Fest while it was going on - midnights every day before an 11am show the next doesn't leave a whole lot of writing time for anything but a few reviews - but one of the things I sort of committed to enjoying (because if I didn't it would likely drive me nuts) was the lottery aspect: Every day at 10am, you can start ranking which film you want to see in each "slot"; it closes at 6pm and then badge-holders are chosen in random order, given their first available choice. I decided early on not to get too riled about getting my first choice or not - heck, when people would ask how many of my first choices I got, I usually couldn't say; I made my choices quickly, went for the independent stuff over the bigger names as much as I could (while also prioritizing the Japanese Big Three of Miike, Sono, and Nakashima), and by and large not including stuff I didn't want to see or had already seen just to fill the list and be guaranteed something, lest I block someone genuinely enthusiastic about seeing that movie.
It's fun, but it also means that by the end of the festival, with some stuff having been knocked out by Fantasia as well, I'm not sure who is more to blame for my Day Eight schedule: Me, the random number generator, or whoever built the day's schedule as a whole. But, man, this was not the sort of thing that sends you away happy: Grim movie about a woman dealing with a horrific miscarriage, story about an entire family of sex criminals, dark crime thing about a detective drowning himself in a case, and finally a thriller about a detective hunting down a pedophile. Suffice it to say, that last one was the most fun, even though when I pointed out my schedule and that it was ending with that, at least one person grunted and said it was a pretty rough draw.
I actually considered trying to move some stuff around, but there wasn't much happier stuff to be found. I heard a theory that this was to make the closing night party seem even more celebratory by comparison. I didn't go - not a big fan of loud crowds of people smoking and drinking - so I can't attest to how much that might have been the case.
Anyway, not exactly the way to be sent off. I'll have a few more general thoughts of the festival as a whole when I write up the "This Week in Tickets" for these dates, but it's at least something I'm glad to have done once.
I Am Here
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I Am Here is heart-and-gut-wrenching in its first act, taking horrific events and making them hurt more with things that would at first glance have the opposite effect. It's not quite so sure-handed when it starts to actually tell a story around the situation it has set up, but is built on such a strong base that this hardly matters.
Maria (Kim Basinger) and Peter (Sebastian Schipper) are a wealthy, successful couple living in Copenhagen, but the one thing that they - especially Maria - feel would make their life complete is a child. It's no easy thing to conceive at their age, and their most recent attempt has ended catastrophically. With Peter realistically giving up any hope, Maria latches onto a comment at work and embarks on an extremely ill-advised quest.
Writer/director Anders Morgenthaler has his roots in animation and cartooning, and while one would likely not guess this from looking at this extremely grounded film, there are moments which certainly indicate a different way of looking at the material. The scene which introduces Christian (Jordan Prentice) to the film certainly qualifies in retrospect, and there are a couple others from before that which drop the jaw, with one becoming all the more heartbreaking because it briefly gives the audience a sense of wonder and joy before not just leading to one of the film's most horrifying moments, but setting something up which will carry through the rest of the movie, either as a narrative conceit or an indication of just how broken Maria may be.
Full review at EFC
I Am Trash
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
"Just jerk off when your brother tells you to" isn't quite the first line of I Am Trash, but it's close and gets the audience's attention. It also turns out to be one of the less horrific moments in this movie about a family of sex offenders. If that description puts you off, you're probably well-served trusting those instincts.
Writer/director Lee Sang-woo delivers that line as a character of the same name, a street cleaner and de facto head of his family. He wants his brother Sang-tae (Yang Myung-hun) to masturbate because he is prone to acts of sexual violence otherwise, and it seems to run in the family: Third brother Sang-gu (Park Hyung-bin) is molesting his barracks-mate while on his military service, and their pedophile father has just been released from prison after a ten-year sentence for raping an eight-year-old girl. The still-traumatized girl's father, Yong-suk, has casually informed Sang-woo that he will castrate the father if he shows up in town.
Signs posted in their neighborhood suggest that the mother went missing twelve years ago, so it appears that the brothers never had much in the way of sensible guidance. Sang-woo may try, but he's established as weak early on, getting attacked kids on the street as he does his job in the first scene. It's a theme that continues through the film, as he's blackmailed by someone who knows of his family's crimes and stymied in his attempts to get Sang-tae to actually take a job. It seems like a rather pessimistic view - men are slaves to their urges, while the women presented are all helpless victims - although it does serve to highlight the jam Sang-woo is in trying to exist with one foot in the civilized world and one in his family's. Perhaps that's what life is like for the sort of man his father and brothers are: Aggression is normal, women (and weaker men) are targets, and those who would impose some sort of order deserve contempt.
Full review at EFC
Waste Land
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
One of the best sorts of mysteries plunges its detective into a world not his own, such that figuring out how this other culture works is an important part of finding the killer. Some sort of personal growth is nice too. The trouble with Waste Land is that it never offers much more than the plunge, and that never with the sort of depth that makes the lack of a compelling mystery or fleshed-out character arc less keenly felt.
It's got the making of all three: Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) pulls the case of Lukengo, a 19-year-old Congolese man who is pulled out of the river with a couple of Nkonde statutes. The trail leads Leo and partner Johnny Rimbaud (Peter Van den Begin) to a collector and businessman named Géant who still has a mine in the former colony. In fact, all records indicate that Géant is still in the Congo at the time Leo meet with him. The investigation is affecting him in other ways, too - though he has promised his pregnant wife Kathleen (Natali Broods) that he would leave the force after this case, he's been feeling a strange pull towards Congolese mysticism from the start, and has been more attentive than usual to the victim's sister Aysha (Babetida Sadjo).
Leo sits squarely at the intersection of all that's going on here, and in the movie's favor, he is always interesting. The intense detective who is perhaps only able to weather what he sees on the job because he himself is a little off is a familiar character type, but in this case he is put together fairly well. There's a bit of paranoia to his depression, while scenes with his father quickly illustrate where his fear of admitting weakness comes from. Jérémie Renier plays Leo as seeming much more secure than he actually is, although it's a clear, well-essayed part to what he becomes as the case swallows him whole. It's a superior example of this sort of character, and Renier does him justice.
Full review at EFC
De Behandeling (The Treatment)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Film festivals, or the other ways that film lovers cram more movies than their friends watch in a month into a much shorter span of time, can really warp one's perception of a given picture via context. On its own, I might consider The Treatment to be a dark, pessimistic movie about especially horrible crimes; after three screenings that plunged me into that sort of dark water without any sort of lifeline, this movie's police procedural approach made it seem much more an exciting thriller.
It follows Nick Cafmeyer (Geert van Rampelberg), a detective for the Belgian federal police who has just been called in to take the lead on an ugly case - a couple found chained up in their home, their captor fleeing with their nine-year-old son upon being discovered. The whole department scrambles, but it's more personal for Nick than most: When he was nine, his brother Bjorn was abducted and never found. Neighbor Ivan Plettinckx (Johan van Assche) was the prime suspect, but nothing could be proven, and he has spent the last twenty-five years slipping Nick taunting notes containing conflicting accounts of what happened to Bjorn, stepping it up in recent months. Plettinckx almost certainly has nothing to do with this new case, although what looks like his most honest note yet may be the only thing that can break Nick's focus on what some of the kids he talks to call "the troll".
The Treatment is a detective story if not necessarily a mystery; it points its fingers in roughly the right direction early on on and then spends most of the next couple of hours having the police piece together the path necessary to get there. In fact, it lets the audience get far enough ahead of Nick and his colleagues that it can get a bit frustrating toward the end; viewers may find themselves frantically rewinding the picture in their heads, trying to remember if Nick has all the crucial bits of information they have our not. That's not necessarily ideal - not every detective story needs to be a fair-play whodunit, but it helps to know what everyone knows - but director Hans Herbots and screenwriter Carl Joos (adapting a novel by Mo Hayder) mostly have a good juggling act going, keeping plenty of balls in the air even as new ones are thrown in.
Full review at EFC
It's fun, but it also means that by the end of the festival, with some stuff having been knocked out by Fantasia as well, I'm not sure who is more to blame for my Day Eight schedule: Me, the random number generator, or whoever built the day's schedule as a whole. But, man, this was not the sort of thing that sends you away happy: Grim movie about a woman dealing with a horrific miscarriage, story about an entire family of sex criminals, dark crime thing about a detective drowning himself in a case, and finally a thriller about a detective hunting down a pedophile. Suffice it to say, that last one was the most fun, even though when I pointed out my schedule and that it was ending with that, at least one person grunted and said it was a pretty rough draw.
I actually considered trying to move some stuff around, but there wasn't much happier stuff to be found. I heard a theory that this was to make the closing night party seem even more celebratory by comparison. I didn't go - not a big fan of loud crowds of people smoking and drinking - so I can't attest to how much that might have been the case.
Anyway, not exactly the way to be sent off. I'll have a few more general thoughts of the festival as a whole when I write up the "This Week in Tickets" for these dates, but it's at least something I'm glad to have done once.
I Am Here
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I Am Here is heart-and-gut-wrenching in its first act, taking horrific events and making them hurt more with things that would at first glance have the opposite effect. It's not quite so sure-handed when it starts to actually tell a story around the situation it has set up, but is built on such a strong base that this hardly matters.
Maria (Kim Basinger) and Peter (Sebastian Schipper) are a wealthy, successful couple living in Copenhagen, but the one thing that they - especially Maria - feel would make their life complete is a child. It's no easy thing to conceive at their age, and their most recent attempt has ended catastrophically. With Peter realistically giving up any hope, Maria latches onto a comment at work and embarks on an extremely ill-advised quest.
Writer/director Anders Morgenthaler has his roots in animation and cartooning, and while one would likely not guess this from looking at this extremely grounded film, there are moments which certainly indicate a different way of looking at the material. The scene which introduces Christian (Jordan Prentice) to the film certainly qualifies in retrospect, and there are a couple others from before that which drop the jaw, with one becoming all the more heartbreaking because it briefly gives the audience a sense of wonder and joy before not just leading to one of the film's most horrifying moments, but setting something up which will carry through the rest of the movie, either as a narrative conceit or an indication of just how broken Maria may be.
Full review at EFC
I Am Trash
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
"Just jerk off when your brother tells you to" isn't quite the first line of I Am Trash, but it's close and gets the audience's attention. It also turns out to be one of the less horrific moments in this movie about a family of sex offenders. If that description puts you off, you're probably well-served trusting those instincts.
Writer/director Lee Sang-woo delivers that line as a character of the same name, a street cleaner and de facto head of his family. He wants his brother Sang-tae (Yang Myung-hun) to masturbate because he is prone to acts of sexual violence otherwise, and it seems to run in the family: Third brother Sang-gu (Park Hyung-bin) is molesting his barracks-mate while on his military service, and their pedophile father has just been released from prison after a ten-year sentence for raping an eight-year-old girl. The still-traumatized girl's father, Yong-suk, has casually informed Sang-woo that he will castrate the father if he shows up in town.
Signs posted in their neighborhood suggest that the mother went missing twelve years ago, so it appears that the brothers never had much in the way of sensible guidance. Sang-woo may try, but he's established as weak early on, getting attacked kids on the street as he does his job in the first scene. It's a theme that continues through the film, as he's blackmailed by someone who knows of his family's crimes and stymied in his attempts to get Sang-tae to actually take a job. It seems like a rather pessimistic view - men are slaves to their urges, while the women presented are all helpless victims - although it does serve to highlight the jam Sang-woo is in trying to exist with one foot in the civilized world and one in his family's. Perhaps that's what life is like for the sort of man his father and brothers are: Aggression is normal, women (and weaker men) are targets, and those who would impose some sort of order deserve contempt.
Full review at EFC
Waste Land
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
One of the best sorts of mysteries plunges its detective into a world not his own, such that figuring out how this other culture works is an important part of finding the killer. Some sort of personal growth is nice too. The trouble with Waste Land is that it never offers much more than the plunge, and that never with the sort of depth that makes the lack of a compelling mystery or fleshed-out character arc less keenly felt.
It's got the making of all three: Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) pulls the case of Lukengo, a 19-year-old Congolese man who is pulled out of the river with a couple of Nkonde statutes. The trail leads Leo and partner Johnny Rimbaud (Peter Van den Begin) to a collector and businessman named Géant who still has a mine in the former colony. In fact, all records indicate that Géant is still in the Congo at the time Leo meet with him. The investigation is affecting him in other ways, too - though he has promised his pregnant wife Kathleen (Natali Broods) that he would leave the force after this case, he's been feeling a strange pull towards Congolese mysticism from the start, and has been more attentive than usual to the victim's sister Aysha (Babetida Sadjo).
Leo sits squarely at the intersection of all that's going on here, and in the movie's favor, he is always interesting. The intense detective who is perhaps only able to weather what he sees on the job because he himself is a little off is a familiar character type, but in this case he is put together fairly well. There's a bit of paranoia to his depression, while scenes with his father quickly illustrate where his fear of admitting weakness comes from. Jérémie Renier plays Leo as seeming much more secure than he actually is, although it's a clear, well-essayed part to what he becomes as the case swallows him whole. It's a superior example of this sort of character, and Renier does him justice.
Full review at EFC
De Behandeling (The Treatment)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Film festivals, or the other ways that film lovers cram more movies than their friends watch in a month into a much shorter span of time, can really warp one's perception of a given picture via context. On its own, I might consider The Treatment to be a dark, pessimistic movie about especially horrible crimes; after three screenings that plunged me into that sort of dark water without any sort of lifeline, this movie's police procedural approach made it seem much more an exciting thriller.
It follows Nick Cafmeyer (Geert van Rampelberg), a detective for the Belgian federal police who has just been called in to take the lead on an ugly case - a couple found chained up in their home, their captor fleeing with their nine-year-old son upon being discovered. The whole department scrambles, but it's more personal for Nick than most: When he was nine, his brother Bjorn was abducted and never found. Neighbor Ivan Plettinckx (Johan van Assche) was the prime suspect, but nothing could be proven, and he has spent the last twenty-five years slipping Nick taunting notes containing conflicting accounts of what happened to Bjorn, stepping it up in recent months. Plettinckx almost certainly has nothing to do with this new case, although what looks like his most honest note yet may be the only thing that can break Nick's focus on what some of the kids he talks to call "the troll".
The Treatment is a detective story if not necessarily a mystery; it points its fingers in roughly the right direction early on on and then spends most of the next couple of hours having the police piece together the path necessary to get there. In fact, it lets the audience get far enough ahead of Nick and his colleagues that it can get a bit frustrating toward the end; viewers may find themselves frantically rewinding the picture in their heads, trying to remember if Nick has all the crucial bits of information they have our not. That's not necessarily ideal - not every detective story needs to be a fair-play whodunit, but it helps to know what everyone knows - but director Hans Herbots and screenwriter Carl Joos (adapting a novel by Mo Hayder) mostly have a good juggling act going, keeping plenty of balls in the air even as new ones are thrown in.
Full review at EFC
Thursday, September 25, 2014
The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.07: Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and It Follows
You know the drill - 11:05 am movie I'll probably be late for. More another time.
Today's (finale) schedule - I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, The Treatment, and blessed sleep after what looks like kind of a downer of a day.
Man from Reno
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
There's a moment at the end of a lot of the really good "Coen-like" movies (a description unfair to everyone involved, but one people use) where someone sits down, has a long sigh, and considers just what all this insanity means, inviting the audience to do the same. I don't know if Man from Reno quite has that moment, and it's kind of missed. There's still quite a bit to like about this little mystery even without that moment, and maybe it works well enough without it.
We approach the mystery from two directions. First, Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna), the sheriff of a county just outside San Francisco, finds an abandoned car on an extremely foggy night - and then finds the driver when an Asian man jumps out in front of the officer's car. In the city itself, Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) has bailed on a book junket back home to visit friends, also meeting fellow tourist Akira Suzuki (Kazuki Kitamura) in the hotel lobby. But what about the other people lurking in the background?
There are a lot of characters beyond that, from Aki's college friends to Paul's daughter, and their investigations wind up leading to some peculiar areas, although it's often the sort of situation that seems innocently baffling on its face rather than kinky or threatening. Given that there isn't much initial indication of where things are going, it's hard to say that the movie drifts particularly far from its initial destination, but it certainly feels like it does.
Full review at EFC
Fasandræberne (The Absent One)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I swear I've heard of the Department Q books from somewhere, even though I haven't really been keeping up on detective fiction as much as I'd like. If they're going to keep cranking out movies this good in adapting them, I hope they make it over here as well as the Dragon Tattoo books did.
It is kind of a familiar sort of detective set-up - the too-intense sleuth with the partner who grounds him, the case that leads into decadence among the elite going all the way back to boarding school, the finale that, let's face it, involves a lot of things that would get these guys fired from the police force. It's got folks involved who are pretty good at it, though, and a secondary protagonist in Danica Curcic's Kimmie who is downright fascinating and haunting. It's second of a series (the first came out last year), and I wouldn't mind seeing both get US distribution soon-ish.
Full review on EFC
Haemoo
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
This one has received a lot of notice in part because of Bong Joon-ho's involvement as a prodcer and co-writer for long-time collaborator Shim Sung-bo, and if that helps it out, that's great. It's a nifty little movie, the sort of thriller that South Korea seems to do better than anyone else right now - the type that plunges the audience into much darker than expected territory and still keeps one on the edge of his or her seat out of genuine excitement.
It looks great - I joked a couple weeks ago that someone in South Korea built a tank for shooting maritime movies and intends to get their money's worth, but I can't complain about the results, especially with how Shim handles the sea fog of the title, letting it really set the scene when the movie gets into murky territory. I do wonder a bit about the characterization, especially in the second half of the film - a lot of people seem to go way off the deep end, and although they're in a situation where I can't blame anyone for being messed up, I wonder if it's as much a sign of the film's roots as a stage play as anything else.
Full review on EFC
Dios Local (Local God)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I really liked this one from Uruguay, much more than I expected. It's easy to read the description and come in expecting something from like The Descent or As Above, So Below - friends in a spooky cave have to survive and get out - but what we get is a lot of genuinely eerie stuff, and just when it seems like the movie is about to disappear up its own tail, the filmmakers will drop a pretty great jolt on the audience.
It's a bit unorthodox in structure, and that causes a few problems - I don't know that the story which is supposed to set the stage really does the job, and the filmmakers have trouble avoiding "doing the same thing three times" with the set-up they have - but it's a horror movie with some truly memorable moments, and you have to respect that.
It Follows
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It Follows is genuinely weird in a few places, and there are moments when I think writer/director David Robert Mitchell had a great idea for a horror movie without any idea of how he would finish it. This thing is pure distilled "stalker who won't stop and whom nobody will believe exists" without much worry about mythology, and that's okay - it lets Mitchell really get at the emotion of never feeling safe again, and the ending he comes up with certainly works on that level.
The pretty great cast is a big help, too - Maika Monroe is kind of transfixing as Jamie "Jay" Height, described by another character as "annoyingly pretty", and the audience goes for her easily. The group of supportive friends around her is interesting because in some ways they're as much her plainer (by movie standards) sister's friends as hers, but they work as a solid unit while also giving Keir Gilchrist a chance to stand out.
Ultimately, it's a movie about sharing weight even when you can't necessarily see a friend's problem yourself, and that's a pretty great thing to pile on top of a thriller that's already full of inventive, exciting material.
Full review on EFC
Today's (finale) schedule - I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, The Treatment, and blessed sleep after what looks like kind of a downer of a day.
Man from Reno
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
There's a moment at the end of a lot of the really good "Coen-like" movies (a description unfair to everyone involved, but one people use) where someone sits down, has a long sigh, and considers just what all this insanity means, inviting the audience to do the same. I don't know if Man from Reno quite has that moment, and it's kind of missed. There's still quite a bit to like about this little mystery even without that moment, and maybe it works well enough without it.
We approach the mystery from two directions. First, Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna), the sheriff of a county just outside San Francisco, finds an abandoned car on an extremely foggy night - and then finds the driver when an Asian man jumps out in front of the officer's car. In the city itself, Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) has bailed on a book junket back home to visit friends, also meeting fellow tourist Akira Suzuki (Kazuki Kitamura) in the hotel lobby. But what about the other people lurking in the background?
There are a lot of characters beyond that, from Aki's college friends to Paul's daughter, and their investigations wind up leading to some peculiar areas, although it's often the sort of situation that seems innocently baffling on its face rather than kinky or threatening. Given that there isn't much initial indication of where things are going, it's hard to say that the movie drifts particularly far from its initial destination, but it certainly feels like it does.
Full review at EFC
Fasandræberne (The Absent One)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I swear I've heard of the Department Q books from somewhere, even though I haven't really been keeping up on detective fiction as much as I'd like. If they're going to keep cranking out movies this good in adapting them, I hope they make it over here as well as the Dragon Tattoo books did.
It is kind of a familiar sort of detective set-up - the too-intense sleuth with the partner who grounds him, the case that leads into decadence among the elite going all the way back to boarding school, the finale that, let's face it, involves a lot of things that would get these guys fired from the police force. It's got folks involved who are pretty good at it, though, and a secondary protagonist in Danica Curcic's Kimmie who is downright fascinating and haunting. It's second of a series (the first came out last year), and I wouldn't mind seeing both get US distribution soon-ish.
Full review on EFC
Haemoo
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
This one has received a lot of notice in part because of Bong Joon-ho's involvement as a prodcer and co-writer for long-time collaborator Shim Sung-bo, and if that helps it out, that's great. It's a nifty little movie, the sort of thriller that South Korea seems to do better than anyone else right now - the type that plunges the audience into much darker than expected territory and still keeps one on the edge of his or her seat out of genuine excitement.
It looks great - I joked a couple weeks ago that someone in South Korea built a tank for shooting maritime movies and intends to get their money's worth, but I can't complain about the results, especially with how Shim handles the sea fog of the title, letting it really set the scene when the movie gets into murky territory. I do wonder a bit about the characterization, especially in the second half of the film - a lot of people seem to go way off the deep end, and although they're in a situation where I can't blame anyone for being messed up, I wonder if it's as much a sign of the film's roots as a stage play as anything else.
Full review on EFC
Dios Local (Local God)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I really liked this one from Uruguay, much more than I expected. It's easy to read the description and come in expecting something from like The Descent or As Above, So Below - friends in a spooky cave have to survive and get out - but what we get is a lot of genuinely eerie stuff, and just when it seems like the movie is about to disappear up its own tail, the filmmakers will drop a pretty great jolt on the audience.
It's a bit unorthodox in structure, and that causes a few problems - I don't know that the story which is supposed to set the stage really does the job, and the filmmakers have trouble avoiding "doing the same thing three times" with the set-up they have - but it's a horror movie with some truly memorable moments, and you have to respect that.
It Follows
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It Follows is genuinely weird in a few places, and there are moments when I think writer/director David Robert Mitchell had a great idea for a horror movie without any idea of how he would finish it. This thing is pure distilled "stalker who won't stop and whom nobody will believe exists" without much worry about mythology, and that's okay - it lets Mitchell really get at the emotion of never feeling safe again, and the ending he comes up with certainly works on that level.
The pretty great cast is a big help, too - Maika Monroe is kind of transfixing as Jamie "Jay" Height, described by another character as "annoyingly pretty", and the audience goes for her easily. The group of supportive friends around her is interesting because in some ways they're as much her plainer (by movie standards) sister's friends as hers, but they work as a solid unit while also giving Keir Gilchrist a chance to stand out.
Ultimately, it's a movie about sharing weight even when you can't necessarily see a friend's problem yourself, and that's a pretty great thing to pile on top of a thriller that's already full of inventive, exciting material.
Full review on EFC
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.06: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2
Photos:
Everly director Joe Lynch!
Automata director Gabe Ibáñez, with Harry Knowles leading the Q&A.
Scott Weinberg (l) questioning The Guest writer Simon Barrett.
Funny Q&As today; I'll fill in when I'm not running off to movies.
Which are: The Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and a second shot at Necrofobia unless I can get my hands on a ticket for It Follows
The Stranger
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
The Stranger is the intersection of two trends in genre filmmaking that aren't bad in and of themselves, but can be kind of limiting: Sacrificing a sense of place to make your movie palatable for an English-speaking audience and taking genre concepts that are basically absurd very, very seriously. You can make a decent movie this way, as filmmaker Guillermo Amoedo and his team do, but it's tough to make a great one.
The stranger in question (Cristobal Tapia Montt) knocks on 16-year-old Peter's door one night, looking for someone who used to live there, only to be sent to the cemetery. That would be the end outings, especially since this guy runs afoul of three punks led by Caleb (Ariel Levy), who would have beaten him to death if Peter (Nicolas Duran) hadn't happened by on his bike. He flags down lieutenant De Luca (Luis Gnecco), which seems like a good idea, but turns into a bigger mess than any of them - or Peter's mother Monica (Alessandra Guerzoni), a nurse - is prepared for.
That's actually a pretty strong noir-thriller setup, and if Amoedo and his team would have gone with that, it would likely still have been a movie with a lot of potential, especially as the route he chooses does involve never saying a certain word (it's the sort of movie that uses euphemisms like "contagious"). It puts the movie into a bit of a no-win situation at times - it's dependent on mythology that it won't directly acknowledge, either as commentary on the genre or to really dig into what weighs on the stranger. Going for that sort of restraint also means that the admittedly sort of melodramatic themes and parallels get buried fairly deep; they could have been a lot more involving closer to the surface.
Full review at EFC
Everly
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I kind of wonder why folks like Salma Hayek take jobs like Everly; is there some movie-star calculus where the lead role in an English-language action movie almost certain to go straight to video on demand is worth more than a Spanish-language drama or an ensemble part on television, either in terms of money or ego? I'm not complaining about her and others whose careers are at the same spot taking these jobs, you understand, I like these movies and like them even more when the star is someone who can do a little more than look good on the cover. And, hey, if she's willing to do something this nuts, so much the better.
She plays the title character, who was kidnapped four years ago and kept for yakuza boss Taiko's pleasure, presumably via threats to kill her mother and now five-year-old daughter if she got out of line. As the movie starts, it looks like Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe) has learned that she's been contacted by the Feds and sent a bunch of men to rape and kill her, unaware she's got a phone and gun stashed in the bathroom. And while that may be enough for this group of thugs, Takio owns the building and the cops, so what was planned as an escape is looking an awful lot like a last stand.
This is not a set-up that makes a tremendous amount of sense at any point, so it's probably for the best that everything that got Everly to this place happens off-screen without anything in the way of flashbacks and only the vaguest sort of explanation; director Joe Lynch and screenwriter Yale Hannon wisely let the audience try and insert their own sense-making version of events if they're so inclined. Even with that out of the way, there's still a lot of really goofy action-movie silliness going on, such as Everly somehow being a crack shot despite likely being four years out of practice while only sustaining one through-and-through wound that doesn't seem to slow her down that much. Or her conveniently having the building's security system connected to her TV. Or her being targeted by waves of colorful assassins rather than what would seem likely to be more effective measures not deployed until later.
Full review at EFC
Automata
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
For the purposes of Automata, filmmaker Gabe Ibáñez reduces Asimov's traditional three laws of robotics to two: Do not harm a living thing, and do not engage in self-modification. Most movies about rogue machines would concern themselves with the first, so it shows just what sort of movie Ibáñez is trying to make in focusing on the second.
The ROC Pilgrim 7000 robots with those directives installed are ubiquitous in 2044, a generation after increased solar flare activity has drastically reduced the human population and crowded them into a few remaining cities, with walls trying to keep the encroaching desert out. Occasionally things go wrong, and when it does, insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) works on behalf of the company to attempt to avoid a payout. In what is hopefully his last case before a transfer to a seaside district with his pregnant wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), he investigate the claims of a cop (Dylan McDermott) who claims that the unit he shot was repairing itself. He soon finds that something was up, and his search leads him to "clockmaker" Dr. Dupre (Melanie Griffith) - and areas his bosses from old friend Robert Bold (Rober Forster) on up would like kept quiet.
The themes explored in Automata - evolution, personhood, and the like - are potentially fairly heavy material, and Ibáñez treats them with the appropriate weight. The newly ungoverned machines are not suddenly more mature than their human progenitors, exploring their situation gradually and often having halting conversations on the subject rather than giving us straight lectures. That sort of philosophical intelligence isn't always reflected in in the moment-to-moment cogwork of the script - there are times when a walk through the desert seems to be happening in real time, with characters withholding information for no good reason and Rachel dragged along mostly because the film needs her around for the finale. That Ibáñez doesn't want his sci-fi movie to be men and robots shooting each other is admirable, but there are moments when they should be doing a bit more than they are.
Full review at EFC
The Guest
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I didn't necessarily think much of The Guest as it started; it quite frankly seemed like a step back for the team of writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard. It introduced a pleasant enough cast and set up a kind of familiar "stranger in the house is more dangerous than anyone knows" situation which the group is good enough to make go well, but, ho-hum... And then a thoroughly unremarkable scene starts a chain that gets Lance Reddick involved. After that, it's still the same movie in a lot of ways, but it gets bigger and crazier.
And that's a real kick, to be honest, what looked like it was going to be just a typical indie thriller gets just big, nuts, and self-aware enough to drop jaws in a good way. It's already hitting theaters, and shouldn't be missed.
Full review on EFC
Død Snø 2 (Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Saw this back at Fantasia, but kind of felt like I was missing ten minutes or so. Turns out I was, but they weren't of huge consequence. I missed a different ten minutes or so this time, so now I've seen the whole thing, more or less.
I liked it a bit more, although I still say I'll be more excited for the Hansel & Gretel sequel.
Full review at EFC
Everly director Joe Lynch!
Automata director Gabe Ibáñez, with Harry Knowles leading the Q&A.
Scott Weinberg (l) questioning The Guest writer Simon Barrett.
Funny Q&As today; I'll fill in when I'm not running off to movies.
Which are: The Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and a second shot at Necrofobia unless I can get my hands on a ticket for It Follows
The Stranger
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
The Stranger is the intersection of two trends in genre filmmaking that aren't bad in and of themselves, but can be kind of limiting: Sacrificing a sense of place to make your movie palatable for an English-speaking audience and taking genre concepts that are basically absurd very, very seriously. You can make a decent movie this way, as filmmaker Guillermo Amoedo and his team do, but it's tough to make a great one.
The stranger in question (Cristobal Tapia Montt) knocks on 16-year-old Peter's door one night, looking for someone who used to live there, only to be sent to the cemetery. That would be the end outings, especially since this guy runs afoul of three punks led by Caleb (Ariel Levy), who would have beaten him to death if Peter (Nicolas Duran) hadn't happened by on his bike. He flags down lieutenant De Luca (Luis Gnecco), which seems like a good idea, but turns into a bigger mess than any of them - or Peter's mother Monica (Alessandra Guerzoni), a nurse - is prepared for.
That's actually a pretty strong noir-thriller setup, and if Amoedo and his team would have gone with that, it would likely still have been a movie with a lot of potential, especially as the route he chooses does involve never saying a certain word (it's the sort of movie that uses euphemisms like "contagious"). It puts the movie into a bit of a no-win situation at times - it's dependent on mythology that it won't directly acknowledge, either as commentary on the genre or to really dig into what weighs on the stranger. Going for that sort of restraint also means that the admittedly sort of melodramatic themes and parallels get buried fairly deep; they could have been a lot more involving closer to the surface.
Full review at EFC
Everly
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I kind of wonder why folks like Salma Hayek take jobs like Everly; is there some movie-star calculus where the lead role in an English-language action movie almost certain to go straight to video on demand is worth more than a Spanish-language drama or an ensemble part on television, either in terms of money or ego? I'm not complaining about her and others whose careers are at the same spot taking these jobs, you understand, I like these movies and like them even more when the star is someone who can do a little more than look good on the cover. And, hey, if she's willing to do something this nuts, so much the better.
She plays the title character, who was kidnapped four years ago and kept for yakuza boss Taiko's pleasure, presumably via threats to kill her mother and now five-year-old daughter if she got out of line. As the movie starts, it looks like Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe) has learned that she's been contacted by the Feds and sent a bunch of men to rape and kill her, unaware she's got a phone and gun stashed in the bathroom. And while that may be enough for this group of thugs, Takio owns the building and the cops, so what was planned as an escape is looking an awful lot like a last stand.
This is not a set-up that makes a tremendous amount of sense at any point, so it's probably for the best that everything that got Everly to this place happens off-screen without anything in the way of flashbacks and only the vaguest sort of explanation; director Joe Lynch and screenwriter Yale Hannon wisely let the audience try and insert their own sense-making version of events if they're so inclined. Even with that out of the way, there's still a lot of really goofy action-movie silliness going on, such as Everly somehow being a crack shot despite likely being four years out of practice while only sustaining one through-and-through wound that doesn't seem to slow her down that much. Or her conveniently having the building's security system connected to her TV. Or her being targeted by waves of colorful assassins rather than what would seem likely to be more effective measures not deployed until later.
Full review at EFC
Automata
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
For the purposes of Automata, filmmaker Gabe Ibáñez reduces Asimov's traditional three laws of robotics to two: Do not harm a living thing, and do not engage in self-modification. Most movies about rogue machines would concern themselves with the first, so it shows just what sort of movie Ibáñez is trying to make in focusing on the second.
The ROC Pilgrim 7000 robots with those directives installed are ubiquitous in 2044, a generation after increased solar flare activity has drastically reduced the human population and crowded them into a few remaining cities, with walls trying to keep the encroaching desert out. Occasionally things go wrong, and when it does, insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) works on behalf of the company to attempt to avoid a payout. In what is hopefully his last case before a transfer to a seaside district with his pregnant wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), he investigate the claims of a cop (Dylan McDermott) who claims that the unit he shot was repairing itself. He soon finds that something was up, and his search leads him to "clockmaker" Dr. Dupre (Melanie Griffith) - and areas his bosses from old friend Robert Bold (Rober Forster) on up would like kept quiet.
The themes explored in Automata - evolution, personhood, and the like - are potentially fairly heavy material, and Ibáñez treats them with the appropriate weight. The newly ungoverned machines are not suddenly more mature than their human progenitors, exploring their situation gradually and often having halting conversations on the subject rather than giving us straight lectures. That sort of philosophical intelligence isn't always reflected in in the moment-to-moment cogwork of the script - there are times when a walk through the desert seems to be happening in real time, with characters withholding information for no good reason and Rachel dragged along mostly because the film needs her around for the finale. That Ibáñez doesn't want his sci-fi movie to be men and robots shooting each other is admirable, but there are moments when they should be doing a bit more than they are.
Full review at EFC
The Guest
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I didn't necessarily think much of The Guest as it started; it quite frankly seemed like a step back for the team of writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard. It introduced a pleasant enough cast and set up a kind of familiar "stranger in the house is more dangerous than anyone knows" situation which the group is good enough to make go well, but, ho-hum... And then a thoroughly unremarkable scene starts a chain that gets Lance Reddick involved. After that, it's still the same movie in a lot of ways, but it gets bigger and crazier.
And that's a real kick, to be honest, what looked like it was going to be just a typical indie thriller gets just big, nuts, and self-aware enough to drop jaws in a good way. It's already hitting theaters, and shouldn't be missed.
Full review on EFC
Død Snø 2 (Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Saw this back at Fantasia, but kind of felt like I was missing ten minutes or so. Turns out I was, but they weren't of huge consequence. I missed a different ten minutes or so this time, so now I've seen the whole thing, more or less.
I liked it a bit more, although I still say I'll be more excited for the Hansel & Gretel sequel.
Full review at EFC
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.05: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and I Am a Knife With Legs
Zero time this morning; will update later.
Today's assignments: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2
Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Though Hayao Miyazaki's retirement from directing animated features with The Wind Rises deserved all the attention it got last year, there is somewhat less noise being made about Isao Takahata's swan song, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, though Takahata has made a number of classics at their Studio Ghibli production company that have not gained the same sort of traction in America. As such, is not necessarily a surprise that Takahata says goodbye with a movie that may be a tough sell in the U.S., but is just as brilliant as its companion.
In this one, bamboo cutter Sanuki no Miyatsuko (voice of Takei Chii) observes a strange shoot growing impossibly fast, and is doubly surprised to see the to open to reveal what looks like a tiny princess, inches tall. The sprite becomes a regular-sized baby at the touch of the man's wife (voice of Nobuko Miyamoto), and will continue to be subject to growth spurts that have the village children calling her "Li'l Bamboo" as she surpasses them in age. As she becomes a teenager, the first presents her father with other gifts that would allow him to fulfill what he believes is her destiny to become a princess, though the girl (voiced by Aki Asakura) is not a natural fit for the capital whether the newly christened Kaguya is dealing with tutors or suitors.
It's a charming, episodic little story, breaking out into a number of smaller, often funny tales, each with a rhythm of its own, strung together in a way that the audience doesn't really feel the film's long running time - 137 minutes is highly unusual for an animated picture - at all. There are bits that feel like they could be cut down - does one really need five princes and ministers attempting to woo Kaguya? - but each is small enough that removing it wouldn't tighten things notably and a couple of good moments would be lost. It's a leisurely pace that can encompass an entire life, even if there's some irony in that parts of Kaguya's are accelerated.
Full review at EFC
Purgatorio
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I didn't think much of Purgatory for a good chunk of its short running time; as much as Oona Chaplin did a fine job of holding the screen, there didn't seem to be much story, and it just felt like someone doing the best that they could with artificial constraints. It had a few good moments, but was kind of forgettable.
Then it got to its double-barrelled twist action, and while the quick-arriving second one didn't do much for me, the first seemed legitimately shocking and angering, providing a pretty fascinating context for the rest of the movie. I don't know that this elevates it that far, but I was interested by the situation by the end, and can't deny I felt some chills.
Plus, the movie is around 80 minutes, pretty close to the ideal length for a horror movie.
Realiti
* * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Realiti has a couple of entertaining performances in it - I loved every time that Graham McTavish appeared on screen as a sinister corporate lawyer - and Nathan Meister is an amiable enough lead, but for the most part it's very bland. Director Jonathan Kind and Chad Taylor seem to be onto something in their basic concept - a media organization behind the "what is real and what is illusion" mystery - but they don't really have what is necessary to make it really fascinate. I sort of lost track of what was going on for a while, and just didn't care that much when things were coming to a head.
From the Dark
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Give Conor McMahon credit for building a reasonably solid horror movie out of almost nothing here, but it really strains against its tiny budget. The premise of it - a light-averse peat bog zombie thing - requires darkness, but there are long stretches of this movie where I felt like I couldn't see anything either because of the dark or because there were lights being shone directly in my eyes, and it was more frustrating than eerie.
On the other hand, Niamh Algar absolutely owns this movie as the heroine, and when McMahon is able to ust show her gutsily and cleverly try to escape, it's a lot of fun. Even if she does have a really frustrating habit of losing light sources.
I Am a Knife with Legs
N/A (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Hey, would someone in Boston pick this up and show it at 7pm or so? Thanks. It's got some big laughs, but this is the second festival where I've tried to watch it and fallen asleep just as it's getting really weird.
Today's assignments: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2
Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Though Hayao Miyazaki's retirement from directing animated features with The Wind Rises deserved all the attention it got last year, there is somewhat less noise being made about Isao Takahata's swan song, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, though Takahata has made a number of classics at their Studio Ghibli production company that have not gained the same sort of traction in America. As such, is not necessarily a surprise that Takahata says goodbye with a movie that may be a tough sell in the U.S., but is just as brilliant as its companion.
In this one, bamboo cutter Sanuki no Miyatsuko (voice of Takei Chii) observes a strange shoot growing impossibly fast, and is doubly surprised to see the to open to reveal what looks like a tiny princess, inches tall. The sprite becomes a regular-sized baby at the touch of the man's wife (voice of Nobuko Miyamoto), and will continue to be subject to growth spurts that have the village children calling her "Li'l Bamboo" as she surpasses them in age. As she becomes a teenager, the first presents her father with other gifts that would allow him to fulfill what he believes is her destiny to become a princess, though the girl (voiced by Aki Asakura) is not a natural fit for the capital whether the newly christened Kaguya is dealing with tutors or suitors.
It's a charming, episodic little story, breaking out into a number of smaller, often funny tales, each with a rhythm of its own, strung together in a way that the audience doesn't really feel the film's long running time - 137 minutes is highly unusual for an animated picture - at all. There are bits that feel like they could be cut down - does one really need five princes and ministers attempting to woo Kaguya? - but each is small enough that removing it wouldn't tighten things notably and a couple of good moments would be lost. It's a leisurely pace that can encompass an entire life, even if there's some irony in that parts of Kaguya's are accelerated.
Full review at EFC
Purgatorio
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I didn't think much of Purgatory for a good chunk of its short running time; as much as Oona Chaplin did a fine job of holding the screen, there didn't seem to be much story, and it just felt like someone doing the best that they could with artificial constraints. It had a few good moments, but was kind of forgettable.
Then it got to its double-barrelled twist action, and while the quick-arriving second one didn't do much for me, the first seemed legitimately shocking and angering, providing a pretty fascinating context for the rest of the movie. I don't know that this elevates it that far, but I was interested by the situation by the end, and can't deny I felt some chills.
Plus, the movie is around 80 minutes, pretty close to the ideal length for a horror movie.
Realiti
* * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Realiti has a couple of entertaining performances in it - I loved every time that Graham McTavish appeared on screen as a sinister corporate lawyer - and Nathan Meister is an amiable enough lead, but for the most part it's very bland. Director Jonathan Kind and Chad Taylor seem to be onto something in their basic concept - a media organization behind the "what is real and what is illusion" mystery - but they don't really have what is necessary to make it really fascinate. I sort of lost track of what was going on for a while, and just didn't care that much when things were coming to a head.
From the Dark
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Give Conor McMahon credit for building a reasonably solid horror movie out of almost nothing here, but it really strains against its tiny budget. The premise of it - a light-averse peat bog zombie thing - requires darkness, but there are long stretches of this movie where I felt like I couldn't see anything either because of the dark or because there were lights being shone directly in my eyes, and it was more frustrating than eerie.
On the other hand, Niamh Algar absolutely owns this movie as the heroine, and when McMahon is able to ust show her gutsily and cleverly try to escape, it's a lot of fun. Even if she does have a really frustrating habit of losing light sources.
I Am a Knife with Legs
N/A (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Hey, would someone in Boston pick this up and show it at 7pm or so? Thanks. It's got some big laughs, but this is the second festival where I've tried to watch it and fallen asleep just as it's getting really weird.
Monday, September 22, 2014
The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.04: "Pandas", Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and The Man in the Orange Jacket
Say this for Fantastic Fest: It fills your day from start to finish, even if there is a little more dead space than I might be used to in between. So, one bit of horrible photography and then off:
Hey, Man in the Orange Jacket director Aik Karapetian and producer Roberts Vinovskis - why no trip to Montreal in July? An enjoyable little Q&A, at least - I hadn't realized just how long this film took to shoot (three years, a few days at a time).
Today's plan: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and another midnight secon chance for I am a Knife with Legs.
"Pandy" ("Pandas")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I half-suspect that "Pandas" is at least partly the result of writer/director Maths Vizar having a few had ideas that could potentially be combined with the panda-specific bits. If that's the case, it works out fairly well; there's a steady stream of funny, frequently gross jokes, both within a funny "evolution of life" sequence, and more pointedly during the bits where the panda seeming like a genuine evolutionary dead end is the gag.
That, though, is what winds up tying the whole thing together: That the panda has survived in such a narrow niche environment, but just barely; its diet doesn't give it the capability to actually do much, and now the ones surviving in captivity can't even be bothered to reproduce, like they know that there's no future for them as a species and they might as well just end it. Contrast that with rats, a tremendously successful species, even if they're not nearly as cute as the panda.
Wastelander Panda
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
If you're going to do yet another thing movie/series with people wandering through a post-apocalyptic (or otherwise arid and sparsely populated) world, you might as well have some characters be pandas. It at least makes the movie unique to look at, and with any luck, it will mean the people behind the camera a are genuinely inspired rather than just going through the motions.
The journey into the wasteland begins after Isaac accidentally kills kills a fellow resident of Legion, one of the few self-sufficient cities in the world, but he offers an alternative before they stone him to death - he finds another young woman and brings her back to take her place. To keep him from running off, brother Arcayus and mother Hannah are exiled with him. Isaac joins a group of bandits led by Varrick Helm (Chantal Contouri), and spots Rose (Lily Pearl) just as his hitch is winding down. But, of course, lies and double-crosses will lead to a chase through the Obsidian Forest.
Isaac, Arcayus, and Hannah are pandas, although that is mostly a matter of physical appearance; they are not, at any point, portrayed as fat and lazy furballs who can't be torn away from eating bamboo long enough to reproduce. On the plus side, they are portrayed by actors in suits rather than being CGI creations, and while the masks may not be the most articulated, the mouths move well enough to keep scenes where they talk from breaking the illusion. Sometimes the relatively static expressions on their faces make for an odd juxtaposition to the action, but it works better than one might expect much of the time.
It does set the family apart as outsiders, even if other characters terms to treat panda-people more as unusual than bizarre enough to require explanation. If director/co-creator Victoria Cocks and the rest of the team get to make more - the feature version playing festivals is six ten-minute web episodes strung together - there's room to do some interesting things mostly hinted at here, from the various species populating the world to how women of childbearing age are treated as commodities.
The main character is portrayed by actors under masks, although they don't seem to be too physically limited by it when the time for action comes, with the voice work by NAME fairly strong. Lily Pearl is good as Rose, and Chantal Contouri especially memorable as the bandit leader. All involved play things straight, as opposed to some sort of tongue-in-cheek mash-up.
Do I have a lot of interest in Wastelander Panda without the panda angle? To be honest, probably not; this sort of wandering-through-the-desert action movie is kind of dime-a-dozen. So the hook helps, and the thing you find upon watching it isn't bad at all.
Musarañas (Shrew's Nest)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Shrew's Nest is designed to stuff a lot of movie into a small space, and on that count it succeeds quite nicely: Even if it's not as constrained to one location as that apartment's agoraphobic resident, it's got a gravitational force that pulls one back during the brief sojourns away, and enough going on inside to keep it interesting.
The resident of that apartment is Montse (Macarena Gomez), a severely agoraphobic dressmaker who hasn't left in years, serving loyal customer Doña Puri (Gracia Olayo) and having her younger sister (Nadia de Santiago) who just turned eighteen, deliver others. Not that she's totally alone when her sister is at work; she imagines the father who abandoned them fourteen years ago (Luis Tosar), and one day Carlos (Hugo Silva) falls down the stairs from his apartment on the next floor, knocking himself unconscious and breaking his leg. This stirs new feelings in the deeply religious Montse, although with three people in one apartment keeping secrets from each other, a situation that was already becoming stressed is guaranteed to break.
And while things do break in fairly spectacular fashion, the build-up is perhaps even more accomplished, as the filmmakers get us to watch the sisters play out a few days that are maybe not quite normal for them, but which don't quite feel like tipping points. Directors Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel (working from a screenplay by Andres and Sofia Cuenca) do an excellent job of increasing the tension as they reveal the different sides of Montse's instability while also building a situation that it would be difficult to just leave. It's ace work, telling the audience everything it needs to know while also leaving empty spaces in the structure that can either be filled in during the rest of the film or used to make things collapse.
Full review at EFC
Plemya (The Tribe)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Well, that's certainly something I'm glad to have seen, although I'm also sort of thankful that I'll likely never see the like again.
I suspect that what we see in the tribe - a sequestered, young population turning away from their supposed reason for being there but instead wreaking mayhem - happens at a lot of public schools, but seeing it happen at a Ukranian school for the Deaf makes it hit a bit harder. Although no explanations are given, it's not hard to figure out what's going on in these kids' heads: The hearing world finds them a nuisance worthy of only grudging concessions, and this is the first time they they've been able to band together to do what they want, and with that anger it comes out as violence, crime, and sex. There is one classroom scene early on, but after that, academics seem irrelevant - the only time we see the kids doing anything resembling study later, the purpose is immediately undercut.
It's a harrowing ride, with traditional bullying at the start, lawlessness in the middle (which filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky often uses as a perverse way to show students coming together), and horrors the audience might wish to unsee at the end. It's a bleak movie that often elicits cringes, but to his credit, Slaboshpitsky never seems to just be engaging in exploitation; everything moves the story of new student Sergey forward in some way.
The movie looks striking - the school in Kiev where we spend much of our time isn't quite run down but hasn't been upgraded in a while, and much of the rest of the action takes place in the dark. Sound is also an intriguing part of the film - with no music and no spoken dialogue (no subtitles for the sign language, either), the incidental noises tend to ring out sharp and clear, but Slaboshpitsky and his crew do an excellent job of making sure that they are somewhat inessential. The hearing audience is not going to get any sort of heads-up that the Deaf audience misses, and even incidents where we notice that there's a lot of noise being made that the characters won't hear are kept to a minimum. It's a precisely-made film in that way, even if it does embrace a certain amount of chaos.
Full review on EFC
Tokyo Tribe
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Sion Sono has never really been the quiet, contemplative sort of art-house director, but his last few films seem to have been brimming with the sort of constant action that would make genre filmmakers jealous, with Tokyo Tribe an almost non-stop barrage of over-the-top insanity once the fighting starts. The surprising thing is that an audience can be somewhat forgiven for not registering that fact, since the veneer on top of it - a busy manga adaptation told as a hip-hop musical - is crazy enough in its way that it may be what the audience remembers.
And that's not exactly unfair. That style has Tokyo Tribe moving forward at a constant fast pace, with jokes and details packed into every corner, more characters than the audience can possibly process, and moments of jaw-dropping insanity that you can almost imagine Sono giggling as he put them into the script for how silly they are (the beatboxing server in a banquet scene may have been my favorite thing Sono has ever gone for while she was on-screen). It's colorful, bizarre, and sometimes tacky as heck, enough that it may take a bit of time to realize that what the action crew is doing is actually really amazing.
There's a real exhilaration to the film in general, as well, as it is about various factions coming together rather than pulling apart. Like a lot of Sono's best recent films, there's a gigantic heart underneath the frantic violence and chaos, and it's almost sure to send the audience out with a smile on their faces.
Full review on EFC
M.O.Zh. (The Man in the Orange Jacket)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Having already seen all of the midnight selections before, I opted to use this opoprtunity to revisit one I saw at Fantasia but came out of kind of fuzzy. End result: Not quite so fuzzy, but sort of went "huh?" in one of the exact same places, so I don't know whether filmmaker Aik Karapetian was trying for that reaction of if it's just me.
Full review at EFC
Hey, Man in the Orange Jacket director Aik Karapetian and producer Roberts Vinovskis - why no trip to Montreal in July? An enjoyable little Q&A, at least - I hadn't realized just how long this film took to shoot (three years, a few days at a time).
Today's plan: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and another midnight secon chance for I am a Knife with Legs.
"Pandy" ("Pandas")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I half-suspect that "Pandas" is at least partly the result of writer/director Maths Vizar having a few had ideas that could potentially be combined with the panda-specific bits. If that's the case, it works out fairly well; there's a steady stream of funny, frequently gross jokes, both within a funny "evolution of life" sequence, and more pointedly during the bits where the panda seeming like a genuine evolutionary dead end is the gag.
That, though, is what winds up tying the whole thing together: That the panda has survived in such a narrow niche environment, but just barely; its diet doesn't give it the capability to actually do much, and now the ones surviving in captivity can't even be bothered to reproduce, like they know that there's no future for them as a species and they might as well just end it. Contrast that with rats, a tremendously successful species, even if they're not nearly as cute as the panda.
Wastelander Panda
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
If you're going to do yet another thing movie/series with people wandering through a post-apocalyptic (or otherwise arid and sparsely populated) world, you might as well have some characters be pandas. It at least makes the movie unique to look at, and with any luck, it will mean the people behind the camera a are genuinely inspired rather than just going through the motions.
The journey into the wasteland begins after Isaac accidentally kills kills a fellow resident of Legion, one of the few self-sufficient cities in the world, but he offers an alternative before they stone him to death - he finds another young woman and brings her back to take her place. To keep him from running off, brother Arcayus and mother Hannah are exiled with him. Isaac joins a group of bandits led by Varrick Helm (Chantal Contouri), and spots Rose (Lily Pearl) just as his hitch is winding down. But, of course, lies and double-crosses will lead to a chase through the Obsidian Forest.
Isaac, Arcayus, and Hannah are pandas, although that is mostly a matter of physical appearance; they are not, at any point, portrayed as fat and lazy furballs who can't be torn away from eating bamboo long enough to reproduce. On the plus side, they are portrayed by actors in suits rather than being CGI creations, and while the masks may not be the most articulated, the mouths move well enough to keep scenes where they talk from breaking the illusion. Sometimes the relatively static expressions on their faces make for an odd juxtaposition to the action, but it works better than one might expect much of the time.
It does set the family apart as outsiders, even if other characters terms to treat panda-people more as unusual than bizarre enough to require explanation. If director/co-creator Victoria Cocks and the rest of the team get to make more - the feature version playing festivals is six ten-minute web episodes strung together - there's room to do some interesting things mostly hinted at here, from the various species populating the world to how women of childbearing age are treated as commodities.
The main character is portrayed by actors under masks, although they don't seem to be too physically limited by it when the time for action comes, with the voice work by NAME fairly strong. Lily Pearl is good as Rose, and Chantal Contouri especially memorable as the bandit leader. All involved play things straight, as opposed to some sort of tongue-in-cheek mash-up.
Do I have a lot of interest in Wastelander Panda without the panda angle? To be honest, probably not; this sort of wandering-through-the-desert action movie is kind of dime-a-dozen. So the hook helps, and the thing you find upon watching it isn't bad at all.
Musarañas (Shrew's Nest)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Shrew's Nest is designed to stuff a lot of movie into a small space, and on that count it succeeds quite nicely: Even if it's not as constrained to one location as that apartment's agoraphobic resident, it's got a gravitational force that pulls one back during the brief sojourns away, and enough going on inside to keep it interesting.
The resident of that apartment is Montse (Macarena Gomez), a severely agoraphobic dressmaker who hasn't left in years, serving loyal customer Doña Puri (Gracia Olayo) and having her younger sister (Nadia de Santiago) who just turned eighteen, deliver others. Not that she's totally alone when her sister is at work; she imagines the father who abandoned them fourteen years ago (Luis Tosar), and one day Carlos (Hugo Silva) falls down the stairs from his apartment on the next floor, knocking himself unconscious and breaking his leg. This stirs new feelings in the deeply religious Montse, although with three people in one apartment keeping secrets from each other, a situation that was already becoming stressed is guaranteed to break.
And while things do break in fairly spectacular fashion, the build-up is perhaps even more accomplished, as the filmmakers get us to watch the sisters play out a few days that are maybe not quite normal for them, but which don't quite feel like tipping points. Directors Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel (working from a screenplay by Andres and Sofia Cuenca) do an excellent job of increasing the tension as they reveal the different sides of Montse's instability while also building a situation that it would be difficult to just leave. It's ace work, telling the audience everything it needs to know while also leaving empty spaces in the structure that can either be filled in during the rest of the film or used to make things collapse.
Full review at EFC
Plemya (The Tribe)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Well, that's certainly something I'm glad to have seen, although I'm also sort of thankful that I'll likely never see the like again.
I suspect that what we see in the tribe - a sequestered, young population turning away from their supposed reason for being there but instead wreaking mayhem - happens at a lot of public schools, but seeing it happen at a Ukranian school for the Deaf makes it hit a bit harder. Although no explanations are given, it's not hard to figure out what's going on in these kids' heads: The hearing world finds them a nuisance worthy of only grudging concessions, and this is the first time they they've been able to band together to do what they want, and with that anger it comes out as violence, crime, and sex. There is one classroom scene early on, but after that, academics seem irrelevant - the only time we see the kids doing anything resembling study later, the purpose is immediately undercut.
It's a harrowing ride, with traditional bullying at the start, lawlessness in the middle (which filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky often uses as a perverse way to show students coming together), and horrors the audience might wish to unsee at the end. It's a bleak movie that often elicits cringes, but to his credit, Slaboshpitsky never seems to just be engaging in exploitation; everything moves the story of new student Sergey forward in some way.
The movie looks striking - the school in Kiev where we spend much of our time isn't quite run down but hasn't been upgraded in a while, and much of the rest of the action takes place in the dark. Sound is also an intriguing part of the film - with no music and no spoken dialogue (no subtitles for the sign language, either), the incidental noises tend to ring out sharp and clear, but Slaboshpitsky and his crew do an excellent job of making sure that they are somewhat inessential. The hearing audience is not going to get any sort of heads-up that the Deaf audience misses, and even incidents where we notice that there's a lot of noise being made that the characters won't hear are kept to a minimum. It's a precisely-made film in that way, even if it does embrace a certain amount of chaos.
Full review on EFC
Tokyo Tribe
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Sion Sono has never really been the quiet, contemplative sort of art-house director, but his last few films seem to have been brimming with the sort of constant action that would make genre filmmakers jealous, with Tokyo Tribe an almost non-stop barrage of over-the-top insanity once the fighting starts. The surprising thing is that an audience can be somewhat forgiven for not registering that fact, since the veneer on top of it - a busy manga adaptation told as a hip-hop musical - is crazy enough in its way that it may be what the audience remembers.
And that's not exactly unfair. That style has Tokyo Tribe moving forward at a constant fast pace, with jokes and details packed into every corner, more characters than the audience can possibly process, and moments of jaw-dropping insanity that you can almost imagine Sono giggling as he put them into the script for how silly they are (the beatboxing server in a banquet scene may have been my favorite thing Sono has ever gone for while she was on-screen). It's colorful, bizarre, and sometimes tacky as heck, enough that it may take a bit of time to realize that what the action crew is doing is actually really amazing.
There's a real exhilaration to the film in general, as well, as it is about various factions coming together rather than pulling apart. Like a lot of Sono's best recent films, there's a gigantic heart underneath the frantic violence and chaos, and it's almost sure to send the audience out with a smile on their faces.
Full review on EFC
M.O.Zh. (The Man in the Orange Jacket)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
Having already seen all of the midnight selections before, I opted to use this opoprtunity to revisit one I saw at Fantasia but came out of kind of fuzzy. End result: Not quite so fuzzy, but sort of went "huh?" in one of the exact same places, so I don't know whether filmmaker Aik Karapetian was trying for that reaction of if it's just me.
Full review at EFC
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