Fantasia 2022.04: Science Fiction Shorts, "Molting", The Girl from the Other Side, Next Door, "Bug Bites", and Moloch

Hello, day that always screws the posting schedule up! You've come early this year.

Sunday was a day for guests, and though there's usually a pretty good line-up at the shorts programs, it was just Paul Arion of "Fieldtrip" this year, although he had some entertaining stuff to talk about, since his 20-minute film was in the works for five years, some of it likely pandemic-related delays, but also because they spent a huge chunk of time building the primary costume (a highly-believable environmental suit) in his co-director's living room. The original intent in making it was "special effects but not visual effects", since they knew how much time that would add, although they wound up adding graphics for the characters' heads-up displays and the like. He also talked about shooting in some of those gorgeously stark Icelandic landscapes and how a full crew has to go through a rigorous permitting process, a small project like them can often "just trespass". This included the site of an actual plane crash that was apparently never properly… Well, I don't know, is it standard procedure to have people go in, break it up, and cart everything away, or is it possibly less impactful to just leave it there than to drive a bunch of heavy equipment into the area?

Next up, more animation, as Axis programmer Rupert Bottenberg introduced the pairing of The Girl from the Other Side with its directors Yutaro Kubo & Satomi Maiya, also joined by Katsushi Bowda, the director of "Molting", the short film that played ahead of it. They found it amusing that the two films had been programmed as a pair months ago, and in that time Bowda would wind up on a project with WIT Studio, who produced both short and feature versions of Other Side, so they got together and met there prior to coming to Montreal.

This was an introduction rather than a Q&A, as I gather things were scheduled a bit tight and both brought mini posters and other souvenirs to autograph after the presentation. I didn't get in that line because I don't need more stuff that's somehow got to get packed in a way that it won't be damaged on the way home, which is a bummer, because I'd have liked to get in close for a shot of one of the stop-motion models Bowda brought with him.

The guest for Next Door was Yeom Ji-ho, who made it as his senior project in film school, as apparently the film board has a program where top students can submit proposals and, with a lot of things being taken into consideration, the top one gets the resources for a small feature. They seem to have made a pretty decent choice here; it's pretty solid work. Kind of amusing to see someone asking for words of inspiration, though - he made it through enough screening that this wasn't exactly winning the lottery, but he's still at the start of things.

And, finally, we have Mitch excited to see Moloch director Nico Van den Brink, who has had shorts in Small Gauge Trauma a few times, including one that is in development for him to remake with Sam Raimi and James Wan producing. They'd been hoping to have him in person for a while, and what better time than this? He had some interesting talk about how the folk legend in the film was invented for it, but that there were similar ones, despite the fact that passing down these sorts of folk tales had fallen out of favor for some time in the Netherlands. He also mentioned that he's got projects in development both in America and back home, and it's entirely possible he'll have time to shoot and finish another Dutch film in the time those projects the big American producers are attached to make it into production.

So, long day that gave the camera some work. Today's plans are My Small Land, Next Exit, and Dark Nature. I could fit the Jean Rollin documentary in there, I suppose, but I'm not big on artist docs in general and he's not someone I have any particular attachment to. The Roundup with Ma Dong-seok is fun; apparently it didn't make it to Montreal during its North American run a month or two ago. But, then, it'll likely already be tomorrow when this gets published, because 10 shorts adds to the writing time disproportionately.

"The Gift"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

"The Gift" is quick and basic enough to not really leave much time for "wait, what about–" when you put it in this sort of short film block. It starts with a father and son burying the latter's hamster, though a reverse shot reveals some sort of spaceship hanging in the sky behind them. Those have been around for a couple of years, and nobody really knows why. There's hints of something unexpected, but the film ends on the sort of ironic twist where it's hard to be sure.

It's not bad, pretty good for something done by folks whose IMDB entries suggest hobbyists, with quality effects work and not-bad-at-all direction.

"S.O.S."

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

"S.O.S." is the sort of French comedy that often throws Americans, something kind of mean and dark underneath a thick layer of whimsy. It features a couple (Jacques Bouanich & Anne Benoît) who manage a seaside apartment building, with the UFO-enthusiast husband actually having sent a message to aliens, seeking placement as a climate refugee, though the representative and answer may not be what they expected.

What's clever, and sometimes a tricky thing to reconcile, is that the concept is something to be taken seriously and that there's a (sometimes literally) cutting set of observations being made about bourgeois hypocrisy but the film is such a bunch of pastel colors, with even the bad things in pleasing compositions. Filmmaker Sarah Hafner will also take the chance to do any bit of amusing slapstick that presents itself; even if it's jarring and an interruption. I really enjoy and like what she's doing here in a lot of cases, like the way she'll use piles of plastic water bottles big enough to seem obscene without making the image of pollution ugly; it's over-the-top enough to check off "looks harmless but we know it isn't". Like a lot in this mode, though, it's full of distractions and kind of exhausting as it arrives at its point.

"Heartless"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

"Heartless" has one of those Twilight Zone scenarios that initially makes one wonder how you even get to the starting point - Haukur Björgvinsson posits a place where everyone's romantic relationships are reassigned every seven years, with those who resist being sent to the massive Egg that hovers ominously near the town, where their attachments will presumably be purged over the cycle. For Gunnar (Jóhann Kristófer Stefánsson) and Anna (Bríet Elfar), in their first relationship, the upcoming lottery is as fraught as might be expected.

Interestingly, Björgvinsson doesn't do the "you don't want to go back to how things were before, with society tying people to abusive partners, do you?" thing at all, which is an interesting choice, though this relatively short film could perhaps use that sort of an injection of reasons to consider this relationship lottery from a perspective other than Gunnar's anguish. On the other hand, Jóhann Kristófer Stefánsson does give good anguish, his adoration of Anna seeming to fill him almost too bursting without seeming overplayed, powerful enough that it's very easy to assume that Anna feels the same, although I suspect that a second viewing will show Bríet Elfar playing Anna more sad for how this guy she genuinely likes is about to get absolutely crushed.

It's a rich premise, and while I'm not sure that Björgvinsson has done the best possible job of extracting a story that explores it while also standing alone, but it's still not bad at all.

"Keep/Delete"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

Has it really been long enough that someone could possibly be reinventing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind without knowing that they're doing it? Not that the idea was entirely original then or that Kryzz Gautier is the first to do so since, and her take on it is interesting for its differences - Kaari (Lorena Jorge) & Grace (Wilder Yari) not being heterosexual makes the relationship dynamics different, and the clean aesthetic implying hints at it perhaps being the tested, regulated future of that movie's world - its "technically, this is brain damage" line is legal boilerplate. It's got a couple of nice stars in Jorge and Yari, and Gautier avoids giving the audience too close a look at their memories so that they can communicate what they've lost and how themselves.

It has another one of those set-ups whose arbitrariness makes itself a little too obviously known - why four memories that can only be accessed with permission? It would be one thing if the nature of those memories seemed to have some purpose, but there's not enough time or detail for that. This also seems to be the least interesting portion of the story, compared to either coming to the decision to forget or trying to live without a huge chunk of one's life.

"Struck"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

At three minutes long, it's almost absurd to give "Struck" a rating or even a review, and it's even weirder to see Hulu and 20th Century Studios logos on it. What are they going to do with it? Is it the result of some sort of contest to create a pitch reel for a potential film or series?

Although, if that's what it is, it's one I'd be curious about. Writer/director Nichola Wong establishes just enough of characters and premises and teases more in those three minutes to put a lot of series that spend a 90-minute pilot episode to get the audience to the basic premise that they knew from reading the show's listing to shame. It looks pretty nice, too. Which makes it an odd duck - there isn't much of it and it doesn't feel complete at all, but it's still impressively efficient storytelling.

"Till"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

"Till" has a fascinatingly dystopian premise, in which the title character (Ulrich Matthes), determined to no longer be sufficiently useful to society, is expected to be replaced with an artificial intelligence, one which presumably executes using his brain as a platform. It might, in some ways, be a better version of him, although in others not so, especially since most of his memories will be lost; in this future, they're not so big on feeding an algorithm uncurated data as we are now.

Filmmaker Marc Philip Ginolas has Matthes and Till approach the idea with a sort of melancholy, back up at the idea of being considered less useful and not wanting to die, but perhaps not entirely in disagreement, as if he on some level understands he's been wasting his life of late and it may be too far gone to turn around. There's a bit or two in here about him trying to preserve something of it, in analog human fashion, which gives the film a bit of plot to keep things moving forward and helps set the mid-twentieth-century-bureaucracy tone (I kind of wonder how many people involved with this film remember the divided Germany and draw from it), but ultimately lets it settle back down into the intriguing mix of whether this is a situation that calls for rebellion or well-negotiated acceptance.

"Anima Possession"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

"Anima Possession" proves surprisingly fascinating because it goes to the expected places for a short film about a woman (Hedwig Tam Sin-Yin) unsatisfied with her robot lover (Fish Liew Chi-Yu) despite "Tammy" being built and configured to her exact specifications. Maybe, it's suggested, what you really want is a girlfriend without a control collar - which sounds good until another robot girl shows up, looking for an arm to replace the one removed because her dead master had a disability fetish.

Though filmmaker Wai Mo Chan seems to be a new face, there are other names in the credits who may be familiar to fans of Hong Kong cinema even beyond stars Tam and Liew, and they seem to be having fun doing something where the reception in China doesn't matter in the sort of independent short that's clearly low-budget but kind of well-appointed because the professionals involved know their stuff. It's transparently queer and fairly openly admits that the only resolution is to become more so. It also has fun with its sci-fi bits as characterization, as Tammy's complaints about the "add-ons" that her (former) Master has installed not being things she wanted slyly reflects her own frustration at not knowing how to function the way people expect her to herself (welcome to humanity!), and the way that the robots communicate non-verbally is both logical and symbolic of a deeper connection.

This is good enough for me to wonder about where its director fits into Hong Kong cinema going forward - can someone new pull off the same sort of "one in Mandarin for them, one in Cantonese for me" the way someone established like Fruit Chan or Pang Ho-Cheug does (or, in the latter case, did before imploding his career)? Maybe not, but at least they did come up with this.

"Fieldtrip"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, digital)

There's always one short in these programs where, even without being told, it's clear that some of the folks involved are not students or hobbyists but professionals who, even if they aren't sneaking equipment and/or processor cycles from their day jobs, certainly know how to get things done. In this package, that one's "Fieldtrip", which follows a military contractor whose ship home crashes upon takeoff for home and the deluxe retirement package they've been working for. The sole survivor, with a damaged suit, must get to a resupply base before considering his next move - no small feet considering they've just finished mining the planet.

Savvy viewers will immediately guess what "retirement" actually means in this context, and they're not exactly wrong, but filmmakers Paul Arion and Soren Bendt seem to be fan enough of the genre to set things up so that this doesn't really matter - whether you get there ahead of "Q" (Laurentieu Ciucur) or after, or if Arion & Bendt have something different in store, can wait while their resourceful engineer faces off with nifty variations on the classic hostile-planet bits, niftily staged in such a way that they also tell the viewer just enough about how things work to set up a terrific little ending.

"Molting"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)

A nifty little short about a protean mass making its way through a museum or archive, absorbing what it finds, forming a cocoon, and emerging changed, over and over again, many transformations seemingly necessary to get to the next step, frightening and scaring the automata tending the place, on the way to… what?

It's a question that's sort of easy to overlook because Katsushi Bowda's animation is so delightful, 15 minutes of stop motion where something familiar can persist even though the most radical changes of the strange invader. One of the delights of this form of animation is that it frequently doesn't mind showing its gears and mechanisms on the one hand while being impressively smooth in the same set of frames, and "Molting" hits the right balance of immersing the viewer and dazzling them at the technique throughout.

As to what Bowda is trying to communicate, I see a story about treating education as a scavenger hunt - you may only be trying to learn what you need for some purpose, getting through the numbered doors, but that approach is destructive and leaves nothing new in its wake. Ultimately, knowledge is transformative, and can't help but leave its user changed - whether they're looking for it to or not.

Totsukuni no shôjo (The Girl from the Other Side '22)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)

I was quite fond of the short-film version of this previously made by the same creators, and while expanding it into a feature inevitably causes some dilution, this still retains the core of what made the original so appealing: A monster who still retains some vestige of his soul, a young girl more afraid of loneliness than anything else, and the look of a storybook which only enhanced the feel of a dark fairy tale.

That girl is Shiva (voice of Rie Takahashi), somehow still alive after a slaughter on the border between Inside and Outside, found by a nameless Outsider that she eventually calls Sensei (voice of Jun Fukuyama). The pair bond, though it would be dangerous for them to touch despite Sensei assuring her that he is different from the others and cannot spread the Curse. They are happy with each other, the doting Sensei finding it easy to remember some lost, forgotten humanity by caring for the girl, but borderlands are full of dangers from all sides.

It's the style which makes the biggest, most consistent impression, even when filling the screen with detail, it's the sort of clean look that one often finds as an illustration in children's books, clean with striking contrasts between light and dark, but not so much that it's something abstract. The filmmakers play around with the visuals a bit, but it all keys off the charming core with friendly villages and forests paired with the contrast between a sweet girl whose boots imply mischief and a horned creature whose silhouette is nevertheless dignified. The animation is sometimes allowed to be a little fuzzy, but that just adds to the handmade feel of it.

Attempts to expand the story are a little iffier: World-building involving human treachery and the difference between "Insider" and "Outsider" fills in a few blanks but also makes it feel like there are loose ends. The voice acting is solid, though; while the short did without dialogue, Fukuyama and Takahashi fairly quickly become the voices that the characters have in my memory of the first one, and having the characters speak doesn't reduce a story previously told visually to words and details now that the option is available.

I suspect that this is still a fairly condensed version of the original manga (it clocks in at a tight 70 minutes), but it certainly captures the essence of this sort of fairy tale without much waste.

Next Door '22

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

It maybe gets a little extra credit in my mind for being a student film, albeit one given some extra funding as part of a special program, but Next Door hits an impressive balance between being a clever setup and featuring people who are only clever to a believable level. So often folks are secretly geniuses or it's all a master plan, but filmmaker Yeom Ji-ho makes this an impressively honest mess his first time out.

It's not the first attempt for Chan-woo (Oh Dong-min), who has been spending five years trying to pass the entrance exam to the police academy, now down to his last few won to the point where he's asking a friend to spot him the $10 processing fee. Sure, Song-ho says, but come to dinner with the guys tonight. Chan-woo agrees, but there's also drinking, and he really can't hold his liquor. He wakes up the next morning in the apartment of neighbor Ko-hyun (Choi Hee-jin), subject of many noise complaints, a bruise on his forehead, and a body on the floor in a pool of blood. As circumstances conspire to keep him in there, he'll have to get a head start on using what he's been studying to figure out what happened and how not to take the fall.

The film is perhaps at its best in the first half, when its would-be detective backs himself into a series of corners and is puzzling his way out on his own, fighting his self-doubt as much as the traps he finds himself in. Yeom writes Chan-woo as the sort of guy who makes up bad raps to psych himself up and is still enough in student mode that it's easy to see him thinking aloud to work something out, and Oh Dong-min takes full advantage, making Chan-woo dorky but endearing, an average-level puzzle solver rather than someone so drawn to the intricacies that you worry there might be something wrong in his head.

More characters get added to the mix eventually - otherwise there will come a point where he can just walk out of the room and be done with it - and it turns out that having more concrete adversaries doesn't necessarily make for more compelling conflict, especially in a late coming turn that will likely make the audience wonder if Chan-woo or Ko-hyun has ever watched a crime movie before. Even then, though, I am kind of intrigued by some of what Yeom plays with, particularly the idea of how you reinvent the femme fatale for an era built for Instagram cuties and crypto schemes. Choi Hee-jin plays it with an intriguing lack of subtlety that feels like it could either be clumsy or her knowing just how much effort a girl with her looks needs to expend when dealing with guys as awkward as Chan-woo. Maybe not quite there, but it's something to build on.

The finale gets even messier, maybe not quite hitting the right balance between an escape and an implosion as everything goes to hell, but the film has built up enough goodwill by this point to have momentum to get across the finish line. It's strong for a debut, enough so to make one curious where Yeom goes next with this experience under his belt.

"Bug Bites"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I feel like I could almost repeat my brief review of the director's previous short verbatim; this, too, is a sort of punchline short that ends on a neat bit of practical effects. I suspect it's especially satisfying for film and horror fans who are prone to get into the weeds a bit and know of what they speak: As unabashedly modern as the setting is, director Daniel DelPurgatorio and cinematographer O'Connor Hartnett certainly make the effort to make it look like it's shot on 16mm or cheap 35mm stock, and the way it's staged and acted - sort of like a giallo where intonation is kind of weird because everyone presumes they're going to be dubbed by someone whose delivery winds up being kind of odd itself - makes it feel like the sort of short where they just showed up at someone's apartment to shoot, but the finale says they clearly did not.

I don't know that it totally handles the swing between unnervingly creepy and "wait, no, really, what the heck?" - there's a gag bridging those tones that just keeps going well past the point of being funny because DelPurgatorio and co-writer Anthony R. Williams apparently couldn't find a punchline - but it still winds up the sort of thing that grabs a very specific spot at the intersection of "knows their filmmaking" and "mind goes to weird places".

Moloch

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Though I'm one with the tendency to overthink horror most of the time - I like well-thought-out mechanisms and monsters that represent things - I do kind of find myself appreciating that to the extent Moloch is that, it's sort of secondary. Director Nico van den Brink and co-writer Daan Bakker have made a movie that rings true enough for people to project their own fears onto it, but is mostly just a good time that's going to involve something supernatural and knives.

After all, it's already happened at least once, as a flashback features a ton of blood seeping into the basement pantry where a young girl is giving the mouse that lives there a treat. Thirty years later, Betriek (Sallie Harmsen) has a little girl of her own, Hanna (Noor van der Velden), a busybody mother (Anneke Blok) starting to have some health issues, and her father Reol (Fred Goessens) all living in the same family home. It's near a swamp where a local eccentric has suddenly died, somewhat ironically - there's an archaeological team there unearthing "bog bodies", naturally mummified corpses in extraordinary condition despite being centuries old. She winds up mediating between the locals and the scholars a bit, as her former career as a touring violinist means she's got the best English and the team's head, Jonas (Alexandre Willaume), doesn't speak Dutch. They hit it off, though Jonas finds it hard to believe the locals see Betriek and her family as more cursed than catch - that is, until a member of his team with no history of violence attacks the family in their home, and both the local legend of Feike and what they're unearthing suggests there may be something bigger afoot.

The filmmakers kick things off with a big, delightful piece of haunted-house creepiness - the opening shot of this modest house is perfectly dark and foggy with music that leaves no doubt that this is a bad place even before the walls start gushing blood - so it's kind of impressive just how quickly and easily they settle back into something mostly comfortable. As much as the intrigue about the strange deaths and how they may connect to the paranormal or an ancient legend is never far from the forefront, the film seems to be fueled by the chemistry between Sallie Harmsen and Alexandre Willaume more than anything else. They have these smart folks light up around each other with the mystery feeling like a mutual interest rather than an excuse to pair them.

The mystery and mythology that the filmmakers build is, I suppose, as close to a fair-play mystery as something involving ancient spirits and a pagan god can be, although it may wind up a little more opaque than necessary by the end: Bakker and van den Brink lay all the pieces out plainly enough but there's no really good point for a detective to point out what was a red herring and explain what was really happening, so they skip it. There's a bit of wondering what's being accomplished by all of this at the end and a sense that maybe the mythology fits together rather loosely, but never enough to actually stop things dead. This isn't really a murder mystery, after all, even if it maps to that genre surprisingly well.

No, it's the story of a curse, and van den Brink proves quite good at taking the seemingly innocuous and twisting into dangerous territory before one is even quite aware what has happened, playing the genre elements mostly dead-straight despite how light things often are between Betriek and Jonas. There's sometimes shocking amounts of blood and enough control of the atmosphere that he doesn't have to revel in mutilation or gore to get a good shock.

It's solid, well-built horror that doesn't have a specific bigger point to make, but still gets its jumps and creeps honestly.

Last and First Men

Three more days of this at the Brattle - Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday - and I recommend seeing it there while you can. I'm sure that this will wind up on video eventually, but it's the sort of thing that benefits greatly from being absorbed in a dark room where you can't easily get up to stretch your legs or fiddle with your phone without disturbing others or gaining their reluctant permission. It's only 70 minutes, but that's longer than I typically give to something relatively abstract at a stretch. For instance, I can't easily imagine sitting through an entire museum installation where the loop is that length.

Granted, to a certain extent, this is the sort of thing that I am tempted to feel was put on just for me. I'm fond of science fiction that doesn't worry too much about grinding the incredible down to human size and contemporary understanding, as well as the spare functionality of the language. Nobody here is trying to impress the audience with their wit or turn of phrase, but instead speaking plainly about extraordinary things. The earnest unreality of it makes it a little harder to grasp, but it kind of should be; the far future shouldn't just be a metaphor for the present.

Also, I'd love to go to those Balkan locations with my 3D film camera and just shoot them, seeing what kind of images and effects I get out of that. I've been posting images from that camera on another blog for a few months now (with each post containing versions for red/cyan glasses, animated "wigglegrams" that try and trick your brain into seeing a third dimension, and left-right images for viewers to put together as they will), and it's a lot of fun to photograph odd shapes and structures that way. It's mostly vacation photos and mostly in color, but I've gone through a roll of black-and-white film (from here to here to try and see local sights a different way.

This kind of feels like the sort of thing that might play the Harvard Film Archive or the Museum of Fine Art's film program if they'd reopened, but it fits right in at the Brattle as well. Check it out on-screen if you can, though hopefully it gets a fairly spiffy release on disc.

Last and First Men

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (special engagement, DCP)

Last and First Men is a pointedly unconventional movie, and not just because writer/director/composer Jóhann Jóhannsson uses metaphorical visuals rather than directly showing the story being told, but because that story is less an adventure or drama than an exercise in stretching the imagination without trying to wrestle that scale back down to something person-sized. The universe and the future are grand and unknowable and quite likely indifferent to present-day humanity, and this film invites a viewer to ponder that without reducing it to a problem that someone like that viewer can solve.

It's not initially presented that way, of course. Presented as a message delivered psychically from two thousand million years in the future, the narration (provided by Tilda Swinton) states early on that "we can help you and we need your help". But first, it must describe the world of the future, when humanity has taken up residence on Neptune as inner planets became uninhabitable, although it is not the humanity those in the current era would recognize, but the eighteenth successor species designed by their predecessors, although this may be the end, as the sun and other nearby stars are becoming unstable.

There are stories in there, and plot devices and problems to be solved, but no individual characters, really. Olaf Stapledon, the author of the original 1930 novel, was as much poet and philosopher as constructor of narrative, with Jóhannsson and co-writer José Enrique Macián stripping that novel down to its essential ideas, with narrator Tilda Swinton intoning them in a way that hints at eons of evolution without seeming condescending. Though a story reason this description of the far future is given, the mental image is the actual point, and Swinton captures the essence of describing marvels considered mundane from the teller's perspective.

It's description because this film isn't built to render those wonders photorealistically; even if a studio were willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on such an abstract story, this particular project appears to have its roots in an orchestral production anyway. Instead, Jóhannsson and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen take cameras to the Balkans and shoot various sculptures and bits of Brtualist architecture on 16mm black-and-white film. The results are, on their own, striking. Denied context, sitting in empty fields, it is difficult to determine whether these shapes come from some ancient civilization or modern abstraction, with a few suggesting human forms, while others look alien and others representing mid-twentieth-century electronics, while most seem strictly geometrical. The photography itself is phenomenal, reshaping these objects by shifting perspective and cautiously allowing them to emerge from mist as if materializing.

Their nature makes them good accompaniment to the narration, as the viewer knows that even though they are not created for this film, they come from human hands though the minds behind them are inscrutable in one way or another. Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman contribute an eerie and alien score (as Jóhannsson famously did for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival) that increases in intensity as the narration moves closer to the inevitable end, and it's fascinating to watch how the group combines these things to intensify the feeling: An angular figure where the human brain finds multiple faces complements talk of a telepathic hive mind, shapes resembling clenched fists hint at the struggle to continue, the camera moving through parallel sculptures with circular voids implies interplanetary travel. Jóhannsson never directly shows anything Swinton describes, but instead uses all of this to let the audience form an idea while also making sure that said audience knows that the reality is in fact stranger than they or the present-day people telling the story can imagine.

As the film ends after a sequence with some of the film's limited color (a dark, threatening red becoming a blinding white), the lighting seems to flicker for the first time, perhaps a candle being snuffed in the future or a hint that we are still proto-hominids experimenting with fire from the hive-mind narrator's perspective. At that point, it may occur to the viewer that the film never got around to how these two slices of humanity two billion years apart can help each other - but then, that was never the point.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Arctic

Holy crap, you can see the Kendall from the street again!



Arctic wound up being sort of a last-minute detour, as another theater reshuffled their screens to give The Wandering Earth a lot more showtimes than it originally had, wiping what I'd planned to see out, so while I was going to see the movie later rather than at the screening with a guest that I assumed would sell out, well, might as well give it a shot.

I got in, but with the movie starting so it was easiest to grab the front row, which was a bit of an interesting perspective, even for a "try and make sure you're using your entire field of vision" guy like myself. I think, to a certain extent, it enhanced the film, in how I sometimes had to do a careful scan to figure out where the action was and that magnified the feeling of the characters being swallowed by the field of snow and ice, but I get how some folks may not go for that. It probably helped that screen #1 has the best projection at the Kendall, although I don't know that they got a 4K DCP of this one.

Anyway, as promised, co-writer/editor Ryan Morrison:



Morrison is, I gather, a relatively local guy who had been working with director Joe Penna on a YouTube channel for years only to find that the ability to make money off such a thing has evaporated as Google changed the monetization rules, which had them anxious to try and create something similar in a new medium, with a similar emphasis on aiming for universal appeal and relatively few words. They weren't striving to get it down to a single line as was the case with Robert Redford in All Is Lost (a film that came up a few times in the Q&A), but they wanted something that could be told visually to the extent it was possible.

So they came up with a script called "On Mars", only to be shown the trailer for The Martian, which may have led them down a better path, as setting things in Iceland (or some other northern latitude) let them pull a lot of exposition out and focus on the characterization. Interestingly, they wrote up a whole bunch of backstory for Mads Mikkelsen to read, and he tossed it, feeling that if it wasn't going to be on the screen, it didn't need to be quite so specific, which went back to their ideas about keeping it universal - this wasn't meant to be about Overgard surviving as a way to resolve something in his past, but just about the act itself.

Mikkelsen was apparently down for whatever was on tap, with the biggest diva on set Agee the polar bear. The filmmakers apparently had to talk to the trainer's girlfriend because the beast is very possessive of the trainer himself. They also couldn't have any food on set for days before Agee was there, lest she smell it, or even have water bottles, because Agee would think it's food and try to take it.

The whole bit with the polar bear, they pointed out, was an example of how studio notes are not necessarily a bad thing - the need for something actively dangerous was what took them from "almost there" to the script really working.

Anyway, it's a neat one and I'm glad I got to see the Q&A after all. And, hey, they're finally actually showing the thing I intended to see now!

Arctic

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2019 in Landmark Kendall Square #2 (first-run, DCP)

There's often not a whole lot to say about this sort of survival adventure, especially if it's pulled off as well as Arctic is. You admire the difficult conditions, note how well the star communicates what's going on in his head with looks and body language, maybe try and find some other theme, and eventually decide that to a certain extent, the movie defies analysis because it's about a visceral experience. It can seem either very easy or like an impossible bit of alchemy because it feels like something anyone could do given the right location, and it's hard to pin down what makes a given attempt great.

And, yes, this one was quite clearly shot sompleace awfully cold and isolated, and Mads Mikkelsen is great at showing emotion by how his survivor does things rather than by delivering lines. It's inevitably and unapologetically that movie. It throws a bit of a curve in how it's built by starting out with Mikkelsen's pilot, Overgard, already doing what he can to scratch out survival, avoid the polar bear whose territory he has invaded, and try to attract rescue when the film starts, only for a second crash to set things in motion, which is kind of clever in terms of leading with the methodical grind rather than giving a false impression of what the film will be with spectacle. From there, it goes in a familiar direction - the able-bodied person crossing the ice with an injured companion, bits of how-to, animal attacks and dangerous terrain.

But the details are good. The most important ones, which arguably drive the entire film, are the ones that give a sense of the preciousness of life in all circumstances but especially this one. The first time the audience sees Overgard catch a fish, he holds it for a moment, wordlessly considering that this living thing will have to die to feed him. At the other end of the film, a pale pink bloom peeking out from the blinding white of the snow and ice around it reminds him of the principles he's about to defy. The filmmakers have Overgard demonstrate a great deal of ingenuity but never any sort of foolish pride in doing without.

Full review at EFC.

These Those Weeks In Tickets: 23 April 2018 - 6 May 2018

Four days until Fantasia starts (in July), so it's time to put the final bow on my blogging about Independent Film Festival Boston (back in April and May).





Might as well get right to it, then, without making the dumb mistake I did when writing it on the calendar page above:

• April 25th: Eighth Grade
• April 26th: Crime + Punishment and "Shorts Allston"
• April 27th: Leave No Trace and Rodents of Unusual Size
• April 28th: Tre Maison Dasan, The New Fire, Never Goin' Back, and Don't Leave Home
• April 29th: Nothing Is Truer Than the Truth, We the Animals, The Third Murder, and Beast
• April 30th: The World Beneath Your Feet and Under the Tree
• May 1st: Disobedience and Damsel
• May 2nd: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The wise thing would be to take a break from movies for a few days, but Avengers: Infinity War had opened during the festival, and by then, folks on social media were already not spoiling but hinting enough at stuff so that you can see the shape of what they were working around, so no sense waiting any longer! Happily, it's pretty nifty, enough to make me feel pretty good about this insanely ambitious 22-film cycle ending with a bang next year.

With that film being an 800-pound gorilla, there was room for two Chinese movies the next weekend: The Trough turned out to be a pretty darn nifty Hong Kong crime story, while A or B was an interesting thriller that doesn't quite work. The sort that's good enough to make one interested in a remake, I guess.

After that,it was easier to get back into the habit of doing these weekly again, while also updating my Letterboxd page as well as the blog.

Avengers: Infinity War

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2018 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)

Infinity War probably won't be the crowning achievement of Marvel's massive experiment in moviemaking, even if the second half turns out to be terrific when it comes out next year. But that's kind of okay; as the first Avengers replicated the feel of a great team-up comic, this one represents the "event" where the scale is much of the point, where the creators are connecting not just threads but genres, with the spies, wizards, superheroes, and spacemen all having to figure out how to play by each other's rules.

So there's not really a great story, and the villain winds up too big to be really interesting (although it could be worse; Marvel's going to get to Kang eventually). Maybe they'll eventually find something that resonates in the center about how Thanos's philosophy and zero-sum outlook is that of a man who lacks imagination and the ability to create, even with all the power in the universe literally in the palm of his hand, the opposite of Tony Stark building new solutions, but it's not there yet. Still, you've got to admire the heck out of a movie that finds a teenage vigilante and his super-scientist mentor stowing away on a spaceship to rescue a wizard from aliens. For as much as Marvel has spent the last few years crossing things over in nifty ways, that's a great job of putting all the things you love together.

Is that kind of a lot for a while, with almost too much action? Yeah, but there's also no denying that these filmmaker are really good at it. The last act is enormous, an action set-piece that spans three solar systems, but it's paced, choreographed and rendered fantastically, and the action throughout isn't too shabby.

The film ends on a combined callback and tease, and given how much Marvel has done well over the past ten years, I wouldn't bet against them taking a movie mostly spent building up a villain who needed it and serving up a satisfying denouement with part two next year. They've done the like before.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2018.06: The World Before Your Feet and Under the Tree

Both during the film and the Q&A for The World Before Your Fee, Matt Green (left) says he's a year and a half behind on his blog, and, brother, I feel ya - note the 57-day lag between seeing this film and posting the completed review and my mild amazement that I'm going to have two full weeks between the end of writing about this festival and catching a bus for Fantasia. That's why I'm ending at the middle - every movie I saw at the festival after this one has already hit theaters and bumped up the list.

But enough about me! I'm also kind of astounded by the project of walking every block of every street in New York City, considering how utterly wiped I am after a day of trying to see every room in a museum or wandering a sliver of a city. Green talked about how he feels like he's coming to the end, with 500 to 1000 miles to go, but he's been at that figure for several years, and he keeps finding more roads and pathways to walk in the City, and it's fair to ask whether he's putting off what he does with the rest of his life off. He doesn't seem to have much interest in holding down a day job, or a place of his own, and I suspect he'll eventually write a book despite that not being his plan because what else is he going to do with his time and what he's amassed afterward? I kind of admire the ability to live an unencumbered life while also having a little side-eye toward how many other people have to keep busy in order to give him that freedom.

Anyway, it was an entertaining Q&A, in part because much of the film was made with just Green and filmmaker Jeremy Workman. They were honest about how, yeah, Matt probably benefited from doing this as a white male quite a bit, especially compared to the Jamaican fellow doing something similar. They joked a bit about the inevitable "you don't have to talk to my girlfriend" / "oh, we absolutely have to talk to your girlfriend" conversations.

Looks like that one has just been picked up for distribution, albeit by a pretty small label. Under the Tree got picked up by Magnolia, for that matter, although I'm not sure how major a label they are any more (they used to look like the next Miramax, but I don't see their logo much any more). So, if you're just now hearing about these way after the festival is done, it looks like you'll have a chance to catch them.

The World Before Your Feet

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2018 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)

It's a competitive business, making an independent film and then getting it into theaters and festivals and in good position for streaming services, convincing people that it is worth their time and money. That's why I take a special joy in seeing movies like The World Before Your Feet make the cut despite being completely inconsequential. Go to enough film festivals, or see enough boutique-house films at a rate that approaches going to a festival, and it's something of a relief to see something that is pleasant and well made but free of the burden of convincing you that it's important.

The film follows Matt Green, a former civil engineer who has spent much of his thirties on a project to walk every street in every borough of New York City. Depending what you count as a street, that is somewhere between six and eight thousand miles (Matt is walking footpaths in public parks and cemeteries, so his number skews high). He is not necessarily being systematic about it - in some cases a day's starting point is determined by where his couch-surfing or cat-sitting - and he's opting to travel light enough to keep his expenses low rather than hold down a job. The film opens on day 1,258 out of about 2,200 and counting, and jumps around from there.

Between Matt's improvised, non-linear itinerary and the need to filter even more uneventful footage than usual, director Jeremy Workman (who also shot, edited, and produced the film) must have had a heck of a challenge finding a shape for his movie, and a great deal of his success comes from not imposing too much structure on it. The film itself is impressively freeform, spending time on random subjects like barber shops with z's replacing s's in their names ("Cutz", "Shearz") or "churchagogues" (former temples repurposed into churches after the Jewish community moved but still showing their old symbols if you know where to look), but managing momentum well; Workman may fade to black, throw up a new title card, and move forward (or back) a few months every once in a while, but it seldom feels like stopping and starting again.

Full review on EFC

Undir trénu (Under the Tree)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2018 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)

Under the Tree is a tight little story of simmering malice in the suburbs that starts testing how dark you want your comedy very early, to the point where it's arguably just a couple of jokes to slide the audience into quite mean-spirited material. Still, the veneer of absurdity over the building pressure (the latter more underlined by the score than the former) is enough to keep pulling the audience forward, as is the precarious balance between horrific potential and good intentions.

It starts with Atli (Steinþór Hróar Steinþórsson) being kicked out of his house by his wife Agnes (Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir) for what are understandable, if not necessarily insurmountable reasons, and as such winding up in his old family home while Agnes moves for full custody of their daughter Asa (Sigrídur Sigurpálsdóttir Scheving), where his mother Inga (Edda Björgvinsdóttir) and to a lesser extent his father Baldvin (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) tend to compare him with absent brother Uggi. They're having a disagreement with their next door neighbors, as their prize tree casts a shadow over the back patio where Eybjorg (Selma Björnsdóttir) likes to sunbathe, and Inga doesn't particularly like the younger woman her neighbor Konrad (Þorsteinn Bachmann) married anyway.

Trees like the one Inga and Baldvin have are something of a rarity in their residential neighborhood - the houses are densely packed and the rocky Icelandic soil is not particularly hospitable - so the most practically straightforward solution to the problem is off the table. There's something fitting about a tree serving as the personification of the couples' anger and resentment; it grows slowly but surely, its shadow harmless until it reaches a certain height and something else changes, and the root system has been growing as well, maintaining a firm grip on the ground (and suggesting that just getting out a chainsaw won't get to the whole issue). It's a living thing even if it seems inactive on first glance, pre-empting the question of how these neighbors ever got along. Director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson and cinematographer Monika Lenczewska shoot it and the backyards in question carefully, often framing scenes just wide enough to capture the entirety of the feuding families' house and yard, but just tight enough to exclude the rest of the neighborhood. Every once in a while they'll do the same on the other side of their houses, a brief reminder that all this melodrama may be hidden from passerby.

Full review on EFC

The Maze Runner and the last Fantasia catch up.

I actually finished the review for Welcome to New York on the flight from Boston to Houston, so I think it's fair to say that I did, in fact, finish all my Fantasia business before Fantastic Fest, even if I am actually posting from the ground in Austin. Woo-hoo!

Anyway, enjoy The Maze Runner, which I caught as a preview about a week and a half ago; it opens tonight/tomorrow, and it's not bad, just kind of overdoing it on the holding back. You'll certainly see many action movies that aren't put together as well as it is during any given season, and it's got a capable enough cast. Here's hoping there's more to the sequel, if such a thing gets made.

Anyway, not much time to get bagged and lined up for Fantastic Fest day one, where I'll be seeing Hardkor Disco, As Seen By Others, and Cub.

And to close up the old business, here are the last seven Fantasia reviews: Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission, Real, Ejecta, The Desert, Monsterz, Metalhead, and Welcome to New York. As much as I'm looking forward to the next week, I also can't wait to get back to Montreal.

The Maze Runner

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2014 in Regal Fenway #13 (preview, RPX DCP)

There have been action movie more aggressively stripped of the basic building blocks of story - like character background and motivation - than The Maze Runner, but the better ones are either trying to make some point about basic human nature or engage in some criticism of their genre. Here, it's the generic anonymity of a video game, with player proxies, tasks to accomplish, and the promise of information as a reward. That's all good for as far as it goes; it just doesn't go very far.

Player approximately-38 (Dylan O'Brien) enters "The Glade" the way all of them have, through a cargo elevator that also supplies whatever the couple dozen or so amnesiac boys in this walked valley can't grow or glean themselves, although it's clear that there's something a bit different about him, since if the others have flashes of the outside world in their dreams, they don't seem to mention it. High walls surround The Glade on all sides, with doors that lead into a massive labyrinth, closing at night when the sound of "Grievers" frighten the Gladers (nobody who has stayed in the maze overnight has survived their sting). Things have apparently changed with the arrival of Thomas - names come back in a day or two - as one of the "maze runners" looking for a way out is stung during the daytime, soon followed by an ahead-of-schedule new arrival. This one's a girl (Kaya Scodelario), clutching a note saying she's the last.

A half-dozen our so other boys have roles of some import, and while only a couple get to really show much in the way of individuality - most notably Chuck (Blake Cooper), the youngest, and change-fearing fighter Gally (Will Poulter) - they are, by and large, a group that the audience will generally find amiable enough, although the range of personalities is both kind of narrow and low-key, even with the backstory that implies a Lord of the Flies period that nobody wants to return to in the past. The cast isn't really bland; they're just handed characters who have no history by definition and given a story where, at least in this adaptation of the novel, only ever pivots on the characters' emotional reactions as a distraction.

Full review at EFC

Gekijouban HUNTERxHUNTER: The Last Mission (Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission )

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, HD)

As near as I can tell, there were fifty weekly TV episodes between the two Hunter X Hunter films released in Japan last year, so it's not exactly surprising that The Last Mission does not exactly pick up right where Phantom Rouge left off - and despite this film's title, the weekly anime and manga adventure has rolled on through 2014, meaning another film is not unlikely. And they may as well keep on going; the fans are still there and this is a good time even for those going in relatively cold.

Pre-teen Hunters Gon and Kilua haven't changed that much since the events of Phantom Rouge, although Kurapika is now working as a princess's bodyguard and is apparently on speaking terms with a villain he wanted dead before. Today, Gon & Kilua are attending the Battle Olympiad at Heaven's Arena to support their friend Zushi as are many other members of the Hunter Association as well as various dignitaries. Which means that bit from the beginning of the movie when Isaac Netero, now president of the Association but one of its fiercest warriors decades ago, didn't quite kill rebel hunter Jed before he could cast a "Demonic Grudge" spell, is obviously foreshadowing a pretty massive hostage situation.

As before, there is a fair amount of Hunter X Hunter mythology referenced by characters who don't exactly get a proper introduction, so non-fans may be a bit lost at times. On the other hand, enough of it is in the form of secrets being revealed that it's not hard to catch up with the important stuff, and the script by Nobuaki Kishima makes things a bit easier by sticking close to familiar genre material: This is basically Die Hard, when you get right down to it, albeit with super-powered 12-year-olds in a kilometer-high building. That the resurrected Jed is threatening to reveal the Hunter Association's dark secrets works on its own as a macguffin without the actual nature of those secrets being terribly important, and that his powers come from "on" rather than "nen" isn't that big a deal, either. While some events are probably a big deal for fans, the action and emotion is big and over the top enough to be a blast for the rest of us.

Full review on EFC

Riaru: Kanzen naru kubinagaryû no hi (Real)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has gotten even more interesting in the past few years, after stepping away from horror to do 2008's drama Tokyo Sonata, then immersing himself in teaching before doing a television series, a short feature that's probably as much record promo as stand-alone project, and this bit of science fiction. The interesting thing here is that this is still very much the work of a guy who knows how to scare you, making a pretty straight line between slick futurism and a contemporary world becoming more and more strange.

The science fictional elements are an old standby, an apparatus that one person can use to enter the dreams of another, in this case husband Koichi Fujita (Takeru Sato) trying to reach his wife Atsumi Kazu (Haruka Ayase), who has been comatose since a suicide attempt one year ago. He finds her constantly revising the horror manga she's drawing, saying she could finish and leave the apartment if he could just find a picture of a plesiosaur she drew in fourth grade. He searches for it outside her dream environment, first finding an unpublished comic and then following that to Hikone island where she grew up (and he spent that fourth-grade year), where a buried memory awaits.

The material itself isn't necessarily the most creative - technology to get inside the heads of coma patients is a classic bit of sci-fi - but Kurosawa and his co-writers (and original novelist Rokuro Inui) come up with neat details, such as "philosophical zombies" and jumbled-up dreams. His particular genre-film background comes in especially handy here, as it's no particular surprise when the subconscious mind of someone who writes and illustrates horror stories for a living contains zombies of a non-philosophical bent and other monsters, but beyond that, Kurosawa has always been one whose movies played on the idea of a world where things suddenly don't make sense, perfect for this sort of movie. He's also accomplished enough to pull off an impressively constructed "how'd they do that" scene where Koichi and Atsumi walk into fog in one location and out in another despite it being a single tracking shot.

Full review on EFC

Ejecta

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

In the Q&A after the movie, the filmmakers described how Ejecta sort of came together as a sort of chimera, with its two distinct tracks being shot well apart and stitched together like a Frankenstein's monster. It's not necessarily a bad idea - I don't really think I'd like to see either stretched to a full ninety minutes, even if each has something worth watching - but it doesn't quite come together as a greater whole.

Though cut together, with both built around talking to the same man, the two parts have distinct styles. One is found-footage, shoot by paranormal documentarian Joe Sullivan (Adam Seybold), who has come to a remote farm to interview William Cassidy (Julian Richings), who claims to have been abducted by aliens, and certainly seems erratic enough to support his claims that they did something to his head. That's certainly bolstered, for the audience at least, by the other scenes, where Cassidy is being held in a black site and interrogated by Dr. Tobin (Lisa Houle), who is also directing a team of government agents very interested in the aliens' latest visitation.

Both tracks are ways that filmmakers with a certain set of resources - not a lot of money but a capable cast - might go about making a sci-fi thriller, letting the actors build characters around necessary exposition and saving one's metaphorical and literal bullets for a big payoff. The trouble is, this tends to lead to unreliable narrators teasing the audience with hints rather than telling the bigger story, and while the whole team - writer Tony Burgess and directors/editors Chad Archibald & Matt Wiele - do yeoman's work keeping up the feel of forward motion while keeping actual resolution just out of reach, but there's just not a whole lot to it.

Full review on EFC

El Desierto (The Desert)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

There's a lot to like about Christoph Behl's post-apocalyptic love triangle, and the fact that it can be described as such without coming across as an annoying genre mismatch is just the start. It's a neat little entry into the canon of small stories that take place during the end of the world, albeit one that sacrifices most of the immediate physical damage to do it.

As far as they can tell - and in any real sense that matters - Axel (Lautaro Delgado) and Jonathan (William Prociuk) may be the last two men on Earth, with Ana (Victoria Almeida) the last woman. They've converted a house into a fortress and come up with rules to ensure their survival as well as (hopefully) their sanity, but it's no surprise that they're starting to reach their breaking point. Maybe it could have gone on indefinitely when it was just Axel and Jonathan, but adding Ana makes it a situation that is never going to go smoothly, even if things didn't wind up with Ana and Jonathan together and Axel burning with desire.

The cast is terrific in a situation where one not playing up to the standards set by the other two could have sunk the whole enterprise, or at least reduced it to something much less interesting. Behl makes the somewhat interesting choice of not having Axel's obsession bleed into envy, which makes the scenes with just Delgado and Prociuk a little more interesting. There's a sense of them being perfectly complimentary, with Axel's intensity a bit unnerving but Prociuk getting a certain amount of the same effect by portraying Jonathan as kind of laid-back - not the kind that gets people killed through inattention, but right on the border of detachment, a distinction that is not easy to see immediately.

Full review on EFC

Monsterz

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

2011's Haunters was an excellent Korean movie that established a simple premise - two people with opposite superpowers (mind control and rapid healing) on a collision course - and delivered with entertaining action pieces, a likable cast of characters, and style to complement its straight-ahead drive. I figured it for a US remake, but Japan got there first, and sort of screwed it up.

The initial set-up is, in fact, almost exactly the same: Ten or fifteen years ago, an abusive father tried to kill his son but succeeded only in unleashing his powers to control anyone he sees, with the enraged boy forcing his father to snap his own neck. The boy is grown now, limping through the world on a prosthetic leg, making people give him whatever he needs and occasionally adding control just because he can. Elsewhere in the city, mild-mannered Shuichi Tanaka (Takayuki Yamada) works for a moving company with friends Jun (Taiga) and Akira (Motoki Ochiai), at least until he is hit by a car and recovers impossibly quickly. He eventually winds up taking a job in the driver's guitar shop and getting close to his daughter Kanae (Satomi Ishihara). When the "monster" (Tatsuya Fujiwara) robs the shop, it turns out that Shuichi is not vulnerable to his powers, and that just cannot be allowed!

This version, adapted by Yusuke Watanabe and directed by Hideo Nakata, has some nice details (although giving a kid with immense psychic powers a copy of the Akira manga to read and latch onto may have been a bad idea), but it also does some completely unnecessary things. Much like the recent Ju-on reboot, the cast skews younger than that of the original, and while there's a certain logic to it, there's also a certain bit of weight lost. It's a weird bit of narrow-casting to appeal to a core audience which is also reflected in how Kyu-nam's Ghanian and Turkish friends are now otaku or gay, with no mention of Kanae having a western mother. The unusual diversity of Haunters's cast played into a theme, which is why seeing it reduced is somewhat disappointing.

Full review on EFC

Málmhaus (Metalhead)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Metalhead doesn't exactly sneak up on an audience - it's clear from the start that writer/director Ragnar Bragason has some pretty good ideas for his story about grief and mourning, especially when he trains his camera on the parents of the title character. And yet, is still never quite what the viewer might expect, especially if he or she comes in expecting a simple story of a young woman out of sync with her small town (although that's in there and also done well).

Nine years ago (in 1983), Icelandic farmers Karl (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) and Droplaug (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) sent their daughter Hera to fetch her older brother Baldur for dinner, only to witness him slipping and falling into a still-running thresher. Hera responded by taking possession of Baldur's heavy-metal record collection and immersing herself in that. Now a young woman, Hera (Thorbjörg Helga Dyrfjörd) wait for the bus out of town every morning but never actually gets on - which is more than can be said for her still shell-shocked parents - and her devotion to this music along with her generally hostile demeanor has the conservative farming community alarmed, though the new priest (Thröstur Leó Gunnarsson) may be more understanding than she expects.

After the horrific opening, there's not always that much for Hera to actually do, but Bragason keeps her just busy enough for things to crank along. In this town of Hof, she's the squarest of pegs in the roundest of holes, but by this point all the big clashes seem to be over, and the focus is on how static a situation is: Hera is pointedly not leaving, and is continuing to orbit her lifelong friend Knutur (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) if only because they're seemingly the only young people around. Her drunken acting out is entirely predictable by this point, while Karl and Droplaug are in a similar state of paralysis. It's such an utterly effective look at what it's like to be unable to move past grief or to be stuck in a town that seemingly has nothing for you but your family that one might not notice just how close things have come to a breaking point.

Full review on EFC

Welcome to New York

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Closing Night, HD)

That Welcome to New York is a long, rambling movie is not in and of itself a bad thing. There are times early on where it's a definite plus as the audience is kind of assaulted with the excesses of M. Devereaux (Gerard Depardieu), and compacting either that our what comes later might change the impact. Ultimately, I wonder what it's about. Who is never in doubt: The movie is based closely enough on the Dominique Strauss-Khan case closely enough to have three screens worth of disclaimers at the front, but pointedly fictionalized in a way that causes it to lose a bit of weight.

Devereaux, an official at the World Bank and potentially the next President of France, has tremendous appetites, especial of the sexual variety, and no compunctions about indulging them at any time, whether it be with the attractive and accommodating women he has hired for his office in Washington or the escorts he and his traveling companion hire on a trip to New York. The next morning, a hotel maid walks in on him as he's coming out of the shower...

... and cut to Devereaux checking out, creeping his daughter's Canadian boyfriend out with his enthusiastic sex talk that includes speculation about the young couple's activities, and making his way to the plane while the NYPD takes the maid's statement and discovers just how little time they have to arrest him before he flees the country. When they do, word reaches Devereaux's wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) in the middle of a charity dinner, forcing the publishing heiress to come to America and see to his defense, try to salvage her ambitions for him, and see if her husband realizes just what sort of damage he's done.

Full review on EFC

Another Me and Land Ho!

I was originally going to write about a triple feature, but I can't really say much about the third movie and it wouldn't really fit the pattern anyway, so we'll hold that off until TWIT gets posted in a day or two.

Both of these movies, it turns out, are directed by people whose work I had enjoyed before even if I'm not specifically a fan; I recognized Isabel Coixet's name right off the bad for Another Me and at least thought Aaron Katz sounded familiar for Land Ho!, but it took not just trips to IMDB but quick looks back at my reviews for The Secret Life of Words, Quiet City, and Cold Weather to recognize just how much I'd liked their previous work. That's kind of a weird feeling, to be honest - shouldn't that genuine fondness have come back on its own?

I must admit, I recommend Land Ho! much more highly than Another Me, and it's not entirely because it uses the ending I didn't like in A Night of Nightmares a couple years ago. It's an ending a movie has to earn and give a bigger sense of its meaning than this one did.


One other, mildly amusing thing: As I was walking from the T station to the Kendall Square theater, but was still far enough away that it wasn't entirely clear where I was headed, a lady stopped me and mentioned she had just got out of Land Ho! and it was one of the best movies of the year. How the heck did she know what I was up to?


Another Me

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2014 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)

Another Me didn't look like much - a young-adult thriller that likely would have gone straight to video-on-demand but for a slow release week and the fact that the other line on star Sophie Turner's filmography is Game of Thrones - but Isabel Coixet as the person to adapt it to the screen is a strange enough choice to be interesting. Unfortunately, as much as the gamble of putting an art-house filmmaker in charge of a mainstream horror movie could pay off well, it can also turn out as dull and muddled as this one.

A year ago, Fay Delussey (Turner) had a seemingly perfect life, at least until the day that her father Don (Rhys Ifans) is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Now, he's slowly wasting away, her mother Ann (Claire Forlani) is probably having an affair, and a girl at school (Charlotte Vega) is saying she only got the lead part in the school play because their drama teacher (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) feels sorry for her. Her photography is taking a decided turn for the macabre, but that may be fitting - Fay gets the feeling that someone is following her, and people are claiming to have seen her when she knows she was elsewhere.

I must admit, I feel a little foolish for not making the full connection about what's going on until after the movie - adapting a novel by Cathy MacPhail, Coixet has pieced together a few very familiar ghost-story bits into a story that hits upon some of the same themes as her My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words. The trouble with that is that it's Don's story, not Fay's, and being in a wheelchair means that he can't be a terribly active participant (although there's probably a pretty creepy horror movie to be made where the focus stays on Don).

Full review at EFC

Land Ho!

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2014 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

There is something to be said for filmmakers (or anyone) getting out of their comfort zone. Both directors Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens are known for certain types of movies - Katz for some of the better youth-oriented mumblecore to come out while that was a word people used and Stephens for films set in Kentucky. Neither seems likely to make a film following a couple of senior citizens to Iceland, but that''s what they've done working together, and it turns out to be a very good call.

The two men are Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) and Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson), who became friends after marrying sisters but haven't seen each other much since the women left the picture (Mitch divorced, Colin was widowed). Mitch comes to visit Colin in Kentucky, and then springs a surprise on him - he's purchased two round-trip tickets to Iceland, and insists Colin come with him.

Why does Mitch want to go to Iceland specifically? In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, it is simply a matter of him never having been to Iceland and wanting to see the place. Katz & Stephens don't necessarily give the film much Icelandic character in terms of the people - there's nary a subtitle to be found, and almost every character who has a speaking part is also a tourist coming from the United States or Canada (Colin's originally Australian, but he's been in the U.S. for some time), and there's not much play give to how they're in a foreign land but still sticking to their own people. It does provide a fantastic backdrop visually, especially once the guys get outside their nice Reykjavik hotel. The black volcanic sand is a constant reminder that this isn't the average road trip, along with the steam rising from from hot springs surrounded by scrubby greenery. And some shots are just beautiful, with cinematographer Andrew Reed backing off the lo-fi look he used for the films he shot for Katz but not over-emphasizing digital sharpness.

Full review at EFC

The Fantasia Daily 2014.20: The Desert, Monsterz, Metalhead, Welcome to New York

The wind-down for Fantasia is kind of long this year - Tuesday was the official "closing night", with Welcome to New York the closing night film, but there's more on Wednesday and an extra day of encores on Thursday.

Kind of a bland day, though, with all of the movies inspiring less than a strong reaction from me. I kind of get the impression that the festival wasn't blown away by demand for Welcome to New York - I think the announcement in French before Metalhead was that you could go see WtNY on that ticket as well, which (needless to say) you don't do with a sold out show.

And then, man, the Q&A.



Abel Ferrara (r) delivered one of the most rambling Q&A sessions I've seen, refusing to answer the simple question of what attracted him to the subject and going off on tagents with almost every question, and festival co-director Mitch Davis (l) basically had to just sit back, enjoy the randomness, and let the man go, because I don't think you come see Ferrara for focus. He's an emotional guy who specializes in rawness in his films, and this is the persona you kind of have to expect. He's the sort of "from the gut" filmmaker that you'd expect to bristle when somebody mentions "process".

Still, this lasted from the end of the movie at around midnight until one-thirty or so, and while sometimes these Q&As aren't exactly informative, this one occasionally felt like the movie just happened free of anybody making a decision at all. I'm pretty sure that's not the case, although it would kind of explain why it rambled so much.

Also, there was one guy a few rows behind me who went to the "who are we to judge" well with Gerard Depardieu's DSK-inspired character and mentioned how his wife kept trying to put the blame on him rather than accepting culpability herself, and while I suppose there's some merit to the latter, I am really all kind of okay with judging someone who sees a maid come into his hotel room and decides that ejaculating on her face is a reasonable thing to do harshly. There's not exactly a lot of moral ambiguity to this character.


Anyway, final day #2 will be Preservation, the "Outer Limits of Animation" block, and probably Killers, although I might be tempted by The Fives if the animation ends early enough. Skipping Kundo: Age of the Rampart in the hopes that AMC will actually book it in Boston at the end of the month.


"Former Things"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, HD)

"Former Things" is fifteen minutes of a man returning to his childhood home after some sort of outbreak, and it's all right. It's not sluggish or overwrought or hampered by bad effects or anything like that. It's a decent slice of post-apocalyptic melancholy that doesn't drag.

That's something, but I've got to admit - I'm kind of with the folks who were struggling to remember its name after the main feature. It's a decent bit of imagery, but not one with much staying power at all.

El Desierto (The Desert)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

There's a lot to like about Christoph Behl's post-apocalyptic love triangle, with Lautaro Delgado and William Prociuk playing what may be the last two men in the world and Victoria Almeida the last woman, a situation that is never going to go smoothly. The cast is terrific in their restrained performances, and a bit of clever structuring and editing in the last act makes the movie something close to heartbreaking at times. The flies are unnerving, both the ones buzzing around the house where they're holed up and tattooed on one character's skin.

The movie doesn't quite run out of steam, but it does bump up against its barriers on occasion. Behl and company don't seem to have the resources to depict a post-apocalyptic world outside of the house, and it often comes across as limited rather than claustrophobic. It's also the sort of movie where identifying any particular scene that needs to go or be tightened is difficult, but where the cumulative effect of not a whole lot happening starts to wear on the viewer. I felt a little more fidgety than I really should have coming out of it, even if I liked most of what it was doing.

Monsterz

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

2011's Haunters was an excellent Korean movie that established a simple premise - two people with opposite superpowers (mind control and rapid healing) on a collision course - and delivered with entertaining action pieces, a likable cast of characters, and style to complement its straight-ahead drive. I figured it for a US remake, but Japan got there first, and sort of screwed it up.

It's got some nice details - giving a kid with immense psychic powers a copy of Akira to read may have been a bad idea - but it also does some completely unnecessary things, like grafting a greater mythology onto the story but not making that actually important, while also trying to give the characters too much nuance. There are odd jumps, action that seems nowhere near as crisp or logical as it was in the Korean film, and a tendency by horror director Hideo Nakata to equate killing a lot of people with excitement. It's a remake trying to add too much at the expense of what made the original terrific.

Málmhaus (Metalhead)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Metalhead doesn't exactly sneak up on an audience - it's clear from the start that writer/director Ragnar Bragason has some pretty good ideas for his story about grief and mourning, especially when he trains his camera on the parents of the title character, who still seem shell-shocked nine years after losing their son while daughter Hera watched. There's not always that much for Hera to actually do, but just enough for things to crank along.

The last act is something special, though, as Karl and Droplaug start to come out of their funks and Helga crashes in a way that finds her giving in to the standards of her small Icelandic community just as a group from Norway who like her music shows up. It's a surprisingly complex interaction that actually frees the movie up to be funny in a way that the previous hour of one lone headbanger in a quiet farming town might have been expected to be but wasn't.

I'm not sure that Metalhead will emerge as a particular favorite, but it's pretty good, and surprisingly ingratiating when you might expect screaming.

Full review on EFC

Welcome to New York

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Closing Night, HD)

That Welcome to New York is a long, rambling movie is not in and of itself a bad thing. There are times early on where it's a definite plus as the audience is kind of assaulted with the excesses of M. Deveraux (Gerard Depardieu), with a noteworthy contrast as he's arrested and booked.. There are later scenes with Jacqueline Bisset as his wife trying to fight the charges and save her reputation that go on and on, and while they're individually interesting, the cumulative effect is wearing.

Ultimately, I wonder what it's about. The movie is based closely enough on the Dominique Strauss-Khan case to have three screens worth of disclaimers at the front but pointedly fictionalized in a way that causes it to lose a bit of weight, it winds up with the Special Victims Unit episode resolved off-screen and no notable movement for either Deveraux or Simone, it winds up just a look at a man without a conscience who skates because he is rich and powerful, but doesn't seem to have much to say about the matter beyond the obvious while letting Depardieu and Bisset do their things.

Full review on EFC