Fantasia 2025.09: Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and Transcending Dimensions

This is the last post before flying back south, not quite reaching halfway on the blog during the event, and I don't know how much more I'll get through before everything is just too far in the back of my head to finish if I hold true to form, so I just want to say it's been great seeing you all again, we saw some pretty good movies, dealt with a decent AirBNB in a building that kept making things a little difficult (okay, maybe that's just me), and generally had a good time.

I got a late-ish start on Thursday because I saw Fragment opening night, so for me, the day kicked off with the second screenings of Redux Redux. I was a little disappointed that the McManus clan wasn't there, although it turned out my bladder wanted me out right as credits rolled and just got this picture of actor Jeremy Holm ®, who played the villain, starting his Q&A and saying that he got the role by freaking the McManus brothers out, sending them poetry he wrote in-character. I'm torn over whether that was just the start or whether it couldn't get any better.

Next up in De Sève without guests was The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which has odd in playing late afternoon at the midpoint of the festival and at night on the second-to-last day, when the schedule is usually night then matinee a couple days later. Good for flexibility.

Then I crossed the street for Anna Kiri, the second time in three days where I kind of consider myself lucky that the French-Canadian film listed as having English subtitles actually had English subtitles. I've gotten trapped in the center of a row for something I barely understood before and while that wasn't happening tonight (I am choosing seats with escape routes this year), it would still mean eating a slot. Anyway, there wasn't much of a Q&A afterwards but pretty much everybody involved in the movie was there. That's director Francis Bordeleau in the eye of the storm with a mic.

And, finally, we end the night with Transcending Dimensions director Toshiaki Toyoda. I must admit, I don't know if I've heard his name specifically before, but he's a guy that certainly has a following. among some at the festival. He gave a pretty cheerful Q&A, although one laced with jokes about how difficult it is to make an independent film these days. He also mentioned writing to the cast which meant having to be very fortunate for windows of availability to line up, and that he took a chorus at a buddhist retreat for the specific purpose of getting to blow the conch shell.

I must admit: I zoned out during his movie, so it's a good thing I fell behind enough to see it on the next Monday before writing a review. I was going to see it then in any case, but I'd opted to skip the big Adams Family movie across the way because my experience with their stuff was that it was a fun novelty once, but diminishing returns thereafter. That movie won the Cheval Noir, but I don't regret the decision to zone out during the trippy mystical sci-fi versus the gifted-amateur horror movie.


Huh, no shorts on Thursday the 24th? Unusual! Friday would be The Serpent's Skin, I Live Here Now, Forbidden City, and New Group. Yesterday (the last day!), I was able to run from Burning to A Chinese Ghost Story III, then finished with Holy Night: Demon Hunters, >Fixed, and Tanoman: Expo Explosions.


Redux Redux

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Redux Redux is the sort of genre movie that I arguably go to film festivals looking to discover: Quality, lean sci-fi action that makes sure to deliver the goods right away and then keeps up an impressively steady pace all the way through. It twists and world-builds a bit, but keeps its eye on the prize.

It opens provocatively, with Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) murdering a man (Jeremy Holm) in ways designed to make him suffer, before the last one goes awry and has her leading the police on a desperate chase before she can return to her hotel room, where she has what looks like a steampunk coffin. It's a machine for jumping between realities, and she's been doing that for some time, taking out every iteration of the serial killer that killed her daughter and 11 other girls. This time, though, something is different - she arrives just in time to find a 13th victim, Mia (Stella Marcus), still alive, and the street-smart orphan wants a piece of this revenge even before discovering Irene's secret.

Michaela McManus Irene gives off some Sarah Connor vibes as her universe-hopping avenger, but a lot of the fun comes when Stella Marcus enters the picture and the movie transforms into something snappier and perhaps more entertaining without lowering the stakes or the melancholy. McManus's Irene is plenty capable as the film's antihero, but one of the things that comes across even during the opening badass imagery is that she's tired; not in a way that seems to have her sluggish or unable to meet a challenge, but questions about the point of all this are starting to kick around in her head. Marcus, meanwhile, is playing Mia as someone who was already a smart-ass teen and this is all turbocharging it. The neat trick is that McManus never makes Irene seem like she's regarding Mia as a new daughter, but that she has had a teenage daughter and knows what she's dealing with enough to parry and appear to relent.

The film in general manages to be very funny without abandoning a grim plot; the universe-hoping often means that narrow escapes are followed by awkward entrances, and filmmakers Kevin & Matthew McManus find ways to ease into heavy situations by finding the absurd in Irene's encounters with new-but-not-so-new people and places. It's never a thing that gives the viewer whiplash, but greases the wheels and reminds the audience that there is this spark of humanity left in Irene and Mia despite her self-imposed missions of revenge.

The whole thing moves, too, offering up quick action that finds new ways to challenge Irene even though the audience is well aware of the escape hatch, doubling down and adding mythology in a way that doesn't distract or diminish what had come before. The finale circles back around to the start but also shows how Irene has expanded her intentions.

It's nice work without being overly flashy, a lot like the original Terminator: A simple but striking sci-fi premise that lends itself to human-scale action and elevated through strong execution.


La Virgen de la Tosquera (The Virgin of the Quarry Lake)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is described as adapting two stories in a collection by Mariana Enriquez, and I kind of wonder how it branches out from this: Up and down the line of Natalia's life? Following side characters? Thematic similarities? And, most curiously, is there more magic compared to the hints we see here, because its placement is pretty convenient but not nearly as cringe-inducingly so as other tales of this type can be.

Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) is a teenager, or just out of school but not yet looking to leave the home of her grandmother Rita (Luisa Merelas), where she's been since her mother left for Spain; it's not like there's a lot of opportunity in turn-of-the-millennium Buenos Aires. She's probably the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, the one everybody presumes will end up with handsome Diego (Agustín Sosa), at least until Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) enters the picture. Silvia's not quite so pretty as Nati, but she's a bit older and more experienced, with tales of traveling extensively to Mexico and Europe, and it threatens to bring out the worst in Nati.

Everyone is primed to blow in this movie from the opening scene where a neighbor beats an unhoused person almost to death, especially at somebody who might be considered an outsider, and you don't really need the addition of apparent witchcraft to make that point; the abandoned shopping cart lurks in more shots than one expect, a reminder of the potential for evil that exists in everyone and an omen of worse to come. Indeed, for all that the fantastic elements seems to be a settling point, I kind of wondered if it figured more into the other stories from the adapted collection. It winds up a bit of an unarmed big finale though little more than a series of potentially-coincidental metaphors throughout.

The slow-ish burn getting there is good stuff, at least, as the strain on Nati builds and she finds it easier to be selfish. The filmmakers are well able to be empathetic even as it becomes clear that Nati is not a particularly good person, especially during a particularly brutal phone call where Dolores Oliverio's face reveals stunned surprise that someone could do this to her but also the genuine hurt of her first stabbing heartbreak. It is, we see, somewhat easy to think well of Nati because of her circumstances, and even understand as this young and angry girl does not necessarily respond maturely, but how does one cope when she doesn't always grow in the right direction.

Oliverio is great in the role, transmuting adolescent naivete to cool rage before the audience's eyes, retaining enough of what makes Nati the cool girl people flock to that it's hard to let go even when she's probably passing points of no return. The folks around her are pretty good, too, most notably Luisa Merelas as Rita, whose kindness seems to hold the neighborhood together but which has its practical limits. Agustin Sosa plays Diego as a sort of handsome cipher, possibly worth Nati's obsession but vague enough to emphasize that this isn't the point. Fernanda Echeverría intrigues as Silvia, coming off as someone who puffs themselves up and flaunts their good fortune at first but seeming more mature and well-rounded as one starts to question Nati's perspective.

The filmmakers do an impressive job of immersing this group in what feels like a very specific time and place. Folks around the world will probably grin at the precision of how they ground it in time with fashion, music, and how internet communication is just beginning to be a major part of teenagers' lives, but the rolling power outages, water shortages, and other infrastructure issues will undoubtedly strike a chord with Argentinians who lived through it. Even the quarry lake of the title, a beautiful oasis, requires leaving the city and walking from the last bus stop, and it's apparently haunted, both by the people who died digging it and the idea that there was once going to be a town where people could live a comfortable middle-class life there.

That's where the shocking finale happens, and while I'm normally not exactly fond of the way it plays out, there's no denying that the final line and the way it seems to set things into place are effectively delivered. I don't so much wonder what happened to these girls next, if that's where the book goes, but I sure felt the process of getting there.


Ana Kiri

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)

I was wearing a watch during this screening, so I'm kicking myself for not doing a quick check to see how literally this movie is split down the middle for me when the time jump happened. Sure, things had been going well enough not to be tracking elapsed time, and you can't exactly know in the moment that this is when things are going to go downhill, but in retrospect, I certainly couldn't help but wonder.

It starts with how Anna (Catherine Brunet) and her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotreet) had been on their own since childhood, and though Anna loves him fiercely, she recognizes that he's been buying into his gangster persona too much of late despite their group - Anna, Vincent, his girlfriend Cindy (Charlotte Aubin), and best friend Mirko (JadeHassouné) mostly being small-time crooks at best. And now, Vincent's gotten ambitious - the bowling alley they just knocked over was a stash house for crime boss Micky (Kar Graboshas). Anna loses her diary while fleeing Micky's bar, and it winds up in the hands of French Literature lecturer Phillippe (Fayolle Jean), who is impressed enough to offer Anna a scholarship. She initially refuses, but then realizes it would be a good way to break away from a life that's turned dangerous.

I really loved the grungy crime vibes of the first half, full of Anna's sarcastic self-aware narration, inevitable betrayals, and plenty of colorful small-timers and losers. It just looks and feels right, and even when Anna winds up catching Philippe's interest and visiting his office, there's this nifty tension of how she doesn't feel like she belongs there, whether this is worth sticking her head up for, and what happens when she steps back outside this university building. It's great heist-fallout stuff, and the way the action, Anna's narration, and the scribbled notes that show up on-screen like a telestrator reinforce and contradict each other makes the simple story feel dense and emphasizes just how many directions Anna's mind is being pulled in.

The second half, where Anna is in school and developing her diary into a novel, never quite comes together compared to the first. The filmmakers introduce a bunch of new characters it does little with and their take on the literary world feels broader than their take on crime tropes. The audience isn't given time to acclimate to Anna's new situation before her old life tears its head. And the ending... Oof. The potential is frustrating; there's little exploration over whether Anna fits into this world or not, or the idea that one can hide out in the same city they "fled" by changing social status and associations; working-class neighborhoods and academia can be a block apart and never mingle.

Also, I don't know whether this is a compliment or not, but when we first see Anna's new boyfriend using a laptop, I wondered how he had one because it seemed like this movie took place in 1983 or the like until that point, a pay-phone era crime flick rather than a smartphone-era one.

Catherine Brunet is plenty watchable as Anna regardless; she and the filmmakers do a fine job of capturing a woman who is a little too smart for the life of a small-time crook but too much of that world to truly fit into the art & lit crowd she finds herself in. There are some fun other characters around her - Charlotte Aubin's Cindy plays like a the sort of wannabe femme fatale that wears high heels to go bowling, and Nincolas Michone's Zhao is seemingly trying to work his way up to management of the bar where he sells drugs - though Maxime de Cotret gets a bit caught in between as Vincent, not quite charismatic enough to be as full of himself as he is, even considering that he's not entirely getting away with it..

There's half a good movie here, and half a movie with an interesting idea but not nearly the same execution.


Transcending Dimensions

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Seen 28 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I ran out of gas during my first screening of transcending Dimensions - running the psychedelic movie at 10m works for an audience that rolls out of bed at 2pm rather than 7am - and came out feeling as though I'd missed a lot. The second time through, at a more civilized noon, I think that maybe I didn't miss quite so much as I thought the first time but was maybe just too tired to absorb it. It's actually more straightforward than the trippiness would indicate.

It opens with Ryosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka), a sort of monk, sitting in nature, pondering; but soon it is visiting a retreat run my Master Ajari Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), who wears the robes but has a sadistic streak. He dares one visitor, Yazu (Masahiro Higashide), to cut off his finger because no knowledge comes without sacrifice; another, Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), sees where this going and tries to leave. Another, Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), is a hitman there at the behest of Nonoka (Haruku Imo), the monk Ryosuke was her boyfriend and disappeared here, so she wants Hanzo dead. But is Rosuke in the forest, at the end of the universe, or someplace stranger?

As all this goes on, the extent to which Transcending Dimensions just looks and sounds cool should not be overlooked. A lot of attention will be paid to the scenes in order space or the mirrored rooms, but it looks generally spiffy whether what's on screen is kaleidoscopic CGI or wide-open nature. The jazzy soundtrack with the diegetic sound of monks blowing on conch shells is excellent, and the sound design is terrific as well, whether it's ordinary but enveloping or built in such a way as to imply heightened senses and awareness of every time Ryosuke's staff raps on a stone.

What's maybe most surprising is the extent to which the assassin is perhaps the sanest, most centered character of the whole lot. While the monks and masters appear to spend their entire lives chasing enlightenment, he comes off as a guy who might actually be living outside of his job, separate from conventional morality but having instincts about how things connect. Enlightenment, the film suggests, is not a particularly important goal on its own; the process has not made Matter Hanzo a better man, and Ryosuke, meditating until the end of the world, will not contribute much to it. The cast is impressive playing this out, from Chihara Jr.'s gleeful sadism to Yosuke Kubozuka's earnest disconnection, with Kiyohiko Shibukawa's frustration hilarious and Haruka Imo eventually giving Nonoka perspective that is both human and ethereal.

Having that at the film's center probably makes it somewhat easier to tell a story when it's not quite so important to communicate something grandiose and spiritual. Transcending Dimensions has plenty of strange turns, unreliable narrators, sidetracks, and subtle revelations, but filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is good at using the time to let a joke or shock breathe so that the rest of the film can sink in as well, meaning that stitching it all together is more straightforward than you might thing.

Anyway, I'm very glad that the schedule worked out so I could see it with the director Q&A and the "what did I just watch?" sensation the first time, and give it a second chance a few days later when my brain was operating normally. It is, perhaps, how this sort of movie is best experienced.

Fantasia 2025.07: Stinker, "First Rites", Sweetness, Peau à Peau, "A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers", and Contact Lens

If you'd told me ahead of time which program on today's schedule would be one of my favorites of the festival I might not have believed you.

We kicked things off with Stinker and director Yerden Telemissov (center), who really came off as a charming, sweet guy making his first feature as a director after working as an actor for years. He's a big dude, so it's probably not entirely surprising that he's mostly been cast as gangsters and other heavies, but from the film he made and the way he talks, that's got to be some really impressive acting.

Next up, we have programmer Carolyn Mauricette with "First Rites" director Findlay Ironside, whose short I liked a bit more than the feature it was attached to.

After a dinner break, I headed across the street for Peau à Peau, which being a French-Canadian film had a whole mess of people in attendance, and me crossing my finger that the "subtitled in English" label on the program wasn't just a little joke at my expense, the way that it sometimes can be. Thankfully, it was not!

Still, kind of no idea what director Chloé Cinq-Mars and star Rose-Marie Perreault are talking about here.

And, finally, we head a bit closer to the mountain with Justine Smith introducing Birdy Hung Wei Ting, whose short "A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers" played before Contact Lens and was a real delight, as was the feature. This surprised me a bit, because they are riffs on specific art-house films that I might have missed - I only saw Jeanne Dielman because it won the Sight & Sound poll and IFFBoston and the Somerville Theatre booked it on 35mm - but there's a bit of a lesson here in that even films that get the reputation as being challenging or for sophisticates can be for everyone. These Hung and Contact Lens director Lu Ruiqi sort of pull the best bits out of the films they homage and twist them in a way that the fun is front-and-center, but the material itself is still great, and works beyond just recognition or a secret handshake between cineastes.

That said… Contact Lens can drag a bit like Jeanne Dielman in points, so I did at one point reach into my backpack for an energy drink I'd purchased for the next morning. It was disturbingly effective and now I'm making sure I'm carrying some little Pepsi Zeros for when I start to flag during marathon movie sessions like this.


So there's Tuesday! Wednesday would be A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House With Laughing Windows, the "Things That Go Bump in the East" shorts, and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn. Today (the next Tuesday), I'll probably do The Undertone, the "Diasporing Dualities" shorts, LifeHack, and Dollhouse. Stuntman is good fun.


Sasyq (Stinker)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Stinker absolutely plays like a "kid hiding his new alien friend" movie, except that the kid is a homeless former classics professor in his sixties and the best jokes involve attempted suicide and a hand grenade. It's well enough made, but for who? Is last year's Steppenwolf all the more shocking because this is sort of the norm for mainstream entertainment in Kazakhstan?

It opens with that initially-nameless professor (Bakhytzhan Alpeis) attempting to end his life in various manners but not able to go through with it for one reason or another. When he's not doing that, he's hanging out in the general area of a roadside convenience store operated by crusty grandmother Nadya (Irka Abdulmanova) as she watches out for her granddaughter (Ailin Sultangazina). He's the only one that sees a UFO crash-land, disintegrating and leaving only one survivor (Chingiz Kapin). The Earth's sun would burn him severely, and it turns out that the only place nearby that approximates his home planet is the hole beneath the shop's outhouse. As the professor and the alien try to repair a communication device, the town's mayor is getting worked up over a motorcade that will pass the town in a few days, instructing a policeman to get word out to the residents to put their best foot forward, and clear away undesirables, like a homeless drunk going on about aliens.

As these movies go, it's mostly fairly pleasant and straightforward. The characters are familiar enough types played relatively well, especially once things thaw a bit and the granny and professor start warming to each other. The comedy tends toward the scatalogical - the title comes from two characters who kind of reek - but director Yerden Telemissov and coo-writer Sergey Litovchenko mostly keep their film on the side of the line where it's amusingly rude rather than truly disgusting. There doesn't seem to be much budget for special effects, but what there is looks reasonably nifty, well designed and within the limits of what they can do.

It still winds up feeling like they're executing a familiar template, and the pieces that could add some color don't do that much. The mayor, who seems to have a nice office from which to run a town that otherwise feels like a wide part of the highway, is introduced as a petty despot but never seems to have any villainous ambition or worthwhile secrets to hide. There's stuff that will maybe help the alien get home, but it doesn't amount to much other than making one wonder if police badges are literal tin in this town. There's a joke to be made about how folks in an advanced civilization don't know a whole lot about their tools in folks vaguely seeking some sort of metal, but this isn't that movie.

It means that the end is a real mess, with the mayor suddenly able to call on militarized police even though he's been leaning on one overmatched deputy (and as much as I'm kind of okay with a cop willing to prostrate himself for this mayor being the butt of some kind of mean physical comedy, the bits where he's deprived of his inhaler cross the line into cruelty), so that there can be a more bombastic climax. That's where the hand grenade comes in, and even that joke gets elongated just long enough to not be quite so much fun.

The film ambles along well enough, but it's hard to imagine anyone but kids being terribly amused, and I'm pretty sure I'd get into trouble with by brothers if I showed it to my nieces and nephews, so I'm really not sure who the audience is.


"First Rites"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Do genre festival programmers have a sort of insider term for "short that is build-up to and execution of some sort of supernatural rite, followed by an unexpected result?" I'm not complaining about them, mind you; just noticing that they seem to show up fairly often. "First Rites" is actually a pretty good example - it starts with an awkward conversation between Martha (Vanessa Gonzalez-Egan), who claims to a private chef, and Kirk (Matt Vince), who delivers her animal blood from the meat market, his interest being unwanted and maybe inappropriate; continues as Martha tries to revive the corpse of Jane Hudson; and then hits the viewer with a punchline.

It's done well-enough, although at times I wonder about the odd part of the house where the ritual is performed (I imagine the owner of the house saying uh-uh, you shoot the whole thing in the entryway even if it looks weird and keep your fake blood away from the carpet and the dining room); writer/director Findlay Ironside and her team bring a sort of foreboding atmosphere to a suburban environment that seems like it would be extremely unremarkable just outside Martha's door, and her specific discomfort with Kirk's persistence lets one think that her motivations are one thing as opposed to something else, even though there's been a clue or two dropped. The punchline is pretty darn good.

So, yes, this is a familiar sort of short, but executed rather well.


Sweetness

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Let's start with the usual caveats that I have never been a teenage girl and that the nieces that I only see once every few months at family things seem pretty well-adjusted. They're maybe unnecessary, because I do more or less buy into the parts of Sweetness that are about Rylee being obsessed and going horrifically overboard in a way she figures is well-meaning, even if it's not particularly exciting to me. It's the rest that kind of falls flat and makes the film a grind to get through.

Said girl is Rylee Hill (Kate Hallett), whose widowed father (Justin Chatwin) is dating a woman she doesn't particularly like (Amanda Brugel) and who gets relentlessly teased at school, although she probably isn't helping herself by doing things like having her earbuds in when best friend Sidney (Aya Furukawa) wants to include a boy or two in their hangouts. Her current favorite musician is Floorplan frontman Payton Adler (Herman Tømmeraas), and both Rylee and Sid are excited for the weekend's concert. They get separated as Sidney wants to hang out with other friends, and Rylee is nearly run over by Payton before being offered a ride home. It's not quite a dream come true - her dreams involve much more! - and that's before the supposedly-sober Payton stops at a dealer's house and crashes the car. Rylee decides she's going to help him detox, and why not - her father's job means she's got access to handcuffs, said father and Marnie are away on a weekend retreat, and she's also house-sitting a place just down the street whose retired owners won't be back from their cruise for weeks.

Roughly halfway through Sweetness, I found myself thinking that this has escalated too far, too fast, and I didn't see how the filmmakers could work with their new baseline and stakes. Sadly, they can';- it's suddenly much harder to empathize with Rylee and the filmmakers don't seem to have a new plan to get the audience to understand her (and I wouldn't be shocked if they had trouble showing this petite girl lugging people around in a way that made it believable. There's really only one scene to come that delivers on the potential of the start.

It goes to show that sometimes even a relatively small independent film can be too big. The bit about Sweetness that intrigued is two characters in a room - the idol-worshipping teen girl who needs music to hold her together and the pop star whose own issues are causing him to crack - and once everyone is spending time on Things Getting Worse and Not Getting Caught, that all winds up in the background. The movie becomes a thriller of mechanics, but the folks involved don't seem to realize this, deferring what Rylee is doing to stay ahead of things which haven't been presented as a threat yet and acting like the character's well hasn't been poisoned.

Kate Hallett puts in the effort - even at the moments when Rylee seems to have an unchanging resting scowl, the audience can feel the mix of sadness and rage within her, and even when she's confident, it's a wavering, convincing-herself confidence. Hallett can be convincing in her heartbreak and teenage earnestness, enough to pull the audience in despite everything else. It's a nice complement to Herman Tømmeraas, who convincingly presents Payton's inner turmoil in moments when he's not just a jackass or rightly terrified and lashing out at the teenage psycho or yelling for help.

The mess of the second half causes the movie to end with a quiet thud that's all the worse because the epilogue suggests an intriguing alternate explanation for what's going through one secondary character's head. Interesting and unnerving as those last scenes are, this isn't that movie, or the one that it started as.


Peau à Peau (aka Nesting)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)

Peau à Peau feels like a random, zig-zagging movie that raises things and then has the filmmakers get distracted, not returning until much later, and it maybe takes a while for a viewer to recognize that it's not distraction, but a different sort of seeming randomness. While the audience is looking for some sort of casual chain, this is about traumas being stacked, and the seeming lack of a pattern is part of the problem.

Motherhood is not coming easy to Pénélope (Rose-Marie Perreault) - not only did she have a difficult pregnancy, but her baby Lou's premature birth nearly killed her, and now that he's born, he's not gaining weight even as he seems to do nothing but feed, and won't sleep through the night, with boyfriend Gaspard (Simon Landry-Desy) somehow not awakened by the crying. She's taking Lou for a walk to the local depanneur during one of these incidents when it is held up, and she recognizes the robber as her sister Charlotte (Marie Bélanger). Coincidentally, a former lover she and Charlotte met at camp as teenagers, Swiss artist Edward (Saladin Dellers) has returned to Montreal for a gallery exhibition, and rekindling that relationship highlights how frustrated she is with Gaspard.

Also, during the robbery, "Charlotte" dropped her gun and Pénélope picked it up and has been keeping it close.

Viewers are often used to seeing thrillers as clockwork constructions, mysteries which can be solved and traced from start to finish then more or less safely put away, because that is in many way how minds work for everything. This isn't how things work for Pénélope; each new crisis reminds her of the last time she was this scared and vulnerable, but others have difficulty seeing beyond the issue at hand. So while they are trying to do what they can to handle that (or just as often seeing Pénélope as a disruptive source of problems), Pénélope is creating connections in her own mind trying to find a pattern, and it's leading her to stranger and more desperate places.

On the way, I often wasn't sure what to make of Rose-Marie Perreault as Pénélope as she wavered between grounded and the sort of exhausted that occasionally results in blurting out something shocking or unfiltered, with occasional detours into what can read as overacting until one realizes the extent to which she is in the process of cracking. There's a sort of consistency to her chaotic reactions, though, and Perreault manages to keep it unnerving or desperate enough that an outburst out of almost nowhere never seems out of character, but just this moment's last stray. She and filmmaker Chloé Cinq-Mars occasionally slip a glimpse of the woman she was before her pregnancy in, sometimes briefly enough that you don't know you've seen it.

I had, admittedly, expected a more genre-adjacent film (maybe not The Babadook, but in that neighborhood), but the filmmakers use that sort of thing sparingly: Mirrors don't seem to quite work right, at least for Pénélope, and the filmmakers often edit in a way meant to unsettle, jumping forward when the audience expects to stay in the same time and place, although the occasional narrated dates in the baby diary are a reminder that not much time has passed, and Pénélope is deteriorating fast.

I suspect this one will grow on me. So much about it is built to not just misdirect, but to trigger the instincts that say a film isn't working, even if it actually is, and a second viewing with that in mind could be interesting.


"A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream A Brighter Summer Day (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon

I think I need to see A Brighter Summer Day the next time it shows up in the Boston area, which probably won't be too long, because the various venues back home all tend to circle back around to Edward Yang eventually. I loved this short, but feel like a lot of what's in it has sort of been hanging around my consciousness for a while in clips and stills, and wonder how much Birdy Hung Wei-Ting and company are impressing me with impressive mimicry of something acknowledged to be great and how much is their distinctive spin.

It doesn't quite feel like that, though, especially when this film's Ming, after buying a bag of watermelon juice that seems like it could be on a collision course for her white school uniform, cheerfully buys a ticket to The Lady Avenger, a violent bit of pulp that she gobbles up, seeming to intimidate the boy smitten with her. You can see Hung flip the script even if you don't know what that script is, as Ming's fantasies take on a much more assertive bent and the boy starts to freak out. It's funny and unnerving on top of being genuinely beautiful.


He ma pi fu (Contact Lens)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2025 in Cinéma du Musée Even (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Jeanne Dielman (Prime link), or order the disc at Amazon

A delightfully playful riff on a classic (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) that likely nobody would describe that weird to describe, Contract Lens can still sometimes have its inspiration's methodical nature, but pairs it with whimsy much more often as it is very much its own thing.

Bubble (Zhong Yunxi) lives on her own in a nice little apartment, tending to run late as she starts her day, screaming "I know!" when appliances inform her their work is done while she's still dressing or putting in her contacts. When not tutoring a little girl (Wu Shiqi) on her Chinese characters, she spends much of her time in the park, shooting various objects and people with her camcorder, and befriends one confident girl (Chen Fan) who seems tickled by the idea of being a muse. Bubble's "roommate" surprises her, though; she has "adopted a film", with the kitchen from Jeanne Dielman projected on a screen in Bubble's, and Jeanne (Dai Yanli) appears to be aware of the situation.

The most obvious fun comes from how writer/director Lu Ruiqi plays with the projection, having Jeanne initially bumping into the movie screen from the other side, or having Bubble occasionally seem to pass into and out of Jeanne's world, or having it interact with the balcony behind it. Lu tends to stage these moments more like magic tricks than visual effects, carefully matching Zhong Yunxi walking behind a sheet with her entering on the other set previously, or arranging things so that Dai Yanli's eyeline matches with the outside world. Lu will often start a scene blurry, bringing it into focus as Bubble puts her lenses in.

That's maybe not just a gag, but a reminder that Bubble is introverted and tends to interact with the world through a lens. She tells her outgoing new friend that many of the people she shoots are also shy and seem to prefer the camera as a mediator. She spends a lot of time on her laptop editing, and as the film goes on, she interacts more with Jeanne, though at a remove, than the friend who is right there. A fan who would "adopt" a film this way is often inherently possessive, and one wonders if Jeanne's apparent growing independence (real or imagined) springs from Bubble's fandom and obsession, and where it could lead Bubble.

The film, it must be said, is not non-stop surrealism and meta-commentary; though there are bits that are quite funny even outside of that (and I would love someone who speaks and reads Chinese to tell me just exactly how funny one of the penmanship lessons is), the film also parallels Jeanne Dielman in ways that can frustrate the folks who would avoid a three-and-a-half-hour arthouse drama, even at well under 90 minutes: We spend a lot of time watching Bubble do chores, or staring at ordinary, inactive things through the eyepiece of her camera, and repeating them. It's a contrast in some ways - Bubble has labor-saving devices that nevertheless seem to stress her out compared to the patient, methodical Jeanne - but it can occasionally give some viewers the fidgets in the way that the original film does.

I do kind of wonder how Contact Lens would have hit me without Jeanne Dielman being listed at the top of the Sight & Sound list and thus creating more of an impetus to see it when it had more bookings than usual a couple years ago. There's enough to it that doesn't necessarily require familiarity with that specific film, but it's a richer experience knowing it.

Fantasia 2024.06: "Furet", Fly Me to the Saitama: From Biwa Lake with Love, and The Chapel

Pretty short day in part because of previous days not going as planned: Bookworm being sold out on opening night meant I opted for Swimming in a Sand Pool instead, and the science fiction shorts ran just long enough on the 21st that finishing the Nobuhiro Yamashita hat trick with Ghost Cat Anzu wasn't possible, meaning it was easy enough to turn back around and see Not Friends. Pair that with not wanting to risk cascading delays causing Vulcanizadora running late and making me miss Fly Me to the Saitama 2, and I had the whole afternoon free.

First order of business: Another Asian movie!. Well, technically, the first was going into Marshall's and getting some extra socks and underpants so that I could push laundry day to the exact midpoint of the trip, thus only hitting the laundromat once and hopefully not having clean and dirty clothes mingling in the suitcase on the way home. But that mall is right across the street from the old Forum and an easy stop before Customs Frontier.

Second order of business: Poutine!

Honestly, I wish my schedule had lined up so that I could hit Le Grand Poutine Fest for a few days in a row, trying out all the food trucks. This General Tao's Chicken Poutine was good stuff, though.

Then, finally, back to the Concordia campus and a couple of films without guests, which is why I'm throwing pictures of poutine in there. Not that I don't mind a little break after a week.

Not much of a break for the start of the third weekend (or "Week Three", if short weeks are allowed, where I'll be catching the first three episodes of Lantern Blade, Haze, and A Chinese Ghost Story II, seeing what the time/crowd situation is to choose between Jour de chasse and "CineMaposa 2024", and finishing with Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.


"Furet" ("Ferret")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Les Fantastiques Week-ends du Cinéma Québécois, laser DCP)

Fantastiques Week-ends is a celebration of local Québécois filmmaking, from features that recently played major festivals like SXSW ot things that are clearly a few friends screwing around with a camera and editing suite, mostly entertaining themselves as opposed to harboring much thought of doing this for a living. "Furet" is one of those, in a number of senses; if it gets broader notice, it will likely be as a novelty: Most of the supporting cast has Down syndrome, which can lead to the feeling of it taking place in some unusual parallel world. I don't think that's what the filmmakers are going for; they're just a bunch of people who have a thing in common getting together to make the sort of movie they enjoy and having a good time.

And it is a pretty good time - the title character (Rémi-Pierre Paquin), nicknamed "Furet" ("Ferret" in English) for his ability to weasel his way out of situations, gets pulled into a plot to rob a bar from the inside, only for a number of things to go wrong. It's goofier than a lot of comedies using that skeleton are, but also feels like a lot of fun: Why make a movie about gangsters if you're not going to put on costumes and make them 1940s gangsters? Use the ridiculous joke. If you can get a celebrity cameo, let him be silly in a way he probably doesn't get to be at work.

Make movies and have fun with it. You might turn out something better than expected.


Tonde Saitama: Biwako Yori Ai o Komete (Fly Me to the Saitama: From Lake Biwa with Love)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I'll bet, watched back to back, there's precious little difference between the two Fly Me to the Saitama movies and either my tastes have changed or something in the experience was different (it's a movie just made to bring out the weebs going "haw haw, I know that bit!", and that can get me gritting my teeth more than laughing), but this one seemed to be trying a little too hard and leaning on that recognition in the way the first wasn't quite so much. Or maybe it just hit differently tonight. That happens.

The first - well, the first was something, a framing story about a family in a car whose daughter is ashamed to be from the Saitama prefecture listening to a radio drama about the Saitamese throwing off the yoke of their oppressors. The same family is in the car again five years later, daughter Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) now grown and pregnant, worrying over the name of the child, when another drama comes on. It starts with princess Momomi Dannoura (Fumi Nikaido) looking to help unite the Saitama by building a railway line that connects its various districts as opposed to just going to Tokyo and back, but facing resistance; husband and Saitaman hero Rei Asami (Gackt) proposes building a beach. To do that, he and his comrades will travel to Shiga to import sand, but the hips are attacked, and they find themselves amid a similar revolution: Shiga is the equivalent of the Saitama in this part of Japan, with Osaka and its governor Akira Kashoji (Ainosuke Kataoka) ruling with an iron fist and revolutionary Kai Kikyo (Anne Watanabe), very much a female version of Rei, opposing him. He's got plans beyond just having Shiga under his thumb, though - a special chemical extracted from Koshinen Stadium can actually turn outsiders Osakan, effectively making all of Japan Osaka… or even the world!

The good news is that a movie so eager to throw jokes against the wall to see what sticks like this will do pretty well even if only ten percent are working for you, and the hit rate here is better than that. There's not a moment that isn't trying to make the audience laugh in two or three ways even if it's also looking to push some sort of story forward. Many of the jokes are very dumb, and many are completely inscrutable if you're not Japanese and haven't been diving into Japanese pop culture even more than the typical manga fan (I certainly wouldn't know someone had started talking with an Osakan accent or using Osakan slang without other characters commenting on it), but the thing is, they at least all look like jokes and are presented with gusto. Nobody is going to miss the gag because it's too dry, ever, and even if something is hard to parse, the comic timing is pretty impeccable, at least with a crowd. By the end, certainly, the filmmakers have locked into a delightfully absurd mode with big laughs.

Both new and returning cast are strong, and not just because the sight of Anne Watanabe and Gackt in near-matching costumes is fun - the same basic outfit that marks Rei as a someone feminine bishonen makes Kikyo a masculine "Lady Oscar" type - and they're both kind of excitable but complement each other in where they're clever and where they're dumb. Watanabe, especially, dives into how a lot of fans are going to be immediately eager to pair them off and has a ball. Ainosuke Kataoka similarly gets to chew a bunch of scenery as a megalomaniac villain who is quite obviously being cuckolded. And it's kind of a shame that Fumi Nikaido's Momomi is not so much relegated to the sidelines as doing her own thing back in the Saitama - she's a riot, and can sell a lot of gags on her own, but it's mostly against minor characters, as opposed to the other stars.

As with the first, the movie is a bunch of fun to just look at, with elaborate costumes that are as big a part of the characters as the performances but an overall aesthetic that can be kind of rickety, like a lot of secondary locations and visuals were built quick and on short notice so that the whole doesn't feel too fancy. When the action gets big and brash, though, the effects work is up to the task, because the filmmakers want the audience laughing at how wacky this is, not at how low the budget must be.

There's a lot that's fun here, but it doesn't always connect. Maybe the very end locks what wasn't quite working for me in - the first film is more self-deprecating while this sequel points more mockery outward, to the point of saying sorry, we don't really think this at the end. There was something kind of weirdly universal even when the first was at its most specific - every city that's not Tokyo or London or New York has that kind of chip on its shoulder (and even then, Queens has it for Manhattan, for example) - so you felt it even if the references weren't your own, but this is often more about the specific stereotypes than the feeling behind them. It may just be a small difference in attitude, but when you're blowing everything up to the scale that this movie is, it can make a notable difference.


La ermita (The Chapel)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Because these daily reviews have a kind of format, I often wind up copying the previous one, keeping the skeleton, and filling in. Today, this kind of reminds me that The Chapel played in the same slot that had The Beast Within the night before, and some important elements are similar, in that both center on a pre-teen girl whose perspective is an important part of the story. I quite like this one where the other left me cold, and I think a big part of the reason why is that where Beast tried to be a timeless fairy tale, Chapel is contemporary and specific, and its details are interesting and make it easier to identify parallels than something trying to be universal.

The lore here dates back to 1631; with the Black Death raging, the plague doctors rounded up the sick and sealed them in one of the church's rooms, including Uxoa, a little girl who dropped her doll on the way inside and is said to haunt it. Nearly 400 years later, the site has been excavated and recreating the event has been a tourist attraction for decades, in part because medium Ivana Peralta claimed to make contact with Uxoa. This year, one of the locals most fascinated by the whole thing is 8-year-old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), a neighbor of Peralta's who hopes to become a medium herself and is encouraged by the old woman, but for a very specific reason: Her mother Maider (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer. She finds the old woman dead one night during the five-day period when the chapel is ceremonially opened before being resealed, which brings Ivana's estranged, burnt daughter Carol (Belén Rueda) back to town to settle the estate. She's also a medium, but of the cold-reading variety, and resists Emma's entreaties to teach her. But Emma's a very determined girl who doesn't realize how dangerous the forces she'd have to access to talk to the dead are.

I love smart, practical little girls who nevertheless wear cat ears and light-up sneakers like Emma, and Maia Zaitegi is a real delight in the role, making Emma serious and perspective enough to realize what she's dealing with but also light and innocent enough that she doesn't plod through scenes morose. There's determination and curiosity to her that are genuine - a girl like this doesn't really put up a front - that make the moments when sadness overwhelms her or danger creates genuine fear more powerful. The kid is easy to love but is also making things happen in a way that makes sense.

Even with that, it can be hard to make them the actual center of the story and still keep them believable, but it also creates an interesting prism through which to view the adult characters as well. In this case, that's mostly Carol, who is Emma's complement in many ways that make her uncomfortable, and Belén Rueda gets across that Carol knows herself and how other people see her all too well. On her own, she's sarcastic but in a way that suggests she knows she's trying to push people away but doesn't actually want to hurt them. They're interesting to watch together in large part because they're intriguing separately and the pairing is not natural; Carol is well-aware of where the direction Emma is heading leads but also can't help but want to recapture that feeling that there's magic in the world and one's faith matters. Add in Josean Bengoetxea as a policeman that when to school with Carol and is one of the many neighbors looking out for Emma, and there's a trio that look like they should become a found family, but they don't quite fit.

Aside from all that, I like how it plays with faith and belief as well, with Emma motivated by need and possibly harming herself because she's literally playing with fire. The ghost story around the Chapel is terrific, leading to a neat horror-movie finale, but also a commodity, and the way the filmmakers will trick the audience into thinking they're seeing something from 400 years ago but reveal it to be modern recreations is clever: This is all malleable and convincing, and the balance between comforting and exploiting those who need the assurance these stories provide is never fair, whether coming from the official church or a fake psychic.

It's an idea that burrows in and takes hold in part because director Carlota Pereda and her co-writers don't try to abstract what Emma and Carol are dealing with but explore it, while still giving the audience creepy plague-doctor monsters and a phantom who lures an innocent into danger. It's smart and scary and makes all its pieces work together.

Fantasia 2022.15: "Flames", Out in the Ring, Freaks Out, and DJ XL5's Ultimate Zappin' Party.

End of an era with the final Zappin Party. But first...

First up, we've got Bertrand Hebert and Out in the Ring director Ryan Bruce Levy. There were apparently a lot more people in town to support the documentary on Tuesday, but they're pro wrestlers, so they take gigs when they come, and if that's the middle of the week, it's the middle of the week.

It's a neat documentary, something I'm kind of curious about because for as much as I watched a bit of wrestling back in the 1980s and 1990s, because what else was on Saturday afternoon? A couple of my brothers still follow it, I think, although how much they're still into WWE as opposed to the other circuits like AEW, I don't know. I'm also kind of surprised how many women I know (though not particularly well in some cases) got into wrestling in general and AEW in particular over the last few years, seemingly out of nowhere. I kind of wonder to what extent these alternate circuits being easy to follow online has done, especially with folks having found reasons to be disillusioned with the McMahons' outfit.

The post-film talk was kind of interesting, even if some of it was kind of inside to me - Levy mentioned that they had to reconfigure a lot of the back half of the movie and shoot new material when folks that were apparently a major part of the original cut were involved in a scandal, saying it like this was something most of the wrestling fans in the audience would recognize but not a lot more details (they weren't upset, as it allowed them to get Dark Sheik and other folks they really liked in). It was kind of odd to me that it was in the Q&A that they brought up that Mike Parrow hadn't won a match since he came out and that, contrary to the way she's presented in the film, Sonny Kiss doesn't get on the AEW television shows, which is crazy considering how acrobatic and charismatic she is from what we see in the film. These seem like kind of important omissions.

Take a bow, Mark Lamothe, who has been programming the "DJ XL5 Zappin' Party" program at Fantasia for more or less as long as I can remember going - per the blog, I saw my first one in 2009, and I bet if I dug through whatever boxes my old festival programs are in, I'd find them back to 2005. This was apparently the final one, which means the festival won't be the same next year, at least one one night.

(Apologies for the quality of the photo; I was sitting back much further than usual and while the new phone has a pretty amazing camera, it can only do so much!)

I should have asked Gabrielle to translate for me - as I mentioned the previous time Monsieur Lamothe took the stage, my French was not great when I stopped taking the class in high school 30 years ago - but I caught enough to sort of piece it together: "Soixante", "mes VHS cassettes", "comédie" all came up, and, yeah, I imagine it must be tricky to program a comedy program for a younger crowd once you get up past 60, and Fantasia does do a pretty good job of drawing new young attendees rather than catering to older nerds like me, and given how Québêc-centric a lot of the material can be in some years (including this one), there must be a lot of overlap with Fantastique Week-end programming.

Which isn't to say that times have passed this block by; he seemed surprised by just how many folks in the audience were attending their first Zappin Party show. But, on the other hand, how many of those first-timers had actually spent a late night sitting around, "zapping" between channels on cable, coming across the odd or unusual because a lot of these stations could be kind of fly-by-night, filling the off-hours with any old thing that one might tape (on actual tape) because it may never show up again, as opposed to part of some corporate behemoth that just reruns familiar things constantly (if they've even got cable at all)? If they're college students, not many, I imagine. That makes the format kind of alien, as opposed to something that us fogies remember well and can see this as a heightened take on it - the Zappin' party has gone from a twist on the familiar, to something nostalgic, to a period conceit over the course of its life.

(Maybe in a couple of years, there will be a DJ XL6 who puts a show like this together emulating an eccentric and deranged streaming algorithm, but that might hit different, in that it would be an idealized version of what we want YouTube to do, not the whole thing getting weird and surreal the way the Zappin' Party is.)

We also spent some time talking about how the specific community around the show was, if not gone, dispersed. This show is usually a must-see for another friend, but he wasn't here for this one, having to handle his own screening elsewhere. The presentations always ended with thanks to "the front row crew" (and maybe this one did as well) but that group has thinned out a lot in recent years, even before covid. Where there used to be a group of up to a dozen people who would settle in the front row of almost every screening in Hall and quite a few in de Seve - like, as much as I often take the first row, I always felt like I would be encroaching when I first started coming - they were less and less a presence during the last few in-person festivals, and I think I only saw one of the folks I recognized for a few shows at the tail end this year. And it happens; people go all-in on three-week movie events and the like when they're younger, but then they relocate for work, get married, have kids, maybe move out to the suburbs so that it's a little more hassle to come into the city. It probably hasn't been quite the same for a while.

And then, of course, there's covid, which had this program virtual at least in 2020 and maybe 2021, so really not the same. There were also local folks we used to see a lot, but didn't see at all this year. One in particular was older and somewhat frail-looking back even before 2019, so we found ourselves kind of hoping that he was just staying away from indoor crowds, but you never know with this sort of nodding acquaintance, do you?

Ah, well. Some of this is probably way off, me projecting a lot of feelings about a dynamic, evolving festival and my own growing older on some poorly-heard words in a foreign-to-me language. But even if so, there's going to be a hole where the Zappin' Party used to be ⅔ the way through the festival next year. Maybe it gets filled with something similar, or something new and exciting, or maybe it's just another spot to show movies until someone comes up with a new signature event. Time will tell.

But as we say goodbye, let's applaud all the folks who made shorts for the festival and came, in large part because they were local. Enough were pickle-related that I wonder if there was some sort of Montreal-area filmmaking challenge, but it's cool to see this sort of crowd of filmmakers.

One last thing - Gabrielle wondered if the meowing between the time the lights went down and the film started up would fade in coming years, as it originated what the regular "Simon's Cat" shorts here (themselves no longer an indie cartooning thing, but something bought by a larger company that makes plushes, greeting cards, and the like along with the cartoons). I figure it won't, because it's too much of a thing on its own now, for better or worse, and I wouldn't exactly put it past the programmers to pair a Simon's Cat cartoon with the opening-night film just to make sure it continues.

So, this is Thursday. Friday is up next, another short-ish day with What's Up Connection, Whether the Weather Is Fine, and The Witch Part 2: The Other One.

"Flames"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)

A cute little short that pairs quite well with Out in the Ring, although it's one of those where I looked at the program's description afterwards and was like "oh, yeah, that explains some things!" It's always interesting when you see just how well a short can get by without much in the way of exposition, but what's in the program is necessarily nothing but that.

As to the film itself, it's very cute, a pair of young men practicing pro-wrestling moves but not exactly entirely into it while being heckled by an older man watching from the apartment. There isn't exactly a lot to do at this point, so filmmaker Matthew Manhire has his cast quickly sketch some emotions out, establish that the old man has probably been this specific sort of pain since these two were little, and then give them time for a rather nice reversal of emotion before an entertainingly goofy punchline.

It packs a fair amount into its six minutes, without a whole lot of talking but with an earnest vibe of it not being what you love, but that you love it and how you express that.

Out in the Ring

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, DCP)

Not a lot of documentaries made by people who are clearly fans are able to approach their subject quite so clearly as Out in the Ring does, openly acknowledging that the history it presents is full of contradictions, and that the thing those fans love has so often not loved them back. There's no escaping the cognitive dissonance. Nevertheless, the filmmakers clearly love wrestling and celebrate queer people, even when the intersection can be a mess.

As the film points out, queer angles in wrestling go back in 1940s lucha in Mexico, where the "exoticas" gimmick was actually created by American Dizzy Davis, although when he returned home, he didn't think it would work north of the border, telling George Wagner to run with it if he wanted. "Gorgeous George" quickly became a superstar with his make-up, capes, and boas, and other wrestles with pretty-boy gimmicks would prove popular through the years (and even those not technically doing that sort of thing, like Ric Flair, would lean into that sort of flamboyance). There would be leathermen more clearly inspired by Tom of Finland than any real bikers and other similar angles, but at the same time, folks like Pat Patterson, who started out in Montreal before moving to Boston and the West Coast, would stay carefully closeted, even as he took behind-the-scenes roles and was arguably the architect of what made Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (later World Wrestling Entertainment) the dominant force in the industry.

There are plenty of stories like Pat's and George's, and plenty which don't turn out so well, as well as a lot of chances to impishly point out that if a lot of wrestling wasn't directly lifting from drag balls and other pieces of queer culture, they certainly came up with a lot of the same things. Filmmaker Ryan Bruce Levey has a big job in compacting 75 years or so of history into something under two hours, and that he manages it without feeling like he skipped over any particular time periods or got trapped in a repeating cycle is actually fairly impressive, when you think of how many documentaries don't find the time or the good combination of archival footage and people who were there to make that happen. It reassures the audience that he's not trying to shape the narrative into something else without hammering points home too bluntly.

(He is also very helpful in putting names, areas of expertise, and pronouns on the screen nearly every time someone appears as an interview subject. It may seem like overkill, but there are a lot of people popping up even if people weren't more inclined to watch movies in general and documentaries in particular in chunks in the streaming era.)

As I imagine that most stories of wrestling inevitably do, Out in the Ring sort of gets swallowed by the WWE during its second half, and it's kind of a tricky thing to maneuver: How Vince McMahon built what sure looked like a monopoly to non-fans - one that has only recently seen its first real competition in a decade or two emerge - is a big part of the landscape but not the point of this story. It does allow the filmmakers to zero in on a certain type of hypocrisy in how it's often good business to demonstrate you're not bigots but maybe not so much to put your money where your mouth is, which could probably be extracted as an object lesson in it. Based on the Q&A, the film probably paints things a little rosier than is actually true, at least in how prominent some of the gay or trans wrestlers shown are in the mainstream, at least if you're not coming to it as someone who watches regularly.

And it's a shame that wrestling fans are not getting as many chances to see that talent as they should; the film is at its best when celebrating the folks who would be up and comers in a just world - the acrobatic stuff Sonny Kiss does is particularly amazing - and otherwise showing some joy. There are moments when it engages in the sort of weird meta-reality that wrestling often indulges in, like Charlie Morgan coming out during a show somehow feeling just different enough from typical mic work to feel authentic even as one is aware just how much acting is involved in those segments, and cockeyed bits where tiny shows of people beating on each other in high school auditoriums are family entertainment for queer kids. For a film that's about something so physical, where the performance clips are expected to be the most fun, it's able to get incredible mileage out of its subjects probably feeling more comfortable about the intersection of the thing they love and who they are than they were a few years ago, let alone when some of the older subjects were active. It's infectious, although it can be even more so because it's not just talk.

Despite what Levey and company choose to show, those things don't actually intersect as well as one might hope. On the other hand, the end of a documentary that might not really circulate until a couple years after it's done, festival circuits and sales and release schedules being what they are, needs to show trajectory as much as anything, and there's no shame in being a little hopeful there, given how good and persistent some of these folks are.

Freaks Out

* * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As oddball superhero movie premises go, one would think that "Italian circus X-Men versus a 12-fingered Nazi who gets hgh and sees the future" would be an excellent starting point, and it winding up a complete mess makes it one of the festival's biggest disappointment. Director Gabriele Mainetti and co-writer Nicola Guaglianone seem to be trying to do too much on the face of it, but they often have the opposite problem, lacking the important pieces needed to pull the story together.

As it opens, Ringmaster Israel (Giorgia Tirabassi) is showcasing the other four members of his small troupe: Fulvio (Chaudio Santamaria), an erudite beast-man covered in fur with superhuman strength; Mario (giancarlo Martini), a diminutive clown who is also a human magnet; Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), who can control insects, which is particularly impressive with fireflies, though he dislikes bees; and Matilde (Aurora Giovinazzo), a teenager who can channel electricity, though controlling it is another story. It's interrupted, though, as the town where they've set up is bombed - it is World War II, after all - and they find themselves making thier way to Rome without a tent. Israel intends to get visas so that they can escape to America, but vanishes, and while Matilde seeks him, the others figure they may as well see if the German circus direct from Berlin is hiring. What they don't necessarily realize is that its leader Franz (Franz Ragowski) is not just a pianist with an extra finger on each hand, but that he can see the future, and has become convinced that the only way to prevent the Nazi's ignominious defeat is by him leading a team that includes a foursome of people with powers like his.

Superhero tales have been inserting World War II since it was current events, and it's easy to understand why - the truly monstrous villains, the iconic imagery, the real-life stories that seemed to become iconic immediately - but it always winds up a little trickier than it looks. You're also talking about the Holocaust, after all, and there at least should be a certain amount of unease in rewriting history to fit in necromancers and super-soldiers or juxtaposing the horrors of war with the whimsy of brightly-colored costumes. This film opts to confront the Holocaust directly, and while it could go much worse, it's hard to see the point of mixing it with this sort of fantasy - the reality of it is so seemingly larger than life that you don't need fantasy to lay things out in starker terms, and it risks recasting true horrors as cartoon villains. Mainetti and Guaglianone seem aware of this, and work hard not to diminish the reality, but it mostly means there's not much fantasy value here. It's an alternate history where everything's all going to turn out the same, except there are mutants.

And on top of that, their mechanics of building the story are kind of terrible. There's a sequence where Fulvio, Cencico, and Mario wind up on a truck heading toward a concentration camp, bust out in violent screw-these-guys fashion… and then just head back to town to join the Nazi circus. Once there, Franz bounces between making the guy very comfortable and torturing them for no reason, and there are at least two or three times when the only way the filmmakers can get to the next stage of the story is just to have Matilde walk deliberately and stupidly into danger even when it's exceptionally clear she should know better, when a well-written movie would have actually having her learning from the first time it ended in disaster. It's odd, because they never really come up with much for the troupe to do beyond the absolute basics, rather than having any sort of particular stories of their own.

Frustrating because as much as so much is dumb, one can see where the filmmakers are right on target. The opening introduction, for instance, is terrific, a way to introduce the characters and their personalities and powers without a lot of exposition before pulling the curtain back on the sort of darkness the movie is dealing with. There's a bit of inspired lunacy with the cannon used to launch human cannonballs that's just goofy enough that one can happily overlook how, nah, it's not going to help them catch up with that train. And for all the dumb anachronistic jokes built around Franz, there's a specific sort of angering tragedy about him: It's not just that he can see the future, but he's pulling in songs and art that only he can play on the piano, seeing other ways to delight people, and all he wants is to be a normal Nazi, even knowing that they're a historical dead-end.

Those clever bits are too few and far between, though, and too much that's in-between winds up tacky or boring when it's not just downright ill-considered. It's a terrific premise squandered by people never finding the right material to flesh it out.

DJ XL5's Ultimate Zappin' Party

Seen 28 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

So many of these shorts are very short indeed, too short for notes, and many of them local-enough that I'd just be grasping them by the time they finished, so let's just hit the highlights:

• "Monsieur Magie" - A delightfully daft premise which almost feels enhanced for those of us who speak little French because we get the slow dawning on us as to what's happening organically: The title character, the sort of magician who usually works children's parties, is brought out to a cabin to perform for an adult audience, and while on the one hand the guest of honor just seems kind of dim, it eventually turns out that these guys are criminals, and they want him to make a body disappear.
  
  It's a nutty, dumb idea that would probably absolutely self-destruct if dragged out much longer than these ten minutes, but at that length it's still got me chuckling at the goofball logic of it while M. Magie is trying his best to extricate himself from a bunch of murderers using only his skills at close-up magic and their evident gullibility. Just long enough not to get frustrating and just tricky enough to keep a contest of wits with morons from being an unfair fight.
• "Simon's Cat: Light Lunch" - Maybe not the most brilliant or original "Simon's Cat" short, as we have probably seen Simon leave food unattended only for the cat to be gross, or go to some trouble to feed him only for the cat to ignore it, and there's not exactly a lot of creative destruction here. It's a comfortable familiar gag, though, and it would have been wrong to see the Party without a visit from its favorite feline. Though it does seem likely that it was chosen for the fact that there's a pickle in it, which made for a bit of a theme with other shorts.
• "Felis Infernalis" - Then again, this kitty sows a fair amount of havoc in one minute. Just a cute, funny short that captures the exact line cats straddle between deliberate and uncaring mayhem.
• "Spaghetter Getter" - The sort of short that seems custom-made for the Zappin' Party, because it initially seems like it could be one of the screwy commercials used to pad out the time between shorts until it just starts going off the rails. It's random-seeming, dark and absurdist comedy, maybe not actually that funny unless you're on its up-too-late-what-is-this vibe, but this is a package that gets you there.
• "Guimauve" - Kind of comedy torture, in a way, as writer/director/star Daniel Grenier demonstrates his skill at tossing a marshmallow in the air and catching it in his mouth, tosses one too high, and then spends the next ten or fifteen minutes getting in position to catch it. Silly and self-aware, but Grenier by and large has the right instincts on when to get laughs from stretching a bit out and when to cut something off and amble on to the next thing.
• "Guts" - The of "guy with his guts either on the outside of his body or his belly just sliced open and somehow not bleeding out feels he's being discriminated against at work" sort of speaks for itself, but it escalates into chaos even as it repeats its joke four or so times, treating the weird gross-out bit as a sort of safe place to reset as the film spirals into bigger messes.
• "Panique au village: Les grandes vacances" - Who doesn't love "Panique au village" (aka "A Town Called Panic")? Joyless monsters, that's who. This one's a jumbo-sized short, nearly half an hour, but it hums along as the mischievous Cowboy and Indian create trouble, have it spin out of control, and have to do something even stranger to fix what they've broken. Somehow, this goes from building a toy boat to having to win a bicycle race to replace Horse's car, all while Horse is trying to impress his would-be girlfriend.
  
  Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar are masters of just piling one thing on top of another, having it fall down, and then having their characters scramble to make up for lost time in a way that makes the audience feel almost as frantic as they do. As is often the case, they use this to let them suddenly take sharp turns into new territory even as they maintain the running jokes that have been going on since the whole thing started. The very limited stop-motion just adds to this, like they're frantically trying to keep up with their story while also reminding the audience that this is a totally made-up cartoon place with no rules , so absolutely anything can happen next.

… and a dozen more, and a bunch of stuff in-between where you kind of had to be there.

Fantasia/New York Asian Film Festivals 2021.00-01: Kratt, Not Quite Dead Yet, Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break, Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist, and Brain Freeze

In a typical year, I'm taking a bunch of time off work and heading up to Montreal for most of July, which means that going down to New York for a weekend beforehand is kind of hard to justify, although that hasn't stopped me in the past. Last year was weird not just because both were virtual, but the rescheduling had Fantasia up first, and both kind of tricky to deal with: For Fantasia, it was mostly my fault, as I've by and large been able to avoid dealing with screeners, so I didn't know how to work the library; NYAFF had a weird system for paying customers where I had to stream to my phone and then echo that to the Roku and TV.

Both look a lot more manageable this year, so hopefully I won't run into any situations where I'm waiting to watch something. Fantasia's got a library of stuff that doesn't require sending a bunch of emails that might not get answered, NYAFF looks to be using a much less frustrating system, and I'll probably using any time actually on-site for catch-up if I travel to New York (which I'm planning on, but then again, I haven't actually purchased any tickets/transport/lodging). There's also a few discs on order from Hong Kong that should be shipping out right about now and will likely make it to my door before the festivals are over.

Although, funny story, I am reasonably sure I saw Not Quite Dead Yet available for pre-order on DDDHouse a couple months back, but didn't bite, which is a shame - it's a fun movie that I would like to watch again, especially considering that the screener was a scope-width picture inside an Academy-Ratio frame, to which my Roku added blank space on the sides when outputting to my 4K TV, meaning it took up something like 42% of my screen and that's before you get to the big ol' watermark. It's a genuinely goofy way to show critics the film if you want their reviews to say anything about the film's visual elements, but then, the niche audience for this sort of thing might be small enough that even a little piracy could destroy your market. Anyway, you as a reader probably don't care about this unless you're really into knowing why I don't talk more about composition and cinematography in some cases, but the funny part is I can't find any trace of this having been available to order. Maybe the HK disc was cancelled, maybe they just cleaned the DB of stuff that sold out, but I'm sure it was there and now it's not.

Anyway, here's some movies maybe worth streaming if you're north of the border, as NYAFF doesn't start until Friday, when those of us in the U.S. get to join the fun.

Kratt

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

One of my favorite Fantasia discoveries in recent years is November, a stark black-and-white fantasy whose willingness to immerse the audience in the world of Estonian folklore made it both more bizarre and grounded, with the obsessive automatons known as "kratts" particularly memorable. Rasmus Merivoo transplants a fair amount of that mythology to the present in his movie Kratt, but rooting it in such a contemporary setting winds up muting what makes this particular demon interesting and timeless.

The film opens with a flashback to 1895, the last time someone in this small Estonian town built a kratt - that is, a demonically-animated automaton with an endless appetite for work that will turn on its creator should it fall idle. In the present, siblings Mia (Nora Merivoo) and Kevin (Harri Merivoo) are dropped off at the home of their grandmother Helju (Mari Lill) while their parents go on some sort of retreat, without phones but with chores, which Mia especially finds unreasonable. They meet local twins Juuli (Elise Tekko) and August (Roland Teima) and eventually wind up at the library where they discover a book with a pentagram moved from the governor's mansion, whose embattled resident (Ivo Uukkivi) is desperately trying to hang on to power by trying to play to both a developer trying to cut down an ancestral grove and the locals (led by the twins' father) aiming to preserve it.

There are moments where one can see very clearly where the filmmaker might have had the idea to do a movie about trying to conjure work out of thin air beyond grumbling that kids weren't so lazy back in his day, although that framing does make his casting his own children as the main characters even more amusing ("oh, you want to just screw around on your phones all summer? Fat chance, we're going to spend a month making a movie about why you shouldn't!"). Everyone but the grandmother seems to be looking for shortcuts, from Val with her chores, their parents apparently trying to fix their relationship in a couple of weeks, the politician who wants to stay in power without really accomplishing anything versus just showing up and saying something that sounds good - which, to be fair, is about the level of effort the protesters want to put in. There's an especially clever bit later on where Merivoo follows a question asked of a Siri knock-off to the mechanical turk behind it.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Ichido shinde mita (Not Quite Dead Yet)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Vimeo)

As odd as watching young actors grow up and change the directions of their careers can be, it's all the more so when one just gets the bits and pieces of their career that make it abroad to festivals. Take Suzu Hirose, whom most English-speaking audiences likely first noted in Our Little Sister and mostly saw as a solid part of other dramas by renowned filmmakers, but has spent her teens and early twenties working in Japanese film and TV almost non-stop, across a variety of dramas. So it's a bit surprising to see her starring in something as zany as Not Quite Dead Yet, although maybe not that she dives in and makes it work.

She plays Nanase Nobata, the daughter of pharma company founder Kei (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi) who just graduated college with a degree in pharmacology but only shows up at the job interview expected to be a mere formality to say there's no way in hell she'll work in the family business after it kept him away when mother Yuriko (Tae Kimura) died. Instead, she goes to a gig of her death metal band Soulzz, shadowed as always by Kei's exceptionally unobtrusive employee Taku "Ghost" Matsuoka (Ryo Yoshizawa). While that's happening, her father takes a "two-day death" pill to help flush out the mole feeding information to rival Tanabe (Kyusaku Shimada), except that it's Watanabe (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), the guy who sold him on this plan and who means to pressure Nanase into selling the company. Of course, he didn't see Ghost in the room while he gave Kei the pill, or know that Nanase can see and smell (but not hear) her father's ghost, meaning he's got a lot of skullduggery to do before Kei comes back to life on Christmas.

That sounds like something frantic, but it's really not; writer Yoshimitusu Sawamoto and director Shinji Hamasaki are smart about how they use their two-day deadline to give Nanase and Ghost (and Kei from beyond) just enough enough time to try and thwart Watanabe and Tanabe without having to pour every second of that time into it, so they can vent and fill the time when they're waiting for something to finish with wavering and flashbacks, because Nanase is genuinely irate. It's a pace that never lets the viewer's mind wander, even when bits start to repeat, but does give the filmmakers time to poke around in odd corners and let character bits play out enough that someone can pop up later and have a joke land.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break

* * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

There's a weird desperation to the back half of Paul Dood's Deadly Lunch Break, like the filmmakers are desperate to make the audience invest in the pursuit and violence of what's going on because they are acutely aware that they squandered the first half-hour of the movie and need to catch up if they're going to make the points they intend. Not that those are particularly interesting or novel points; a story about a delusional social-media addict/would-be entertainer needs to be more interesting than this to stand out.

And that's what Paul Dood (Tom Meeten) is, well into his forties but still dreaming of show business success; he's currently using livestreaming site "TrendLadder" as an outlet but very far down the ladder in terms of viewers, and for every person who watches him sincerely like his co-worker Clemmie (Katherine Parkinson), there is probably at least one more watching to mock him like Bruce (Jarred Christmas). His mother Julie (June Watson) - elderly, ailing, and in a bit of a fog - supports him unreservedly, so it's important she go with him to the TrendLadder Talent Show audition hosted by Jack Tapp. A series of setbacks from unkind people has the day end as badly as it can, and soon Paul is planning a livestream that will really get him noticed - the one where he takes his revenge.

There are many, many worse premises for a dark comedy than "middle-aged theater kid goes on a rampage", but even something with that potential demands to be set up with a little more care than this manages. Paul and Julie aren't given any sort of backstory at all, and while they don't need to have some sort of unique situation that has kept them down, anything to make them less generic could have helped, even the slightest personality quirk. Even if Paul is meant to be some sort of everyman despite his discount-rack flamboyance, the crawl to the audition is just brutal viewing, something like a half hour going for dry and acerbic but instead winding up mostly dull, with even the meanness not packing any zip after the first first jerk the Doods encounter. Some of the situations also make Paul feel frustratingly stupid; while he's not supposed to be particularly clever, it's not unreasonable to yell something along the lines of "just walk out of that extended sketch about an absurd tea-house rather than just leaving your wheelchair-bound mother on the street! If this place exists, there must be a shop where you can buy a bottle of water nearby!"

Full review at eFilmCritic

Satoshi Kon, l'illusionniste (Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist) * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)

It's a crying shame that Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist can be both relatively detailed and complete as an overview of Kon's career; when pancreatic cancer claimed him in 2010, he was only 46, with four animated features, one mini-series, and a handful of shorter works in anime and manga to his name. Nevertheless, this festival's award for excellence in animation bears his name for good reason, and this documentary profile does a fine job of showing why he is so revered.

His relatively short career means that it can be broken up into sections focusing on his works: Perfect Blue, a psychological thriller whose grounded and adult nature was unlike much Japanese animation that had previously crossed the Pacific; Millennium Actress, which story that spans Japan's Twentieth Century inspired by the life of actress Setsuko Hara; Tokyo Godfathers, a freewheeling adventure among the unseen people of the metropolis; Paranoia Agent, a TV series where chaos takes human form and anything can happen; Paprika, a science-fiction thriller that pulled his themes on multiple identities and the nature of reality together; and the unfinished Dreaming Machine, intended to be his first family-friendly adventure story. Director Pascal-Alex Vincent is able to excerpt all of these works liberally (except the last, where he mostly has concept art), allowing the audience to see the extent to which Kon brought a realistic style to his films while still being able to explode into fantasy and heightened emotion, and see how themes recur in his work.

Kon himself obviously cannot be interviewed, but Vincent is able to put together an impressive group of people to talk about his work. There are noteworthy Western filmmakers who were at points aiming to adapt his work like Marc Caro and Darren Aranofsky, with the latter being frank about why his live-action Perfect Blue never came together even though he was able to homage the original in Requiem for a Dream; there are fellow anime directors like legend Mamoru Oshii and Mamoru Hosada. Novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, a legend of Japanese science fiction, comes across as aware of his own status but generous in how Kon adapted his work; there's a nice bit of serendipity in how as Kon was making his last film Paprika, Hosada was making his first feature from another Tsutsui work, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The most interesting and entertaining interviews come from those who worked with him, whether it be Junko Iwao talking about drawing on her own experience as an idol singer to voice Mima in Perfect Blue, Madhouse Studios founder Masao Maruyama and producer Taro Maki showing clear admiration but also clearly focused on the business side, or gregarious animator Aya Suzuki talking about her difficulties with how Kon treated his female characters.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Brain Freeze)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Vimeo)

I wish I were able to travel to Montréal to see what folks think about this one - though I'm sure the local filmmakers will get a warm welcome, how will those who always liked zombie-movie tropes feel about them as they are tentatively coming out of the Covid era, especially since this one occasionally feels like it's got both pre- and post-pandemic elements and is as such a bit off. Of course, what makes it as much fun as it is comes from a cock-eyed perspective that's both local-to-Montréal and more universal.

It takes place, by and large, on "Peacock Island'', one of the smaller isles off Île de Montréal that has more or less been developed into a gated community, most notable for a golf course whose fertilizer - developed by "Biotech M" - allows grass to grow and melt the snow even during a cold Montréal winter. Dan Gingras (Roy Dupuis) does security patrols even as he listens to a talk radio host (Simon-Olivier Fecteau) who rails against the "elites" living there, while daughter Patricia (Marianne Fortier) works at the country club. As some of the fertilizer starts to make it into the water supply, teenager André (Iani Bédard) - the sort whose nose is always in his phone - is frantically calling mother Josée (Anne-Élisabeth Bossé) because baby sister Annie's nanny Camila (Claudia Ferri) hasn't arrived, and Josée arrives home just as things are starting to go to hell.

I'm mildly curious about when Brain Freeze filmed, because it often has the hallmarks of things shot while everybody was trying to maintain distance without specifically taking place in 2020, where most scenes are a little less crowded than seems right, to the point where you only get a proper horde or dogpile once or twice and the radio studio feels a bit more like an underground bunker than the city's top station. Still, if that occasionally seems not quite right, it does so in a way that says something about how the well-off can build themselves comfortable cocoons in comparison to Dan's apartment. It may just be limited resources, of course, although I also wonder if Dan went from being a certain stock zombie-movie character - the paranoid doomsday prepper who is ironically well-prepared - to a more generous father figure once filmmakers saw the old trope wouldn't play as well, or if that was just always part of the story.

Full review at eFilmCritic