Would you believe me if I said The Undertaker's Home isn't included here because I was trying to emulate the festival experience and I would have been in de Seve watching Dinner in America while it played in Hall so that doesn't ring true? No? Is it because I clearly would have been in the other room because the subject matter would have been more my speed even if Dinner had actors I like?
Well, it would be fun to say, but I don't necessarily have the room to be clever like that. It turns out that Dinner in America is not necessarily a bad movie but it is very much a not-for-me one, although it likely would have found its way onto my dance card during a normal fest for the same reason it did here: I'm going to try and max out my time with as many movies as possible, and maybe only give the program a cursory glance early on so that I'm not 100% sure what I'm getting into as I sit down. I'm probably doing that a little bit more here than I would in Montreal, since I'm not carrying around the big paperback program which I like flipping through a lot more than the website. But I'm also just kind of taking the screeners as they come.
Hunted, on the other hand, turns out to definitely be my thing, especially now that I'm probably a little more aware of how Little Red Riding Hood probably resonates a lot more with women's experiences than I was when I noted that something like three or four entries in a short women's horror program referenced it. The star is actually wearing a red hoodie through much of the movie, but it's also tons of fun when you get down into the details, including a bunch that were too fun to put in the review because of the surprise (though I will say that the blue paint goes from "wait, what?" to "that's kind of perfect" in about two seconds). I also really dug Cosmic Candy along the same lines - it's another simple story told well with sharp details.
And then, finally, we looped back around to "You Wouldn't Understand", which I gather played before Dinner in America if you watched it via the livestream. It's a nifty little short that hits a really specific mood better than a lot of jokier attempts to do so, and I'm looking forward to having a little time to dig further into what the group has posted on YouTube.
Dinner in America
* * (out of four)
Seen 20 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Sometimes there's a thin line between characters who are difficult and abrasive but interesting and characters you just plain hate. Sometimes it's not necessarily thin, but it just seems to take forever to reach the point where you can see it and maybe get something out of it. Dinner in America is in the second category, but by the time I realized that I found it hard to give it the proper credit. It spends so much time being nasty and charmless that it is hard to take its better impulses seriously.
We first meet Simon (Kyle Gallner) puking as he takes part in a drug study which is going about as well for Beth (Hannah Marks). They're booted out, and she invites him over to her place for Sunday dinner, which goes about as well, with him burning some bridges and other items on the way out. Elsewhere in Detroit, mousy 20-year-old Patty (Emily Skeggs) is being bullied on the bus and at work, with her parents saying she can't go to a concert on Friday night. She spots Simon as he's dealing some drugs and running from the cops, and he decides to hide out at her place for a while, although he's got a whole list of things he's got to do while she's looking for a new job.
Simon is a miserable little jackass, and while writer/director Adam Rehmeier will occasionally toss in something to make him seem a bit more sympathetic, but almost every bit of it is just targeting his violence at people the audience disapproves of more, and even his eventual opening up to Patty is selfish, like he can't see her having value until it's revealed that she has talent directly related to his own interests. It could be a moment of growth, but he's not given much of a chance to show he's a better person in general. He's the sort of petulant punk-rocker who's got nothing but anger and violence most of the time, and while it's energetic and entertaining at moments, it can wear on a viewer.
yle Gallner is kind of fun to watch in the role, at least; he spends almost the entire movie not quite bug-eyed but with that sort of intensity either on display or obviously just under the surface, always ready to pull out an arch variation that indicates he's got a brain behind the bile, and even on occasion showing a bit of humanity. It's a broad performance but not a bad one. Emily Skeggs doesn't quite gel with him as Patty, but it may be more about Rehmeier not having the same handle on her than he does on Simon than any shortcoming of Skeggs's; she pulls off the necessary blank and uncomprehending stare that comes from a too-sheltered upbringing without looking stupid, which is no mean feat, while also occasionally bringing out frustration that there's more in her head than her folks have prepared her for
One almost wonders at times if the script started with Patty in high school only to be revised older, but not everything made it all the way, and it wouldn't really be surprising; it's a script full of moments and characters who are strong and well-crafted for single scenes or sequences but which don't stretch that much further. Sometimes that works out pretty well - the quick hits of black comedy work, and it occasionally gives a "guest star" like Lea Thompson or Hannah Marks the chance to be memorable without holding back. That the film seldom stops to explain people's backgrounds can be a bit of a double-edged sword; it doesn't slow things down artificially but can sometimes make things seem random, or has Rehmeier losing track of the line between the bits that seem real and the ones which are meant to be heightened.
Rehmeier brings enough scrappy energy to the movie that it's entirely possible I'm judging it harshly for doing a bunch of things that I generally don't care for - I've got spectacularly little patience for movies where someone being a talented musician is meant to excuse his being a turd as a person and baseline assumptions that families are all stuck with each other and kind of miserable about it, and this one has a lot of both. It's designed to rub me the wrong way, but even given that, it's enough of a battle between nastily clever and boringly nasty that those things can easily push a viewer one way or the other.
Dead(?) link to original review at eFilmCritic
Hunted (2020)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Most moviegoers don't see that many movies like Hunted, but if you go to genre festivals or spend a lot of time digging through your favorite streaming services to find the new selections, it gets categorized: Survival horror, nature, woman on the run, etc. What makes one of those stand out? A couple good performances. Some visual style. And a willingness to go kind of crazy at the point where the audience might be expecting the filmmakers to coast.
It starts in familiar-enough fashion - a fairy tale allusion, a woman frustrated at work who goes out to a bar to blow off some steam, and a guy who initially seems nice enough but shows his true colors quickly. Soon enough Eve (Lucie Debay) is stuffed in a trunk, but able to flee her kidnappers (Arieh Worthalter & Ciaran O'Brien) thanks to a freak accident. They are never that far behind, though the woods are full of surprises.
Writer/director Vincent Paronnaud is likely best-known internationally as Marjane Satrapi's collaborator on the film version of Persepolis, and he's spent much of the rest of his career in comics and animation, so it's not exactly a surprise when the bit before the opening title includes a nifty bit of animation that is nevertheless well-enough matched to the rest of the movie that it doesn't feel like it doesn't belong. It's quickly contrasted with a moment or two of grainy-video shot in less than great lighting, and that's a bit of a preview of what's going to happen throughout the movie: Every time Eve is able to put a little bit of distance between herself and her pursuers, the forest scene takes on a bit of a fairy-tale quality, albeit as much Grimm as Disney, while there's a flatness to the guys' scenes, maybe a slight washing-out, like they're living in the violent constructed fantasy meant to be captured on camera.
The violent nature of that means Lucie Debay is going to be spending a lot of the movie running, being afraid, and looking more worn-down as things go on, which could be fairly thankless, but she never gives a half-effort, especially considering that Paronnaud and co-writer Léa Pernollet have her start from a place of having a chip on her shoulder from people wanting the impossible at work rather than having her ever be surprised that any man can be like this. It is fun to see her suddenly redirect all of that into rage when she gets her hands on a nice, solid stick to swing, though, and I also want to compliment the hairstylists who give her a cut that lets her catch the camera's eye in early scenes, tagging her as confident and savvy, but degrades exceptionally well over the course of the film.
Opposite her, Arieh Worthalter seems to be having a lot more fun, doing a great turn from gallant to downright nasty without it being a showy mask-drop, and then happily chewing the scenery for the rest of the film because his guy (credited as just "The Guy") is just completely unhinged. For much of the film, he's given Ciaran O'Brien as a sidekick to abuse, and while his part is less showy, he does a good job of playing the put-upon beta without ever becoming more than nominally sympathetic. His job is to give Worthalter's guy an audience to perform to and otherwise remind the audience about this man's need to dominate even when Eve is far off, but it's a pairing that works.
It plays into a tiny scene that demonstrates how Paronnaud is bringing a little something extra in terms of skill to this bit of VOD fodder, as Worthalter opens a candy bar and casually chucks the wrapper into a nearby stream. The camera tracks it a bit until it passes Eve, and in that moment the audience gets a little more on edge, because the way that shot works establishes that she is moving toward her would-be rapists, rather than away. But it also seems calculated to anger even a jaded viewer who has watched hundreds of these chases, because the guy is freakin' littering. It's silly, but the different form of callousness of it works. There's another bit later when the filmmakers start messing around with things happening out of order, and it feels fair because there's a bit of a warning in it, and it also makes a natural lead-in to how crazy the last act will get.
Which is impressive, because for all that stuff like that candy wrapper was making the film feel fairly tight, the homestretch has at least three crazy things that come out of nowhere and send the chase off in a new direction, often in such an absurd way as to elicit a cackle or a delighted "what!?" It's an impressively go-for-broke set of bits that works because Paronnaud hasn't entirely forgotten what got him there in terms of style or essentially being Eve fighting the guy in an uncertain environment. He's willing to pick up and drop those bits of randomness fast enough that the film doesn't get overloaded on the way to maybe, sort of, coming full circle, and while it really shouldn't work - films which drop what had been a good tense thing for an hour to do something else entirely with the finale are usually misfires - but does.
Though made in Belgium with a broadly European cast, it's shot in English, likely because the producers knew that would be good for sales to the streaming services where this will inevitably find long-term homes. I am rather looking forward to the waves of tweets that will come from people stumbling upon it, expecting a generic 85-minute time-waster, and instead getting something where the filmmakers put in the effort to make something memorable and entertaining from start to end.
Dead(?) link to review at eFilmCritic
Cosmic Candy
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It took me a bit of time to reset my brain for how off-kilter Cosmic Candy is, and the funny part is that because I saw it via this festival and consume a fair amount of fantastical material anyway, I had to adjust it downard. It's trippy at the start but things didn't click into place until I realized that it didn't take place in a world where hallucinogenic confections make it to supermarket shelves, but one where things get plenty weird and interesting on their own.
So that piece at the start where Anna Pilarinou (Maria Kitsou) seems to fly into space from the liquor aisle of the supermarket where she works is just a dream, one from which she is wakened by Persa (Magia Pipera), the ten-year-old next door, loudly practicing her lines for the Independence Day school play. That may not be an issue for very long; the other residents of the building are circulating a petition to kick Persa's father (Dimitris Lalos) out, what with them being behind on the rent, attracting suspicious characters, and being generally weird. Of course, Anna is a bit of a mess herself, probably kept on at the shop because her late father was the best friend of proprietor Yannis (Fotis Thomaidis) and apparently suffering from some sort of compulsive behavior. But when Persa's father disappears and the landlord changes the locks, she can't bring herself to push the girl in front of her door away.
It takes a while for director Rinio Dragasaki and her co-writer Katerina Kaklamani to really start digging into the reason why Anna is the way she is, if that's what they actually do - for all that viewers may wisely nod at understanding why she's a lousy supermarket clerk clinging to certain things despite apparently owning a very nice apartment outright, the filmmakers leave the exact extent to which it is cause and effect up to viewers. Similarly, there's almost no time spent on exactly why Persa's father needs to run and hide; the two learn just enough about each other to recognize a bit of themselves, but the story keeps their backstories fuzzy enough that the film can't really lead to them confronting the past as opposed to deciding on a present and future.
Dead(?) link to full review at eFilmCritic
"You Wouldn't Understand"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
The fun of "You Wouldn't Understand" is that it never quite makes sense, but always feels like the piece that would make everything fall into place is just around the corner. It starts with a man (Anthony Arkin) having himself a tastefully-elaborate solo picnic, seeing something odd in the distance, and then having one of the folks he sees (Jacob A. Ware) approach and ask for some "horsey sauce" but dissemble just enough to make it weird before things start getting truly strange. From there, things seem to get even more bizarrely random.
But… not quite. I don't know whether director Trish Harnetiaux and co-writer/co-star Jacob A. Ware have mapped out what's really going on to the point where the film is actually tight and self-consistent if you know all the background, but they've built something just steady enough that they can throw in a bunch of science-fiction tropes and have the viewers both feel like they have seen this bit and understand it enough to get by but also sympathize with Anthony Arkin's bemused observer and get the feeling that this is what suddenly finding yourself in a sci-fi situation where the underpinnings of reality are being kicked out. Or, hey, living in a world where something that should be a really big deal gets tweeted out every ten minutes but the cumulative effect is kind of numbing, if you have to align it with the real world.
Not that there's much effort to do that, and indeed, Harnetiaux and company do a nifty job of mixing the comfortable with the unusual; all the white in the wardrobe and other spots marks things as specifically otherworldly, though there's a sort of comforting normalcy about the setting, even if it does seem like it's designed as an idealized early-twentieth-century. The two actors strike this balance extremely well too; Anthony Arkin has a reassuringly grounded nature even as he gets pulled into the weird here while Ware has a wide-eyed beaky presence that suggests a lot of times through the scenario has not exactly driven him mad but made him care very little about appearing sane.
It's kind of odd to apply the "it only felt like…" line to shorts, but it's amusingly true here - this ten-minute movie comes together well enough to only feel like five, never hitting a snag despite having a whole lot of ideas to fit in and move through. Arkin probably has a hand in that as editor, although it goes to show just how well Harnetiaux and the rest of this "Steel Drum in Space" team works together. I'm not sure I've ever been inspired to follow a YouTube channel from a festival short before, but this is certainly a group I'll keep an eye on.
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
Fantasia 2019.22: Judy & Punch, The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, Promare, and The Divine Fury
How long does the process of getting reviews written through the rest of the festival take when I finally go "screw it, I can't keep up with all these shorts"? Well, in a strictly numeric sense, roughly four months and three weeks. In a more general, landmark-based sense, the last movie of the festival, a preview of a soon-to-be-released Korean film, has had its theatrical and home video releases. The second to last has not quite had that happen, but it has had Fathom Events shows, stuck around Boston Common for a surprisingly decent run, and then come back for encores.
That night, though, it was the closing night film which meant I had to buy a ticket and get in line, which is good for the soul lest you get too used to cutting to the front.
There were guests for the short film that played before Promare, "Totsukuni no Shoujo" (or "The Girl from the Other Side" in English, and my notes stink, but I think it's directors Yutaro Kubo and Satomi Maiya, along with producer Jouji Wada of Wit Studio. No Q&A, because they introduced rather than followed, but they made a nifty film.
Anyway, that's a wrap, four and a half months later. Which means, just another seven months until the next one and some 30-odd movies to review on the second pass. This festival is a monster and I wouldn't spend my summer any other way.
Judy & Punch
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Punch & Judy shows weren't a big thing in the United States when I was a kid, and I'm not sure how much longer they remain something that people in the British Isles or Australia still grow up with. They've disappeared, in part, because enough people eventually became uncomfortable with the violence behind their broad knockabout humor, and perhaps they've been shuffled far enough back in our cultural memory that Judy & Punch can manage to pull people in with the promise of entertaining puppetry and wry humor before making them think about domestic violence.
Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) was once a famous touring puppeteer - a popular form of entertainment in the 1600s - with whom Judy (Mia Wasikowska) fell in love, eventually marrying and having a child. They now live in the town of Seaside (which is nowhere near the sea), operating a theater of their own. Punch's name is on it, of course, even though Judy is now the more talented marionette builder and operator, and she must often cover for his drunkenness. One day, Punch does far worse than his usual dalliances with the barmaid at McDrinky's, and when Judy confronts him in horror, he responds with violence, leaving her for dead. Fortunately, she's found by Scotty (Daisy Axon), a little girl who would sneak into town from a camp of outcasts to see the show, and nursed back to health. She wants justice, but is that even possible for one as wronged as her?
It's an unfortunate state of affairs that one can't honestly add "in that time and place" to the last sentence, and the familiarity of Judy's story is what gives the film such genuine depths of despair. Writer/director Mirrah Foulkes uses the period setting to make Punch's crimes and the community's complicity all the more horrific, but making the language contemporary enough that the audience can't quite dissociate. Audiences will look at the worst of what Punch does and how the mob enables him and hopefully find themselves leaning toward wondering if society is better enough today rather than just dismissing the question out of hand. There's even purpose to the things which seem designed to be anachronistic, like the more progressive attitudes of newly-appointed Constable Derrick (Benedict Hale) - Foulkes is able to make a joke out of how out-of-place they seem but also make the audience maybe think a little about how often people live up to them today.
Full review at EFilmCritic
To thávma tis thálassas ton Sargassón (The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Eels, apparently, can migrate surprisingly far distances, from the Mediterranean to the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. I know this because filmmaker Syllas Tzoumerkas makes sure that the audience sees a clip from a documentary on the subject, so you'd better believe that there's a metaphor to be found here. That, after all, is what raises a film from being dark misanthropic genre material that goes nowhere to being a praiseworthy drama: Not just having the crime story stand for something else, but making sure that the audience knows it does.
The eels here are not caught so much as farmed, though, and like them, there are at least two women who would rather be migrating from small-town Meologi. Elisabeth (Angeliki Papoulia) is the oft-hungover chief of police who is only there because it was easier for the people in Athens who found her inconvenient to promote her to a backwater than fire her when they needed her out of the way, while Rita (Youla Boudali) works in the processing plant but has a ticket to Miami in her wallet, mostly staying behind for family reasons. She soon has a bit less family, with disreputable younger brother Manolis (Hristos Passalis) found dead of an apparent suicide. It's the sort of thing that might not be investigated much closer, except that some out-of-town students are also missing, nobody from Rita to the Albanian drug dealers seems to be reacting quite the way you'd expect, and Elisabeth is a good cop when given the chance to be.
It's never particularly hard to see why these women are looking to get away; there are towns like Meologi all over the world, and they all have the same sort of look to them, at least in the movies - houses that look like slightly-overgrown sheds with trash in the front yards, the one nightclub that just barely avoids looking depressing with the lights down low, beaches where the sand, sea, and sky all verge on being the same gray color. Of course it has a fish-processing plant, because what else can make a seaside, agrarian community feel quite so miserable? Tzoumerkas doesn't lean on these tropes quite to the point of parody, fortunately, but they are familiar in their deployment, mostly interesting in how he occasionally shakes them up: The ten-years-earlier opening in Athens, for instance, is staged like something from a much bigger action movie and gets across why Elisabeth might miss the excitement of the city even if it also shows the inherent dangers and hints that it's probably not good for police to enjoy their work too much. There's another jaw-dropping moment with Rita that briefly takes things into more surreal territory, even if the film doesn't stay there long.
Full review on EFilmCritic
"Totsukuni no Shoujo" ("The Girl from the Other Side")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
I did not realize, before writing this review, that there was a manga for "The Girl from the Other Side" that was much larger than this ten-minute short, and I therefore have no idea if this is meant as a sort of pilot or if it adapts some specific chapter. I may try to learn more about this series later, but I may not, as I am fond of the animated short as it is.
It gets its point across in impressive form, after all, wordlessly suggesting a girl out of place but (mostly) unafraid, due to a doting creature whose genteel manner contrasts with his inhuman face and shadowy air, and glimpses of how certain things seem to decay in his presence. There is, in all this, a story implied that is elemental, and the way directors Yutaro Kubo & Satomi Maiya use this visual format to play a little tug-of-war between the generic and specific gives it even more feeling of a fairy tale. The understated score plays its part well, too - it is simple and gentle, for the most part, doling notes out like a music box in innocent fashion, but racing just a bit when there's a little menace to be found, or when the little girl's dreams briefly reminds her that something is not right.
Promare
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS/Closing Night, digital)
There are some films that lean into their genres' tropes so hard that they verge on self-parody, and then there's Promare, which punches clear out the other side. The filmmakers are well aware of every single form of excess that this sort of anime sci-fi adventure is prone to, but they're also aware that those things are what make said movies and shows awesome, and are fully committed to making their movie that sort of thrillingly crazy as well.
Sometime in the future, people just suddenly start catching on fire when their emotions flare, leading to the Great World Blaze. Thirty years later, these "Burnish" are no longer completely out of control, in large part due to an elite firefighting force armed with the latest technology and heroic specialists, none more fearless and dedicated than Galo Thymos (voice of Ken'ichi Matsuyama), a frequently shirtless lunatic dedicated to squelching flames with his burning soul. This latest fire seems to be the work of "Mad Burnish" Lio Fotia (voice of Taichi Saotome), who sees himself as a freedom fighter. And, while Galo hates to admit it, something does seem screwy about the whole situation He consults his mentor Kray Foresight (voice of Masato Sakai) and investigates on his own, discovering an incredible secret about the source of the Burnish's power.
Consume enough comics/manga, anime, and other superhero adventure, and you can start getting blasé about set-ups like this; I spent a fair chunk of another review of a film that played this festival trying not to call it folks reinventing the X-Men again. Promare obviously takes most of its inspiration from the Japanese equivalents and their tropes - the elaborate vehicles piloted by apparent teenagers, the over-the-top explosions and property damage, the angular character designs and the bellowed declamations - but it does so with the brakes completely disengaged, using apocalyptic disaster as a starting point, pausing the action to splash character names on screen, and frequently not just turning on a dime but having that turn take the characters into such an enormous new region that you wonder how anybody in this world could have missed it before. Director Hiroyuki Imaishi and writer Kazuki Nakashima clearly love this stuff and while they can make jokes at the excesses, they are not going to treat it as a joke.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Saja (The Divine Fury)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The hook for The Divine Fury is such a simple and obvious genre mash-up - the martial artist whose hands have been blessed/cursed in such a way that he can exorcise demons by punching them in the face - that it's kind of surprising that such a film doesn't hit theaters every other week. The reason, I suspect, is likely why this movie is only half as cool as it could be: Shooting fight scenes is complex and time-consuming compared to talking about demons, so the movie inevitably doesn't do as much of the good stuff as one might hope.
Things start out twenty years ago, when policeman Park Ji-Won (Lee Seung-Joon) is killed during a traffic stop by a driver who is something other than human. Park had been a devout Catholic, but his son Yong-Hu lashes out against the church. Twenty years later, he's a Mixed Martial Arts champion, but a voice in his head is making him more aggressive and he's starting to wake up covered in unexplained blood. A shaman sees that he's got a demon attached to him and refers him to Father Ahn (Ahn Sung-Ki), who recognizes stigmata on Yong-Hu's palms and enlists him to help fight the Black Bishop (Woo Do-Hwan), though Yong-Hu (Park Seo-Ju) just wants those things off his hands so he can live a normal life.
Exorcism stories don't have a lot of room for half measures in terms of ambition, to the point where it's sometimes better to be a shallow, pulpy work the doesn't make a whole lot of sense but delivers a lot of blood and spectacle than to grasp at more serious themes without fully connecting. That's an issue that filmmaker Kim Joo-Hwan never quite solves: There's a story here about Yong-Hu rediscovering his beliefs, but that's a different thing in a world where there are actual demons than one where you truly must take the supernatural on faith, and there's not a whole lot more that resonates, at least for Yong-Hu (Father Ahn is feeling kind of worn down). The Bishop and his brethren are fairly generic villains, as well.
Full review at EFilmCritic
That night, though, it was the closing night film which meant I had to buy a ticket and get in line, which is good for the soul lest you get too used to cutting to the front.
There were guests for the short film that played before Promare, "Totsukuni no Shoujo" (or "The Girl from the Other Side" in English, and my notes stink, but I think it's directors Yutaro Kubo and Satomi Maiya, along with producer Jouji Wada of Wit Studio. No Q&A, because they introduced rather than followed, but they made a nifty film.
Anyway, that's a wrap, four and a half months later. Which means, just another seven months until the next one and some 30-odd movies to review on the second pass. This festival is a monster and I wouldn't spend my summer any other way.
Judy & Punch
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Punch & Judy shows weren't a big thing in the United States when I was a kid, and I'm not sure how much longer they remain something that people in the British Isles or Australia still grow up with. They've disappeared, in part, because enough people eventually became uncomfortable with the violence behind their broad knockabout humor, and perhaps they've been shuffled far enough back in our cultural memory that Judy & Punch can manage to pull people in with the promise of entertaining puppetry and wry humor before making them think about domestic violence.
Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) was once a famous touring puppeteer - a popular form of entertainment in the 1600s - with whom Judy (Mia Wasikowska) fell in love, eventually marrying and having a child. They now live in the town of Seaside (which is nowhere near the sea), operating a theater of their own. Punch's name is on it, of course, even though Judy is now the more talented marionette builder and operator, and she must often cover for his drunkenness. One day, Punch does far worse than his usual dalliances with the barmaid at McDrinky's, and when Judy confronts him in horror, he responds with violence, leaving her for dead. Fortunately, she's found by Scotty (Daisy Axon), a little girl who would sneak into town from a camp of outcasts to see the show, and nursed back to health. She wants justice, but is that even possible for one as wronged as her?
It's an unfortunate state of affairs that one can't honestly add "in that time and place" to the last sentence, and the familiarity of Judy's story is what gives the film such genuine depths of despair. Writer/director Mirrah Foulkes uses the period setting to make Punch's crimes and the community's complicity all the more horrific, but making the language contemporary enough that the audience can't quite dissociate. Audiences will look at the worst of what Punch does and how the mob enables him and hopefully find themselves leaning toward wondering if society is better enough today rather than just dismissing the question out of hand. There's even purpose to the things which seem designed to be anachronistic, like the more progressive attitudes of newly-appointed Constable Derrick (Benedict Hale) - Foulkes is able to make a joke out of how out-of-place they seem but also make the audience maybe think a little about how often people live up to them today.
Full review at EFilmCritic
To thávma tis thálassas ton Sargassón (The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Eels, apparently, can migrate surprisingly far distances, from the Mediterranean to the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. I know this because filmmaker Syllas Tzoumerkas makes sure that the audience sees a clip from a documentary on the subject, so you'd better believe that there's a metaphor to be found here. That, after all, is what raises a film from being dark misanthropic genre material that goes nowhere to being a praiseworthy drama: Not just having the crime story stand for something else, but making sure that the audience knows it does.
The eels here are not caught so much as farmed, though, and like them, there are at least two women who would rather be migrating from small-town Meologi. Elisabeth (Angeliki Papoulia) is the oft-hungover chief of police who is only there because it was easier for the people in Athens who found her inconvenient to promote her to a backwater than fire her when they needed her out of the way, while Rita (Youla Boudali) works in the processing plant but has a ticket to Miami in her wallet, mostly staying behind for family reasons. She soon has a bit less family, with disreputable younger brother Manolis (Hristos Passalis) found dead of an apparent suicide. It's the sort of thing that might not be investigated much closer, except that some out-of-town students are also missing, nobody from Rita to the Albanian drug dealers seems to be reacting quite the way you'd expect, and Elisabeth is a good cop when given the chance to be.
It's never particularly hard to see why these women are looking to get away; there are towns like Meologi all over the world, and they all have the same sort of look to them, at least in the movies - houses that look like slightly-overgrown sheds with trash in the front yards, the one nightclub that just barely avoids looking depressing with the lights down low, beaches where the sand, sea, and sky all verge on being the same gray color. Of course it has a fish-processing plant, because what else can make a seaside, agrarian community feel quite so miserable? Tzoumerkas doesn't lean on these tropes quite to the point of parody, fortunately, but they are familiar in their deployment, mostly interesting in how he occasionally shakes them up: The ten-years-earlier opening in Athens, for instance, is staged like something from a much bigger action movie and gets across why Elisabeth might miss the excitement of the city even if it also shows the inherent dangers and hints that it's probably not good for police to enjoy their work too much. There's another jaw-dropping moment with Rita that briefly takes things into more surreal territory, even if the film doesn't stay there long.
Full review on EFilmCritic
"Totsukuni no Shoujo" ("The Girl from the Other Side")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
I did not realize, before writing this review, that there was a manga for "The Girl from the Other Side" that was much larger than this ten-minute short, and I therefore have no idea if this is meant as a sort of pilot or if it adapts some specific chapter. I may try to learn more about this series later, but I may not, as I am fond of the animated short as it is.
It gets its point across in impressive form, after all, wordlessly suggesting a girl out of place but (mostly) unafraid, due to a doting creature whose genteel manner contrasts with his inhuman face and shadowy air, and glimpses of how certain things seem to decay in his presence. There is, in all this, a story implied that is elemental, and the way directors Yutaro Kubo & Satomi Maiya use this visual format to play a little tug-of-war between the generic and specific gives it even more feeling of a fairy tale. The understated score plays its part well, too - it is simple and gentle, for the most part, doling notes out like a music box in innocent fashion, but racing just a bit when there's a little menace to be found, or when the little girl's dreams briefly reminds her that something is not right.
Promare
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS/Closing Night, digital)
There are some films that lean into their genres' tropes so hard that they verge on self-parody, and then there's Promare, which punches clear out the other side. The filmmakers are well aware of every single form of excess that this sort of anime sci-fi adventure is prone to, but they're also aware that those things are what make said movies and shows awesome, and are fully committed to making their movie that sort of thrillingly crazy as well.
Sometime in the future, people just suddenly start catching on fire when their emotions flare, leading to the Great World Blaze. Thirty years later, these "Burnish" are no longer completely out of control, in large part due to an elite firefighting force armed with the latest technology and heroic specialists, none more fearless and dedicated than Galo Thymos (voice of Ken'ichi Matsuyama), a frequently shirtless lunatic dedicated to squelching flames with his burning soul. This latest fire seems to be the work of "Mad Burnish" Lio Fotia (voice of Taichi Saotome), who sees himself as a freedom fighter. And, while Galo hates to admit it, something does seem screwy about the whole situation He consults his mentor Kray Foresight (voice of Masato Sakai) and investigates on his own, discovering an incredible secret about the source of the Burnish's power.
Consume enough comics/manga, anime, and other superhero adventure, and you can start getting blasé about set-ups like this; I spent a fair chunk of another review of a film that played this festival trying not to call it folks reinventing the X-Men again. Promare obviously takes most of its inspiration from the Japanese equivalents and their tropes - the elaborate vehicles piloted by apparent teenagers, the over-the-top explosions and property damage, the angular character designs and the bellowed declamations - but it does so with the brakes completely disengaged, using apocalyptic disaster as a starting point, pausing the action to splash character names on screen, and frequently not just turning on a dime but having that turn take the characters into such an enormous new region that you wonder how anybody in this world could have missed it before. Director Hiroyuki Imaishi and writer Kazuki Nakashima clearly love this stuff and while they can make jokes at the excesses, they are not going to treat it as a joke.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Saja (The Divine Fury)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The hook for The Divine Fury is such a simple and obvious genre mash-up - the martial artist whose hands have been blessed/cursed in such a way that he can exorcise demons by punching them in the face - that it's kind of surprising that such a film doesn't hit theaters every other week. The reason, I suspect, is likely why this movie is only half as cool as it could be: Shooting fight scenes is complex and time-consuming compared to talking about demons, so the movie inevitably doesn't do as much of the good stuff as one might hope.
Things start out twenty years ago, when policeman Park Ji-Won (Lee Seung-Joon) is killed during a traffic stop by a driver who is something other than human. Park had been a devout Catholic, but his son Yong-Hu lashes out against the church. Twenty years later, he's a Mixed Martial Arts champion, but a voice in his head is making him more aggressive and he's starting to wake up covered in unexplained blood. A shaman sees that he's got a demon attached to him and refers him to Father Ahn (Ahn Sung-Ki), who recognizes stigmata on Yong-Hu's palms and enlists him to help fight the Black Bishop (Woo Do-Hwan), though Yong-Hu (Park Seo-Ju) just wants those things off his hands so he can live a normal life.
Exorcism stories don't have a lot of room for half measures in terms of ambition, to the point where it's sometimes better to be a shallow, pulpy work the doesn't make a whole lot of sense but delivers a lot of blood and spectacle than to grasp at more serious themes without fully connecting. That's an issue that filmmaker Kim Joo-Hwan never quite solves: There's a story here about Yong-Hu rediscovering his beliefs, but that's a different thing in a world where there are actual demons than one where you truly must take the supernatural on faith, and there's not a whole lot more that resonates, at least for Yong-Hu (Father Ahn is feeling kind of worn down). The Bishop and his brethren are fairly generic villains, as well.
Full review at EFilmCritic
Friday, September 14, 2018
Fantasia 2018.22: Piercing, The Field Guide to Evil, What Keeps You Alive, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, and Brothers' Nest
Bonus day! At least, it feels like a bonus day, though I'd have to check to see just when my emails went from describing the festival as running through the first to ending on the second. I think it was before the schedule was announced, although I didn't notice it until I had paper in hand. Still, it was kind of cool that the 22nd annual festival had 22 days, even though that's a lot of film festival and I was kind of wiped out by the end, to the point where I kind of dragged for my two free days in the city.
So let's take some time to thank the festival's volunteers. It would be interesting to see how much turnover there's been - while the programmers and such have stayed pretty consistent, the volunteers at this festival tend to be a young group, and you move and pick up other obligations in your twenties. The old front row crew is almost gone too. Still, Fantasia remains a fantastically-run festival, better than the more corporate ones I"ve been to and really astonishing for the scale of it. Normal festivals don't run three weeks, and seeing so many of these people here from beginning to end just underscores what a labor of love this is - it's a big commitment during the summer when you could be doing a lot of other things with your afternoons and/or evenings for the better part of a month
The schedule was almost entirely repeats, with the sole exceptions being the two screening at Hall that evening, one of which had already had a limited release (although given that Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum didn't hit Boston, I don't know if it hit Montreal), while Lords of Chaos wasn't announced until midway through the festival. It got a lot of good press, but having already really liked Heavy Trip, I kind of felt like I was set in terms of my metal consumption for the festival and way ahead in my metal enjoyment. So I ended the festival across the street with Brothers' Nest
That's Brothers' Nest director/co-star Clayton Jacobson on the right, and he really is the exact sort of laid-back, chatty Aussie you want to ease you out of a 22-day festival, and he himself seemed low-key honored to have the last film of the festival even if it wasn't officially the closing film. Like, we've all been here a while, but we'll stick around a couple hours longer for his movie. Kind of fit my mood at that point more than Mitch earnestly screaming his excitement across the street would have.
It was a fun Q&A afterward, too. He pointed out that he and his brother are often confused with each other back home in Australia, although you really wouldn't necessarily think so to watch their movie. The film itself was one of those odd little indie shoots where everyone is basically living in the house that serves as the film's main location, since it's kind of out of the way, far enough that the city-based actors thought it was kind of unnerving. They shot in sequence so that they could make a mess, and did a lot of nifty things that might be worth a closer look (for instance only one brother makes the floors creak).
(I have a note from this Q&A just labeled "Movie 'Rams'", which I guess is the Icelandic one about a pair of brothers trying to save their flock. I should either take more detailed notes or not let these things age a month before writing them up.)
That's not quite a wrap on the festival - I've got to circle back and the write up all the other stuff that just got Letterboxd-sized capsules - but it's the end of my time at Fantasia for the year. I'll be back next year, even if I may try to find a way to make it less overwhelming, and I can't wait to see everyone I only see once a year and a bunch of sometimes great, but always interesting movies again.
"Clean Blood"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
There are like three or four things going on in "Clean Blood" that could make for an interesting short genre film, from the opening moments that seem like a flash-forward to a slasher-style ending, the fact that one of the main characters is an exceptionally pregnant man and nobody seems to be saying boo about it, and the otherwise-contentious scene at a family dinner that would, if none of the other things were going on, make this entire clan remember it as "The Christmas with the Really Stupid Argument". It's like writer/director Jordan Michael Blake had a bunch of ideas that he could see connecting but kept cutting down so that he could achieve some sort of artistic minimalism.
It almost works, I think - you can see every single bit of that working, and Blake does a nice job using structure to build a sense of unease, with title cards and act breaks that suggest the little eyebrow-raiser from a moment ago was even more significant, along with a handheld camera that feels like a person rather than a machine. There's skill, and if the goal is just to make the audience feel an odd combination of off-balance, worry, and the mixed emotions of family, it hits that. If there's a more solid storytelling goal, it doesn't quite come together for me, even though it feels like it's teasing, introducing, advancing, and climaxing in all the right places.
Piercing
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
It does not particularly surprise me to see that this comes from a novel by Ryu Murakami, the same author who provided the source material for Audition. One can see a lot of the same DNA that went into that here, though expressed in a garish, colorful manner that's fun to watch in the moment but which never comes together into much more than screenwriter/director Nicolas Pesce showing us just how much affection he has for film and the genre.
Reed (Christopher Abbott) and Mona (Laia Costa) are new parents, which is an exhausting state to be in, and you might not be surprised to find out that Reed is anticipating an upcoming business trip just a little bit. The trouble is, he seems to have snapped - the baby has looked at him and said "you know what you have to do". He's got to sacrifice a prostitute, and one who speaks English so that he can't shut her suffering out. He's already called an escort service for the second night in the hotel, but when he decides he wants to get it over with a night early, the service sends him Jackie (Mia Wasikowska), who is groggy, detached, and not really what he had planned for at all.
There may, someday, be more promising casting for this sort of material than "Mia Wasikowska as a young woman who is more/other than what she seems", but not at the present time. She is, as usual, an exceptional pleasure to watch, playing up Jackie's muted, possibly depressed exterior like it's a thick garment that even her more shockingly unstable moments don't entirely pierce. She never entirely drops a sex worker's reticence to reveal her whole self, which makes the violence that eventually emerges more fascinating - the audience is never quite sure whether it's a reaction or something that was there all along.
Full review at EFC.
The Field Guide to Evil
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
The Field Guide to Evil is not a bad horror anthology, really - it probably averages out to something a notch or so above average by the time all eight countries in its world tour of frightening folklore have checked in. It's just that it quite possibly peaks with its first entry, and even some of the better ones that follow never quite live up to how smart and thrilling that one is.
That first one is Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz's "The Sinful Women of Hollfall", a take on an Austrian myth that at least seems to subvert its folkloric roots while still cranking up some tension. It follows Kathi, a young woman (Marlete Hauser) who witnesses another drawing blood so that she can at least temporarily hide her pregnancy by showing stained undergarments when the village women do their laundry; they grow closer, a danger in itself, as Kathi's mother warns that it will draw The Trud out of the woods. Franz & Fiala engage with what makes this fable frightening on a gut level, but also find ways to interrogate and question it, recognizing both its original intent but also the power myth has over a community itself, and how one can fight those forces.
Turkey's Can Evrenol attacks similar material in "The Haunting of Al Karisi the Childbirth Demon", which features Naz Sayiner as another woman less than satisfied with the slot she is expected to fill, in this case a miserable mother-to-be caring for her bedridden mother-in-law, her possibly abusive husband mostly absent, while a dark force calls from the well. Evrenol creates a palpable sense of menace, and Sayiner a compelling anti-heroine, enough to make this an effective little horror story on its own. It's simply hard to miss how traditional its interpretation of the myth is compared to its predecessor, despite this being the one set in the modern day. This becomes more acute in the next segment, "The Kindler and the Virgin", which plays like an attempt to compact its story into ten or fifteen minutes without highlighting any specific aspect; a disappointment considering director Agnieszka Smoczynska made The Lure.
Full review at EFC.
What Keeps You Alive
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I haven't perused the listings for the local LGBTQ festival as closely as I have others in recent years, but I don't recall many entries that seemed as unrepentantly pulpy as What Keeps You Alive. It doesn't exactly have main characters who just happen to be gay, but it's also not a niche film, or an introduction, or really outside of the mainstream in any way. It's just a darn good thriller that shows that everyone should watch their backs when they go out to the pretty country with the spotty cell phone reception.
That's where Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) and wife Julie (Brittany Allen) are headed, to a really beautiful lake house that has been in Jackie's family for years. It's not entirely idyllic - the boathouse seems to have collapsed over the winter, for a start - but Julie is impressed, looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend. She's excited to meet Sarah (Martha MacIsaac), a close friend from Jackie's childhood, and her husband Daniel (Joey Klein), although it's a little odd that Sarah called Jackie "Megan".
Writer/director Colin Minihan lets that stew for a while, letting the audience file it back in their heads as something where they are expecting another bit of related information so that when the two connect, there's that thrilling "oh, shit!" moment before things go to hell. Instead, he jumps straight to the violence, kicking things into high gear early and not leaving a whole lot to be explained. Details will be filled in, sure, but for now, it's about running, hiding, recovering from what may be the year's second-nastiest fall after the one in Revenge, and trying to out-think an exceptionally crafty opponent. It's not a completely streamlined thriller, but it doesn't waste time on building sympathy for its villain or trying to build a metaphor. It is what it is, and it's good enough at being that to not feel like it's just going through the motions.
Full review at EFC.
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Before anything else, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is a good horror movie, one that gets the audience to jump at the right times and does a fair job of creeping them out in between. It also arguably represents the evolution of a certain part of the genre, either a transitional step between found-footage movies like The Blair Witch Project and screenshot entries like Unfriended or an impressive job in cross-breeding the two. It's a good enough haunted-house movie that the format never feels like a cheap gimmick.
That format is a live horror webcast hosted by Ha-joon, where a few of his collaborators along with some randomly selected fans will spend the night inside Gwangju's Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital - closed for twenty years, infamous for a 1979 mass suicide during which the director disappeared, and rumored to have been a site where prisoners (both political and North Korean) were tortured. Nobody, it is said, has been room 402 on the top floor since it was shuttered. The group heading out there includes site regulars Je-yoon and Seung-wook, along with nursing student Ah-yeon, major fan Ji-hyun, Korean-American Charlotte (who has been visiting haunted sites while part of a touring dance crew), and Sung-hoon. They're well-equipped with plenty of maps, cameras, and flashlights, but sometimes even the smallest things can freak you out - and some things don't seem so small.
Once upon a time, something like Gonjiam might have been trying to fool an audience into thinking it was real, or at least been standing back in half-convincing mock surprise that one would accuse the filmmakers who cast unknowns playing eponymous characters in a movie shot on consumer video equipment of that, but the audience has seen too many of those movies while the drones and 4K cameras available at any electronics store are good enough to blur the line between amateurs and professional, at least on the surface level. Gonjiam plays into this, both by establishing early on that this group has enough gear on hand to never really worry about missing anything and by blurring the lines between truth and fiction in different ways, notably by Ha-joon being as much showman as genuine paranormal enthusiast, with eyes on monetizing a video stream that certainly aims to be a more professional production, to the point where the characters are often making sure to create multi-camera set-ups and wear camera harnesses that also capture their faces, driving the visual language of a found-footage film back toward the more conventional.
Full review at EFC.
"Bloom"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
"Bloom" was, if nothing else, an extremely well-programmed short at this festival, serving as a perfect appetizer for Brothers' Nest. Both Australian, both featuring tight casts that allow the filmmakers to focus on one strained relationship, both defined by their space. Both pretty good.
It's immediately and darkly funny, as director Kieran Wheeler establishes mood with cigarette butts and empty beer cans all over a messy little house, so that when star Andrew Faulkner enters the door and seems to match the environment more or less perfectly, the audience immediately gets just how his immediate reaction to seeing rose petals strewn about is to jump to extreme jealousy - this just does not fit! It becomes a row when the audience meets the girlfriend (Emily Wheaton) who insists that there's nothing going on, hot and cool by turns until…
Well, that'd be telling. The climax is as stupid as the fight, which is completely fitting, but Wheeler and his group don't just make this a movie about yelling; this pair is enough of a mess by this point to just not be working when they're at the kitchen table, although it's clear that insults and shouting aren't far behind. They get plenty of laughs out of it, including a nasty one or two at the end, and then get out before it becomes heavily tragic.
That, in this case, is the sort of thing a short saves for the feature.
Brothers' Nest
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
There should, by now, be a name for the class of crime film that starts as a screwball comedy but ends far from it in either feeling or deed, so that one can say a movie is this thing in just a few words and the person to whom it has been recommended won't feel misled. Whatever you call it, Brothers' Nest is an impressive example of that thing, dark as heck but often roaringly funny.
It starts with Australian brothers Jeff (Clayton Jacobson) and Terry (Shane Jacobson) surreptitiously approaching the family homestead in Victoria. The family has, individually and as a whole, fallen on some hard times lately, with the father's death, the mother's cancer, Terry's marriage falling apart… It's a whole bunch of things. So Jeff's come up with a plan, established an alibi, and now they've just got to wait until old farmhand and family friend Rodger (Kim Gyngell) comes by to groom the family's horse Freddie (who will be handed to a new owner next morning). But when he comes early, and their mother (Lynette Curran) is in the car, that messes everything up.
There's a pleasant idiocy to the way Jeff and Terry play off each other, the sort of poor planning that manifests as excessive complication and each brother pointing out something obviously foolish that the other is doing in turn. It's reliably funny stuff, and everybody involved is careful not to lose the fact that most people are just not naturally gifted in criminal situations as the movie darkens. There's bloody slapstick and dumbfounded double-takes, and even though it becomes less inherently funny, things going to hell in an absurd way still bring a reluctant chuckle and a shake of the head, because these guys, right?
Full review at EFC.
So let's take some time to thank the festival's volunteers. It would be interesting to see how much turnover there's been - while the programmers and such have stayed pretty consistent, the volunteers at this festival tend to be a young group, and you move and pick up other obligations in your twenties. The old front row crew is almost gone too. Still, Fantasia remains a fantastically-run festival, better than the more corporate ones I"ve been to and really astonishing for the scale of it. Normal festivals don't run three weeks, and seeing so many of these people here from beginning to end just underscores what a labor of love this is - it's a big commitment during the summer when you could be doing a lot of other things with your afternoons and/or evenings for the better part of a month
The schedule was almost entirely repeats, with the sole exceptions being the two screening at Hall that evening, one of which had already had a limited release (although given that Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum didn't hit Boston, I don't know if it hit Montreal), while Lords of Chaos wasn't announced until midway through the festival. It got a lot of good press, but having already really liked Heavy Trip, I kind of felt like I was set in terms of my metal consumption for the festival and way ahead in my metal enjoyment. So I ended the festival across the street with Brothers' Nest
That's Brothers' Nest director/co-star Clayton Jacobson on the right, and he really is the exact sort of laid-back, chatty Aussie you want to ease you out of a 22-day festival, and he himself seemed low-key honored to have the last film of the festival even if it wasn't officially the closing film. Like, we've all been here a while, but we'll stick around a couple hours longer for his movie. Kind of fit my mood at that point more than Mitch earnestly screaming his excitement across the street would have.
It was a fun Q&A afterward, too. He pointed out that he and his brother are often confused with each other back home in Australia, although you really wouldn't necessarily think so to watch their movie. The film itself was one of those odd little indie shoots where everyone is basically living in the house that serves as the film's main location, since it's kind of out of the way, far enough that the city-based actors thought it was kind of unnerving. They shot in sequence so that they could make a mess, and did a lot of nifty things that might be worth a closer look (for instance only one brother makes the floors creak).
(I have a note from this Q&A just labeled "Movie 'Rams'", which I guess is the Icelandic one about a pair of brothers trying to save their flock. I should either take more detailed notes or not let these things age a month before writing them up.)
That's not quite a wrap on the festival - I've got to circle back and the write up all the other stuff that just got Letterboxd-sized capsules - but it's the end of my time at Fantasia for the year. I'll be back next year, even if I may try to find a way to make it less overwhelming, and I can't wait to see everyone I only see once a year and a bunch of sometimes great, but always interesting movies again.
"Clean Blood"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
There are like three or four things going on in "Clean Blood" that could make for an interesting short genre film, from the opening moments that seem like a flash-forward to a slasher-style ending, the fact that one of the main characters is an exceptionally pregnant man and nobody seems to be saying boo about it, and the otherwise-contentious scene at a family dinner that would, if none of the other things were going on, make this entire clan remember it as "The Christmas with the Really Stupid Argument". It's like writer/director Jordan Michael Blake had a bunch of ideas that he could see connecting but kept cutting down so that he could achieve some sort of artistic minimalism.
It almost works, I think - you can see every single bit of that working, and Blake does a nice job using structure to build a sense of unease, with title cards and act breaks that suggest the little eyebrow-raiser from a moment ago was even more significant, along with a handheld camera that feels like a person rather than a machine. There's skill, and if the goal is just to make the audience feel an odd combination of off-balance, worry, and the mixed emotions of family, it hits that. If there's a more solid storytelling goal, it doesn't quite come together for me, even though it feels like it's teasing, introducing, advancing, and climaxing in all the right places.
Piercing
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
It does not particularly surprise me to see that this comes from a novel by Ryu Murakami, the same author who provided the source material for Audition. One can see a lot of the same DNA that went into that here, though expressed in a garish, colorful manner that's fun to watch in the moment but which never comes together into much more than screenwriter/director Nicolas Pesce showing us just how much affection he has for film and the genre.
Reed (Christopher Abbott) and Mona (Laia Costa) are new parents, which is an exhausting state to be in, and you might not be surprised to find out that Reed is anticipating an upcoming business trip just a little bit. The trouble is, he seems to have snapped - the baby has looked at him and said "you know what you have to do". He's got to sacrifice a prostitute, and one who speaks English so that he can't shut her suffering out. He's already called an escort service for the second night in the hotel, but when he decides he wants to get it over with a night early, the service sends him Jackie (Mia Wasikowska), who is groggy, detached, and not really what he had planned for at all.
There may, someday, be more promising casting for this sort of material than "Mia Wasikowska as a young woman who is more/other than what she seems", but not at the present time. She is, as usual, an exceptional pleasure to watch, playing up Jackie's muted, possibly depressed exterior like it's a thick garment that even her more shockingly unstable moments don't entirely pierce. She never entirely drops a sex worker's reticence to reveal her whole self, which makes the violence that eventually emerges more fascinating - the audience is never quite sure whether it's a reaction or something that was there all along.
Full review at EFC.
The Field Guide to Evil
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
The Field Guide to Evil is not a bad horror anthology, really - it probably averages out to something a notch or so above average by the time all eight countries in its world tour of frightening folklore have checked in. It's just that it quite possibly peaks with its first entry, and even some of the better ones that follow never quite live up to how smart and thrilling that one is.
That first one is Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz's "The Sinful Women of Hollfall", a take on an Austrian myth that at least seems to subvert its folkloric roots while still cranking up some tension. It follows Kathi, a young woman (Marlete Hauser) who witnesses another drawing blood so that she can at least temporarily hide her pregnancy by showing stained undergarments when the village women do their laundry; they grow closer, a danger in itself, as Kathi's mother warns that it will draw The Trud out of the woods. Franz & Fiala engage with what makes this fable frightening on a gut level, but also find ways to interrogate and question it, recognizing both its original intent but also the power myth has over a community itself, and how one can fight those forces.
Turkey's Can Evrenol attacks similar material in "The Haunting of Al Karisi the Childbirth Demon", which features Naz Sayiner as another woman less than satisfied with the slot she is expected to fill, in this case a miserable mother-to-be caring for her bedridden mother-in-law, her possibly abusive husband mostly absent, while a dark force calls from the well. Evrenol creates a palpable sense of menace, and Sayiner a compelling anti-heroine, enough to make this an effective little horror story on its own. It's simply hard to miss how traditional its interpretation of the myth is compared to its predecessor, despite this being the one set in the modern day. This becomes more acute in the next segment, "The Kindler and the Virgin", which plays like an attempt to compact its story into ten or fifteen minutes without highlighting any specific aspect; a disappointment considering director Agnieszka Smoczynska made The Lure.
Full review at EFC.
What Keeps You Alive
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I haven't perused the listings for the local LGBTQ festival as closely as I have others in recent years, but I don't recall many entries that seemed as unrepentantly pulpy as What Keeps You Alive. It doesn't exactly have main characters who just happen to be gay, but it's also not a niche film, or an introduction, or really outside of the mainstream in any way. It's just a darn good thriller that shows that everyone should watch their backs when they go out to the pretty country with the spotty cell phone reception.
That's where Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) and wife Julie (Brittany Allen) are headed, to a really beautiful lake house that has been in Jackie's family for years. It's not entirely idyllic - the boathouse seems to have collapsed over the winter, for a start - but Julie is impressed, looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend. She's excited to meet Sarah (Martha MacIsaac), a close friend from Jackie's childhood, and her husband Daniel (Joey Klein), although it's a little odd that Sarah called Jackie "Megan".
Writer/director Colin Minihan lets that stew for a while, letting the audience file it back in their heads as something where they are expecting another bit of related information so that when the two connect, there's that thrilling "oh, shit!" moment before things go to hell. Instead, he jumps straight to the violence, kicking things into high gear early and not leaving a whole lot to be explained. Details will be filled in, sure, but for now, it's about running, hiding, recovering from what may be the year's second-nastiest fall after the one in Revenge, and trying to out-think an exceptionally crafty opponent. It's not a completely streamlined thriller, but it doesn't waste time on building sympathy for its villain or trying to build a metaphor. It is what it is, and it's good enough at being that to not feel like it's just going through the motions.
Full review at EFC.
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Before anything else, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is a good horror movie, one that gets the audience to jump at the right times and does a fair job of creeping them out in between. It also arguably represents the evolution of a certain part of the genre, either a transitional step between found-footage movies like The Blair Witch Project and screenshot entries like Unfriended or an impressive job in cross-breeding the two. It's a good enough haunted-house movie that the format never feels like a cheap gimmick.
That format is a live horror webcast hosted by Ha-joon, where a few of his collaborators along with some randomly selected fans will spend the night inside Gwangju's Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital - closed for twenty years, infamous for a 1979 mass suicide during which the director disappeared, and rumored to have been a site where prisoners (both political and North Korean) were tortured. Nobody, it is said, has been room 402 on the top floor since it was shuttered. The group heading out there includes site regulars Je-yoon and Seung-wook, along with nursing student Ah-yeon, major fan Ji-hyun, Korean-American Charlotte (who has been visiting haunted sites while part of a touring dance crew), and Sung-hoon. They're well-equipped with plenty of maps, cameras, and flashlights, but sometimes even the smallest things can freak you out - and some things don't seem so small.
Once upon a time, something like Gonjiam might have been trying to fool an audience into thinking it was real, or at least been standing back in half-convincing mock surprise that one would accuse the filmmakers who cast unknowns playing eponymous characters in a movie shot on consumer video equipment of that, but the audience has seen too many of those movies while the drones and 4K cameras available at any electronics store are good enough to blur the line between amateurs and professional, at least on the surface level. Gonjiam plays into this, both by establishing early on that this group has enough gear on hand to never really worry about missing anything and by blurring the lines between truth and fiction in different ways, notably by Ha-joon being as much showman as genuine paranormal enthusiast, with eyes on monetizing a video stream that certainly aims to be a more professional production, to the point where the characters are often making sure to create multi-camera set-ups and wear camera harnesses that also capture their faces, driving the visual language of a found-footage film back toward the more conventional.
Full review at EFC.
"Bloom"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
"Bloom" was, if nothing else, an extremely well-programmed short at this festival, serving as a perfect appetizer for Brothers' Nest. Both Australian, both featuring tight casts that allow the filmmakers to focus on one strained relationship, both defined by their space. Both pretty good.
It's immediately and darkly funny, as director Kieran Wheeler establishes mood with cigarette butts and empty beer cans all over a messy little house, so that when star Andrew Faulkner enters the door and seems to match the environment more or less perfectly, the audience immediately gets just how his immediate reaction to seeing rose petals strewn about is to jump to extreme jealousy - this just does not fit! It becomes a row when the audience meets the girlfriend (Emily Wheaton) who insists that there's nothing going on, hot and cool by turns until…
Well, that'd be telling. The climax is as stupid as the fight, which is completely fitting, but Wheeler and his group don't just make this a movie about yelling; this pair is enough of a mess by this point to just not be working when they're at the kitchen table, although it's clear that insults and shouting aren't far behind. They get plenty of laughs out of it, including a nasty one or two at the end, and then get out before it becomes heavily tragic.
That, in this case, is the sort of thing a short saves for the feature.
Brothers' Nest
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
There should, by now, be a name for the class of crime film that starts as a screwball comedy but ends far from it in either feeling or deed, so that one can say a movie is this thing in just a few words and the person to whom it has been recommended won't feel misled. Whatever you call it, Brothers' Nest is an impressive example of that thing, dark as heck but often roaringly funny.
It starts with Australian brothers Jeff (Clayton Jacobson) and Terry (Shane Jacobson) surreptitiously approaching the family homestead in Victoria. The family has, individually and as a whole, fallen on some hard times lately, with the father's death, the mother's cancer, Terry's marriage falling apart… It's a whole bunch of things. So Jeff's come up with a plan, established an alibi, and now they've just got to wait until old farmhand and family friend Rodger (Kim Gyngell) comes by to groom the family's horse Freddie (who will be handed to a new owner next morning). But when he comes early, and their mother (Lynette Curran) is in the car, that messes everything up.
There's a pleasant idiocy to the way Jeff and Terry play off each other, the sort of poor planning that manifests as excessive complication and each brother pointing out something obviously foolish that the other is doing in turn. It's reliably funny stuff, and everybody involved is careful not to lose the fact that most people are just not naturally gifted in criminal situations as the movie darkens. There's bloody slapstick and dumbfounded double-takes, and even though it becomes less inherently funny, things going to hell in an absurd way still bring a reluctant chuckle and a shake of the head, because these guys, right?
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
This Week In Tickets: 11 March 2013 - 17 March 2013
Chlotrudis Awards stuff dominating my movie-watching time, for good and ill.
Stubless: The three movies I saw to vote on Chlotrudis's Buried Treasure Award (Beauty Is Embarrassing on Monday, Alps on Tuesday, Sound of Noise on Thursday, all in my living room); and Ginger & Rosa (Sunday at 10am in Coolidge Corner #2).
I think this may be the first year of voting in the Chlotrudis Awards when I've actually seen enough of the movies in the Buried Treasure category to actually vote in the category. I still missed Breathing, but five out of six movies that are, by their nature, difficult to see is not bad, especially when you're the only movie lover in North America without Netflix.
I didn't have quite the busy weekend I initially intended. The two King Hu pictures on Friday night were a start, but were also a lot at the end of the work week. Saturday wound up being a bit of a spring cleaning day, and I didn't feel like I'd make the end of A Touch of Zen, let alone The ABCs of Death - especially with a 10am screening of Ginger & Rosa, which wound up being pretty good, on Sunday morning. After that I went for The Call, trying two theaters before I could get MoviePass to work, and then just barely had time to grab some groceries and a much-needed shower before it was time for "the Trudies".
As usual, it was an amusing enough evening, eventually serving as a wake for the Boston Phoenix, which abruptly ceased publication a few days earlier. It's long been a friend to the organization and film in general, and it's tough to imagine the Dig completely filling the void it leaves.
A lot of the people presenting the awards were from the Phoenix, or other local organizations, and maybe it was because that paper closing means that its critics are, temporarily, just enthusiasts like us, but the thing about the Chlotrudis Awards presentation that has struck me as weird ever since I started attending really stood out: Why don't we, as members, give out our own awards? On one level, it doesn't really matter - folks are only rarely there to pick them up - but as much as it's cool to have guests there validating us as being worthy of the critics' and programmers' and officials' respect, the usual set-up where Chlotrudis members stand on stage, introduce someone else, who reads off the nominees and announces the winner kind of feels like we're stepping aside or making sure that someone with authority speaks for us. I think it would actually be much cooler if the members were standing side-by-side with the guests, rather than ceding the stage.
The awards themselves were a pretty reasonable lot. For a small group like this, just getting seen give a movie a lg up, especially since that lets people discuss it on various forums and boost visibility. So I wasn't surprised that The Perks of Being a Wallflower wound up getting a lot of awards; it got a push. And I can't complain about stuff getting a push, as the movie I nominated for Buried Treasure, A Simple Life wound up winning, despite only one or two of us having seen it before the nominating meeting in January. It gave me a weirdly personal stake in the evening's festivities, which I'm sure the folks who nominated the other films up for consideration must have shared. When that got announced as the last and biggest prize of the night, well, what could I thing but "Suck it, losers!"
I kid, especially since a lot of people at the after-party seemed to be implying that they voted strategically - apparently they saw this having momentum and, having liked it pretty well, voted for it perhaps over their first choice; based upon the number of people who did that, it seemed like Sound of Noise could easily have won. That's why you vote your conscience, folks.
The reception afterward was OK, although I found myself having to leave to get some lobby air after a while - aside from the usual difficulties in being able to hear in a crowded room, it was one of those evenings where something just seemed to assault my sense of smell. In this case, it was cucumbers - normally inoffensive enough, but had me recoiling in full get that away! mode.
It was cool to actually hear people talking about reading and looking forward to what I wrote, though. As much as I write in part because it's the best way for me to organize my thoughts on something, I do like knowing people read it, and looking at the page views on this and eFilmCritic often has me wonder how many are people actually reading and how many are spiders or other robots doing little but cataloging the web. A couple of folks mentioned (one or two actually enthusiastically) reading my reviews and, no joke, that felt really great.
Stubless: The three movies I saw to vote on Chlotrudis's Buried Treasure Award (Beauty Is Embarrassing on Monday, Alps on Tuesday, Sound of Noise on Thursday, all in my living room); and Ginger & Rosa (Sunday at 10am in Coolidge Corner #2).
I think this may be the first year of voting in the Chlotrudis Awards when I've actually seen enough of the movies in the Buried Treasure category to actually vote in the category. I still missed Breathing, but five out of six movies that are, by their nature, difficult to see is not bad, especially when you're the only movie lover in North America without Netflix.
I didn't have quite the busy weekend I initially intended. The two King Hu pictures on Friday night were a start, but were also a lot at the end of the work week. Saturday wound up being a bit of a spring cleaning day, and I didn't feel like I'd make the end of A Touch of Zen, let alone The ABCs of Death - especially with a 10am screening of Ginger & Rosa, which wound up being pretty good, on Sunday morning. After that I went for The Call, trying two theaters before I could get MoviePass to work, and then just barely had time to grab some groceries and a much-needed shower before it was time for "the Trudies".
As usual, it was an amusing enough evening, eventually serving as a wake for the Boston Phoenix, which abruptly ceased publication a few days earlier. It's long been a friend to the organization and film in general, and it's tough to imagine the Dig completely filling the void it leaves.
A lot of the people presenting the awards were from the Phoenix, or other local organizations, and maybe it was because that paper closing means that its critics are, temporarily, just enthusiasts like us, but the thing about the Chlotrudis Awards presentation that has struck me as weird ever since I started attending really stood out: Why don't we, as members, give out our own awards? On one level, it doesn't really matter - folks are only rarely there to pick them up - but as much as it's cool to have guests there validating us as being worthy of the critics' and programmers' and officials' respect, the usual set-up where Chlotrudis members stand on stage, introduce someone else, who reads off the nominees and announces the winner kind of feels like we're stepping aside or making sure that someone with authority speaks for us. I think it would actually be much cooler if the members were standing side-by-side with the guests, rather than ceding the stage.
The awards themselves were a pretty reasonable lot. For a small group like this, just getting seen give a movie a lg up, especially since that lets people discuss it on various forums and boost visibility. So I wasn't surprised that The Perks of Being a Wallflower wound up getting a lot of awards; it got a push. And I can't complain about stuff getting a push, as the movie I nominated for Buried Treasure, A Simple Life wound up winning, despite only one or two of us having seen it before the nominating meeting in January. It gave me a weirdly personal stake in the evening's festivities, which I'm sure the folks who nominated the other films up for consideration must have shared. When that got announced as the last and biggest prize of the night, well, what could I thing but "Suck it, losers!"
I kid, especially since a lot of people at the after-party seemed to be implying that they voted strategically - apparently they saw this having momentum and, having liked it pretty well, voted for it perhaps over their first choice; based upon the number of people who did that, it seemed like Sound of Noise could easily have won. That's why you vote your conscience, folks.
The reception afterward was OK, although I found myself having to leave to get some lobby air after a while - aside from the usual difficulties in being able to hear in a crowded room, it was one of those evenings where something just seemed to assault my sense of smell. In this case, it was cucumbers - normally inoffensive enough, but had me recoiling in full get that away! mode.
It was cool to actually hear people talking about reading and looking forward to what I wrote, though. As much as I write in part because it's the best way for me to organize my thoughts on something, I do like knowing people read it, and looking at the page views on this and eFilmCritic often has me wonder how many are people actually reading and how many are spiders or other robots doing little but cataloging the web. A couple of folks mentioned (one or two actually enthusiastically) reading my reviews and, no joke, that felt really great.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Potential Buried Treasures: Beauty Is Embarrassing, Alps, and Sound of Noise
As I mentioned before, I'm generally not very good about actually seeing the nominees for the Chlotrudis Society Buried Treasure award, in part because I hate watchinig movies like they're homework. I could be seeing something I'm really interested in, or doing something else, after all. But, since I made the effort to get one movie nominated this year, I decided not to make someone else see a movie to vote on the award if I wasn't willing to do the same.
It does somewhat skew the perception of the movies, though. I strongly suspect that I would have hated Alps anyway, but would I have disliked it quite so much if I didn't resent it for making me put off watching Justified? Probably not. I also think I would have liked Beauty Is Embarrassing a bit more if I had found it on my own, perhaps fitting it into my IFFBoston schedule last year. It's actually the sort of documentary I want to see more of in that it's informative and positive rather than an attempt to sway one's opinion or elevate a guy who makes a mess of his life - but when I have to watch it, those elements make it seem sort of slight.
It probably also didn't help that somewhere between Amazon sending a stream out, my computer decoding it, and it traveling down an HDMI cable to my TV, the picture seems to get too dark. This wasn't really a problem with Sound of Noise, but there were large chunks of Alps where I really can't see what is going on.
Still, it got me able to see enough to vote by the Friday deadline. The awards ceremony is this afternoon at the Brattle Theatre; if you're in the area, it's a kind of fun show, and with any luck, we'll see A Simple Life win the Buried Treasure award (with Oslo, August 31st also an acceptable victor).
Beauty Is Embarrassing
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (PBS Independent Lens, HD)
Wayne White seems like a nice fellow, thoroughly well-adjusted and funny without the wackiness necessarily seeming too much like a put-on. That may make Beauty Is Embarrassing a relatively unique entry in the genre of artist documentaries, which all-too-often ask the audience to believe that because someone can use a paintbrush or guitar, their substance abuse or self-centered nature is somehow interesting. Of course, this means that it's up to White and his art to keep the audience interested, and, well, they're nice enough.
White is probably best known for designing the sets of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a cramped, surreal, and wonderfully silly environment that netted him three Emmy Awards. That was twenty years ago, but he's been keeping busy since, often with a series of words painted on found landscape paintings. He's also worked in cartooning, puppetry, and animation.
There's not necessarily a lot of drama in White's story; he started drawing at an early age, and while each step he took in his life moved him further from his Tennessee roots, he generally seems to find some measure of success and contentment in college, New York, and Los Angeles without much bitterness toward what he's leaving behind (though it doesn't happen overnight). Director Neil Berkeley does find a certain amount of tension there, mainly during a return home and reunion with a fellow artist who stayed there - not so much tension between them, but White seeming a little more reticent and with interview comments about the southern paternal figure being something he always rebelled against and something that makes it into his work. There are some entertaining plays on that - a scene where he dances a barefoot jig after saying nobody considered him particularly southern until he left the south which is as much a play on Yankees' stereotypes as a swipe and the big Lyndon Johnson mascot head he and son Woodrow build plays into - but it's worth noting that they were literally manufactured for the movie.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Alpeis (Alps)
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)
It's not crippling for a movie to have a peculiar, almost preposterous premise; the weird ones are often the best kind. It helps a lot if that premise is realized in an exciting manner, though, and Alps sucks any possible thrill from the telling that it can.
The story follows four people in Athens - a gymnast (Ariane Labed), her coach (Johnny Verkis), a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), and a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) - who form a group called "Alps" (the paramedic calls himself "Mont Blanc" as the leader) that offers a service in which they impersonate a dead loved one for a few hours every week. Of course, there are already existing tensions within the group, and sometimes it can be easy to lose oneself within this sort of role-playing.
It might be easier for the audience to lose itself if director Girogos Lanthimos didn't play everything so completely straight, though. The aliases acknowledge that this arrangement is peculiar, and there is naturally a point where things start to fall apart, but for most of the film, the characters go about their business as if this was perfectly ordinary, with the audience observing how they go about it but never seeing how it bumps up against more traditional means of mourning a loss. Sometimes, treating the outré as ordinary allows an audience to connect it to an absurdity in ordinary life, but the closest this movie comes is letting the audience compare the Alps' drilling with how the coach torments the gymnast, but that sort of student-coach relationship is hardly the sort of thing that requires an unusual metaphor. Instead, not letting the strange thing be strange just means there's little to do but watch the details.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Sound of Noise
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)
A little bit of IMDB link-following as I prepared to write up The Sound of Noise has me somewhat more curious than usual about how it played and was perceived in its native Sweden. Was it a Six Drummers feature with a lot more plot than their usual shorts, or was it considered a funny detective movie with antagonists that fans of goofy percussion might recognize? It doesn't really matter, as the end result is great fun, but I'm curious nonetheless.
It's not the drummers that get the movie started, though, but Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson), the head of Malmo's anti-terrorism squad, which would be impressive to most families, but he comes from a family of musicians, with his brother Oscar (Sven Ahlstrom), a conductor and one-time child prodigy, much favored over tone-deaf Amadeus. When he recognizes the ticking outside an embassy as not a bomb but a metronome, he doesn't realize that perpetrators Sanna (Sanna Persson) and Magnus (Magnus Borjeson) are planning a four-act opus of musical anarchy, "Music for a City and Six Drummers", with four other comrades (Marcus Haraldson Boij, Johannes Bjork, Fredrik Myhr, and Anders Vestergard) joining in.
Amadeus Warnebring is an interesting creation; a lot of movies would make the cop who hates music because of something in his past a cartoonish monster, receiving either his comeuppance or an unlikely conversion at the end. Amadeus is sympathetic, though; the scenes where he is unable to connect with his family will likely strike some as familiar, as will the idea of not loving something everyone assumes you should even though, yes, you "get it". Nilsson plays his part straight, but doesn't make him so uptight that audiences can't like the guy, and is pretty funny when the action starts to drive him around the bend.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
It does somewhat skew the perception of the movies, though. I strongly suspect that I would have hated Alps anyway, but would I have disliked it quite so much if I didn't resent it for making me put off watching Justified? Probably not. I also think I would have liked Beauty Is Embarrassing a bit more if I had found it on my own, perhaps fitting it into my IFFBoston schedule last year. It's actually the sort of documentary I want to see more of in that it's informative and positive rather than an attempt to sway one's opinion or elevate a guy who makes a mess of his life - but when I have to watch it, those elements make it seem sort of slight.
It probably also didn't help that somewhere between Amazon sending a stream out, my computer decoding it, and it traveling down an HDMI cable to my TV, the picture seems to get too dark. This wasn't really a problem with Sound of Noise, but there were large chunks of Alps where I really can't see what is going on.
Still, it got me able to see enough to vote by the Friday deadline. The awards ceremony is this afternoon at the Brattle Theatre; if you're in the area, it's a kind of fun show, and with any luck, we'll see A Simple Life win the Buried Treasure award (with Oslo, August 31st also an acceptable victor).
Beauty Is Embarrassing
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (PBS Independent Lens, HD)
Wayne White seems like a nice fellow, thoroughly well-adjusted and funny without the wackiness necessarily seeming too much like a put-on. That may make Beauty Is Embarrassing a relatively unique entry in the genre of artist documentaries, which all-too-often ask the audience to believe that because someone can use a paintbrush or guitar, their substance abuse or self-centered nature is somehow interesting. Of course, this means that it's up to White and his art to keep the audience interested, and, well, they're nice enough.
White is probably best known for designing the sets of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, a cramped, surreal, and wonderfully silly environment that netted him three Emmy Awards. That was twenty years ago, but he's been keeping busy since, often with a series of words painted on found landscape paintings. He's also worked in cartooning, puppetry, and animation.
There's not necessarily a lot of drama in White's story; he started drawing at an early age, and while each step he took in his life moved him further from his Tennessee roots, he generally seems to find some measure of success and contentment in college, New York, and Los Angeles without much bitterness toward what he's leaving behind (though it doesn't happen overnight). Director Neil Berkeley does find a certain amount of tension there, mainly during a return home and reunion with a fellow artist who stayed there - not so much tension between them, but White seeming a little more reticent and with interview comments about the southern paternal figure being something he always rebelled against and something that makes it into his work. There are some entertaining plays on that - a scene where he dances a barefoot jig after saying nobody considered him particularly southern until he left the south which is as much a play on Yankees' stereotypes as a swipe and the big Lyndon Johnson mascot head he and son Woodrow build plays into - but it's worth noting that they were literally manufactured for the movie.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Alpeis (Alps)
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)
It's not crippling for a movie to have a peculiar, almost preposterous premise; the weird ones are often the best kind. It helps a lot if that premise is realized in an exciting manner, though, and Alps sucks any possible thrill from the telling that it can.
The story follows four people in Athens - a gymnast (Ariane Labed), her coach (Johnny Verkis), a nurse (Aggeliki Papoulia), and a paramedic (Aris Servetalis) - who form a group called "Alps" (the paramedic calls himself "Mont Blanc" as the leader) that offers a service in which they impersonate a dead loved one for a few hours every week. Of course, there are already existing tensions within the group, and sometimes it can be easy to lose oneself within this sort of role-playing.
It might be easier for the audience to lose itself if director Girogos Lanthimos didn't play everything so completely straight, though. The aliases acknowledge that this arrangement is peculiar, and there is naturally a point where things start to fall apart, but for most of the film, the characters go about their business as if this was perfectly ordinary, with the audience observing how they go about it but never seeing how it bumps up against more traditional means of mourning a loss. Sometimes, treating the outré as ordinary allows an audience to connect it to an absurdity in ordinary life, but the closest this movie comes is letting the audience compare the Alps' drilling with how the coach torments the gymnast, but that sort of student-coach relationship is hardly the sort of thing that requires an unusual metaphor. Instead, not letting the strange thing be strange just means there's little to do but watch the details.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Sound of Noise
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2013 in Jay's Living Room (Chlotrudis Catch-up, Amazon Streaming)
A little bit of IMDB link-following as I prepared to write up The Sound of Noise has me somewhat more curious than usual about how it played and was perceived in its native Sweden. Was it a Six Drummers feature with a lot more plot than their usual shorts, or was it considered a funny detective movie with antagonists that fans of goofy percussion might recognize? It doesn't really matter, as the end result is great fun, but I'm curious nonetheless.
It's not the drummers that get the movie started, though, but Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson), the head of Malmo's anti-terrorism squad, which would be impressive to most families, but he comes from a family of musicians, with his brother Oscar (Sven Ahlstrom), a conductor and one-time child prodigy, much favored over tone-deaf Amadeus. When he recognizes the ticking outside an embassy as not a bomb but a metronome, he doesn't realize that perpetrators Sanna (Sanna Persson) and Magnus (Magnus Borjeson) are planning a four-act opus of musical anarchy, "Music for a City and Six Drummers", with four other comrades (Marcus Haraldson Boij, Johannes Bjork, Fredrik Myhr, and Anders Vestergard) joining in.
Amadeus Warnebring is an interesting creation; a lot of movies would make the cop who hates music because of something in his past a cartoonish monster, receiving either his comeuppance or an unlikely conversion at the end. Amadeus is sympathetic, though; the scenes where he is unable to connect with his family will likely strike some as familiar, as will the idea of not loving something everyone assumes you should even though, yes, you "get it". Nilsson plays his part straight, but doesn't make him so uptight that audiences can't like the guy, and is pretty funny when the action starts to drive him around the bend.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Fantasia Daily for 10 July 2010: Mandrill, First Squad, Evil 2, Gallants, The Message, Mutant GirlsSquad
Top three things I forgot to bring with me to Montreal despite knowing that I was going to need them:
3. Shampoo
2. Business cards
1. More than one change of underpants.
... So, as you can imagine, Saturday morning was spent figuring out where the nearest Target-like store was and attending to #3 and #1. I actually tried looking at places in "The Underground City" between Peel and Guy, but I would have spent way too much finding enough to get me very far into a three-week vacation where I don't have much time for laundry. The Zeller's at Atwater it was.
After that, it was off to a full day of movies. I was hoping to run into a cool publicist from Anchor Bay Canada at First Squad; we met at the Thirst screening last year and she sent me an email saying she'd be around but maybe not at the start of the movie. I didn't see her after, which at least prevented a bit of awkwardness, as I wasn't that impressed. (I also was trying to make good time to Evil: In The Time of Heroes. Hopefully we'll meet up before I Spit On Your Grave tonight.
Some cool guests later in the evening, and since I'm running late, I'll just let the pictures tell the story:
Translator, Bruce Leung, and Clement Cheng before Gallants
Programmer King-Wei Chu presents Bruce Leung with a kung fu star award following Gallants
Director Yoshihiro Nishimura and producer Yoshinori Chiba before Mutant Girls Squad
Nishimura and a NYAFF programmer whose name I didn't catch after Mutant Girls Squad
Chiba rejoins the Q&A dressed as a ninja and swipes Nishimura's loincloth
So, we made a nice full circle where underwear is concerned tonight, which, let me tell you, is the sort of film festival coverage you just can not plan!
Mandrill
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It is, perhaps, possible to tell just how well-done a parody is by how long it's able to convince you that it's the real thing. Mandrill presents an exceptionally straight face, to the extent that it can come across as simply adopting a style even after it's done some pretty crazy things, and not just because the action is for real.
Mandrill (Marko Zaror) is the number one hitman in Chile, although he seems to limit his targets to gangsters. He has finally landed his dream target, having been asked to eliminate the man who murdered his parents when he was a boy - "The Cyclops" - but the only person who knows where the man is located is his daughter Dominique (Celine Reymond). So it's time to break out the seduction playbook, although Dominique may prove to be a tough nut to crack, even without considering the bodyguards.
The "thanks" section of the credits makes it clear that James Bond was a major influence on Mandrill; not only is Ian Fleming listed, but so are all six actors to play the character in the United Artists/Eon film series. The tone of the film is certainly early Bond, with Zaror giving off the same sort of vibe as Connery, a tough guy stuffed into a good suit, but brimming with enough self-confidence to make him mostly irresistible to the ladies, and able to shrug off the dangerous madness of his life. Writer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza locates the line between loving homage and out outright parody and hugs it, occasionally making a quick hop to the other side just long enough for the audience to see him over there but brief enough for it to play as black comedy rather than spoofery.
Full review at EFC
Fâsuto sukuwaddo (First Squad: The Moment of Truth)
* * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
First Squad seems like it would be a great idea: A secret occult battlefield between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, cleverly working in real historical details, told via animation done by one of the world's best production houses, Studio 4°C. Unfortunately, it seems as though nearly every time the writers had to make a decision about how to tell the story, they made the wrong one.
They at least picked a good story to start with - the German Ahnenerbe (an occult branch of the SS) intends to resurrect Baron Von Wolff (voice of Sergei Aisman) who attempted to conquer Russia in the 13th century, only to perish when the battle was fought on a frozen lake, which swallowed his army whole. To counter this army of ghosts, General Below of the 6th Division has Nadaya Ruslanova (voice of Elena Chebaturkina), a teenage psychic who has, unfortunately, lost her memory - and most of the rest of First Squad, so she must train to retrieve them from the other side.
There's the basis for a pretty good movie here, and Studio 4°C certainly holds up their end of the bargain; the animation is gorgeous. Nobody else outside of Disney does such a good job of augmenting cel-based visuals with CGI (they do some great POV camera shots, a killer with traditional animation), and they really hit the sweet spot between historical accuracy, somewhat exaggerated character design, and imaginative visuals. Director Yoshiharu Ashino and his team in Japan do just about all that can be asked of them.
Full review at EFC
To kako - Stin epohi ton iroon (Evil - In the Time of Heroes)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
There is, I suppose, the possibility that Evil - In the Time of Heroes makes a certain amount of sense if you have seen the first film (the Evil from Greece in 2006). I have my doubts, but I suppose I must be open to the possibility. It's not that In the Time of Heroes needs a great deal of background - fast zombie outbreaks are fast zombie outbreaks - but it would be nice to know if the characters really should be taking some of what we see for granted.
The basics are simple - a few days ago, there was a zombie outbreak of some sort in Athens, and a group of four people survived the first movie together: Family man Meletis (Meletis Georgiadis), his friend Marina (Pepi Moschovakou), young Jenny (Mary Tsoni), and soldier Lt. Vakirtzis (Andreas Kontopoulos). They lost at least one of their group, Argyris (Argiris Thanasoulas) on the way. They meet up with some new folks - Olga (Eftyhia Yakoumi), a Major in the army, Vicky (Ioanna Pappa), who had been stuck at the top of a Ferris Wheel during the initial outbreak, and Johnny (Thanos Tokakis), who helps them deal with a sniper that had them pinned down and brings them to a house where they can hide out. Jenny has been shot, though, so they need to find some medical supplies. Among the things that they don't know is that this has happened before, in the time of the great Greek city-states, and a strange messenger (Billy Zane) is coming with something for the reincarnation of the hero who drove the plague back the first time.
In the Time of Heroes is a strange mashup of tones; it jumps back in forth in time between the present and ancient times, and throws a lot of comedy into the both sections. Not just comic relief, either; there are times when it seems like the film intends to be a comedy first. Writer/director Yorgos Noussias is sometimes very haphazard in connecting the jokes with the tragic moments, to the point where the audience can find themselves scratching their heads, wondering just what sort of movie Noussias was trying to make. The characters also have an odd sort of ambivalence to the superhuman elements that show up.
Full review at EFC
Da Lui Toi (Gallants)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
According to the director, Gallants took about ten years to get financing, so one has to wonder - if it had been made then, would it have been giving late-career tributes to different old-school actors, or would Bruce Leung, Chen Kuan-tai, and Teddy Robin have just been playing slightly younger characters? It's a what-if we don't have to ponder, since they're the ones front and center in this movie, and it's lucky to have them.
We start, however, with Wong You-nam as a loser named Cheung. A screw-up at the real estate company he works for, he's been sent to a small village to help buy out tenants for a condo development. Naturally, this means working for Mang (Jin Auyeung), who still hates him from grade school. One of the tenants is a tea shop that used to be a martial arts club, still being run by two of its old students. Tiger ("Bruce" Leung Siu-lung) and Dragon (Chen Kuan-tai) are nearly sixty, but they keep faith with their old teacher, Master Law (Teddy Robin Kwan), who has been in a coma for thirty years after suffering an aneurysm during an epic duel. Cheung finds himself throwing in with the underdogs when Mang's attempts to have goons steal Law's favorable lease results in the master waking and thinking Cheung is both of his pupils - though Kwai (Jia Xiao-chen), the pretty girl helping out around the shop, is another incentive.
Gallants is the sort of comedy that jumps from bit to bit in the best possible way; directors Clement Cheng Sze-Kit and Derek Kwok Chi-kin (along with writer Frankie Tam) have a real knack for setting up funny situations, milking some good gags from them, and discretely casting them aside when they threaten to get too serious or worn-out. For instance, it's great to have a martial-arts tournament to inspire wacky training montages, but does anyone really want to see Cheung, Tiger, or Dragon suffer the inevitable humiliating beatdown that goes with it? Not really, so the script goes elsewhere, in a direction that's maybe not a laugh riot either, but has some earned sentiment that's not trite.
Full review at EFC
Feng Sheng (The Message)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
I can't really give The Message much of a review; as happened last night, I sort of hit the wall around 10pm and had I'm-awake-did-I-miss-anything moments all through the film. It's a gorgeous-looking piece, although it's the type of period film that maybe relies a little much on the effects to pretty things up. And a lot of times I think I would find myself really into a movie like this; the story is a World War II espionage thriller structured like a cozy mystery, all things I like.
But few cozy mysteries have this much torture. Not drawing things out to keep the audience on edge, literal "I will extract this information from you using all the methods of inflicting pain I can" torture. And that's a pretty unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours. It ennobles the heroes, sure, letting the audience see how they suffered, but it's not a lot of fun to watch.
Sentô shôjo: Chi no tekkamen densetsu (Mutant Girls Squad)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
So, aside from the insanity that surrounded the screening - see above - how is Mutant Girls Squad? Pretty good. That is, "pretty good" in terms of being a Sushi Typhoon sort of movie; it's cheap, tacky, ten different kinds of dumb, and its English credits give one the sinking feeling that it's the sort of movie manufactured almost entirely for export to the West (I think that's actually a huge part of Sushi Typhoon's business model), but it's one where the pure fun of it overrides how dumb it can be. Yes, Tak Sakaguchi, Noboru Iguchi, and Yoshihiro Nishimura are making this to sell to North Americans who love crazy Japanese movies, but it's not cynical on their part; they genuinely love this stuff.
And, while it's not exactly polished, it's fairly well-made. Yumi Sugimoto is a likable lead and a capable enough star, Sakaguchi does some good work choreographing the action, and Nishimura's monster and gore designs are creative and bizarre. I suspect that at least half of the Sushi Typhoon movies will be crud, but this is one of the good ones.
Full review at EFC.
3. Shampoo
2. Business cards
1. More than one change of underpants.
... So, as you can imagine, Saturday morning was spent figuring out where the nearest Target-like store was and attending to #3 and #1. I actually tried looking at places in "The Underground City" between Peel and Guy, but I would have spent way too much finding enough to get me very far into a three-week vacation where I don't have much time for laundry. The Zeller's at Atwater it was.
After that, it was off to a full day of movies. I was hoping to run into a cool publicist from Anchor Bay Canada at First Squad; we met at the Thirst screening last year and she sent me an email saying she'd be around but maybe not at the start of the movie. I didn't see her after, which at least prevented a bit of awkwardness, as I wasn't that impressed. (I also was trying to make good time to Evil: In The Time of Heroes. Hopefully we'll meet up before I Spit On Your Grave tonight.
Some cool guests later in the evening, and since I'm running late, I'll just let the pictures tell the story:
Translator, Bruce Leung, and Clement Cheng before Gallants
Programmer King-Wei Chu presents Bruce Leung with a kung fu star award following Gallants
Director Yoshihiro Nishimura and producer Yoshinori Chiba before Mutant Girls Squad
Nishimura and a NYAFF programmer whose name I didn't catch after Mutant Girls Squad
Chiba rejoins the Q&A dressed as a ninja and swipes Nishimura's loincloth
So, we made a nice full circle where underwear is concerned tonight, which, let me tell you, is the sort of film festival coverage you just can not plan!
Mandrill
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It is, perhaps, possible to tell just how well-done a parody is by how long it's able to convince you that it's the real thing. Mandrill presents an exceptionally straight face, to the extent that it can come across as simply adopting a style even after it's done some pretty crazy things, and not just because the action is for real.
Mandrill (Marko Zaror) is the number one hitman in Chile, although he seems to limit his targets to gangsters. He has finally landed his dream target, having been asked to eliminate the man who murdered his parents when he was a boy - "The Cyclops" - but the only person who knows where the man is located is his daughter Dominique (Celine Reymond). So it's time to break out the seduction playbook, although Dominique may prove to be a tough nut to crack, even without considering the bodyguards.
The "thanks" section of the credits makes it clear that James Bond was a major influence on Mandrill; not only is Ian Fleming listed, but so are all six actors to play the character in the United Artists/Eon film series. The tone of the film is certainly early Bond, with Zaror giving off the same sort of vibe as Connery, a tough guy stuffed into a good suit, but brimming with enough self-confidence to make him mostly irresistible to the ladies, and able to shrug off the dangerous madness of his life. Writer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza locates the line between loving homage and out outright parody and hugs it, occasionally making a quick hop to the other side just long enough for the audience to see him over there but brief enough for it to play as black comedy rather than spoofery.
Full review at EFC
Fâsuto sukuwaddo (First Squad: The Moment of Truth)
* * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
First Squad seems like it would be a great idea: A secret occult battlefield between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, cleverly working in real historical details, told via animation done by one of the world's best production houses, Studio 4°C. Unfortunately, it seems as though nearly every time the writers had to make a decision about how to tell the story, they made the wrong one.
They at least picked a good story to start with - the German Ahnenerbe (an occult branch of the SS) intends to resurrect Baron Von Wolff (voice of Sergei Aisman) who attempted to conquer Russia in the 13th century, only to perish when the battle was fought on a frozen lake, which swallowed his army whole. To counter this army of ghosts, General Below of the 6th Division has Nadaya Ruslanova (voice of Elena Chebaturkina), a teenage psychic who has, unfortunately, lost her memory - and most of the rest of First Squad, so she must train to retrieve them from the other side.
There's the basis for a pretty good movie here, and Studio 4°C certainly holds up their end of the bargain; the animation is gorgeous. Nobody else outside of Disney does such a good job of augmenting cel-based visuals with CGI (they do some great POV camera shots, a killer with traditional animation), and they really hit the sweet spot between historical accuracy, somewhat exaggerated character design, and imaginative visuals. Director Yoshiharu Ashino and his team in Japan do just about all that can be asked of them.
Full review at EFC
To kako - Stin epohi ton iroon (Evil - In the Time of Heroes)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
There is, I suppose, the possibility that Evil - In the Time of Heroes makes a certain amount of sense if you have seen the first film (the Evil from Greece in 2006). I have my doubts, but I suppose I must be open to the possibility. It's not that In the Time of Heroes needs a great deal of background - fast zombie outbreaks are fast zombie outbreaks - but it would be nice to know if the characters really should be taking some of what we see for granted.
The basics are simple - a few days ago, there was a zombie outbreak of some sort in Athens, and a group of four people survived the first movie together: Family man Meletis (Meletis Georgiadis), his friend Marina (Pepi Moschovakou), young Jenny (Mary Tsoni), and soldier Lt. Vakirtzis (Andreas Kontopoulos). They lost at least one of their group, Argyris (Argiris Thanasoulas) on the way. They meet up with some new folks - Olga (Eftyhia Yakoumi), a Major in the army, Vicky (Ioanna Pappa), who had been stuck at the top of a Ferris Wheel during the initial outbreak, and Johnny (Thanos Tokakis), who helps them deal with a sniper that had them pinned down and brings them to a house where they can hide out. Jenny has been shot, though, so they need to find some medical supplies. Among the things that they don't know is that this has happened before, in the time of the great Greek city-states, and a strange messenger (Billy Zane) is coming with something for the reincarnation of the hero who drove the plague back the first time.
In the Time of Heroes is a strange mashup of tones; it jumps back in forth in time between the present and ancient times, and throws a lot of comedy into the both sections. Not just comic relief, either; there are times when it seems like the film intends to be a comedy first. Writer/director Yorgos Noussias is sometimes very haphazard in connecting the jokes with the tragic moments, to the point where the audience can find themselves scratching their heads, wondering just what sort of movie Noussias was trying to make. The characters also have an odd sort of ambivalence to the superhuman elements that show up.
Full review at EFC
Da Lui Toi (Gallants)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
According to the director, Gallants took about ten years to get financing, so one has to wonder - if it had been made then, would it have been giving late-career tributes to different old-school actors, or would Bruce Leung, Chen Kuan-tai, and Teddy Robin have just been playing slightly younger characters? It's a what-if we don't have to ponder, since they're the ones front and center in this movie, and it's lucky to have them.
We start, however, with Wong You-nam as a loser named Cheung. A screw-up at the real estate company he works for, he's been sent to a small village to help buy out tenants for a condo development. Naturally, this means working for Mang (Jin Auyeung), who still hates him from grade school. One of the tenants is a tea shop that used to be a martial arts club, still being run by two of its old students. Tiger ("Bruce" Leung Siu-lung) and Dragon (Chen Kuan-tai) are nearly sixty, but they keep faith with their old teacher, Master Law (Teddy Robin Kwan), who has been in a coma for thirty years after suffering an aneurysm during an epic duel. Cheung finds himself throwing in with the underdogs when Mang's attempts to have goons steal Law's favorable lease results in the master waking and thinking Cheung is both of his pupils - though Kwai (Jia Xiao-chen), the pretty girl helping out around the shop, is another incentive.
Gallants is the sort of comedy that jumps from bit to bit in the best possible way; directors Clement Cheng Sze-Kit and Derek Kwok Chi-kin (along with writer Frankie Tam) have a real knack for setting up funny situations, milking some good gags from them, and discretely casting them aside when they threaten to get too serious or worn-out. For instance, it's great to have a martial-arts tournament to inspire wacky training montages, but does anyone really want to see Cheung, Tiger, or Dragon suffer the inevitable humiliating beatdown that goes with it? Not really, so the script goes elsewhere, in a direction that's maybe not a laugh riot either, but has some earned sentiment that's not trite.
Full review at EFC
Feng Sheng (The Message)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
I can't really give The Message much of a review; as happened last night, I sort of hit the wall around 10pm and had I'm-awake-did-I-miss-anything moments all through the film. It's a gorgeous-looking piece, although it's the type of period film that maybe relies a little much on the effects to pretty things up. And a lot of times I think I would find myself really into a movie like this; the story is a World War II espionage thriller structured like a cozy mystery, all things I like.
But few cozy mysteries have this much torture. Not drawing things out to keep the audience on edge, literal "I will extract this information from you using all the methods of inflicting pain I can" torture. And that's a pretty unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours. It ennobles the heroes, sure, letting the audience see how they suffered, but it's not a lot of fun to watch.
Sentô shôjo: Chi no tekkamen densetsu (Mutant Girls Squad)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
So, aside from the insanity that surrounded the screening - see above - how is Mutant Girls Squad? Pretty good. That is, "pretty good" in terms of being a Sushi Typhoon sort of movie; it's cheap, tacky, ten different kinds of dumb, and its English credits give one the sinking feeling that it's the sort of movie manufactured almost entirely for export to the West (I think that's actually a huge part of Sushi Typhoon's business model), but it's one where the pure fun of it overrides how dumb it can be. Yes, Tak Sakaguchi, Noboru Iguchi, and Yoshihiro Nishimura are making this to sell to North Americans who love crazy Japanese movies, but it's not cynical on their part; they genuinely love this stuff.
And, while it's not exactly polished, it's fairly well-made. Yumi Sugimoto is a likable lead and a capable enough star, Sakaguchi does some good work choreographing the action, and Nishimura's monster and gore designs are creative and bizarre. I suspect that at least half of the Sushi Typhoon movies will be crud, but this is one of the good ones.
Full review at EFC.
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