Fantasia 2025.06: Cielo, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, "The Traveler & The Troll", and Dog of God

Man, I remember when weekdays at this festival were shorter than weekend days and you could get out touristing before the first movie!

First stop in de Sève for the day was Cielo with producer John Dunton-Dowser and director Alberto Sciamma, who mentioned seeing the first couple images in a dream but had no idea where they would fit in any sort of story. He mentioned this to Dunton-Dowser, whose wife is from Bolivia, and learning about it started to give the story shape. Because a movie takes time to come together, the three young actresses they were considering for the lead aged out, which led them to Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda, whom they describe as a truly remarkable young lady. She sent a video greeting that played before the movie in what sounded to my ears like pretty darn good French; she's been in a French-immersion school for the past year and Sciamma boasts that she's caught up with most of the kids who have been learning since kindergarten. Part of their goal for the movie is to help fund her education, the filmmakers describe it as a place where the drop-off between the private and public schools is very steep.

Sciamma really seems to have fallen in love with the place, praising the local crew and how they made it a Bolivian film rather than one by a Spanish filmmaker. He also took care to mention that the altitude in Bolivia can really throw you for a loop: La Paz is the most altitudinous capital city in the world, 2km above sea level, so the air is thin and the deserts get far chillier than you would think just from looking at them. A beautiful country, by all accounts, but not for the weak of spirit.

Next up, Ruppert Bottenberg hosting Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers director Amélie Ravalec, who discovered this strain of post-WWII Japanese art relatively recently and did a deep dive into it. Having made this sort of broad-overview documentary before, one thing she noted was that while Western artists in previous projects would often agree to participate quickly but maybe not be incredibly helpful, the Japanese artists often took quite a bit of convincing but were very giving of their time once they assented. There was more she would have liked, but given the timeframe, several people she wanted to interview had passed, and including even seconds of archival footage from television interviews (for example) would have ballooned the feature's budget.

The film would be back in town with French subtitles at the end of the week (now, if you're in Montreal), and has also been reworked into an artbook that was promoted in the closing credits, and it should be a good companion, considering just how much material is in the movie.

There might have technically been time to fit the Korean shorts package in at de Sève before crossing the street, but with everything running a few minutes late, but not the consistent same few minutes, I decided not to chance it, got some food, and then saw Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards in Hall (can't quite make the shift to Alumni Auditorium). Good fun.

I'm not going to lie, I was worn down by the time we got to Dog of God, but you've got to respect the bling the Abele brothers wore to their screening. I think I dozed through a lot of their movie, which seems hard to believe, but is true. On the other hand…

Here's Adam Murray, with Ruppert to the left and Daniel in the background, and his short "The Traveler & The Troll" was worth the price of admission (or time on the schedule). I'm not sure I've seen anything that recalls Weird Jim Henson so well since his passing!

And that's last Monday in the books. Tuesday would be Stinker, Sweetness, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens. Today (the next Monday), I'll be at Transcending Dimensions, The Woman, Looking for an Angel, Hi-Five, and Kazakh Scary Tales, if all goes well.


Cielo

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The filmmakers admitted to being concerned with aesthetic over story in the introduction, and there were times I felt it, down to having to more or less invent a theme that doesn't quite work to make elements palatable (see below). Still, Cielo ultimately worked in ways that this sort of contemporary South American fantasy film often doesn't work for me, finding a way for its flights of fantasy to bring me in rather than take me out.

It opens serenely, with seven-year-old Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) sitting by a beautiful lake, before she catches and swallows a large goldfish. She walks back to the stone house her father is building, but what happens next is shocking, and soon she is on the road, pulling a cart with a large barrel on it, bound for the sea. She makes a trade for a truck with a priest (Luis Bredow), who probably didn't think she was going to drive away in it. That she only gets so far is more on the truck than her, but she'll soon be met by others, including a luchadora going by "La Reina" (Mariela Salaverry) and policeman Gustavo (Fernando Arze Echalar), thoroughly puzzled by the trail Santa has left behind.

The film is, if nothing else, gorgeous from start to finish. Director Alberto Sciamma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe are certainly aided by finding great things to point a camera at, drawing upon the landscape without seeming to push into the fantastical. The film has one of the most beautiful opening shots you'll see, and whether Santa winds up in small towns, the desert, or the city, there are surprising compositions and delightful combinations of colors. These are also environments where people seem at home, with faces and costumes that seldom seem exaggerated.

Young lead Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is also fantastic on her own, 8 years old and with the ability to play a magical, precocious child who seldom sounds like a teenager or like she's saying the words of an adult screenwriter trying to sound like a child. She's a confident kid who sells having a little girl's perspective on her unique experience, and it's why one believes she can accomplish miracles in this world; she never seems not part of it. There is authority covering warmth in the performances of the people she meets - men like Luis Bredow's priest and Fernando Arze Echalar's cop who maybe need someone as remarkable as Santa to unearth the decency between their world-weariness and women Mariela Salaverry's empathetic entertainer.

The story, though... Well, it very clearly follows the imagery of the idea for a scene, and I suspect that it's useful that the violent opening will mea some folks are just going to be out less than ten minutes in. Santa may be a wondrous enough girl that a found family coalesce around her, but to the extent it does, it is all on the performances. The story has the right shape and the cast sells it, but it's a framework, not something that one can dig into.

That's enough, for the most part. It's a great movie to look at with some great pieces, just all aesthetic and emotion as opposed to the sources of that emotion.

(The structure I found myself trying to impose on the film is that I think you've got to posit that this whole plan comes from a desperate mother who places too much weight on an 8-year-old, even one who can perform miracles, but it's not something the movie really examines. Maybe Gustavo recognizes that what Santa does is not truly her fault, but there are things a policeman has to do once the scene is discovered that are elided over.)


Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is firmly in the category of documentaries that I treat like an introductory university course, right down to taking three times as many notes as I normally would for a feature of its length. Obviously it's not even that, but it's a solid chunk of good information to get someone started on the topic.

As these things go, it is pretty darn solid. The filmmakers break things down into logical sections that touch upon the context of these artists' work without ever straying to the point of the film really being about something else, and get what seem to be fairly open, unguarded interviews with the surviving subjects. Even in the earlier sections of the film, where its roughly-chronological nature has them discussing the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, they tend to focus on it shaping them as opposed to releasing a lot of raw emotion, but they are the survivors who found outlets long ago.

Mostly, though, director Amélie Ravalec includes a ton of art - plenty enough to be a good sampler, with the narration relevant but not like someone standing behind your shoulder in a museum, explaining everything in detail rather than letting you experience it and make your own connections. Clearly, she feels, the best way to start to understand a work is to look at it, and while contextualization is useful, one's appreciation of a work must ultimately come from the work itself. It's overwhelming at times, though, with seemingly a new work to examine every minute (the citations part of the credits is long); the companion book is probably going to be great.

There's also a very nice soundtrack, not exactly recognizable needle drops to me, but reinforcing the energy of the period and movement(s) and providing a rhythm that keeps the film from feeling like either a fire hose of information or like it's waiting for you to catch up. It's a really nice presentation.

(Fair warning: There is a lot of bondage, enough to make you wonder if this is what caught the filmmaker's eye originally, with a section attempting to explain why there's so much after so much has gone by without much comment. By the end, it's more like a bit of an odd emphasis.)


Akabane Honeko no Bodyguard (Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Purchase the manga at Amazon

My friend Tony, who owns the local comic shop, often talks about how his son is into manga and anime but tends not to overlap them for the same property: If he reads the manga, he'll probably skip the anime, and vice versa. I don't know how the live-action adaptations tend to figure in for him, but I do find myself feeling the same way about them lately: As much as I dig movies like Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards and see where they've been compressed, I'm not sure I need to go back to the source material. This is fun but you can burn a lot of time getting the same story twice.

Honeko Adabane (Natsuki Deguchi) is an ambitious high school student - she's got dreams of being both a dancer and a lawyer like her parents - and not the sort who has a hundred-million dollar bounty placed upon her head. That's because her birth father is Masahito Jingu (Ken'ichi Endo), head of the Japanese equivalent of the CIA; he grabs roughneck Ibuki Arakuni (Raul Murakami), a childhood friend of Honeko's, off the street and asks him to be her bodyguard, although part of the job is making sure she is not aware of the forces attacking her. Ibuki agrees, but stumbles on his first attempt. Fortunately, Honeko's best friend and dance teammate Nei Toyega (Hikaru Takahashi) is also working for Jingu - as is all of class 3-4, led by dorky-looking Sumiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), and trained in various specialties since pre-school. But with the price on Honeko's head so high, will Somejima's "23 tarot cards" be enough?

Honeko Akabane's bodyguards definitely falls into the trap where folks adapting a manga have trouble fitting the whole story into a two hour movie - there's a spot where original manga-ka Masamitsu Nigatsu probably milked two or three cliffhangers in weekly serialization out of what's an annoying 5-minute delay here - even when you don't have 25 title characters. You could streamline the heck out of this, except that doing so would probably not just lose one of the most entertaining subplots, but the sheer excess of it is part of what makes it so much fun as the filmmakers frantically pile more on well past the point where they actually need to, a hilarious surprise if you're going in fairly blind and probably still entertaining for the sheer audacity of it if not.

It's pretty goofy all around, with some very winning performances in the center, particularly the very fun chemistry between Raul Murakami and Natsuki Deguchi who actually feel like opposites attracting; Murakami is great at suddenly dropping Ibuki's tough-guy pretenses to present a very affable doofus with a massive crush on Honeko, while Deguchi is good at catching how Honeko is smart, assertive, and kind of dorky (when it comes to the law) underneath the sort of pleasantness that can often read as bland. Ken'ichi Endo makes Jingu a funny character whom one can nevertheless believe is a wily spy master, and Tao Tsuchiya is a real delight swinging Masachika from genuinely dangerous villain to socially maladjusted weirdo and using the same backstory for each.

The filmmakers also find a good balance between using the premise for groan-worthy gags and good character based comedy, and there's style to spare. I presume the look is comic-accurate, and both the white-and-black school uniforms (with the assassins in all black a helpful inverse) and the slick outfits Masachika's crew sports. It's fun and poppy while still giving its weirdos room to be likable teenagers even amid the spy movie hijinks.

There's some fairly entertaining action, too: The filmmakers do a nice job blending slapstick with some actual danger, dedicated to keeping it hand to hand and selling that these spy kids might hold off a few professional assassins.

Not sold: Folks thinking Tao Tsuchiya's character is a guy. But, then, that's also a manga trope dialed up to the max, and that's what makes this movie work.


"The Traveler & The Troll"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't know that writer/director Adam Murray is directly influenced by the late Jim Henson here - he could be young enough to have been born after Henson's passing - but his short hits a particular Henson vibe that maybe isn't represented as much among his successors as kid-friendly Muppets: A world where the macabre creatures are possessed of dry wit, moving about in such a way that a viewer can see that they are puppets but where the uncanniness makes them a little creepier. The effect is ultimately still comic, but with the lingering feeling that it could have been scary.

Instead, it's kind of charming, with the troll (voiced by Dave Child) demanding an answer to three riddles when the traveler (Erika Ishii) who has passed through his territory has no money, only to find that she really likes riddles and he's seldom had to actually pose three. It's a goofy little thing, but that sort of flipping the script from unnerving to amusing is a big part of this sort of piece's appeal.


Dieva suns (Dog of God)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Dog of God has a hell of an opener, as its blindfolded werewolf protagonist squares off against a giant and rips its testicles off. It's metal as hell and brothers Lauris & Raitis Abele know how everything works together here, with grandiose physical acting enhanced by rotoscoped animation and a no-messing-around soundtrack, going for "hell yeah!" right away.

It falls off, though, and I found myself unable to hang with it much after that, whether because I was worn out from it being the last film of the day or because the story was pretty darn dull. There are audiences for nasty medieval fantasy where everyone is some degree of cruel or cynical, but it doesn't create a rooting interest in me, and later bits of violence struggled to match the operatic intensity of the opener.

Still, I'm not sure how I slept through so much of a movie this loud.

Fantasia 2019 Catch-up, Part 2: The Deeper You Dig, Away, Jade's Asylum, Almost a Miracle, The Wonderland, Hit-and-Run Squad, Dreamland, Chiwawa, Porno, and Mystery of the Night

On the one hand, I'm sad that Away didn't wind up getting a theatrical release, because I really loved it and the audience was into it.

On the other, you can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video for six bucks in HD. You can also rent it for two or three, but, come on, that's an absurdly good price even to just hold

Anyway, enjoy me trying to make a case for/against movies based upon my Letterboxd entries and notes several months later!

The Deeper You Dig

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

Every time I see a movie like The Deeper You Dig, I wonder how many more groups there are out there like the family that made it, tight-knit enough to do something as resource-and-time-consuming as a movie not just for no money but without the expectation that it will lead to something else. Hundreds, probably, with vanishingly few cracking the lineups of a major genre festival, mostly winding up on virtual shelves next to a hundred times as many self-published novels and indie rock MP3s online. Like most of that material, it will almost certainly not be the most accomplished or easily-recommended movies you'll see all year, but it's individual enough that it will speak almost directly to those who like it.

Ivy Allen (Toby Poser) has a good little grift going as a fortune teller, with 14-year-old daughter Echo (Zelda Adams) helping, shall we say, to set the scene. With other things to do around the house, Ivy's not able to watch Echo as she goes sledding on one of those winter days where the sun goes down quickly, and she is hit by a drunk driver. Horrified, Kurt (John Adams) starts to turn his life around, even making firends with Ivy when they meet in town and guiltily helping out where he can. Of course, it turns out that Ivy's connection to the spirit realm isn't completely imaginary, and Echo is not resting easily.

It's a bit strange to call a horror movie "cute", but that's the sort of vibe this DIY production gives off, especially once you know that the main cast are real-life parents and daughter. It's less actually scary than an earnest attempt to make a scary movie, with the basic shape of a ghost story and the bones of a good parallel between the haunted parties, though it can't help but feel more like people excited to make a horror movie than a group into the particular story they're telling. On top of that, it's a bit of a case where ghosts aren't necessarily as interesting as the guilt that they represent. That said, when the film takes an odd twist that leads to the movie trying to do two or three different things at once that don't quite mesh, it at least handles it better than a lot of films that take a big swing do. The last act may not be quite so eerie or unnerving as it is meant to, but it is also not nearly so unintentionally funny as expected.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Away

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)

It's a rare feature film that is as singularly the work of one artist as Away, and of that small sample, few are this good. With nobody else credited on the film, director Gints Zilbalodis strips an adventure story down to fundamentals, makes some choices that maybe a larger team might not have, and comes through with an animated film for all ages that comes across as unique but not gimmicky.

The plot is dead-simple - a boy has survived a plane crash, starting the movie dangling from a tree by his parachute. He's in the middle of the wilderness, and the nearest city, Cloud Harbor, is some distance away. He's soon befriended by a yellow bird who seems to be about as alone as he is, and together, they journey through dangerous and surreal landscapes in hope of getting to the place that can get him home.

Away is a very simple movie in a lot of ways - Gints Zilbalodis made it on his own, and he's smart to keep from overburdening himself in ways that filmmakers telling this sort of story often do. He doesn't bother with dialogue, for instance, and makes it feel natural by not feeling the need to give the boy someone to talk to. He has, in large part, structured the film like a video game, and rendered it either with a gaming engine or some similar software, and it becomes an intriguing artistic choice on top of being very practical: It works as this boy attacking his problems in a way he understands, and why he doesn't necessarily need to be vocal. Zilbalodis doesn't make it an overt theme by being judgmental - this isn't a "kid who only knows the world through screens can't handle the real thing" movie - but going for a gaming aesthetic lets him buck filmmaking conventions and create different ways of understanding a character who doesn't have much reason to explain himself.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Jade's Asylum

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, ProRes)

I can't say I much enjoyed Jade's Asylum, but the discussion with the filmmakers included one of the more tellingly confessional moments I've seen at a festival screening: It went from mostly indoors to mostly outdoors when they got on site and saw that their monster suit didn't look good in the mansion they'd rented. It doesn't make the final product better, but it gives one an idea of how many different pieces have to come together for a movie to work and an appreciation for how often you have to try and fix things on the fly.

The mansion is somewhere in Costa Rica, to which Jade Williams (Morgan Kohan) has come with boyfriend Toby Hunter (Kjartan Hewitt), one of several guests Toby's brother Wesley (Jeff Teravaninen) has invited for a housewarming party. Most are obnoxious bro types, although Mike (Sebastian Pigott) seems pretty decent despite coming with Instagram-diva girlfriend Tanya (Deanna Jarvis). Jade's in a fragile state and ready to walk back to the city to try and get home despite not having the money to fly back to Canada and Toby unwilling to help despite not really wanting her there, and that state of mind is not going to improve with a bunch of dudes covered in mushroom coming out of the woods to attack the gringos.

There's potential to that, if you want to dig into these characters' relationships and maybe make what's got Jade reeling feel much more central, but filmmaker Alexandre Carrière never seems to find anything there, and stretches what he has thin. This movie is 83 minutes long, but includes a whole ton of outtakes and such over the end credits, along with other big chunks of runtime wasted on pointless nonlinear circling back around to various flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout the film. Take out the subplots that go nowhere and the repetition and there's maybe a half-hour of movie here, and that half-hour doesn't make a lot of sense. One suspects that it is missing a lot of pieces that could have clarified things, but Carrière instead pursues the sort of ambiguity that does a movie little good unless there's something more compelling behind "real or not?" Maybe retooling while they shot put the filmmakers in a bad position, but the result isn't good.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Machida kun no sekai (Almost a Miracle aka Machida's World)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

It's always the ducks. No matter what the cartoon, or movie, or what, the ducks will be the funniest part. They don't actually make themselves known until relatively late, but the teenagers in this movie give them a run for their money, making for a high-school comedy that, for all of its eccentricities, often gets at the heart of what it means to be growing up and finding oneself.

Most notable is Hajime Machida (Kanata Hosoda), who is helpful and altruistic to the point where folks really don't know what to make of him. He winds up at the infirmary at the same time as Nana Inohara (Nagisa Sekimizu), and while something seems to spark, Machida immediately makes it weird. Meanwhile, Ryota NIshino (Taiga Nakano) likes Inohara but accidentally sends his letter declaring it to Machida, recently-dumped Sakura Takashima (Mitsuki Takahata) likes Machida but is liked by Yu Himuro (Takanori Iwata), and a struggling writer (Koichi Sato) thinks that there's a story in all this.

The teens are a bunch of lovable weirdos trying to figure themselves out, sometimes from odd starting points, and the compulsively altruistic Machida is intriguing for how he's such an extreme character who is such an odd type that one might find him hard to believe in, at least compared to some of the others - the cynical, gossiped-about Inohara is certainly much more immediately recognizable. It's often hard to be sure just what to make of Machida's broad-ranging generosity, especially since Kanata Hosoda's performance often makes it clear that Machida is doing what he has been told he should do, but there's not a contrasting "real Machida" behind it. It's a bit of a put-on, but also genuine. It's often easier to recognize the suspicion and confusion in Inohara's reactions; Nagisa Sekimizu plays a more conventional complex teen.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Bâsudê wandârando (The Wonderland)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)

The Wonderland (aka "Birthday Wonderland") has all the surface elements of big, respectable anime - a decent coming-of-age story, absolutely beautiful animation, certain specific character types, a traditional life/environmental message - and does each of them well enough that it plays really well from minute to minute. The trouble is that the whole doesn't fit together in a way that does those pieces justice. It's kind of about moving forward but also accepting destiny and how modern life isn't good for the soul but also shopping… It's all over the place.

It has a common sort of template. Akane (voice of Mayu Matsuoka) is a moody girl turning thirteen, sent by mother Midori (voice of Kumiko Aso) on an errand to the junk shop run by Akane's weird aunt Chii (voice of Anne Watanabe), which gets stranger than things usually do around Chii: A secret passage opens and the alchemist Hippocrites (voice of Masachika Ichimura) and his apprentice Pipo (voice of Nao Toyama) emerge, seeking the "Goddess of the Green Wind" and deciding it's Akane. Soon, they're all transported back to another land, magical and of an earlier era, where Zan Gou (voice of Keiji Fujiwara) and his bat-like sidekick Doropo (voice of Akiko Yajima) are collecting metal for a nefarious purpose, and if Akane doesn't stop them with her "Momentum Anchor" necklace, she'll never get home.

I can't speak for Sachiko Kashiwaba's original novel, but the movie is scattered as heck. That doesn't make it bad, although it can start to wear; it's got the sort of quest structure that has a viewer just starting to get a feel for something before it's on to the next thing, leaving characters and settings and the like behind. For all that growing up is in many ways the process of taking all of this and figuring it out to make it part of oneself, there's not much time spent on Akane resolving these complexities or coming up with her own perspective. The film is never quite just things happening to Akane, but she finds herself along for the ride more often than leading the charge.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Bbaengban (Hit-and-Run Squad)

* * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

How does a movie about Seoul's car-crash investigators, on the tail of a Formula 1-driving criminal mastermind, have so little in the way of automotive action? For crying out loud, when a person buys a ticket for a movie named "Hit-and-Run Squad", they've got expectations, so get to the car chases already! This thing is 133 minutes long and really only has a couple of worthy bits of stunt driving.

That mastermind is "JC" Jung Jae-Chul (Cho Jung-Seok), who retired from the track early to get into business and has seemingly gotten as far as he has with bribery and extortion. It's being investigated by prosecutor Yoo Ji-Hyun (Yum Jung-Ah) and Lieutenant Eun Shi-Yeon (Kong Hyo-Jin), but when a sting backfires in disastrous fashion, with a star witness (Park Hyoung-Soo) attempting suicide during an interrogation and Eun reassigned to investigating car accidents. Not exactly a great career step for a rising star, and she's partnered with Seo Min-Jae (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), who can read an accident scene like a savant but isn't allowed to drive himself because of his checkered past. Then again, it's not like Eun is actually going to let this go, and Seo's skills may prove useful considering that JC still really likes his cars.

Even when you consider that JC is still invested in racing and racing-adjacent businesses, there's still a fairly substantial gulf in what goes on in those two types of stories, and the screenplay by Kim Kyung-Chan and director Han Jun-Hee doesn't do the best job in bridging it. The worst part is, all of the twisty corruption stuff which takes up the bulk of the running time not only doesn't make much sense, it's boring. The writers never seem to figure out who should be the big villain and why - the corruption seems to be fairly generic as opposed to in the service of something in particular - and it keeps stretching out and reversing until it becomes extremely hard to care about all the material that is just making the movie longer. There is so much going on that just doesn't matter, and it dilutes the bits that at least hint at something interesting in the focus on corruption.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Dreamland (aka Bruce McDonald's Dreamland)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The opening stretch of Bruce McDonald's Dreamland introduces a bunch of visually striking characters against a moody environment, has then open their mouths to begin a story, and then summarily has the all shot them in the head. The rest of the film isn't quite that nihilistic, but it is fairly pointedly eccentric and detached, the sort of thing that needs the idea that anything can happen in the audience's head lest they get frustrated with how little is happening right now. McDonald is going for a specific idea of cool here above all else, where it's more important to be stylish than tense.

It is plenty stylish, mostly taking place in the neighborhoods of a European capital where the movies that make a person want to visit Europe take place, the parts not developed into glass skyscrapers or filled with historical buildings that remain preserved in amber. There's cafes and clubs and pawnshops, and the assassin who frequents them taps into a network of cigarette-smoking urchins in suits, one of several places where the wires seem to be crossed and weird chimeras created. McDonald and his collaborators do a decent job of finding entertaining ways of mixing familiar tropes up into different arrangements so that there's often something both comfortingly familiar and bizarrely creative about them when he attempts to do so usually misses the mark.

Not everybody can fit into that sort of milieu, but frequent McDonald collaborator Steven McHattie can, and this movie fits him like a glove. He has a dual role, laying both a world-weary assassin and a decadent trumpet player, and a viewer probably wouldn't want anyone else playing either of those parts, even if the way the film winks at it is another thing that makes a viewer more aware of the games being played than a part of them. Watching him shamble around as the drug-addled musician or trying to do good while not really believing in his own humanity is a distinct pleasure even when a scene is going on too long. He's surrounded by similarly entertaining support - Henry Rollins as a gangster who seems laid-back to a fault but still carries grudges, Juliette Lewis as a maniacal Countess, Lisa Houle as a sympathetic ear in a bar - but these guys are never quite completely engaged with others, just as part of their nature.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Chiwawa-chan (aka Chiwawa)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Chiwawa is structured kind of like a murder mystery, but it's 50/50 as to whether that's the direction it's going to go at any point, and that's fine. After all, it seems like the other way they could have gone with it is faux documentary, which probably would have seemed more like middle-aged folks trying to make a movie about youth, despite actually having been made by a filmmaker relatively close to his characters in age. As someone who has never been a Japanese person in their early twenties, I can 't exactly say how well the film represents that group, but it nevertheless paints an interesting portrait.

It opens with a news report on the especially grisly murder of Yoshiko Chiwako, a twenty-year-old nursing student who, it is suggested, also found herself involved in less savory situations. It is a shock to their friends - they knew Yoshiko (Shiori Yoshida) as "Chiwawa", an effervescent party girl who parachuted into their group when Yoshida (Ryo Narita) picked her up in a bar, sticking around even as relationships changed between her, best friend Yumi (Tina Tamashiro), camera-toting Nagai (Nijiro Murakami), cynical model Miki (Mugi Kadowaki), and Yoshida's friend Katsuo (Kanichiro Sato). There are some wild times and emotional blowouts, but nothing that seems to actually explain what happened to Chiwawa-chan.

Screenwriter/director Ken Ninomiya adapts a manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and though he leads off with homicide, the actual crime is not quite so important as what it implies about the life she and her friends lead, and how it lacks the stabilizing influences and structures that their parents may have had. There's rocket fuel in certain sections of this movie, like how they find a bag with six million yen (roughly $60,000 American) and blow through it in three days of partying, and it doesn't necessarily feel like something that's pushing the plot to how things are going to end. Instead, it's a sign of the abandon with which it is possible for young people to live, while the news occasionally give them reasons to live like there's no tomorrow. People stop in the last leg of the movie to be transfixed by reports of a bombing in Singapore, and like the party, it's less a story point than illustration of the times and how little is in their direct control.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Porno

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Porno is the sort of movie that feels like someone should have thought of it and done it before, but I can't think of anything particularly similar, and I bet those with better catalogs in their brains won't think of a better "monsters in a run-down movie theater" picture (although, as this is very much my thing, I'm happy to hear what obvious example I'm blanking on ). Inspiration usually seems obvious in retrospect, and thus is inspired even before the nice cast and quality, fearless execution shows up.

It takes place in the early 1990s (Encino Man and A League of Their Own are on the two-plex's marquee), and as they do every Friday night, the teenagers who work there are going to watch a movie after the customers leave. Chastity (Jillian Mueller) has just been made assistant manager, and Ricky (Glenn Stott) has just come back from camp, though his talk of the girlfriend he met there have had no noticeable effect on Chaz's crush. Also working are Abe (Evan Daves) and Todd (Larry Saperstein), but before they can tell projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann) what they want to watch, a homeless man bursts in and uncovers a secret door, behind which they find a strange archive and a third screen in the basement. Obviously, when that happens, you watch what you just found - and, of course, it's inevitable that in addition to being more sexually explicit than anything these nice church-going kids have seen before, those reels of film are exactly the sort of thing hide and seal away in horror movies because they imprison a demon.

The last quarter-century or so of cinema construction has given us recliners, digital projection and sound, stadium seating, and, more to the point, buildings where even the first wave has more or less remained in its original configuration (even if the box offices are sometimes unnervingly unmanned). I will not argue for the superiority of the places that came before, their large screens awkwardly divided, their behind-the-scenes areas cramped and labyrinthine, and their projection booths filled with equipment bolted onto projectors that have been there since the silent era, but they undeniably have history and personality, and a large portion of the audience for this movie has probably spent enough time in those places for it to resonate. The oddity of the architecture combines with the way film holds frozen life to make the movie fantastical but also kind of right.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Misterio de la noche (Mystery of the Night)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Everybody's folklore is kind of messed up, but this movie makes it feel like a competition that the Philippines could win. It's a simple but impressively nasty combination of colonial horror and local legend, giving the audience what they've come for, albeit on a scale that may be a little too grand for what the filmmakers have to work with.

It starts with a town's mayor, Anselmo, going out to the forest to hunt, doing Father Parorozo a favor by taking a ranting, pregnant woman with his party and perhaps not being too concerned if she returns with them. A generation later, his son Domingo (Benjamin Alves) makes his own trip to the woods, where he discovers and makes love to a beautiful but feral woman who was raised by the forest spirits after her mother was killed by an angry sow. She is spellbinding but Domingo must eventually go home. "Maria" (Solenn Heussaff) follows him, but she has no more been prepared for the fact that a man who has been so attentive on his trip out of town may have a wife and child at home than she has been taught to walk on two feet. She reacts badly.

That's kind of inevitable, once you've seen Solenn Heusaff's performance leading up to that, which is a no-holds-barred take on the wild child tope that's kind of impressive in that it still has a sort of fantastic authenticity despite the fact that she's got to play things a little more broadly than one might necessarily have to do in order to stay ahead of the rest of the cast, which isn't exactly being restrained themselves. It's an enjoyable physical performance, unabashed in its sexualilty - the filmmakers tend to treat shame and denial as worse than actual sexual activity - and always a nice complement to what Benjamin Alves is doing as Domingo, whether he seems earnestly smitten or casually dismissive when he gets home and decides it can't continue. He does a nice job getting between those states, too, not making it feel like a switch has been turned or like Domingo had been dishonest before.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Fantasia 2019.03: Best of Les Utopiales, Away, Jade's Asylum, Almost a Miracle, and Come to Daddy

Well, I hit the wall late, after spending most of the day in DeSeve, but I hit it nevertheless.



Still, it was a day where the highs were very high indeed, such as Away, with writer/director/everything Gints Zilbalodis (left) here from Latvia and Ruppert effusive in his praise, especially in how well seeing it with a full theatrical sound system works. The one-man-band nature of the movie's production led to some pretty interesting discussion, such as how large chunks of it were rendered straight from preview rather than at a more detailed rate, and the movie was more or less created in sequence. Do that over the course of three years, and your skill and style will change, so he actually found himself going back to re-render the first chapter.

He was also unashamed about this thing being rendered like a game and having the structure of one, even if the person who asked the question seemed reluctant to phrase it that way. I mention in the review that I'll be interested to see if that's an issue in its reception.



The makers of Jade's Asylum had an interesting story to tell about how, when they got to Costa Rica, they found that their monster costumes didn't work nearly so well in the mansion as in the jungle, so this became 90% jungle rather than 90% mansion, and I kind of wonder if that hurt their ambitions to make it ambiguous or psychological. It spins out too far to be all in Jade's head as it is, but that possibility my have worked had it been contained.

They seem like delightful people, but they made a pretty bad movie, though you've got to salute them for getting it done in what sometimes sounded like crazy conditions.



Last up was the crew from Come to Daddy, which was apparently one film too many, because I was in and out and missed a lot of the last half. The live for filmmaker Ant Timpson, a longtime part of the family for Fantasia (and fantastic film in general) was palpable, though.

I'm already running late and starting on Sunday, where the plan is The Wonderland, Hit and Rub Squad, Paradise Hills, Astronaut, and then maybe running off to catch The White Storm 2.

"RFLKTR"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

I'm not quite sure whether "RFLKTR" is an impressive job of compression or a hook that should have had a little more time to play out, though a bit of reflection leads me to think the first even if the second was closer to my first reaction. It's kind of dead-simple in conception, with Breeda Wool as the captain of a small spaceship that crashes on an unknown planet only to somehow encounter herself. It's a classic set-up, but one that can go a lot of different ways, especially when filmmaker Matt K. Turner has the chops to make it look pretty slick.

Almost by accident, it illustrates the trade-off with twists exceptionally clearly: By going for the surprise, it winds up a step away from the impact of when the thing revealed actually revealed. Not entirely, but at least a little.

"Lo Siento, Mi Amor"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

Eduardo Casanova has an enjoyably goofy idea here - Jackie Kennedy (Sara Rivero) having an affair with a grey alien (Javier Botet) - that he and his crew design the heck out of, almost to the point of fetish. It's fun to look at and gets a laugh or two from the sheer outrageousness of it, along with a couple of background gags that feel like they may be clever in some way or another but don't quite land. You can laugh at the idea of it.

… and then you kind of wonder, what's the rest of the gag? Is there some sort of alternate history, something which makes a sort of perverse sort of sense as a result, or what? It feels like the only reason to use a grey is the weird visual - replace him with a human, and nothing changes except that the film is obvious slander. It's not like the late Jacqueline Onassis needs her reputation defended, but it feels like a South Park-level joke, edgy and provocative but not accomplishing much.

"Occupant"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

This particular short film mostly got noticed for the credits - companies Gunpowder & Sky and Dust feel like ones to keep an eye on, and writer/director Peter Cilella's name popped from Resolution and The Endless (Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are credited as producers) - but like a few other shorts in this block, it kind of leaves me thinking "and, next?" It sets up a very familiar situation, executes well, and then ends.

If it's a sort of feature pitch, it's not a bad one; Cilella does a nice job of quickly sketching out some characters and giving his audience room to play (Dan O'Brien is particularly good), and he and the effects crew stage the abduction in a nifty way, using a reflection. I'd see the rest of this movie.

"The Replacement" (2018)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

Sean Miller's "The Replacement" feels like another short which is looking to be a feature pilot - it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, hints at parts of its world that are barely used, and generally feels like it could be expanded a little in all directions. Unlike most with those properties, it's a fairly satisfying unit on its own, even if it doesn't quite execute its late turn toward the serious as well as it could.

When it is being funny, though, it's kind of great, with Mike McNamara pretty darn good as a janitor frustrated that seemingly all of his clones have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, with one just having been elected the first clone president. He gets to have some fun playing multiple versions, although the ones where you can see the original in the personality are more fun than, say, President Abe, who looks like a generic politician and may as well be a completely different guy.

The movie flounders a bit as it reaches the end, like it wants to be two - one where Clones Are People Too, so that when you see your clones doing well you should strive to better meet your potential and embrace achievement even when it comes from those who were a sort of underclass, and another where they are a scary Other intent on violently remaking the world in their own image. Those messages are diametrically opposed, and jumping to the second after spending most of the running time on the first seems disingenuous.

"Laura un Vineta"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

You'll have to pardon me for not getting every joke here, because this Latvian short film was screened with only French subtitles and I'm actually pleasantly surprised just how much of my high-school French is still useful. It's probably funnier if you can follow every single little gag well, but it's still an enjoyably goofy little short with some really excellent visual humor

I must admit that I was rather slow on the uptake in terms of how farmer Aldis Berzhins (Leons Lescinskis), who has an alien spaceship crash in his fields while he sleeps, is not just confused and put upon but genuinely obsessed with potatoes in general, and I never quite got whether the folks he was dropped off with were friends or family or what. But there is some really delightful absurdity here, and just the right amount of Armands Bergis as an impressively ferret-like government official.

And, hey, who doesn't like potatoes? Not much better to snack on than some quality fries!

"The Meltdown" (2016)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

Director Connor Kerrigan seems to have gone back and forth between animation, live-action, and animated documentary around the time he made "The Meltdown", and it's a movie that pokes a bit of fun at the appropriation of documentary tropes, setting something like The Office in a nuclear power plant, albeit one so poorly run that apparently everybody has to be in a hazmat suit all the time. It's a fun sort of compressed sitcom with every character very broad and well-established and everything but the kitchen sink thrown in.

I do love how the choice to have everyone in suits means they gesticulate like crazy and have to have big personalities. There's still a kind of taking the weird for granted here, playing the absurd as normal workplace malaise, but it's visually interesting with bright colors and physical comedy rather than arch.

"Juliet" (2015)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

Only intermittent French subtitles on this French short from director Marc-Henri Boulier, so I'm open to the idea that it works a lot better if you know the language.

One thing that I kind of found amusing, though I don't know whether it was intentional or not, was the idea that you can have sexbots like Juliet and it's treated as kind of tacky, but create a Romeo model and all of a sudden guys are ready to take to the streets and riot at being disrespected and treated as replaceable. It's a self-aware little detail that feels ugly but right, and which I don't think I've seen in one of these android stories.

Also amusing: The little clip of Creation of the Humanoids at the start, which suggests people would recoil at machines they had to control via conversation. As much as I'm never going to have an internet-connected microphone in my home or use that sort of assistant on my phone, it kind of hasn't worked out that way.

"Rust in Peace"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Best of Les Utopiales, DCP)

I don't think I've ever been so sad to discover that a movie wasn't taking place in a post-apocalyptic future before. That's some serious, weapons-grade melancholy as a discarded robot tries to reconnect with his owner, not able to comprehend that he was deliberately discarded.

The robot design is great, primitive and clunky and somehow getting a lot of humanity out of its big, featureless, neck-free head. There's something beautiful and pastoral about its long walk home, even if you're under the impression that the world has ended. Once he gets there, writer/director William Welles seems to tap into something about abusive relationships and bad breakups, where one person doesn't get that it's over and the other, while able to recollect the parts they liked and maybe willing to dip into them, can see this as license to be cruel. It's worse here, because poor Exon's a robot and can't know any better, which makes what humanity he has even more tragic.

"An Eye for an Eye"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)

Apparently filmmaker Julia Ploch has adapted her own comic for this, and I'd be curious to see that, because for as strikingly beautiful as this film is, the story gets a bit lost at times, jumping back and forth and never having a lot to do with the young hero-worshipping frog as it seeks out Red Frog and the Great Catfish.

Still, it is amazing to look at, changing its look up as it moves back and forth in time, giving each chapter its own feel, and showing a lot of flexibility in how you can make a frog look, from the pudgy hero to the powerful legs of the legendary Red Frog. There's a small but epic-feeling air to it that frequently gets one's eyes to open wide at the creativity on display.

Away

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)

Away is a very simple movie in a lot of ways - Gints Zilbalodis made it on his own, structured it like a video game, and doesn't bother with dialogue - but if you're good at what it's focused on, that leaves it fewer places to trip up. And Zilbalodis doesn't trip up - the action is as clear as the symbolism, the music is big and swelling, the designs feel like they could spring from the mind of its young hero, and so on. It's got such an individual personality that it never feels generic, though, just elemental.

And it's gorgeous, each frame looking like a three-dimensional image made by laying construction paper or some other flat material in layers, but the virtual camera work makes it feel like a real place being traversed. Some scenes are tremendously striking - biking across Mirror Lake, for instance, with birds reflected in the impossibly reflective, enough to make one forget the seeming simplicity, or at least appreciate how it makes that shot possible.

I'm curious how different generations will take to it, when someone picks it up for distribution. It is, in a way, so unapologetically game-like that I suspect some will diminish or dismiss it, even if that's also a sign of how it's the hero's journey in almost perfect form.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Jade's Asylum

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, ProRes)

This movie is 83 minutes long, but includes a whole ton of outtakes and crap over the end credits, along with another ton of pointless nonlinear circling back around throughout the film. Take out the subplots that go nowhere and the repetition and there's maybe a half-hour of movie here, and that half-hour doesn't make a lot of sense. One suspects that it is missing a lot of pieces that could have clarified things in pursuit of an ambiguity that does the movie little good, with padding to get it up to something that might get it just long enough to make a festival that doesn't have room set aside for home-grown projects

It's got a reasonably good-looking mushroom monster and a winning heroine - I'd like to see Morgan Kohan in something better - and that goes further than you might think, but the story is so hacked-up and messily shot that they almost never get put in good position. Instead, it's a blur of generic white dudes getting knocked off (albeit without the effects budget to really do the gore well), and the stabs at being a more sophisticated psychological thriller just leave it in no man's land.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Machida kun no sekai (Almost a Miracle aka Machida's World)

* * *½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

It's always the ducks. No matter what the cartoon, or movie, or what, the ducks will be the funniest part.

The teenagers in this movie give them a run for their money, though, a bunch of lovable weirdos trying to figure themselves out, sometimes from odd starting points, with the oddest being the compulsively altruistic lead who has honest trouble figuring out how to put the girl he likes over others. It's a kooky group that often threatens to get too big to handle - and which has to occasionally get twistedly meta because of how teen dramas have warped both our expectations of teens and how they actually behave. A Yoshihiro Nakamura-style "community coming together" bit makes it work better than expected, though, even if it's kind of shoe-horned in to make the point that Hajime Machida's relentless, stubborn decency is making the world a better place.

That's a welcome response to how the film is often grappling with how such goodness can be frustrating, both in how a person needs to be able to love someone else more and that it's important to feel special as well. It's a question that we normally see in terms of burn-out and arguments over what "self-care" means, but it's framed as basic humanity here. It's a little thing that helps pull this out of just being about teenagers, and why the struggling writer doesn't wind up feeling completely out of place: Everybody feels bad about where they place the line between helping others and helping themselves.

Also helping is that it's a frequently beautiful movie, although the scenes obviously shot on film look so good that I wish the rest hadn't seemed like such a deliberately familiar Japanese high-school drama style. It's probably a bit of a weirdly film-snobby thing to gush over the briefly-seen, moody flashbacks as much as the whimsical ending, but those moments are especially fantastic.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Come to Daddy

N/A (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I hit a wall during this tonight, which is a crying shame, because what I saw, I liked quite a bit. Director Ant Timpson gets quite a bit out of a more or less perfect cast, the setting is terrific, and the action is eyebrow-raising.

I couldn't tell you much about what happened after one character exited, though, which is a real shame. Hopefully another chance to catch it will come around soon.

Fantasia 2017.06: Liberation Day, Wukong and Punk Fu Zombie

There could have been a press screening in here, but did I really want to see The Endless without an introduction and Q&A from the filmmakers? No, no I did not. Besides, that was about the same time Cacao 70 opened for breakfast around the corner, and I suspect I'm going to be there a few times during this vacation.

Theater-jumping made for a rapid-fire sort of day, as Liberation Day ended just in time to get across the street for Wukong while someone from the Hong Kong government pitched it as a great place to visit and shoot movies, and then that let out just in time to get downstairs for Punk Fu Zombie.

Wukong was a bit of a surprise - I was expecting something much more serious throughout from the teaser that played before a lot of Chinese movies at AMC Boston Common, but got something a lot funnier, at least through the first third or half. I'm also surprised to look at Fandango and see that it's only playing on half a screen at Boston Common right now (sharing it with Our Time Will Come); it got a pretty big push for a fairly small booking, especially considering that it's apparently cleaning up back in China. Anyway, glad I saw it, but I'm always a bit surprised that these movies show up at Fantasia while/after they played wide releases - for all that Fantasia brings a crowd to Hong Kong action, and the city does have a Chinatown, it seems like there would be a spot at the Forum or something more often. It's also kind of amusing to see some outlets covering movies that got a day-and-date release like they're festival films just being discovered by North America; there seems to be a real lag in catching up to these releases, even a year and a half after people complained about not being informed about The Mermaid.



So, uh, I don't know who any of these people are; the guy on the left was already on-stage when I got into Punk Fu Zombie and my French sucks enough not to catch their introductions properly. Still, they were having a great time working the audience and going on about both their low-budget zombie movie and the short that played beforehand. I honestly straight-up love the enthusiasm the locals display for their films; I really should polish up my French so that I can join in a little more rather than bail before the Q&A I knew I wouldn't understand.

Then I got back "home" and discovered to my delight that not only was the Red Sox game still going on (rained in Boston, I gather), and then that NESN Go isn't blocked in Canada. Darn near fell asleep watching the game on my phone, which was neat.

An interesting day, to say the least. Next up: Skipping the big thing which will be in theaters on Friday but going for Have a Nice Day, Sequence Break, Poor Agnes, and Plan B. Shock Wave is slick, but not a great action movie.

Liberation Day

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)

It is, perhaps, unfair to expect Liberation Day to be more controversial than it is, at least from one perspective: It is a documentary and it documents, in a manner that seems fair and transparent, and often entertaining. But it's also a part of a larger project, one potentially more subversive in its intent, and watching everyone involved not necessarily be timid but also not be daring makes for a film that perhaps lacks the kick that one about art-metal band Laibach playing a concert in North Korea perhaps should have.

The story made the news in 2015 - part of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Liberation Day celebrations (marking both Koreas' independence from Chinese and Japanese rule in 1945) would be the country's first-ever concert by a western rock band, made all the more interesting by the fact that the band is Laibach, a band that first rose to prominence in 1980s Yugoslavia and has since built an identity around their use of fascist iconography in a way that often seems to blur the line between satire and endorsement. Oh, and they would be covering songs from The Sound of Music as a part of the show. Even for someone with the sort of experience working with North Korea that producer/director Morten Traavik has, that's got to be a crazy tightrope to walk.

That this is actually Traavik's fifteenth visit to North Korea is a bit of information tossed out relatively casually, followed by some amusing YouTube videos of other projects he worked on there, but it's something that highlights the almost inevitable paradox at the center of this project: The DPRK isn't going to do something like this with someone they don't trust, someone they trust is not going to push back at their demands very much, and as a result, the friction between extremely unconventional artists and an extremely authoritarian government never really materializes. There's some potentially interesting material to be found in some of that lack of conflict - there is talk about how Laibach is a band from a country that no longer exists, with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc meaning these former Yugoslavians are now Slovenian, and member Ivan Novak sees the utopian elements of the place - but Traavik and co-director Ugis Olte don't particularly delve into that, or even counter those musings with how Pyongyang is something of a showcase city that gives visitors a skewed view of the DPRK as a whole.

Full review on EFC.

Wukong

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

You shouldn't judge a movie by its trailer any more than you should judge a book by its cover, especially the teaser-style thing for Wukong that ran before every Chinese-language film that played my local theater over the last couple of months, but it's still worth mentioning that this isn't exactly the dark, gritty Monkey King re-imagining that implied, but another oft-comedic fantasy adventure featuring the powerful but mischievous demigod, and while it's a fair question as to whether the world needs another one of those, it's at least an entertaining one, even if it does stretch its budget a bit.

It starts in the heavens, where the Destiny Council is preparing to select new immortals 300 years after the escape of a rebellious stone giant ended with the destruction of Mount Huaguo, where the Azi (Ni Ni) eagerly awaits the return of childhood friend Erlang Shen (Shawn Yue Man-lok), whose third eye stays persistently closed a side-effect of his having a mortal father and an immortal mother, only to be interrupted by Sun Wukong (Eddie Peng Yu-yan), who has climbed his way to Heaven to exact revenge for the destruction of his home. Wukong is captured, but the leader of the council, Hua Ji (Yu Feihong) places him in the custody of Azi with a "crown" that will squeeze his head painfully on demand. Undaunted, Wukong still attempts to destroy the Destiny Astrolabe, but that results in him, Azi, Erlang, Hua Ji's enforcer Tian Peng (O Ho), and mechanically-inclined Juanlian (Qiao Shan) being cast down to the crater where Huaguo used to be without their powers, finding the locals menaced by a storm demon.

Though the film opens with a bit of narration that tends toward the grandiose, it gets funny fairly quickly. The Sun Wukong introduced in the first act is not any sort of Monkey King but a shaggy guy in worn clothing strutting with a sort of goofy confidence that is both matched and complemented, an elegant princess who nevertheless is inclined to scrap. Director Derek Kwok Chi-kin and four other writers give the characters big, brash personalities and have them banter as they knock each other around with outsized weapons - Wukong's signature staff often seems like something out of a cartoon, even as it glows red through a black crust like lava. Even after they fall to earth, there's a cheeriness to how they pull together under Azi's leadership, drawing comedy not just from how Juanlian's previously ridiculed devices may be their best hope but from how Wukong and Erlang argue like children over how to best implement it and take credit.

Full review on EFC.

"À part ça, la vie est belle"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québécois, digital)

You don't need to understand French particularly well to enjoy this combination of a bouncy chanson by Claude François with images out of a zombie movie, limited though the animation may be. It is, obviously, a goofy juxtaposition, but it would probably be fun without this particular soundtrack; director François Mercier shows some skill at getting a bit of a zing out of what is basically a comic-book page flip, and making that limited animation work: I laughed a lot more at a zombie's shambling leg being manipulated into playing as dancing than seems reasonable.

It works, no matter what the language.

Punk Fu Zombie

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québécois, digital)

So, anyway, like I said above, I thought there were going to be English subtitles on this one. Shame on me for not re-checking the program before I left the apartment.

That said, this was never going to be my thing; I'm not big on warts-and-all parody or any form of "let's make a crappy movie on purpose", and this one crosses the fine line between a Wakaliwood-style picture that has to make everything from scratch and accept that it's just got no resources and folks doing bad dubbing because it's a joke. On top of that, it's an hour and forty-five minutes long, and that's a long time for this sort of movie. I was having a good time trying to keep track of the plot even without much French, and I kind of suspect that challenge kept me going longer until the "ugh, are we really still doing this" feeling kicked in.

This Week In Tickets: 18 January 2015 - 24 January 2015

If I get this up before going to the midnight at the Brattle, it's still technically "this" rather than "that" week!

Kind of a slow-ish week, although the writing was slowed when my tablet took a tumble to the floor, and this time is was the display that was hosed even though the touchscreen still worked. Rest in Peace, Nexus 7. I wrote more reviews on you than I ever fathomed could be done without an actual keyboard.

Before that, though, there were movies. Sunday's selection was Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's impressive biography of English painter William Turner, brought to life by Timothy Spall. Between that performance and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher, there's been a lot of animalistic grunting in classy movies this year.

On Tuesday night, I only caught the back-end of a Brattle double feature, because I'm at the point where I don't expose myself to Catherine Breillat unless absolutely necessary. That meant just Rocks in My Pockets, and... Man, I was not in the mood. I wanted to strangle the filmmaker for her incessant narration, even if I could be impressed by what she put on-screen.

Plan A on Friday was Strange Magic, but that fell through when the show I checked in for on MoviePass was cancelled. I got them to check me into another, which wound up being Mortdecai, even though I had been dreading it since I first saw a trailer. It wasn't a wholly miserable experience, though - I rather liked Paul Bettany and Gwynneth Paltrow in it, and it meant I learned about the original books, which sound a heck of a lot better than the disastrous movie.

After that, I rested up for Saturday's Boston Horror Show, which the good folks at All Things Horror had at the Somerville Theatre. Short version: Sins of Dracula bad, The Battery OK, Dys- very good, and Spring exceptional. I really can't wait for more people to see the latter when it hits general release in March.

Rocks in My Pockets

I missed the Chlotrudis Society nominations meeting yesterday to go to the Boston Horror Show, which may have been a good thing where this movie was concerned, because there are some people on the mailing list who have been championing it rather strongly over recent weeks, and I can totally see this being a case where they push it for every eligible category, and I try to hold my tongue about not liking it, but...

I wanted to like it. There were plenty of moments when I was staring at the screen agape, all "holy cow look at that", and the fact that this is a extremely impressive piece of animation isn't the only reason to like it. Unfortunately, it's got the sort of narration that has me saying "shut up shut up shut up shutupshutup!" under my breath, glancing at the clock on the Brattle's wall to see how much longer until I'm actually let go. It is frustrating as can be; I can't remember the last time one element of a movie has so thoroughly wrecked my enjoyment.

Speaking of the narration in a different sense: The IMDB shows this as Latvia's submission for the Foreign-Language Film Oscar, but I recall precious little (if any) of the film being in anything but English. Given the nature of the production - there is no dialogue, just voice-over narration - I wonder if there is just a completely different soundtrack in the version submitted.

Rocks in My Pockets

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2015 in the Brattle Theatre (Some of the Best of 2014, DCP)

I want to champion Rocks in My Pockets; it is a striking animated film made with adults in mind, and one that tackles a difficult but important subject head-on. The world needs movies like that. The thing is, the world also needs them to be something other than a chore to sit through. That isn't to say that a film about depression and suicide should be easy, or fun, but it needs to hook the audience, and at the risk of sounding uncaring, this one can get very tedious at points.

It starts out provocatively enough, with filmmaker and narrator Signe Baumane describing a dream about watching her grandmother Anna attempt suicide, and how she would not make the same mistakes Anna does in this dream, because she has given plenty of thought about how to do it right. It turns out that there is a history of mental illness and suicide among the women of Baumane's Latvian family, and she recounts five: Herself, Anna, and three cousins - Miranda, whom Signe was close to; the beautiful and aloof Linda; and Irbe, who casually mentions to Signe one day that she hears voices.

All five of these tales have elements in common - familial and cultural pressures to not reveal this "weakness", the looming presence of the Soviet Union, which drastically upends circumstances and has only clumsy pharmacological treatment on offer for mental illness, the stricter bonds of propriety placed upon women than men. It's to Baumane's credit that, while she gives the bulk of the movie over to Anna (she lived an eventful life even without urges to relinquish it), she finds ways to differentiate these tales and characters who are often only met briefly. Her drawing style may be simple and not given to animated wild takes, but there's a common unease to her characters that transfers readily to the audience.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily 2014.11: Hal, Giovanni's Island, The White Storm, The Midnight Swim, The Man in the Orange Jacket, The Seventh Code

Kind of running 24 hours behind "schedule" here - this year's week of working mornings is not quite so friendly toward "write on one computer while a query chugs on another" as one might hope - so this is going to be quick. Kind of like much of they day. I just had time to walk to m:brgr between Hal and Giovanni's Island, and then once more notice how the anime audience really can be a separate thing: Fantasia keeps a line-up so that people who were at one screening can go in to the next first and keep their seats, but there was almost no overlap between Island and the Hong Kong action of The White Storm.

The time between that and The Midnight Swim was ridiculously tight, though - the start time plus the running time of The White Storm more or less equaled when Swim started exactly, so you could hear me and Kurt Halfyard groan a little bit at picking "court metrage" ("short film") out of the introduction. A good time, but a bit of a sprint afterward to get to the next, where I was seated just as the short film before it started.



I shouldn't take pictures if I don't know the names, should I? Left to right, that's cinematographer Shaheen Seth, one of the festival hosts whose name I really should know by now, director Sarah Adina Smith, and producers Jonako Donley and Mary Pat Bentel. Smith did all the talking, including how the house in the movie was her family home, and she has two sisters, but the only really autobiographical thing in the movie was the lip-syncing bit.

"Hinata no Aoshigure" ("Sonny Boy & Dewdrop Girl")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, DCP)

Universal youthful awkwardness seems to be a more common thread in Japanese animation than it does on this side of the Pacific, to the point where "Sonny Boy & Dewdrop Girl" maybe seemed a little more like something I've already seen than it should have. A shy grade-school boy having a crush on a girl, becoming friends, but not confessing his affection isn't just something you see in anime/manga, but it's the center of a lot.

This one's pretty good. There's a chance to be glib that it sidesteps, and while it leans a bit hard on the fantasy moments in Hinata's head, the visuals of those moments are pretty darn nice. Still, I think my favorite part is the epilogue during the credits, when the movie shifts to Shigure's point of view and her thoughts on Hinata are basically "he was a bit of a goof, but nice"; it's the sort of story that can afford to have a little air let out of it once in a while, after all.

Hal

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, video)

I know some folks who will dismiss Hal because it's animated (and from Japan - the characters even have big eyes!) but might otherwise seek out the humanistic flavor of science fiction it represents. It's a nifty little movie which switches up bits of one of the genre's more common stories without losing sight of why it might connect with its viewers.

It's sometime in the future, enough so that old Mr. Tokio (voice of Tamio Oki) has a helper robot, Kyuchi, although he'll be giving it up for a bit - his granddaughter Kurumi (voice of Yoko Hikasa) has completely retreated from her life after her husband Hal's death. Tokio and specialist Dr. Aranami (voice of Shinpachi Tsuji) have the idea to give Kyuchi human form as a duplicate of Hal (voice of Yoshimasa Hosoya) in order to draw her out. A tricky, emotional job for a robot, even though Kurumi and the original Hal have unwittingly given him the direction he needs by writing their dreams on the sides of Rubik's Cubes.

Writer Izumi Kizara and director Ryotaro Makihara don't spend much time at all delving into the science-fictional details of their story; there is almost no discussion of the technical aspects of the change from Kyuchi to "Hal", for instance. It's apparently near enough in the future that the world is not terribly dissimilar to our own, although the hints of higher technology - Kyuchi's design, the holographic cameras Kurumi puts in buttons, increased use of smartphone apps - are nifty and feel like logical extrapolations; a subplot about how much some of this stuff costs and gets paid for shows that this is not the utopian future it might seem like to someone of Kurumi's middle-class background, although any histrionics about the world being built on a lie might be a bit misdirected.

Full review at EFC

Jobanni no shima (Giovanni's Island)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, DCP)

Tatsuya Nakadai did the voice of the older Junpei in this? That is flat-out fantastic, although looking at IMDB I see that the guy has just never stopped working even though he was a big-deal leading man back in the day.

It's a pretty great little movie even without that in mind, though. While it's hard not to have Grave of the Fireflies in one's head at some points during the latter half of this one, it's fortunately not anywhere close to that sad, as its take on the resilience of children - in this case, two brothers on one of Japan's northern islands that is occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II (and remains part of Russia to this day) - is much more optimistic, as the Japanese and Russian children become close no matter how their parents come into conflict. There's still a little edge to it - the scene where Tanya shows her room to Junpei and Kanta without seeming to fully realize that it was theirs before the occupiers took the house is going to feel beautifully ambivalent to adult viewers, though maybe not to the kids The film is full of little moments like that, and they make it feel real and lived-in.

Interestingly, the visual style of the movie is often very simple, with the kids' faces often distorting more than you might expect for a relatively serious movie. Still, it's interesting, especially to look at how the animators draw Tanya, who looks a bit distorted but probably did seem that way to her Japanese friends. The renderings of the Russian furniture moved into the Japanese home makes them look huge compared to the simple, low-to-the-ground things they replaced, and the whole look of the movie's background changes when the characters arrive at the Maoka internment camp.

Afterwards, I was kind of surprised that some folks brought kids, but a little thought has me thinking that it's not too heavy for them. I would absolutely recommend it as a family movie, though - it's got layers that adults will see that kids don't, and might bear some discussion afterward.

Full review on EFC

"Evil Twin"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

There was an event at the Regent Theatre last year (maybe the year before) called something like "The Boston Action Movie Film Festival", which played a lot of short films like "Evil Twin": Less fully-realized narratives than joint demo reels, with a director showing how well he could pace an action scene, the actors/stuntpeople showing their screen-fighting skills, and maybe some FX guys thrown in.

On that level, "Evil Twin" impresses. It's built as a showcase and that it does, jumping between locations as the cast continues some quality hand-to-hand without slowing down. The story is goofy and barely there, but Cha-lee Yoon and Kamil Can Aydin can throw down, and filmmaker Christian Pfeil does it all behind the camera. They've made a fine calling-card for themselves, and I hope it leads to more work.

Sou Duk (The White Storm)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

Sometimes, it's not enough for someone to be shot in the chest. They have to fall off a cliff, and there have to be alligators in the river below. That is the attitude Benny Chan brings to The White Storm, and it's kind of a blast, a throwback to the operatic heyday of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, only with a couple of even bigger action scenes than Hong Kong could have pulled off back in those days.

It's a ton of fun. Not perfect - the way they sideline Nick Cheung for much of the movie in favor of the characters played by Lau Ching-wan and Louis Koo and then make up for it big-time later on is a little goofy, and even though it drives the second half of the movie, I don't know if I ever buy into it. But, man, when Chan is shooting things up or banging cars together, it is a ton of fun, and the shift between environments - the lovely grit of Hong Kong, the gorgeous scenery of Thailand (that place photographs very very well), the gloss of Macau - makes this one of the most beautiful action movies you'll see.

Full review on EFC

"Sea Child"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clakre (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

A fitting pairing with The Midnight Swim, both in the general setting, tone, and how the movie did not quite connect with me. I felt like writer/director Marina Shron had a very basic idea but not a real story to go with it, and as a result the sharpness of the mother and daughter scenes at the beginning didn't really sustain as young Lila wandered off on her own, thinking about her father but not actually doing much.

The Midnight Swim

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clakre (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

The trick with movies like The Midnight Swim is to make the characters either outright fascinating or dole enough hints at a larger story out that the audience can overlook that not much is actually happening (presuming, of course, that they're like me and very much into the things happening). Writer/director Sarah Adina Smith does fairly well on this account; I felt like I got about halfway through or more before the realization that we were running in place hit, ironically during a bit of explaining folklore that I knew was never actually going to matter. Then things just seemed to stop for me, and even weirdness and explanations never really got things jump-started.

A shame, because Smith did a good job juggling genre and talking-head material through most of her movie, and the ladies playing all three sisters who meet following their mother's disappearance (Lindsay Burdge, Jennifer Lafleur, and Aleksa Palladino) are all excellent. There are a few too many blind alleys to the supernatural bits, but the one eventually chosen is kind of neat, conceptually.

On the other hand, folks were raving coming out of this, so clearly it worked much better for some than it did for me.

Full review on EFC

M.O.Zh. (The Man in the Orange Jacket)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clakre (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Why, Fantasia (and other) programmers, do you insist on scheduling nearly-wordless movies for 10pm (or later)? I get that they're often enough of an acquired taste to keep out of prime time, but it can be rough on those of us already coming down after 8+ hours of movies.

Few movies work with this sort of exhaustion better than The Man in the Orange Jacket, though. It's a simple enough premise - man kills rich guy who kind of has it coming, slides into his house/life, and soon finds that either he has a copycat coming after him or he's starting to crack - and writer/director Aik Karapetian moves it forward at a steady pace but also tends to circle around in surreal loops. At a mere 70 minutes, the lack of conventional action and fairly sparse plot is no problem.

It's a neat, smart movie beyond that. There's something that's not quite comedy but still kind of off about the killer trying to insert himself into the rich man's life - he doesn't know how to eat the fancy soup or how to handle the distractions in the house meant for idleness. And as much as the film sheds no tears over the rich old man with the pretty young wife, there's also something to it about how that sort of wealth is isolating. It's well worth unpacking; hopefully I'll get to see it again sometime and really get into it.

Full review on EFC

Seventh Code

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clakre (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

This back-end, meanwhile, is an enjoyable weird, but still somewhat conventional little movie which has a flaky Tokyo girl chasing a guy she met once a month ago to Vladivostok and then getting half-voluntarily stranded there for her trouble. Of course, she makes new friends, but also gets involved in something very shady.

It winds up going sort of where you'd expect - I can't say what Akiko finally gets into surprised me - but it has exceptional fun getting there, and the latter portion of the movie is both filled with some impressive action and on occasion kind of goofy. Neither has typically been part of writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's arsenal before now, but he handles both pretty well. Heck, even the music video segment - which I half-suspect is what paid for the rest of the hour-long mini-movie as a way to showcase Atsuko Maeda - kind of fits into the anything-goes feel of the thing.

Full review on EFC