International Oscar Submissions: Exile '20 and Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time

An hour or so left to rent Exile from The Coolidge, although I wouldn't be surprised if, like a lot of the Goethe-Institut films, it comes back for a second weekend. That's doubly the case since there were some issues with playback on Friday, although you'll at least have plenty of time to watch it after if the window on my screen was typical. So, potentially plenty of time to pair it with Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, which make a nice bloc as Oscar submissions from central/eastern Europe (Kosovo and Hungary) that have their emigre protagonists up against mostly-unspoken prejudices and end at what can seem like odd places.

I liked them both a lot, though, even if I might have liked Exile a little less if technical issues hadn't broken my viewing up over two nights. Both are movies without a whole lot in the way of trajectory-altering events, but I suspect that one can feel the 30-minute difference in their lengths a bit if it wasn't broken up. It's fun contemplation, with just enough weird stuff going on to grab your attention.

Anyway - it's a good pair, and today I learned that they speak Albanian in Kosovo and that Hungarian puts the family name before the given name, which isn't something I recall any other European languages doing.

Exil (Exile '20)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29-30 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Institut/Coolidge Corner Theatre virtual screening room, internet)

It takes Exile quite a while to get around to a question that viewers may be asking from the start, and though the answer is not trivial, the audience has likely been worn down enough by that point to consider it somewhat secondary. That trick is more impressive than it sounds; a film that plays out on as individual a scale as this one can often lose track of the larger point as it focuses on one character, but writer/director Visar Morina mostly avoids that.

Xhafer Kryeziu (Misel Maticevic) is a Kosovar chemical engineer who has lived in Germany long enough to seem more or less completely assimilated; he's got a good job that supports wife Nora (Sandra Hüller) as she works on her PhD and looks after their three children. But there are things that never let him forget that he's an outsider to some, such as how colleagues like Urs (Rainer Bock) always seem to slow-walk his requests and find ways to undermine him... or the rat he finds tied to his front gate when arriving home one afternoon.

Xhafer isn't always easy to like; he's carrying on an affair with an Albanian-speaking cleaning lady (Flonja Kodheli) but bristles at helping to translate things she must write for immigration authorities into German, for instance, and there's something seemingly off about him even in seemingly ordinary situations. Morina and star Misel Maticevic walk a fine line there, careful to let the audience clearly see the uglier side of his personality while not losing sympathy. Maticevic captures how Xhafer often (but not always) handles things badly rather than maliciously, and when the end approaches and he's both feeling more pressure and having more dredged up, it's never anything that hits just one side of the character. There's this continuing, human loop of "yeah, but..." where he's concerned, urging the audience to both understand and hold him accountable.

The same goes with the people around him; as much as Morina more or less acknowledges within the film that Urs is a very familiar sort of antagonist for this sort of story, one has to kind admire how much Rainer Bock seems to make a study of that sort of unctuousness, what sort of miserable creature he is without being a cartoon villain. Between him, Xhafer, and Uwe Preuss as Xhafer's boss Koch, I spent a fair amount of time marveling at how familiarly dysfunctional this organization was in ways that may or may not have much to do with the sort of prejudice Xhafer is keyed to notice. Sandra Hüller is also given license to be prickly and annoyed as Nora, both to show that this isn't anything new with Xhafer and that she's got her own issues to push against. One wonders, at times, whether frustration is about to overwhelm the rest of their bond.

There's not a whole lot of story there, and Morina pointedly denies the audience much resolution, but all of that plays into showing how oppressive living with that sort of prejudice is. Occasionally it's visual, like how Xhafer never quite seems to fit in his brightly-colored suburban neighborhood, or how the camera will seemingly detach from the action and go looking for something, but mostly it's the placing things in slightly higher relief. It's not just the fact of it, but the seeming impossibility of communicating it to those who don't face it and are invested in thinking of themselves as better than that; the closest thing to obvious bigotry is Koch trying to praise the team's differences and having it come off as a tremendously backhanded compliment. There's a steady background hum here that merges with the foreground, so that the fact that Xhafer, Urs, and Nora are all flawed people makes it harder - how do you know where the line is between something one can maybe do better oneself and something you can't fix about the world?

It feels exhausting in ways that movies with more plot-intensive structures more focused on specific goals often don't, and it may be a larger, more intensive dose than some may want. It seems worth disclosing that tech issues forced me to watch it in two hour-long chunks, so I don't know what the intended effect of taking the film in for two hours straight is. Then again, I'm fortunate enough to not know what it's like to live with this for one's entire life, though I suspect that the film has at least given me a somewhat better idea of it.

Also at eFilmCritic

Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre virtual screening room, internet)

The hook for Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time hints at something more broadly paranoid or sinister, and while that would have been an interesting way to go, writer/director Lili Horvát doesn't necessarily see the need to exaggerate what's going on here. It's not the noir-ish thriller it initially looks like, but is in some ways more engaging for it.

Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork) was born in Hungary but has spent most of her adult life in the United States, becoming a top neurosurgeon over the past eighteen or twenty years. A month ago, he clicked with János Drexler at a conference like she had never connected with anyone before, not even realizing he was also from Buda-Pest at first. They made a date to meet on the Pest side of the Liberty bridge a month later, but when Márta arrives, he's not there; she seeks him out, but János (Viktor Bodó) says they've never met. Literally stunned, Márta decides not to return to New Jersey, but instead takes a job at her old teaching hospital and finds an apartment - both of them well below her status - to try and figure out what's going on.

It's hard to blame Márta for being suspicious when someone doesn't remember her - she's striking on top of being at the top of her field to the point where everyone asks her why she would come back - and what makes the film work is that she's also smart enough and familiar enough with how brains work to interrogate this idea. Conversations with a therapist (Péter Tóth) that might otherwise be a framing device or meant to move things along do something else: They get both Márta and the audience thinking in a certain way rather than offering answers. Horvát never offers any sort of conspiracy or hints that János is some sort of supervillain, so instead we've got to figure out what's going on without easy genre solutions.

It's an intriguingly interconnected mess. One thing that's striking, early on, is how Márta defaults to English before Hungarian and is taken for a foreigner, and though this part of her identity is never addressed directly, one wonders how much it is motivating her actions. Did she read more into János's words because she never truly felt at home in America and wanted an excuse to come back? Does she choose a crappy apartment because it has an obstructed view of her favorite spot rather than a far nicer one despite being able to afford the latter? The way her old professors and friends question her desire to return has some logic to it, especially when one takes the more rampant sexism of the place into account. Preparations often seems like it's a movie about a woman being gaslit because men are intimidated by her being so formidable, but I wonder to what extent the latter is a screen for the first, a way to tell that story without it being over-sentimental, and to what extent they're the two opposing influences Márta must wrestle with.

Either way, it's a real pleasure to watch Natasa Stork work the contrast; she and Horvát never seem to use Márta's confidence as a cover for her uncertainty, or as things that easily fit into different categories of her life. Her certainty in her own capability lets her charge headlong into areas where she is otherwise confused in some spots and tempers that impulse in others, and it's tremendously fun to watch her be so self-possessed in her probing in spots where other characters often seem helpless. She's got nice chemistry with Viktor Bodó in the moments when the story lets Márta and János get close, and Bodó himself has the sort of charisma that can override the way János can often seem like the sort of puffed-up fellow who's not really in Márta's league on more than just her say-so, when the need arises. It's useful (and fun) to have Benett Vilmányi there as a contrast - Horvát is well-aware that his med student eventually pursuing Márta is a flip on convention, and they make sure that there's a little bit of him knowing it and maybe thinking she should be grateful under his mostly-earnest admiration.

Preparations doesn't quite make it all the way through without stopping to hash things out, but the filmmakers are good enough at doing so in a way that still lets the audience play with it on their own and plays up that these are smart people who like to figure things out. It exists in an intriguing place between a mystery and a conventional romance, and makes it work without abandoning either.

Also at eFilmCritic

Short time in the Brattle's virtual screening room: Son of the White Mare and Dead

Both of these movies will be leaving The Brattle and its virtual screening room after Thursday (8 October 2020), so if you want to see them while kicking some money their way, do it now. They will be available elsewhere soon enough - Dead is already on Prime despite just coming out in New Zealand a few weeks ago and White Mare will almost certainly get a nice Blu-ray - but keep some money local, right?

Anyway, fun movies in very different ways, and it was neat to see Michael Hurst in something again, if briefly, with what I assume is something closer to his actual accent than the "somewhere over the Pacific" one he did on Hercules and Xena back in the day, and was even more tickled to discover while poking around on IMDB afterwards that his wife on-screen is played by his real-life wife of 30+ years, Jennifer Ward-Lealand. She also appeared on those Sam Raimi-produced shows, and I almost want to dig in and see if it was cute pairings with Iolaus or just using every actor in New Zealand who could do a neutral (to Americans) accent.

Fehérlófia (Son of the White Mare)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (restoration reissue, Vimeo via Roku)

Son of the White Mare is folklore, which means that it's wild and often nonsensical, even if there's also something underneath that seems to resonate. It's also animation, where you have absolute freedom to go anywhere your mythology-fueled imagination can take you so long as you're willing to do the disciplined, painstaking work necessary. It's a cult classic because the one half of that seldom seems to interfere with the other, making something memorably, impressively surreal.

It opens with a gravid white mare fleeing something that looks like a fire, although the setting is trippy and metaphorical enough that it could be something else before she seemingly races through a portal to another world (or holes up in the hollow of a tree). She gives birth, and the foal transforms into a boy. A forest spirit tells him to have his mother nurse him for seven years (and then seven years more), before leaving to go on a quest to the underworld. "Treeshaker" soon discovers he has two brothers, Stonecrumbler and Irontemperer, and they soon find a hut, a gnome, and three castles with dragons and princesses.

The story doesn't particularly make sense - the mare fills Stonecrumbler in on how they wound up in that tree, but if this leads him to be seeking justice or revenge or liberation, that's not really where the brothers' quest takes them. Truth be told, Stonecutter drains his mother dry and barely looks back without it exactly being her sacrificing herself to avenge him, so the motivation is kind of wobbly throughout. On top of that, Treeshaker is kind of the most boring sort of mythological hero, too outrageously strong to ever face any sort of challenge, so confident and assured in most cases that his brothers' shortcomings highlight how he's got relatively little personality. Director Marcell Jankovics and co-writer László György commit to the rule of three to an almost absurd extent, making for a potentially very repetitive movie.

It never quite becomes that, though; the repeated elements may not vary that much, but they tend not to be drawn out; Jankovics, the editors, and the music department let it feel like ramping up and building momentum, letting Treeshaker's feats grow more superhuman but not having him pull a new trick out for every fight, and making him possibly feel out of control near the end, when he's spent the whole movie ramping up and may not be able to slow down for a misunderstanding. The simplicity of it heightens the feel of a world still forming, and the way this simple repetition will often give way to extended mind-bending visuals makes it more of a time of unsettled legend.

It's the sort of capable underpinning that enables one to brush a lot away by saying to just look at the pictures, because the film is visually amazing, probably looking as good as it has since its original 1981 release thanks to a back-to-the-negative 4K restoration. It is full of full-screen metamorphoses, geometric compositions in which a viewer can lose themselves at home (this must really be something on a big screen), and character animation that never particularly strives for realism but also avoids being childish or self-consciously envelope-pushing. It's not necessarily appropriate for children, though they'll probably only catch the seductive topless princess and dragon with the stone testes rather than the vaginal and phallic imagery throughout. The character design is especially clever, from how there's a lot of kinship between the brothers and sisters despite them being clearly identifiable, while the dragons are wonderfully anachronistic and symbolic of more pervasive violence and dehumanization. They're almost too creative to slay.

Of course, dig too deep into the symbolism and you get to benevolent god-kings ruling through some vague divine right, which isn't great, but it's the sort of movie whose abstraction is so extreme that viewers almost can't help but be hyper-aware of it even as the imagery is washing over them as just gorgeous. Here's hoping that when the sort of small theater that would show an animated movie from 1981 Hungary is re-opened, they'll have room for some late shows of this, because there's not much like it that's done nearly so well.

Also at eFilmCritic

Dead

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (first/limited-run, Vimeo via Roku)

Not a lot of movies simultaneously get right into things and immediately establish a fun, laid-back feel the way that Dead does, especially among the sort of supernatural comedies that most desperately want to pull that off. That confidence lets it dive into its goofy premise quickly enough to have time to explore and expand as well as fit in a bunch of gags despite running just 90 minutes. The group doesn't always make it look easy, but they give the audience a pretty entertaining film on the main.

Dave "Marbles" Malwich (Thomas Sainsbury) is an Auckland stoner who has, of late, discovered that by blending his weed with his late father's neurological meds, he can make something that, when injected, allows him to communicate with ghosts. Jason Tagg (Hayden J. Weal) is a young and enthusiastic uniformed cop who has been trying to find a serial killer for the past two years, but got too close and now is pretty lucky that he remembered Marbles saying something about his weird formulation the last time he detained the guy for possession. Marbles isn't interested at first - it sounds dangerous and he mostly just tries to help people move on before their spirits decay into ghouls- but his mother (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) is planning to sell the family farm unless Marbles can buy it in a couple of days, and Tagg has life insurance that could cover it, if they find his missing corpse and get his foster sister Yana (Tomai Ihala) to sign off. Which might not be as hard as one thinks; she's an ex-lawyer with her own money and has been helping Tagg track the killer, as best she can with a GPS unit on her ankle after her fourth DWI.

Viewers have a pretty good idea of who Marbles and Tagg are from the first time they show up, and a large part of what makes them fun is that both are energetic and well-meaning in ways that make it absolutely believable when they get on each other's nerves without actually becoming nasty toward one another. Co-stars Thomas Sainsbury and Hayden J. Weal also write with Weal directing, and they've got a good handle all around on what they can bring to a certain kind of story, and despite the cheery seeming-obliviousness that Sainsbury gives Marbles to complement how Weal delivers the sort of dumber-than-he-realizes intensity that makes his playing almost the entire movie sans trousers work, they both handle the fact that these characters are in large part defined by their losses well, giving the pair a little weight without losing who they are. Tomai Ihala plays Yana as a bit more pointed as a contrast, and both she and Weal do a nice job of selling the sibling dynamic even when they can't directly interact for much of the film.

There are a lot of amusing bits, both from the quick looks at Marbles helping various people with their ghost problems and as they try to figure out where to start solving Tagg's murder, to make for a fine episodic comedy, including one of the more cheerful "straight guy in a gay bar" sequences. The filmmakers never take the weird part for granted, though, finding a natural way to put a time limit on the case and to switch things up later on. Even with all that going on, the film is still comedy first; there are mystery and horror elements to it, but the filmmakers seldom lose sight of what this particular film is built on in order to get lost going down a particular genre's path.

Things do eventually get kind of tight, because this is the sort of small independent film that can't really afford to waste characters on just one thing or have too many locations. As a result, there's sometimes a bit of a push and pull toward the end where the logic of two similar things being related bumps up against it making for an awfully small world, especially when Marbles's ex-girlfriend Henna (Jess Sayer) shows up after being mentioned in dialogue before but never quite fits once all is said and done, despite being kind of necessary to what's going on.

It's a fun little movie which may have a little trouble getting traction outside of New Zealand - it's all local talent and its North American release seems to be virtual bookings with individual theaters - but folks who dig this sort of thing could do worse than check it out. Weal, Sainsbury, and company have their eye on the supernatural-mystery-comedy ball and seldom stumble.

Also at eFilmCritic

L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online #2 (24 May 2020)

I wasn't necessarily expecting L.A. 3-D SPACE to replace what had been on their calendar for Sunday with another online show just three weeks after their last when most months on the schedule just show one thing, but they did schedule an on-line show, although they wound up having some technical difficulties, both in terms of starting late and not getting the side-by-side and anaglyph streams running at once..

Still, for as much as I was kind of disappointed with the their last stream, I really liked this one. It was taken from the award-winners from their 2018 festival, and they were a really strong group, including a great doc or two, some really nifty animation, and a genuinely oddball entry or two. Even if you're not a 3-D nut like myself, they're worth checking out.

(And, even if you're not, I suspect that if you're reading this particular entry, you've probably got a pair of red-blue glasses kicking around.)

Anyway, there are links to individual shorts where I can find them throughout; as of right now the whole program is still online, with the side-by-side version first and then the red/blue anaglyph. Have fun with it, and maybe kick some cash their way, as they've still got rent and everything else to worry about.

"The Stereoscopic Society"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Kate Sullivan's "The Stereoscopic Society" is only a minute long, so it can only provide the briefest overview of London's Stereoscopic Society, which meets regularly for slideshows and to compare equipment.

Very short documentary, but by all appearances, a cool, charming place to visit and see cool 3D stuff.

"Domino, Secret of the Lost World"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

This isn't quite the longest film of the presentation but it's the one that perhaps make the biggest impression, as filmmakers Richard Bouda & Marek Audy start from a somewhat strained metaphor (the dominoes of the title) and a fanciful introduction (that the tepuis being explored are where Arthur Conan Doyle set The Lost World, and then digging in to what you find when you actually reach the surface, and then you've got a documentary about an amazingly isolated ecosystem that features rugged-looking plants, sandstone caves, carnivorous plants, and unusual frogs. It's an amazing thing to build a documentary about.

Getting a 3D rig up to the top of one of those tepuis is maybe not as hard as it might have been, although they have traditionally been finicky enough that the rough handling Bouda & Audy must inevitably subject them to makes it very impressive that they got as much usable footage as they did. It may not be quite so pretty as what Werner Herzog and his crew got in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but the caves serve as a fantastic stage, extending back into the screen and showing layers of features. The camerawork is great whether examining a tiny frog or a dizzying drop.

"Domino" is the sort of short documentary I really love, made by people passionate about the subject matter going the extra mile to be sure that they can bring it to an audience in compelling fashion. It's the sort of thing that's fun no matter what, but seems to be made for 3D

"Espace, Espaces!" ("Space… Spaces!")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

This one, by Marilou Deshayes and Esther Jacopin, took a bit of time to grow on me, because it's the sort of short film that doesn't seem to settle into the right groove between straight narrative and off-kilter messing around for a while. The filmmakers have access to a nifty building that looks great in 3D, but a very small cast, and large chunks of it don't seem that well thought-out, including the thread meant to tie everything together, with receptionist/cleaner Baptiste (Benjamin Romieux) seeming to have the most pure love for the Ministry of Space where he works.

And yet, by the end, it's evolved into something really nifty. There's a running gag about three exo-linguists industriously inventing new languages that won't be beholden to human standards and capabilities that feels kind of stretched until a scene where the Minister (Majida Ghomari) talks about how the entire department is often treated as a running gag, at least until the people in power need some science, and it becomes a very sincere, and sincerely frustrated, discussion of how sometimes important things run are fueled by things which the practical folks just can't grasp. That the three groups within the Ministry who keep finding themselves at loggerheads - the engineers, the diplomats, and the linguists - are played by the same three actors works as both Deshayes & Jacopin stretching their cast well (the gag didn't leap out at me until the credits) and a twist on how we're all weird specialists to someone else.

"Un Histoire D'amour" ("A Love Story")

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

This one apparently won the top International prize in '18, although I think the previous two are more interesting. This one's amusing enough, especially early on when it looks like filmmaker Julien Charpier might be riffing on Makoto Shinkai's "Voices of a Different Star", or more directly doing so. It's at its best when it's working along those lines, but it loses that and connection to that and goes in a more generally avant-garde direction which is interesting and sometimes striking, but seldom as interesting

It's interesting, but tries a bit hard, and doesn't find the same sort of groove between its story and deliberate oddity that "Espace, Espaces!" does.

"Go Away I Like You Too Much"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Apparently "Go Away I Like You Too Much" (2D & 3D) is going to be part of a 40-minute production that includes all ten tracks on "Smitten" by The Simple Carnival, which was apparently filmmaker Jeff Boller on various instruments. The whole project looks to be about halfway complete.

This particular leg of it is a lot of fun - it's a good pop song with animation that keeps up, tells a story, and has gets a viewer in the head of its super-abstract characters in a couple of minutes. It is very much the work of someone who is playing with 3D animation and wants to see what he can do on top of making a good music video, but that's entirely cool in this particular situation. I'll certainly be going through the rest of the videos and hoping there's a way to purchase a good SBS version when he's done.

"Cryogen Children"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Director Sadie Schiffman-Eller does something especially nifty with the animation in "Cryogen Children", as using 3D makes the separate elements in this mixed-media production feel a bit more disconnected from each other in ways that might not be as apparent when flattened. It's an apt metaphor for someone searching for her roots and knowing that, because her mother used a donor, she herself is metaphorically assembled in that way.

It's a nice bit of work, since Schiffman-Eller captures how strange the whole process seems from both ends, whether anonymously donating sperm or trying to find out where you came from. She leans into the collage aspects of the work, working double helices and other symbols into the film, and while this allows things to keep getting bizarre, Schiffman-Eller never lets it completely get away from her. It's an impressive pieces of work that uses all the bits and pieces it's made of well.

L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online and Ape

The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education is an exhibition space/collection in Los Angeles which I'll have to visit if I make it out that way any time soon, most recently noted for crowdfunding the restoration of El Coranzon y la Espada (on the 3-D Rarities II Disc I reviewed a few weeks back. They've got monthly screenings, although that's obviously off right now. So, for Sunday's show, they had planned to show a selection of recent productions, and chose to do it online. There were options to stream it in anaglyph (red/blue) or side-by-side format, with the TV or projector un-compression the pictures so that they could be alternated, projected through polarized lenses, or the like (at one point, this was a way to distribute 3-D films theatrically, using a special polarized lens to project the two images atop each other).

You lose a bit of image quality that way, but it's not so bad, although with some of the selections being rough themselves, the effect can pile up. It's neat, though, and it's good to see that there are folks who enjoy 3-D enough to make new material. Is it better than the feature I popped in later, Ape? Well, some are, though I don't know if that's clearly a high bar (although upon hitting IMDB, I'm not sure what the knowledge that Joanna Kerns had a B-movie babe phase of her career before playing the wife of "Jason Seaver" on Growing Pains means to me).

The next one is set for the 21st of June, though I don't know whether that will wind up another livestream yet. One thing I found myself anticipating was the fact that it was a livestream - starting at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT, running for an hour, and then being more or less immediately set to private. With no sports, and no movies in theaters with ticketed times, everything can sort of be put off or piled up to pick up when one chooses, but this was a screening. Sure, it's not the only thing like that right now, but, honestly, it added more structure than the daily "stand-up" calls at work.

Yes, I've gotten to the point of missing almost being late for something. It's a weird time.

Fun discovery made while looking for Amazon links to break up the wall of text and maybe, someday, have someone click: The "best short soundtracks" album, which is a cool thing to have exist, although I'm not sure who would be buying a whole album as opposed to just the individual ones which impressed them.

"The Whole Picture"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

This one looks too new to have an entry on IMDB (or, heck, any sort of internet footprint), but it's a nifty little thing that changes aspect ratios and color and depth in its three minutes before it goes a different route. Looking at IMDB, it feels like it might be a sort of calling card for director Zsolt Magyar, showing what he can do as a cinematographer and director when much of his career has been working in sound.

"Ghosts of the Pastures"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Another one whose internet footprint is awfully small, and three days later, I can't remember a thing about it.

"Stimulation"

N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Uh… OK? A minute of home-movie footage which is nice for the folks involved and interesting as a time capsule later but which makes me feel like I'm intruding a bit when watching it.

"Zerynthia Expedition 2"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Kind of a 3-D screen saver in a lot of ways, fun as a tech demo or as the rough draft for a bit of world-building in a sci-fi movie. Nine minutes is kind of a lot, though, especially when you're waiting to get to the next.

"Feline Paradox"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

One of only a couple things in this program that feels like a real movie, but also one that shows what a toll doing good 3D can take on your production - would there have been more resources available for animation if filmmaker Benjamin Reicher wasn't rendering every frame twice? It looks a bit rough throughout, although part of it is that the models for the humanoid cat-people just don't ever feel quite right compared to the humans and the actual cat.

It's kind of fun, though - Reicher has a lot of fun with time travel paradoxes and looping around to the point where it gets a bit out of hand, especially with all the different versions of the main character that keep popping up. It stretches out a bit too long and doesn't necessarily land on the most clever possible ending. But it's goofy and inventive and willing to get weird on occasion, enough that I'll probably grin if I come across something else of Reicher's later and follow the links back here.

"LIttle Planet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)

Another fun little thing that plays like filmmaker Takashi Sekitani is kind of fooling around with some tech and seeing what he can get out of it. Here, that seems to be walking around with a 360-degree VR camera overhead and flattening it out in such a way as to make it look like he's on a fisheye-lens planet.

No particular story, and I don't know Tokyo enough to really get a sense of the different perspective this offers, although I kind of like the effect of how people getting closer to the person at the center become stretched out and more important as the number of pixels increases. It feels like a cool visualization of something, even if the filmmakers have only wound up at the "looks cool" stage.

Ape

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

You think weird things watching a random B-movie like Ape, like how many of the giant-ape movies to come after it used CGI models based on real apes while the ones before used guys in suits or stop-motion and thus had human gaits, and this one often has its ape hunched over but not actually able to get its knuckles to the ground, like they kind of wanted to do better but, oh well, whatever. It's lazy and cheap, but sometimes just bizarre enough in how that pans out to kind of be fun.

It's flagrant in being a King Kong rip-off, although it basically starts with its 36-foot-tall ape chained up in the hold of a ship, being brought across the Pacific to be shown off at Disneyland. It wakes up early and angry, though, capsizing the ship and making its way to the coast of South Korea. Meanwhile, in Seoul, reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) is surprising his actress girlfriend Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) at the airport, having wangled the assignment to report on her first international role. It's not his first time here, which is fortunate, because it means he knows Captain Kim (Lee Nak-Hun) of the local police and can ride along as he and U.S. Army Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol) try and figure out what the heck you do in this situation.

Writer/director Paul Leder gets right to the movie's main draw first, as the nameless giant ape wrestles with a rubber shark and then stomps on some miniatures, and while it never looks close to real - and to make things worse, it's shot in 3D in such a way that one's depth perception immediately reveals the proper scale when viewed that way. This stuff is, nevertheless, still kind of a blast, the kind of kaiju destruction that the audience can enjoy just a bit more because it's fake enough to reassure one that nobody gets hurt even as the first glance makes it feel real. It's lazy and sloppy enough to be frustrating, but there's also a peculiar meta joy to it, where one snickers at the ape flailing at helicopters that just aren't there and thus feeling like it's a victory when one gets in range and he smashes the hell out of that toy.

The whole movie is that sort of mess, not just cheap but stupidly so, like when Tom is pointing things out to Marilyn without getting an B-roll, or the way none of the ape bits seem to be connected, or how nothing anybody does ever makes a lick of sense. It's so comfortable being a King Kong rip-off that it often doesn't need much reason to do something other than "they did it in that other movie", and the ape's fights with giant sharks and snakes make one wonder whether such super-sized mutations are common in the film's world or if the filmmakers just didn't think this through. The laziness is much more apparent with the miniature city demolished at the end, with all the signage in Chinese despite the film taking place in South Korea.

Luckily, there are enough people having fun with the thing that it doesn't become completely insulting, which is kind of impressive, because most of the time when people try to get clever despite messing up the basics just make them look worse. Leder at least makes a few amusing detours as he inserts himself as the director of Marilyn's film - I have no doubt that he has had to sincerely ask actors to be gentle while filming a rape scene - and the cast is in large part just good enough: Rod Arrants and Lee Nak-Hoon are are pleasant without being bland, Alex Nicol does a bit better than mailing it in, and Joanna Kerns (using maiiden name "Joanna DeVarona") does okay for the sort of B-movie most actresses will eventually try to ignore.

There are enough movies with giant apes wreaking havoc out there that this one is mostly of interest for 3D enthusiasts; it's just not good enough at anything else to really stand out. Ape occasionally gets cock-eyed enough to be entertaining, but not enough to be a major part of the kaiju canon.

Also on EFilmCritic

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.

This That Week In Tickets: 5 April 2015 - 11 April 2015

Skipping another few weeks because it looks like another document that I need to catch up without rewriting a bunch of stuff is only on my tablet, and the part that the guy needs to fix it doesn't seem to have made it over from China/Korea yet. Folks, do not drop your tablet, and after that, don't dawdle in getting it repaired. I have a case waiting so that it will be protected in the future, but that's hardly ideal right now, is it?

This week got started early, as for some reason The Gunman was only playing at 10:10am for its last weekend in town. It got finished in plenty of time to get me over to Somerville for the monthly silent show, this time the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments.

If I remember correctly, I tried to get to Lexington on Monday, but catching the bus there from Alewife is a tricky thing. So, instead, I rushed to Apple Cinemas at Fresh Pond to catch Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!", a surprisingly entertaining Bollywood film that wound up playing much more as a WWII mystery than a pulpy action piece. The next day, I was abe to catch the bus and make it to the Venue for one of the last screenings of '71, a pretty strong thriller set in Belfast during the Troubles.

Last chances to see things were a big part of the week, as I think I caught Focus on the last day it was in town. Saturday, at least, I got to see something new, with the really terrific White God.

The Ten Commandments (1923)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 April 2015 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please, 35mm)

Cecil B. DeMille did two versions of The Ten Commandments, one silent and one years later with sound, but who ever remembers that the Biblical part of the first was just the prologue, with the story of Moses giving way halfway through to the story of a mother distraught over how one of her two sons isn't being a good boy and following the Commandments, with the way of selfishness inevitably leading to a fall.

It is, frankly, kind of weird; it means that all the stunning spectacle will be before the intermission and the kitchen-sink drama afterward, which even back in 1923 must have been against the conventional wisdom of how to build a film. Yes, the "main" section does have a pretty impressive climax itself as a building constructed with shoddy materials falls apart, but I suspect that moviegoers might have been tempted to head home at the midway point. That second half is ironically more memorable that the first to me in part because I've seen a few different adaptations of Exodus, and slapping a present-day story onto it is thus different in a way that sticks in the head.

It's still not the better part, though, especially seen from ninety years later. Apparently old people have always been whining about how the young don't take their superstition seriously, with DeMille and writer Jeanie Macperson setting up a rigged game that equates being nonreligious with being jerks. It's also worth noting that while the Israelites in Egypt are noble, persecuted people, Sally Lung is described as "a Eurasian" and treated as a sinister foreigner tempting one of the McTavish boys away from all that is right and good.

DeMille always did spectacle well, and when he concentrates on that here, there's no denying he built something worth buying a ticket to see. His skills as a dramatist are sketchier, though, and that makes this version of The Ten Commandments sillier than perhaps it should have been.

'71

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 April 2015 in Lexington Venue #2 (second-run, DCP)

I suspect that '71 is one of this year's more unfairly-overlooked releases in America I don't know how many theaters it got into outside the big cities, it doesn't have the big names in the cast that might pop out at people, and The Troubles are this moral quagmire that Americans tend to avoid thinking of unless they strongly identify as Irish Catholic because neither side truly feels like an "other". It shouldn't fall between the cracks, though, because it's a nifty little thriller.

Of course, I suspect that Roadside Attractions was expecting star Jack O'Connell to be something of a bigger deal after starring in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, but that one came and went very quickly and quietly. This isn't necessarily a star-making performance, either, because his Gary Hook is meant to be sort of typical of young men sent off to fight in a war in the modern era - backed into the army more out of the lack of better options than patriotic zeal and tending to expect tension more than real danger. He's not exceptional, and he doesn't really drive the story except out of circumstance; often Gary is badly wounded or concussed enough that he's stumbling blindly. He winds up giving the sort of strong performance that's almost invisible, but one without which the film would fall apart.

The situation writer Gregory Burke and director Yann Damange have him stumble through is tense and fascinating in a similarly low-key way. Burke presents a situation full of characters who, despite mostly wanting something close to the same thing, have rivalries and differing agendas that make Gary an asset and a liability. That's presented very clearly, but the film also doesn't just become a game of strategy with human pieces, it's also a look at how people struggle with the conflict between the basic urge to be decent to a fellow human being and the well-earned fear (and nurtured hate) that might prevent them from doing so. There aren't any ruminations on the foolishness of war in general or this conflict in particular, but this concussed soldier means they've got to play it out with their actions.

As they do so, Demange builds a strong action thriller. Coincidence has me writing this the day after seeing Sicario, which also gets right into the muck by just showing it rather than talking, although the level of cynicism is different. Demange goes in for a little more clarity, presenting military objectives and letting the audience understand geography and goals more as the film goes along - the opening may get us turned around along with Gary, but the audience's fog is allowed to lift. From there the violence is properly ugly but exciting because the audience is invested in the outcome without necessarily rooting for a side.

It's a heck of a thriller, and I wish I'd been able to do a little more to help it get the audience it deserved.

Focus

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2015 in AMC Assembly Row #11 (first-run, DCP)

When Focus popped up on the schedule of movies getting an Imax release, I wasn't sure why; it didn't exactly look like the grand spectacle that usually rates such screens, and Will Smith hasn't been the draw that makes theaters salivate at an automatic extra five bucks per ticket in a while. After seeing it at the end of its run, I still didn't get it; even as a movie that takes place in some photogenic locations, it's got very little "wow" to offer.

That's true of the story, a con game that manages to feel bogged down despite not having that many moving pieces - it's a love triangle where there's no strong indication of any sort of genuine affection and a scam where a bunch of suspicious folks count on everybody being much more trustworthy than makes sense. It's focused on race car engine minutiae that won't make for an exciting race. There's an entertaining final twist, mainly because one of the supporting actors, Gerald McRaney, has become a surprisingly effective force considering the bland TV material his career started with.

And speaking of guys who aren't what they were at the start of their careers, consider Will Smith. The only time in the last ten years when he was the sort of effortlessly charming that guy that made him a star was Men in Black 3 (and I'm probably in the minority there), and you can see him trying here, when he really needs to be able to seduce the audience as easily as the other characters, but... well, you can see him trying. Margot Robbie is certainly pretty enough and gives great aw-shucks as the newbie, but isn't much of anything when she's supposed to be more of a veteran.

It goes down fairly smooth, but it's bland. I hope that Smith & Robbie are a lot more fun in Suicide Squad.

White God

Before sitting down for this movie, I joked on social media that I wished the distributors had chosen a less ominous name so that families expecting a traditionally upbeat girl-and-her-dog movie with the dog encountering friendly people on the way back to his mistress would be sucked in and shocked. I don't really mean that, of course - just like I don't actually describe Takashi Miike's Audition as a romantic comedy - but it's amusing to note that I first saw the preview for this one in front of Song of the Sea, so somebody at the theater either just looked at the briefest of descriptions of has a similarly perverse sense of humor.

I don't know whether to advise people to seek that trailer out or not, though, because it gives away some of the best shots, and as much as they were still great, I found myself waiting for them rather than completely blown away when they showed up. I don't necessarily blame the folks who cut it - this is an unusual enough movie that you sort of need to dangle some of the amazing bits in front of a potential audience rather that just let the premise do its job - but it also must be an absolutely amazing thing to go into cold. Try and do that if you possibly can.

One thing that kind of surprised me - and probably wouldn't if I had actually had a dog of my own more recently than childhood (I enjoy both living in a city and travel too much to make it practical) - is how down on mixed-breed dogs the local government in this movie seems to be. Is that the case here? I know there is some snobbery about them vis-a-vis purebreds, but it's undeserved; they tend to both be great dogs and much hardier than fancy breeds. As an example, consider my co-worker's Yorkshire Terrier Joey. Great little dog who has a ton of health problems - he showed us a daily pill organizer as loaded as the ones used by my grandparents - with many stories of both the expense and surprise on the part of pharmacists that he and his wife would be spending that on their dog. But what's he doing to do, not look after the little guy's health? The point is, the eugenics necessary to make a wolf into a yorkie have some pretty serious side effects that you don't see as much with a mutt's hybrid vigor.

I was also a little surprised to see Nimrod Antal get a big mention in the "thanks" section. I shouldn't be, necessarily - as a guy with feet planted fairly firmly Hungary and Hollywood, I suspect that a lot of Hungarian filmmakers have been helped by him in some way. No, it's more the case that since Metallica: Through the Never didn't even interest me enough to shell out for a ticket even with him writing and directing, seeing his name made me wonder what had happened to him, as he made a number of films in Kontroll, Vacancy, and Armored that were better than expected. Apparently, he's directed an episode of M. Night Shyamalan's Wayward Pines, which makes that project a bit more interesting to me.

I must also sadly report that this is one of the chattier audiences I've sat in lately, as even at a boutique house, folks will take stretches without dialogue as permission to whisper a bit too loudly because, hey, it's not like you're blotting anything else or that silence is a thing the filmmaker decided to use, right? Still, it didn't come close to overshadowing what a great movie this is, and how everyone should go see it for a unique experience.

Fehér isten (White God)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 11 April 2015 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, DCP)

I know a lot of people who love horror movies, and they tend to be the same people who care passionately about animal welfare. It's not that surprising; contrary to popular belief, you need empathy to get the most out of horror rather than become jaded, and I suspect that many genre filmmakers have something like White God kicking around their heads as a result. Actually making it is the trick, and most who try don't manage anything near what Kornél Mundruczó pulls off - a small masterpiece.

15-year-old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is pretty fond of her dog, Hagen, a sweet mixed-breed that seems to be her best friend, especially now that she's being sent to stay with her father (Sándor Zsótér) while her mother visits Australia for three months. Unfortunately, Hagen is mixed-breed - a mutt - and in Hungary that requires a license that her father will not pay for, and Lili's father forces her to abandon Hagen on the side of the road. Lili will search, but while Hagen initially falls in with a friendly-seeming group of strays, but the other people he comes across won't treat him nearly as kindly as the girl still looking for him.

There are points when the audience might want to fast-forward through the sequences that focus on Lili; compared to the parts with the dogs, they can seem like just another movie about a bitter kid. Zsófia Psotta is pretty darn good in the role, though, and Sándor Zsótér's father may not always come across very well, but Mundruczó and his co-writers make their story interesting, more than just a parallel to how her mother seemingly abandons her much like the dogs,even if it often plays out behind the scenes. From the way Lili is clearly the youngest player in her youth orchestra, I suspect that she's been accelerated enough to become isolated, although there's never much talk of that or any need to show how her father starts to warm to her.

Full review on EFC.

Fantasia Daily for 20 July: Raging Phoenix, La Meute, 1

Seeing that the first movie I really wanted to see was at 5:20, I thought today would be a good day to finally get to the Railway museum, but no dice; I dawdled too long in the morning to make the train/bus combo. I'm going to try for next Tuesday, my 2nd-to-last day here.

Instead, I had a day on Mont-Royal. It's a hot sweaty walk to get to the top, but always worth it.

One funny thing about the festival being in Montreal for this American: The program talks about how La Meute has an unusual star in Emilie Dequennes, whom it describes as a "darling of auteur cinema". I'm sure that more French films play in Montreal, so that's how she's seen, but I imagine that most American genre audiences remember her best from Brotherhood of the Wolf, even if that was years ago.

Deu suay doo (Raging Phoenix)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

I suppose that technically "Raging Phoenix" is a perfectly reasonable title for this movie - the protagonist does rise from a low point reborn and pissed off - but let's be honest, this is not a perfectly reasonable movie, and as such deserves a title that lets the audience in on just what sort of madness they're in for.

Deu ("JeeJa" Yanin Vismistananda) doesn't seem too out of the ordinary when we first meet her. She's a drummer in a band that kicks her out after she jumps into the audience to go after her ex. She's done a nice job of getting hammered when someone kidnaps her, but she escapes, only to find a whole gang chasing her. She's rescued by Sanim (Kazu Tang), whose "Mayraiyuth" fighting style is a combination of muay thai, drunken boxing, and b-boy dancing. It turns out he and his three comrades have each had a loved one kidnapped or killed by this Jaguar gang. Deu throws in, insisting they teach her how to fight.

And then things get kind of nuts. Understand, by "nuts", I mean they escalate past the "fighting guys on razor-sharp pogo sticks with drunken breakdancing" (did I mention the razor-sharp pogos? I meant to!). In fact, the reason for the Jaguars kidnapping these girls is potentially a wholly different insane Thai martial arts movie. And I kind of wish it had been something separate, because for as much impressive action as the last half has to follow up on a loopy plot, it's no longer to a techno beat with that super-distinctive style. It's "just" big fight scenes.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

La Meute (The Pack)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

Torture porn is a horror fad whose moment has more or less passed, right? Sure, the Saw movies still come out like clockwork, but that's more a franchise of its own than an example of a trend now. I ask because while the new French thriller La Meute (The Pack) doesn't fall entirely under that category, it does have long stretches where it substitutes mere suffering for suspense.

At first, it looks like that may come at the expense of a group of bikers that annoy Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne) on her cross-country drive. Though she thinks she loses them, they show back up when she and Max (Benjamin Biolay) stop at a roadside diner. The diner's owner, "La Spack" (Yolande Moreau), and the local sheriff, Chinaski (Philippe Nahon), run them off, but soon Max apparently goes to the bathroom and doesn't return. Now, it's not like Charlotte is particularly attached to him, but she's curious - though what she finds when coming back the next night will make her wish she'd just kept driving.

Give writer/director Franck Richard credit - he zeroes in on his mood and only very briefly does he ever waver. The back roads he sets the story on are grimy and dusty, with worn-down cars stopping at worn-down diners, and there's a scent of hostility coming from nearly every member of the cast, with the rest initially looking kind of laughable. It's a place where a person can just disappear. Cinematographer Laurent Bares fills the screen with browns during the day and deep, inky blacks that can swallow a man whole at night.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

1

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)

In just a few minutes, I'm going to write an email to the Fantasia press office asking for screeners of movies I've missed or which I think need a second look, and 1 will be at the top of the list. And not for alphabetical order, either; of all the 10pm movies I had a little trouble getting through, this was the one that most intrigued me throughout.

The premise is intriguing - all the books in an upscale bookstore are mysteriously replaced with a volume labeled "1", which contains information on what every person on earth was doing during a given minute - and there's a nifty Twilight Zone vibe to it, especially once we hear about a "reality enforcement" institute. But, wow, is it a tough one to get through at 10pm; there's a lot of sonorous narration and it seems to lose the plot about midway through. But that just may be me; I look forward to making a second try.