The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.04: "Pandas", Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and The Man in the Orange Jacket

Say this for Fantastic Fest: It fills your day from start to finish, even if there is a little more dead space than I might be used to in between. So, one bit of horrible photography and then off:



Hey, Man in the Orange Jacket director Aik Karapetian and producer Roberts Vinovskis - why no trip to Montreal in July? An enjoyable little Q&A, at least - I hadn't realized just how long this film took to shoot (three years, a few days at a time).

Today's plan: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and another midnight secon chance for I am a Knife with Legs.

"Pandy" ("Pandas")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I half-suspect that "Pandas" is at least partly the result of writer/director Maths Vizar having a few had ideas that could potentially be combined with the panda-specific bits. If that's the case, it works out fairly well; there's a steady stream of funny, frequently gross jokes, both within a funny "evolution of life" sequence, and more pointedly during the bits where the panda seeming like a genuine evolutionary dead end is the gag.

That, though, is what winds up tying the whole thing together: That the panda has survived in such a narrow niche environment, but just barely; its diet doesn't give it the capability to actually do much, and now the ones surviving in captivity can't even be bothered to reproduce, like they know that there's no future for them as a species and they might as well just end it. Contrast that with rats, a tremendously successful species, even if they're not nearly as cute as the panda.

Wastelander Panda

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

If you're going to do yet another thing movie/series with people wandering through a post-apocalyptic (or otherwise arid and sparsely populated) world, you might as well have some characters be pandas. It at least makes the movie unique to look at, and with any luck, it will mean the people behind the camera a are genuinely inspired rather than just going through the motions.

The journey into the wasteland begins after Isaac accidentally kills kills a fellow resident of Legion, one of the few self-sufficient cities in the world, but he offers an alternative before they stone him to death - he finds another young woman and brings her back to take her place. To keep him from running off, brother Arcayus and mother Hannah are exiled with him. Isaac joins a group of bandits led by Varrick Helm (Chantal Contouri), and spots Rose (Lily Pearl) just as his hitch is winding down. But, of course, lies and double-crosses will lead to a chase through the Obsidian Forest.

Isaac, Arcayus, and Hannah are pandas, although that is mostly a matter of physical appearance; they are not, at any point, portrayed as fat and lazy furballs who can't be torn away from eating bamboo long enough to reproduce. On the plus side, they are portrayed by actors in suits rather than being CGI creations, and while the masks may not be the most articulated, the mouths move well enough to keep scenes where they talk from breaking the illusion. Sometimes the relatively static expressions on their faces make for an odd juxtaposition to the action, but it works better than one might expect much of the time.

It does set the family apart as outsiders, even if other characters terms to treat panda-people more as unusual than bizarre enough to require explanation. If director/co-creator Victoria Cocks and the rest of the team get to make more - the feature version playing festivals is six ten-minute web episodes strung together - there's room to do some interesting things mostly hinted at here, from the various species populating the world to how women of childbearing age are treated as commodities.

The main character is portrayed by actors under masks, although they don't seem to be too physically limited by it when the time for action comes, with the voice work by NAME fairly strong. Lily Pearl is good as Rose, and Chantal Contouri especially memorable as the bandit leader. All involved play things straight, as opposed to some sort of tongue-in-cheek mash-up.

Do I have a lot of interest in Wastelander Panda without the panda angle? To be honest, probably not; this sort of wandering-through-the-desert action movie is kind of dime-a-dozen. So the hook helps, and the thing you find upon watching it isn't bad at all.

Musarañas (Shrew's Nest)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Shrew's Nest is designed to stuff a lot of movie into a small space, and on that count it succeeds quite nicely: Even if it's not as constrained to one location as that apartment's agoraphobic resident, it's got a gravitational force that pulls one back during the brief sojourns away, and enough going on inside to keep it interesting.

The resident of that apartment is Montse (Macarena Gomez), a severely agoraphobic dressmaker who hasn't left in years, serving loyal customer Doña Puri (Gracia Olayo) and having her younger sister (Nadia de Santiago) who just turned eighteen, deliver others. Not that she's totally alone when her sister is at work; she imagines the father who abandoned them fourteen years ago (Luis Tosar), and one day Carlos (Hugo Silva) falls down the stairs from his apartment on the next floor, knocking himself unconscious and breaking his leg. This stirs new feelings in the deeply religious Montse, although with three people in one apartment keeping secrets from each other, a situation that was already becoming stressed is guaranteed to break.

And while things do break in fairly spectacular fashion, the build-up is perhaps even more accomplished, as the filmmakers get us to watch the sisters play out a few days that are maybe not quite normal for them, but which don't quite feel like tipping points. Directors Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel (working from a screenplay by Andres and Sofia Cuenca) do an excellent job of increasing the tension as they reveal the different sides of Montse's instability while also building a situation that it would be difficult to just leave. It's ace work, telling the audience everything it needs to know while also leaving empty spaces in the structure that can either be filled in during the rest of the film or used to make things collapse.

Full review at EFC

Plemya (The Tribe)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Well, that's certainly something I'm glad to have seen, although I'm also sort of thankful that I'll likely never see the like again.

I suspect that what we see in the tribe - a sequestered, young population turning away from their supposed reason for being there but instead wreaking mayhem - happens at a lot of public schools, but seeing it happen at a Ukranian school for the Deaf makes it hit a bit harder. Although no explanations are given, it's not hard to figure out what's going on in these kids' heads: The hearing world finds them a nuisance worthy of only grudging concessions, and this is the first time they they've been able to band together to do what they want, and with that anger it comes out as violence, crime, and sex. There is one classroom scene early on, but after that, academics seem irrelevant - the only time we see the kids doing anything resembling study later, the purpose is immediately undercut.

It's a harrowing ride, with traditional bullying at the start, lawlessness in the middle (which filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky often uses as a perverse way to show students coming together), and horrors the audience might wish to unsee at the end. It's a bleak movie that often elicits cringes, but to his credit, Slaboshpitsky never seems to just be engaging in exploitation; everything moves the story of new student Sergey forward in some way.

The movie looks striking - the school in Kiev where we spend much of our time isn't quite run down but hasn't been upgraded in a while, and much of the rest of the action takes place in the dark. Sound is also an intriguing part of the film - with no music and no spoken dialogue (no subtitles for the sign language, either), the incidental noises tend to ring out sharp and clear, but Slaboshpitsky and his crew do an excellent job of making sure that they are somewhat inessential. The hearing audience is not going to get any sort of heads-up that the Deaf audience misses, and even incidents where we notice that there's a lot of noise being made that the characters won't hear are kept to a minimum. It's a precisely-made film in that way, even if it does embrace a certain amount of chaos.

Full review on EFC

Tokyo Tribe

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Sion Sono has never really been the quiet, contemplative sort of art-house director, but his last few films seem to have been brimming with the sort of constant action that would make genre filmmakers jealous, with Tokyo Tribe an almost non-stop barrage of over-the-top insanity once the fighting starts. The surprising thing is that an audience can be somewhat forgiven for not registering that fact, since the veneer on top of it - a busy manga adaptation told as a hip-hop musical - is crazy enough in its way that it may be what the audience remembers.

And that's not exactly unfair. That style has Tokyo Tribe moving forward at a constant fast pace, with jokes and details packed into every corner, more characters than the audience can possibly process, and moments of jaw-dropping insanity that you can almost imagine Sono giggling as he put them into the script for how silly they are (the beatboxing server in a banquet scene may have been my favorite thing Sono has ever gone for while she was on-screen). It's colorful, bizarre, and sometimes tacky as heck, enough that it may take a bit of time to realize that what the action crew is doing is actually really amazing.

There's a real exhilaration to the film in general, as well, as it is about various factions coming together rather than pulling apart. Like a lot of Sono's best recent films, there's a gigantic heart underneath the frantic violence and chaos, and it's almost sure to send the audience out with a smile on their faces.

Full review on EFC

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

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Having already seen all of the midnight selections before, I opted to use this opoprtunity to revisit one I saw at Fantasia but came out of kind of fuzzy. End result: Not quite so fuzzy, but sort of went "huh?" in one of the exact same places, so I don't know whether filmmaker Aik Karapetian was trying for that reaction of if it's just me.

Full review at EFC

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.17 (30 July): Gantz 1 & 2, Article 12, Surviving Life, The FP, and Cold Sweat

I think I did a better job of avoiding the festival nap this year than most - of the 70-ish movies I saw, Surviving Life: Theory and Practice is probably the only one that I conked out in and thus won't be able to review. It's an example of how the nap can strike at any time, though - I'm not usually tired at seven o'clock, and I'd managed to sleep in after a late night at the Horny House of Horror on Friday, but the wall hits when the wall hits.

So, before the next movie, I hit the concession stand for a Pepsi Max and one of those strange Canadian candy bars we don't see much in the States, which meant that I was well and truly alert for this at the front of the theater:



That's Tim League of the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, along with The FP directors Jay and Brandon Trost. I think that this was actually a couple days before Drafthouse Pictures officially announced that they would be distributing the movie in early 2012, so League's presence seemed a bit random at the time, although not totally so; the movie had apparently made some noise at the Alamo's Fantastic Fest screenings during SXSW, although part of that noise was the cast and crew being rowdy during the screening.

And if "I've only got so much vacation time a year" doesn't do it the next time someone asks me why I don't include Fantastic Fest on my annual moviegoing itinerary, I'll just pull that picture up on my phone. As much as I enjoy having a little fun with not-so-serious movies, this sort of "hey, we're drinking to excess and acting ca-ray-zee" thing wears out its welcome pretty quickly for me. It drove me bonkers when I went to SXSW a couple years ago - I seriously did not need midnight shows delayed a half hour for drinking games when I'd been seeing movies since 11am and would get up and do it again the next day - and I suspect a whole festival like that would not mesh well with my temperament at all. You may insert your uptight New Englander jokes here.

(Also, did anyone else find it tacky that Fantastic Fest announced their first wave of titles on Fantasia's opening night? Seems like odd timing. Seriously, guys, it's okay if cities other than Austin are talked about as cool film spots for a day or two!)

And now, what I saw on my last Saturday at Fantasia this year:

Gantz

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Here's my original review at EFC from back in January, when I saw this film in a Fathom Events presentation (full entry here. I liked it quite a bit more the second time around, and not just because of how having the original Japanese soundtrack is an immense improvement over the terrible dub track I saw back then. It's amazing; not making the audience laugh at the line delivery turns out to be a massive improvement for a movie meant to be suspenseful. Who knew?

To a certain extent, I think that recalibration of expectations helped as well. I dig the Gantz manga, but without a ridiculous budget, the movies were never going to match the amazing action scenes in the books, so the movie was something of a disappointment the first time through. However, it's a bad practice in general to judge something on what it isn't rather than what it is, and this film is a fine sci-fi thriller.

Gantz: Perfect Answer

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

The Gantz manga is too large and sprawling to make into one movie; and even two may have been a stretch - the first half of this two-part movie covered roughly the first fifteen or so 200-page volumes that have been released in the US, and left plenty out. Gantz: Perfect Answer has the task of explaining what the heck was going on in Gantz and then wrapping the story up, which is one tall order. It gets the job done, and usually with enough style that the audience can overlook the bits that really don't make a lot of sense.

(Note: Spoilers for the first Gantz movie will abound; if you haven't seen it, you might wish to do so and then come back later.)

After watching his friend Masaru Kato (Kenichi Matsuyama) die in the last movie's climax, Kei Kurono (Kazunari Ninomiya) has sworn to make things right. In the regular world, it means he and girlfriend Tae Kojima (Yuriko Yoshitaka) are looking after Kato's little brother Ayumu; when he's called by to a strange apartment by the mysterious "Gantz" entity to hunt down aliens for "points", he and fellow veteran Yoshikazu Suzuki (Tomorowo Taguchi) execute them with ruthless efficiency, protecting the newbies so that they can earn enough points to revive fallen comrades. As bizarre as this is, things are about to get even stranger - model Eriko Ayukawa has a black orb that is sending her on missions of her own, cop Masamitsu Shigeta (Takayuki Yamada) is digging into the strange pattern of deaths and reappearances around Tokyo, and Kato has apparently returned from the dead without anybody accessing the 100-point-menu.

There comes a time in many (if not most) continuing series where the focus inevitably turns inward. What starts out as a scenario that allows the storyteller to explore many ideas within a familiar framework becomes a focus on the details of the framework itself. Perfect Answer winds up in a sort of in-between place - although it never devolves into focusing on minutia, the new characters introduced have less room to breathe than Kato, Kei, and Kishimoto did in the first. Making Gantz and the aliens the focus of the story rather than just plot devices does tend to highlight that the series's video-game logic really makes no practical sense.

Full review at EFC.

Article 12

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Documentaries from the Edge)

It's always unfortunate when a worthy topic becomes the subject of a bad documentary, because it can be very difficult to separate the quality of the picture for from the merit of its arguments. Usually, it's not that difficult to be objective judge each separately, but Article 12 is the sort of self-satisfied preaching to the choir that can push even a sympathetic audience member to investigating the other point of view just so that he or she is not blindly agreeing with these guys.

The title of "Article 12" comes from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; that portion of the document states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." However, the film points out, this is not always the case; even in democratic republics like the United States and the United Kingdom, privacy protections are becoming weaker, both because of government surveillance and by the voluntary actions of the populace.

There are plenty of good arguments for why privacy is important and why the present day's steady erosion of it is dangerous, and it would be very nice if filmmaker Juan Manuel Biaiñ laid them out in a more rigorous, structured way. Instead, he starts by assuming that the audience prioritizes privacy as highly as he does and then repeating a series of dire proclamations about how the weakening of these rights is bad, although there is a curious lack of concrete examples as to why. Sometimes, interview subjects like Noam Chomsky are allowed to make huge, unsubstantiated leaps between premise and conclusion.

Full review at EFC.

Prezít svuj zivot (teorie a praxe) (Surviving Life (Theory and Practice))

N/A (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

I want to like Jan Svankmajer. I really do. He's a guy who has moved between live-action and animation for a long time, gotten praise internationally, and influenced people all aorund the world. And, truth be told, I have enjoyed a good chunk of what I've seen from him, odd thought it may be. Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) generally falls into that category.

But, man, he knocks me out. I don't know why. Often, I've been able to point to weird showtimes or other factors like that, but this was right at 7pm. Fourth movie of the day, but I can handle that. And what I saw of this one, I rather liked. Some weirder-than-usual bits - I really didn't get what he was going for by using the cutout animation for long shots and than live action for extreme close-up. I suppose mostly just fun, but it was a weird bit of stylization in a movie that spends a lot of time on dream imagery..

Ah, well. It'll probably show up at the Brattle sometime in the next year, and I'll make sure to stop off at the 7-11 for a Pepsi Max before hand, just like I did afterward to make sure I'd be up for...

The FP

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

The FP is the sort of flick that is precisely built to appeal to a certain category of movie fans, who are often surprised when it doesn't do much for others. I have no doubt that it will find its cult quickly, and it should: It's crafted, not manufactured, and offers genuine goofy enthusiasm rather than precision pandering.

Things are going down in Frazier Park (the FP, yo!) - a year ago, local Beat Beat Revelation champion BTRO (Brandon Barrera) collapsed and died in a battle with rival L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), and now L Dub's gang controls all the liquor in the county. The only hope for The FP is BTRO's brother JTRO (Jason Trost), if the brothers' buddy KCDC (Art Hsu) can get him to return and train under BBR master BLT (Nick Principe). But can he do that, especially since Stacy (Caitlyn "Caker" Folley), the cute girl he met that fateful night, seems to have taken up with L Dub?

Well, of course he can, otherwise it's a very short and unsatisfying movie for all involved. The Trost brothers (star Jason and cinematographer Brandon co-write and direct) know what sort of template this movie will eventually follow, and they don't deviate very far from the pattern. They just amp it up, figuring out to three decimal places how far you can push the ratios between characters' devotion to a sport, the stakes involved, and the game's inherent silliness before it stops being fun-stupid and starts being stupid-stupid. They stay pretty solidly on the fun-stupid side, attaching some frequently-hilarious bombast to patently ridiculous competition.

Full review at EFC.

Sudor frío (Cold Sweat)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

Cold Sweat is silly and ridiculous in just about every way it can be, but it's the sort of ridiculous that works. Director Adrián García Bogliano and company do a nice job of adding just a little bit more crazy with each reel, making for a fun midnight movie.

Back in 1975, the film informs us, a group of Argentine rebels stole twenty-five boxes of dynamite, but nothing came of it at the time. Today, Roman (Facundo Espinosa) is looking for his ex-girlfriend Jacquie (Camila Velasco), who appears to have left him for some blond guy she met online. Fortunately, he's got help; his friend Ali (Marina Glezer) is able to track down where this guy lives from his IP address. When they get there, the run-down house is home not to the lothario they were looking for, but a couple of old guys - Gordon (Omar Musa), who uses a walker, and Baxter (Omar Gioiosa), who is somewhat more mobile.

One should not underestimate old guys, either in movies or in real life. They are the people that natural selection hasn't figured out how to stop yet, and the older they are, the more likely they are to have learned how to mess you up over the course of their lives. It's not giving too much away to say that Gordon and Baxter are the villains of the piece, and they're an enjoyably unconventional choice for the job; ideology seems to have given way to extreme crotchetiness. Some senility, too, but really, having them just resent young people is enough. In addition, they're clearly sick of each other after thirty-five years cooped up together but neither able to imagine life without the other. Omars Musa and Gioiosa play off each other amusingly, with a natural chemistry as they bicker and both managing to give their characters an actual threatening air even as the movie has a laugh at their age and infirmity.

Full review at EFC.