Still playing a couple shows at the Coolidge this week and one more time at the ICA on Sunday, so this isn't a totally irrelevant post after the ceremony!
Anyway, we've got a really solid group this year, so let's get right to it:
"On My Mind"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)
If Martin Strange-Hansen's "On My Mind" has any issues, it's that he seemingly feels some need to inject more tension and conflict than is really necessary. The story has barmaid Louise (Camilla Bendix) happy to serve a drink and fire up the karaoke machine when Henrik (Rasmus Hammerich) comes in after closing time, with owner Preben (Ole Boisen) choosing to be fussy about such things. The audience, of course, has already had a glimpse of why Henrik needs something to settle himself down, but they're likely going to go along with Louise and empathize with the man anyway. It's not that Preben is hard to believe - many have encountered folks who easily default to not really being able to see more than an inch beyond their own nose - but he winds up feeling transparently like a means to keep the short running in place more than anything else.
It's a great little piece around that, though; Hammerich and Bendix do really excellent work sketching out who these people are without Strange-Hansen having to feed the audience more information than they really need, and this has at its heart one of film's great karaoke scenes, even if it's unconventional: Even if the activity seems tremendously unappealing (as it does to me), the filmmakers still get across just how important escaping into that sort of performance can be, expressing oneself in part by changing context.
(Though I am kind of amused at how the karaoke machine lists "You Were Always on My Mind" as an Elvis Preseley song, since he's well behind Willie Nelson and the Pet Shop Boys in terms of who I associate the song with. Probably in fourth after Hammerich now!)
"Please Hold"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)
This played one of the virtual Fantasia Fests? Huh, I feel like I would have seen it, in that case, but I don't remember it. Odd, because I like it a lot. It's targeted absurdity that recognizes that its audience is not exactly living in a subtle world, so there is no particular need for satire to be subtle. Every point it makes about the American prison-industrial complex feels bang-on, ripped from a story disturbingly hidden on page B18 Law & Order-style. Co-writer/director KD Davila knows his target and homes in on them.
It works, both as a short film and as a story, in large part because lead Erick Lopez makes unjustly-targeted Mateo such an amiable, likable protagonist; he's an easy guy to spend twenty minutes with and is able to rail against his twisted situation in such a way that the audience doesn't find him off-putting, and Davila recognizes how so much of this happens because so many good people want to believe the system is built to be fair and just needs a bit more earnest effort when it isn't. Amid all the very obvious exaggerations of real-world injustices, this unstated idea at the center quietly seeps into everything.
I'm not sure when this was made, but if it's a pandemic-shot production, it's one of the ones that made especially good adaptations. Where so many shorts shot in 2020 or 2021 make the use of screens and empty streets into something that needs to be explained and worked around, this feels like something built around those requirements but not about why they exist in the real world., and as a result has a sense of authenticity even though it doesn't actually redress things outside of its main set that much.
"Sukienka" ("The Dress")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)
Tadeusz Lysiak's "The Dress" isn't actually about a dress, but it's a clear and clever way to distill the limbo Julka (Anna Dzieduszycka) often finds herself in - someone of her short stature and proportions can often find casual clothing in the children's section, but something sexy needs to be custom-ordered or tailor-made, making her feel less like a woman and not really sure what to do when one of the truckers (Szymon Piotr Warszawski) who stops at the motel where she lives and works as a maid actually shows some interest.
Dzieduszycka delivers a genuinely impressive show of frustration that has been going on so long that she's just come to treat it as her life's baseline, the thing that makes it hard for her to get along with even the people like co-worker Renata (Dorota Pomykala) who are at the point of taking her height in stride, mixing it up with general working-class frustration. There's an untidy, transitory feel to even the more permanent parts of the setting, underscoring the limbo where Julka keeps herself, maybe right down to how everybody she meets tends to give her a different nickname.
That the search for a dress is not a quest but just a thing that that hovers over this upcoming date makes the short a little shaggier, but that seems fair and honest. Julka has given up on quick fixes or one thing turning her life around, but that doesn't mean solving that sort of problem won't help.
"The Long Goodbye"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)
How speculative is "The Long Goodbye" meant to be? Aneil Karia's short feels like the kind of thing that could either be based on a real-life incident or a warning about how things like this aren't far off, and that's perhaps part of the point - dire warnings and horrific events overlap in time, which maybe plays into the ways that this film gets even more peculiar as it keeps going past when most would fade to black.
That's the second big tonal shift; after what looks like a household of Middle-Eastern descent apparently preparing for a wedding suddenly finds themselves pulled out by black-clad men with guns, who may be government or may not be. The wedding prep had been a little tense in the way such things are - a lot to do in a little time, and the TVs in the background broadcasting ominous stories - but this is something else altogether, although it's a pretty nifty job of showing how people just trying to live a life with the constant hum of such things in the background can suddenly find it interrupting into real terror.
And then… Well, the short gets weird. One of the most prominent characters is played by Riz Ahmed (credited as "co-creator"), who stands afterward and does a spoken-word/rap piece, and it's an odd bit, making what had previously been subtext text, not exactly logical given what had previously happened. It's nicely-done, if a thoroughly theatrical thing to cap a short that had previously been naturalistically performed and grounded. It'll throw some, but then, it's not exactly a short looking to make its point subtly.
"Ala Kachuu - Take and Run"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2022 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar Shorts, digital)
"Ala Kachuu - Take and Run" is built on hammering things home as well, but then, that's sort of the point: Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova) is a bright young woman who dreams of going to University but has to practically run away to do it, only to find herself kidnapped into marriage, and it's not even an arranged one - she was just convenient. Husband Dayrbek (Nurbek Esengazy Uulu) seems decent, as such men go, but Sezim has no intention of becoming one of the women her mother's age who eventually accepts this as the way things are.
Writer/director Maria Brendle does excellent work keeping her eye on a certain line, where the film isn't just showing the cruelty and sexism of the culture in this part of Kyrgyzstan or how Sezim suffers, but isn't lecturing about how, as much as the men who kidnap force themselves upon their "wives", it is the women who eventually accept it that allow this system to be perpetuated. Granted, the audience is going to want Sezim to spell it out - she and friend Aksana (Madina Talipbekova) and kid sister Aygul (Aybike Erkinbekova) are clearly perceptive enough to understand it, but that kind of direct confrontation might keep the viewer from letting how people become complicit to bury their own shame and anger really fester - and, besides, a certain moment works best if someone figures it out herself.
It's also a striking film to watch generally; Brendle and her crew find the beauty in a land that is poor, isolated, and backward in many ways, and do a good job building high-speed escape attempts around someone who is clearly just driving for the first time or two. There's a great moment early on where Sezim and her mother are making bread together, which is apparently a major part or the wedding rituals, and the way that Sezim is just no good at it compared to her - but has still familiar enough to work in a shop later - is a great, quick way to establish her character. Alina Turdumamatova does a nice job of making Sezim feel like an ordinary girl who knows she deserves more rather than someone exceptional enough to break the system.
As I finish writing this, the awards have already been handed out (off-screen, apparently), because I saw them late and have had a busy-ish week. If I'd had a vote, it would have been for "Please Hold", although that was going to be a long shot. I'm not surprised "The Long Goodbye" won - a name as familiar as Riz Ahmed in a short gives it a heck of a boost - and certainly can't gripe about it.
Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts
Monday, March 28, 2022
Thursday, April 04, 2019
Fantasia 2018 Catch-Up 04: Chained for Life, Blue My Mind, A Rough Draft, Bleach, Laughing Under the Clouds, Punk Samurai Slash Down, Terrified, Number 37, Cinderella the Cat, The Brink '18, and What a Man Wants
How do you manage to be able to keep writing reviews for films you saw at a festival that ended eight months ago and mark your progress in doing so?
Drawing that "X" is incredibly satisfying, and I've managed to do it 82 times for Fantasia. It is kind of amazing how far a few notes good enough to jog your memory and a first draft with the core of what you want to say can get you, and I'm guessing that applies to every type of writing. Being able to figure out where to place your pencil with just the reflected light from the screen and write in a relative straight line while looking up, away from the notebook, on the other hand, probably has relatively limited application.
Even with that, I'm afraid I still had to punt reviews of four movies: RokuRoku was the midnight movie on the festival's second Saturday and I slept through most of it; I saw Da Hu Fa the next Tuesday even though I had already heard the subtitles were kind of a mess (it's a knockout visually and I wish I could find a 3D Blu-ray); Tokyo Vampire Hotel (the Monday after that) was the obligatory Sion Sono selection but it didn't feel right to spend five paragraphs calling it a disjointed mess when it's the cut-down version of an Amazon Prime series which might be perfectly fine; and River's Edge on day #20, which I quite liked but which had the bad luck to be near the end of the festival while I was trying to plow through the notebook in order so that when I got to it this week, I just couldn't flesh the Letterboxd entry out. Sorry, movie, you deserved better from me.
Obviously, the fact that the team up in Montreal is able to choose such a memorable group of movies is also a huge part of why you can do this. Whether they think me taking eight months to finish off is reason for them to deny me the next time I come looking for a pass or reason to approve (I am, after all, doing my part to help boost awareness year-round!).
It's been long enough that Blue My Mind, Terrified, Number 37, and What a Man Wants are all available to stream on Amazon by now (though Terrified requires a subscription to Shudder). Go watch them, they are by and large pretty good.
Anyway, one more bonus post, potentially, since I've received a couple of other films from the festival on disc a couple weeks ago. I should get that done just before I head north this July.
Chained for Life
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
You can feel Chained for Life struggling with the legacy of Freaks and similar films throughout, not to mention the more general difficulty of physical differences, and maybe ultimately not sure what else to do but acknowledge the struggle. The filmmakers are determined not to present a simple fairy tale or something which minimizes the reality of living with an appearance that makes people stare, and as a result they wind up going around in circles a bit, making a movie about making a movie and talking about talking about disfigurement and beauty.
Within the movie, "Chained for Life" is the first American feature by a young European director (Charlie Korsmo), and Mabel (Jess Weixler) its star. They're shooting in an empty section of an old mental hospital, which in the film will be home to conjoined twins, bearded ladies, and the like, most played by people who have done this sort of work before. Mabel's co-star, Rosenthal (Adam Pearson), is relatively new at this, and while his face may be distorted by neurofibromatosis, he's a charming, if shy, man; he and Mabel find themselves chatting and rehearsing together. It's a tentative sort of thing that could become friendship, depending on the circumstances.
The easiest story to tell would probably have Rosenthal a bitter man when introduced, but writer/director Aaron Schimberg instead opts to focus on his nervousness to start, letting the audience meet the guy rather than the issue, and by the same token not defining him by what "normal" people think of him. It's a tack that works in large part because Michael Pearson has a firm handle on the sort of charisma he needs to project here, a combination of natural charm and practiced confidence. Early on, one might be struck by the wit in how he tells Mabel she's got a look of pity on her face - it plays as banter - but it's also a kind of probe. The speech about why he'd like to be a waiter might also be something that's been refined over time, but Pearson doesn't make it feel rote. He's good enough to that I hope he can find some roles that aren't so much about his appearance, if that's the direction he wants to take.
Full review at EFC.
Blue My Mind
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, digital)
Blue My Mind is the sort of movie where I find myself kind of impatient, waiting for a more active story to kick in, but where I am also fully aware that someone who has actually been a 15-year-old girl might look at it and say "yes, this, exactly - this is an uncannily perfect metaphor for having your body and mind suddenly changing and not feeling like you can talk to anybody about it because you've been made to feel like a monster!" It's not for me, and that's okay.
The teenager in question is Mia (Luna Wedler), new at her school and as such somewhat reserved, kind of resenting that her parents (Georg Scharegg & Regua Grauwiller) have put her in this position now. As is often the case, the first girl to talk to her (Una Rusca), is nice enough, but she's more drawn to misbehaving queen bee Gianna (Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen) and her friends Nelly (Lou Haltinner) and Vivi (Yael Meier), which leads to the usual smoking, parties, cutting class, and maybe finding a connection with Gianna's boyfriend Roberto (David Oberholzer). The other girls, however, don't appear to have to deal with the thirst for salt water, or being too freaked out to tell the doctor that the changes in her body that she's really worried about are the bits of webbing starting to form between her toes.
Does it still sometimes feel like the filmmakers have this big fantastical thing in the middle of their story that they spend an hour and a half trying to avoid? Sometimes, yes, and it can be kind of frustrating. Director Lisa Brühlmann and her co-writer Dominik Locher don't necessarily need to build up some detailed mermaid mythology, but the slow doling out of hints doesn't lead to a dramatic pulling back of the curtain, either in terms of transformation or the idea that Mia is part of some larger world in addition to the mundane teenage one she's in. There's tremendous potential in this particular transformation - from the physicality of it to how knowing herself fully will require Mia to go somewhere that her friends and loved ones cannot help her - but Brühlmann often seems satisfied with the vague idea of transforming into a mythological creature as a metaphor for becoming a woman, and as long as the audience recognizes that, there's no need to get more specific.
Full review at EFC.
Chernovik (A Rough Draft)
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It's never a particularly good sign when a viewer's first reaction to a movie is "what is this 'to be continued' garbage?"; this is especially true when the film in question comes from a country that does not exactly have a great pipeline to said viewer, as in this case. After all, if Russian popcorn movies can't be expected to show up in North America, one might never see any follow-up. What's worse here is that, two hours later, the question of whether or not that second part would be of interest is still up in the air; A Rough Draft offers an interesting setting but doesn't get very far.
It starts with one of the good science fiction hooks; video-game developer Kirill (Nikita Volkov) ties one on at a company party, only to return to work the next day to find nobody remembers him, and the same goes for his ex-girlfriend Anna (Olga Borovskaya). When he returns home, there's a woman he never met by the name of Renata Ivanova (Severija Janusauskaite) in his apartment, and it appears the neighbors' memories of him are being erased in real time. It turns out that he is being drafted to serve as a sort of customs agent between alternate realities, and while he has been removed from this world, he has a talent for opening doors to others - and who knows, he may be the one who can find a path to "Arkan", which urban legend says is controlling many others, including our own.
There is certainly a lot there that sounds like a lot of fun could be a lot of fun, and maybe it was in Sergey Lukyanenko's original novel. But while the film is filled with neat ideas and fun visuals, director Sergey Mokritskiy and his team are kind of terrible at introducing them and letting them play out in a way that seems in any way natural. As good an opening hook as the film has, Lukyanenko et al use the opening act to introduce a lot of things that won't much matter (and skimp on the bits that will), before ditching it all with a big "wait, what?" moment for a new status quo. They continually jerk the viewer back and forth with things that are needlessly cryptic or just shrugged off like they should be obvious. There's some interesting details to the world-building, but not even much promise of a story that one can get involved in until the movie is almost over.
Full review at EFC.
Bleach
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Unlike many adaptations of Japanese comics which have to guess at the ending, the release of the live-action Bleach movie roughly coincides with the conclusion of the original manga, give or take a few months - not bad timing, considering that series ran for roughly seventeen years of weekly releases. It's not hard to see what made the manga so popular; this adaptation of its "Soul Reaper Agent "arc is a satisfying bit of young-adult fantasy action which promises more without feeling like it's short-changing someone who just wants a couple hours of adventure.
Teenager Ichigo Kurosaki (Sota Fukushi) isn't exactly looking for adventure; though protective of little sisters Karin and Yuzu and his absent-minded father Isshin (Yosuke Eguchi) ever since the death of his mother when he was a kid, he could do without the part where he sees ghosts. It also means he can see soul-reaper Rukia Kuchiki (Hana Sugisaki) as she fights a monster invisible to humans. Injured in the battle, she transfers her power to Ichigo, who has a surprising knack for it - her weapon grows bigger and more powerful in Ichigo's hands, and he is able to dispatch the "hollow" quickly. He apparently has a high spiritual pressure that prevents Rukia from reclaiming her powers, marooning her as a mortal. She has to train him so that he can dispatch more hollows and liberate enough power to recharge Rukia, as not only are there more dangerous hollows out there, but between the reapers who prize their secrecy and their sworn enemies of the Quincy tribe, there are a lot of people gunning for the pair.
Extraordinary teenagers fighting supernatural menaces while still trying to get through high school is not exactly the most original idea, especially in Bleach's original medium, but director Shinsuke Sato and his collaborators show a casual comfort with it that isn't always present. They seldom fall into the traps of fetishizing high school experiences or making everybody act like immature teenagers, or cranking up the melodrama so high that there doesn't seem to be any room for pedestrian concerns. The stakes are high but not so much that Ichigo can't keep a foot in both worlds. Stars Sota Fukushi and Hana Sugisaki are a big part of why it works - Fukushi makes Ichigo a big-hearted but reluctant hero despite his expansive personality, while Sugisaki handles Rukia's straight-faced dedication so that it's often deadpan funny but not a joke. They and the film are at their best early on, when "buddy comedy" is showing more than some of the other genres that have been put in its blender - the chemistry between its two superpowered teens is sharp but, at least for now, thankfully non-romantic.
Full review at EFC.
Donten ni warau (Laughing Under the Clouds)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Over the past decade or so of going to this festival, I've had a chance to see a lot of films based upon Japanese comics (with live action starting to displace animation over that time), and while Laughing Under the Clouds is far from the most aggressively pitched to existing fans rather than new audiences, it does very much feel like most of the intended viewers are going to know whether or not this is their thing before the movie starts. It's not a bad sort of fantasy story, but probably won't win a lot of new converts.
It takes place in a small town, where the three Kumo brothers tend a family shrine, a responsibility passed down for generations, meant to protect the world from a slumbering demon that is now the stuff of legend. Eldest brother Tenka (Sota Fukushi) has a reputation as a fighter that is just sort of legendary, but aims to help the local police more by maintaining an atmosphere of good cheer. Middle child Soramaru (Yuma Nakayama) is always looking to escape his brother's shadow, while Chutaro (Kitaro Wakayama) mostly gets into harmless mischief. The zeal of a ninja being transported to the prison in the middle of a nearby lake - and the strange new behavior of a prisoner who has been held in solitary confinement for years - hints that it may be time for "Orochi" to emerge. The Meiji government takes the threat seriously enough to send soldiers, who see Tenka as a lightweight amateur despite his reputation.
Given this film's English-language title, you might think that the whole "giant snake demon" thing and other bits of attendant melodrama would be played a bit more comedically, but they instead seem to be taken for granted, even when there's relatively little outside the stylized costuming to indicate what sort of heightened setting the filmmakers are playing in (at least to an outsider who knows relatively little about Japan; others may find this take on the Meiji Restoration pointed in what it emphasizes and exaggerates). It means that the film tends to get kind of muddled at times, not always entirely sure what it wants to be about or how much weight to give its supernatural and modern elements. It spends a lot of time putting light soap in the foreground for the first half of the film, enough that the shift to fantasy and action may not entirely seem like a detour, but less important despite the higher stakes.
Full review at EFC.
Panku-zamurai, kirarete sôrô (Punk Samurai Slash Down)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Well, this movie's something. Several somethings, in fact, starting out as a winking con-game movie set in samurai times and eventually becoming five kinds of absurd before a jaw-droppingly insane finale. Somewhere along the way, even the cheery parts get cynical and the biggest hucksters seem to have things right entirely by accident. Some may argue that this makes it a film perfect for modern times, and I don't know that I would disagree.
Junoshin Kake (Gou Ayano) is a samurai and would probably be considered a punk, by some, as the wandering ronin is not above pretending there is a crisis to make sure he gets a new job. In this case, that involves convincing Lord Naohito Kuroae (Masahiro Higashide) that the "belly shaker" cult is a threat to his rule rather than a small group of fairly harmless cranks. Several others, most notably chief retainer Tatewaki Naito (Etsushi Toyokawa), suspect this is malarkey and aim to undermine (or, if necessary, assassinate) Kake, but he's frustrating resilient. As are his lies - and once a disaffected populace knows about the cult, it actually starts to attract members, leading Kuroae to assign Kake to Hanro Chayama (Tadanobu Asano), one of the original founders, to see if he can actually do something about it. At least he's got a cute servant (Keiko Kitagawa), although Ron may be more than she seems.
How closely screenwriter Kankuro Kudo and director Gakuryu Ishii adapt Ko Machina's 2004 novel, I can't say, but if it's close, it speaks to universal the things being parodied are. A viewer determined to bend the film into a metaphor could probably find themselves deep down in a rabbit hole trying to make things that are just jokes fit, but the world is full of opportunists like Kake, trivial issues that take on the scale of real problems because people over-invest in them and the like. Japanese viewers may or may not be able to draw a line to specific targets, but the film works in large part by playing things big and broad enough to seem unmoored from reality, often seeming too ridiculous to have that sort of point until you're talking about it later.
Full review at EFC.
Aterrados (Terrified)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Give Terrified a lot of credit for not screwing around on the way to the good stuff. A lot of haunted house movies will do a slow build, hint at things that could have a rational explanation, or otherwise play things coy. Writer/director Demián Rugna says to hell with that, going all in on the paranormal barely ten minutes into the movie, and rather than having nowhere to go from there, he builds a contained but still grand mythology, finding ways to make things bigger while still placing them within the corners of our world.
The first haunted house belongs to Clara Blumotti (Natalia Señorales) and her husband Juan (Agustin Rittano); and his not believing her "hysteria" goes roughly about as well as can be expected in the opening of the movie. It soon turns out that their house is not the only one in the neighborhood which has had things going bump in the night - neighbors Walter (Demián Salomón) and Alicia (Julieta Vallina) have encountered strange activity - and that eventually attracts the attention of local comisario Funes (Maxi Ghione). He convinces a trio of experts on the paranormal - Jano Mario (Norberto Gonzalo), Mora Albreck (Elvira Onetto), and Dr. Rosenstock (George L. Lewis) - to come to Buenos Aires to investigate. They each take a house for the night, maybe a bit too excited to see actual evidence of the supernatural.
Paranormal experts like these three show up in a lot of movies about the paranormal; the viewer often needs someone authoritative to both argue that there is such a thing as ghosts and to set rules that can either be obeyed or ignored, and three seems like overkill. The neat trick that Rugna pulls here is that there's a sense that the trio is not quite crackpots, but are folks who believe their own press and know where their bread is buttered - they know each other by reputation, and are practically winking at each other during their first meeting. Rugna spends an enjoyable amount of time playing with how, though these people may be right about there being monsters, that doesn't mean that they are not themselves crazy or cynical. Elvira Onetto, Norberto Gonzalo, and George Lewis give the group a collective vibe on first meeting and their own distinct personalities as they split up, ranging from surprise that they're seeing something so concrete to utter mania. Rugna makes the experts into the potential targets, and in doing so gives himself room for unexpected reactions and ways to defy the pressure on sensible people to get the heck out of there.
Full review at EFC.
Nommer 37 (Number 37)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Number 37 is basically an uncredited remake of Rear Window set in an unsavory Cape Town neighborhood, but that's not exactly a bad place to start if the goal is to make a decent thriller, and while the result may not be a classic, it clears that bar. Maybe this version is not as inventive as the things that inspired it, and there's really not a beat that you can't predict once the basics have been put into place, but it does find an approach to the material that makes it worth a new pass.
A few months ago, ambitious crook Randal (Irshaad Ally) and his friend Lester borrowed some money from loan shark Emmie (Danny Ross) to finance a job that, it turns out, could have gone a lot better. Now, Randal is coming home from the hospital paralyzed while Lester isn't coming home at all, but Emmie still wants his money back in a week, and how's Randal going to do that from a wheelchair in a second-floor apartment? Well, there's blackmail - Randal's girlfriend Pam (Monique Rockman) gave him a pair of binoculars, and Randal saw the drug dealer across the way, Lawyer (David Manuel), murder a cop. But Randal will need to recruit help to make this plan work, and that's before the cops start sniffing around.
There's a lot of Hitchcock's classic in Number 37, but it exists at less of a remove than the earlier film. Where James Stewart's Jeff was a photographer, used to placing something between himself and the world before telling its story and effectively meeting his neighbors through his lens, Randal is already part of this neighborhood and world; his being in a wheelchair is not just inconvenient and embarrassing, but directly related to the rest of the story, and more explicitly shameful. That makes the story's themes something of an inversion - where Rear Window told the tale of a voyeur who inevitably must confront danger directly rather than through those who have volunteered to help, this film is about a man used to being on the scene who must, in a way, learn to be like his foes. Not so much as a killer, but as a planner, directing others, even though the last time he made a plan was disastrous.
Full review at EFC.
Gatta Cenerentola (Cinderella the Cat)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Axis, digital)
I feel a bit ungrateful wondering how Cinderella the Cat got made when I enjoyed enough pieces to shade my "it's okay" score toward the positive, but it's a decidedly odd movie that has to stretch to do its most worthy bits and which, as an animated film based on a fairy tale, is often going to have people coming at it with the wrong idea or ignoring it for the same reason. It is, if nothing else, interestingly eccentric, which isn't always enough.
As it opens, Don Vittorio Basile (voice of Mariano Rigillo), a much-beloved tycoon, is set to open a new "Science and Memory Hub" in a future Naples, with his massive high-tech yacht, the Megaribe, as its centerpiece. He's also planning to marry Angelica (voice of Maria Pia Calzone), who has several children to Vittorio's one, but also a lover in Salvatore Lo Giusto (voice of Massimiliano Gallo), who has plans for Angelica to soon become a widow. Those plans come to pass, and ten years on, Vittorio's dreams are in ruins; Salvatore, Angelica, her daughters, and Vittorio's daughter Mia (voice of Mariacarla Norall) live aboard the declining Megaribe, the latter as little more than a prisoner, because Salvatore knows that the only way to control the Basile fortune for good is to marry Mia.
A modern/futuristic retelling of "Cinderella" may seem like a played-out concept, but its four directors and their three co-writers seem to have enough ideas between them that you can certainly see the potential from the attention-grabbing opening all the way through. The movie has a bunch of wonderfully loopy pieces to it, from a yacht seemingly designed to be a ghost ship to a tragic (yet arguably still wicked) stepmother to a transvestite stepsister to glass slippers used to smuggle cocaine to a spunky take on the title character. It's got a new treat for the audience every five minutes, to the point where it could be overwhelming. That it never really seems to go off the rails is at least partially a product of its Italian DNA: The songs are equal parts cheery and mournful, there's a casual sexiness that is only occasionally exploitative (and then knowingly), and a certain fatalism and loyalty where the characters' situations are concerned.
Full review at EFC.
Kuang shou (The Brink)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
"Max" Zhang Jin is certainly well-positioned to be the next big Hong Kong martial-arts star, fresh off a couple fight-scene-stealing turns against Donnie Yen and Wu Jing & Tony Jaa, the sort that make you want to see more of the guy playing the villain. Of course, it's worth remembering that Wu's first starring roles after similar parts weren't exactly impressive, and that's where Zhang finds himself here: Physically gifted, showing enough acting chops beyond fights to suggest star potential, but not yet getting cast in the good lead roles yet.
Instead, he's in this, playing a rule-breaking cop hunting down gold smugglers who are much more interesting to watch before one starts consolidating power and taking charge. It's not quite boring, but it feels like a script built around location availability and what needs to happen, but not really fleshed out otherwise. Zhang's "Sai Gau" Chan Har-dong is often given more intensity than personality, and a subplot about adopting his late partner's daughter but not exactly being an attentive foster father that should say more about this guy but instead feels like it's been copied from another script where it fit better. There's more meat on the story of Shing (Shawn Yue Man-lok), a smuggler disrespected by the triads who see him as only the son of a fisherman, and who intends to steal the chief's underwater cache of gold.
There's a good movie in there, but I kind of suspect that it stars Shawn Yue; there's intrigue and melodrama and a clear motivation to his desire to clean house and pull off a seemingly impossible crime. He's got a colorful, fitting villain, too - triad boss Blackie (Yasuaki Kurata) never leaves his floating casino, and that ostentatious wealth makes a more interesting contrast to Shing and his gang than Shing does to Sai Gau. It's not hard to imagine Lee Chun-fai's script reconfigured to place Shing at the center, with Sai Gau the obsessed cop chasing him, especially if you can put more of a square focus on the nobler parts of his motivations.
Full review at EFC.
Ba-lam-ba-lam-ba-lam (What a Man Wants)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Somewhere in What a Man Wants is a really delightful farce that knows what to do with its female characters and plays with the dissatisfaction that everybody feels in a way that heightens both its screwball nature and possibilities. Instead, it bogs down for a while before getting to the really fun parts, and reduces interesting women to a way for the male characters to come around to something conventional.
It takes place in Jeju, an island town known for its strong winds (the film's Korean title, "Ba-lam-ba-lam-ba-lam", translates to "Wind Wind Wind"), where Seok-gun (Lee Sung-min) drives a cab, though he once traveled the world designing roller coasters, in part because his wife Dam-deok (Jang Young-nam) was tired of the infidelity. They live next door to Dam-deok's brother Bong-soo (Shin Ha-kyun) and his wife Mi-young (Song Ji-hyo), who run a not-terribly-successful restaurant together. Seok-gun hasn't so much stopped cheating as slowed down, with his latest target Jenny (Lee El), a gorgeous new arrival to town who finds herself drawn to Bong-soo instead - and Bong-soo is stuck in enough of a rut that he's willing to be tempted. Circumstances, therefore, find Seok-geun in the strange position of trying to serve as his brother-in-law's conscience for a change, but Jenny is determined, even getting Mi-young to hire her at the restaurant to get close to her man.
"Circumstances" kind of does a lot of work in that description; screenwriters Bae Se-yeong and Jang Gyu-seong move the story from one lane to another with such a sharp turn that it smashes through the median, at which point the movie feels like it should absolutely fall apart. The plot advances in a cruel enough way as to make the viewer question director Lee Byeong-heon's ability to turn things around and get back to being funny. On top of that, the film becomes somewhat unbalanced, even with bits added that seem designed more to fill in the gaps rather than actually add to the story. Fortunately, director Lee is able to temper and use that choice to create a good feeling of melancholy rather than wallowing; the tragedy is not enough to make things mainly sad, but instead seems to spur people to more actively seek out happiness.
Full review at EFC.
Drawing that "X" is incredibly satisfying, and I've managed to do it 82 times for Fantasia. It is kind of amazing how far a few notes good enough to jog your memory and a first draft with the core of what you want to say can get you, and I'm guessing that applies to every type of writing. Being able to figure out where to place your pencil with just the reflected light from the screen and write in a relative straight line while looking up, away from the notebook, on the other hand, probably has relatively limited application.
Even with that, I'm afraid I still had to punt reviews of four movies: RokuRoku was the midnight movie on the festival's second Saturday and I slept through most of it; I saw Da Hu Fa the next Tuesday even though I had already heard the subtitles were kind of a mess (it's a knockout visually and I wish I could find a 3D Blu-ray); Tokyo Vampire Hotel (the Monday after that) was the obligatory Sion Sono selection but it didn't feel right to spend five paragraphs calling it a disjointed mess when it's the cut-down version of an Amazon Prime series which might be perfectly fine; and River's Edge on day #20, which I quite liked but which had the bad luck to be near the end of the festival while I was trying to plow through the notebook in order so that when I got to it this week, I just couldn't flesh the Letterboxd entry out. Sorry, movie, you deserved better from me.
Obviously, the fact that the team up in Montreal is able to choose such a memorable group of movies is also a huge part of why you can do this. Whether they think me taking eight months to finish off is reason for them to deny me the next time I come looking for a pass or reason to approve (I am, after all, doing my part to help boost awareness year-round!).
It's been long enough that Blue My Mind, Terrified, Number 37, and What a Man Wants are all available to stream on Amazon by now (though Terrified requires a subscription to Shudder). Go watch them, they are by and large pretty good.
Anyway, one more bonus post, potentially, since I've received a couple of other films from the festival on disc a couple weeks ago. I should get that done just before I head north this July.
Chained for Life
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
You can feel Chained for Life struggling with the legacy of Freaks and similar films throughout, not to mention the more general difficulty of physical differences, and maybe ultimately not sure what else to do but acknowledge the struggle. The filmmakers are determined not to present a simple fairy tale or something which minimizes the reality of living with an appearance that makes people stare, and as a result they wind up going around in circles a bit, making a movie about making a movie and talking about talking about disfigurement and beauty.
Within the movie, "Chained for Life" is the first American feature by a young European director (Charlie Korsmo), and Mabel (Jess Weixler) its star. They're shooting in an empty section of an old mental hospital, which in the film will be home to conjoined twins, bearded ladies, and the like, most played by people who have done this sort of work before. Mabel's co-star, Rosenthal (Adam Pearson), is relatively new at this, and while his face may be distorted by neurofibromatosis, he's a charming, if shy, man; he and Mabel find themselves chatting and rehearsing together. It's a tentative sort of thing that could become friendship, depending on the circumstances.
The easiest story to tell would probably have Rosenthal a bitter man when introduced, but writer/director Aaron Schimberg instead opts to focus on his nervousness to start, letting the audience meet the guy rather than the issue, and by the same token not defining him by what "normal" people think of him. It's a tack that works in large part because Michael Pearson has a firm handle on the sort of charisma he needs to project here, a combination of natural charm and practiced confidence. Early on, one might be struck by the wit in how he tells Mabel she's got a look of pity on her face - it plays as banter - but it's also a kind of probe. The speech about why he'd like to be a waiter might also be something that's been refined over time, but Pearson doesn't make it feel rote. He's good enough to that I hope he can find some roles that aren't so much about his appearance, if that's the direction he wants to take.
Full review at EFC.
Blue My Mind
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, digital)
Blue My Mind is the sort of movie where I find myself kind of impatient, waiting for a more active story to kick in, but where I am also fully aware that someone who has actually been a 15-year-old girl might look at it and say "yes, this, exactly - this is an uncannily perfect metaphor for having your body and mind suddenly changing and not feeling like you can talk to anybody about it because you've been made to feel like a monster!" It's not for me, and that's okay.
The teenager in question is Mia (Luna Wedler), new at her school and as such somewhat reserved, kind of resenting that her parents (Georg Scharegg & Regua Grauwiller) have put her in this position now. As is often the case, the first girl to talk to her (Una Rusca), is nice enough, but she's more drawn to misbehaving queen bee Gianna (Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen) and her friends Nelly (Lou Haltinner) and Vivi (Yael Meier), which leads to the usual smoking, parties, cutting class, and maybe finding a connection with Gianna's boyfriend Roberto (David Oberholzer). The other girls, however, don't appear to have to deal with the thirst for salt water, or being too freaked out to tell the doctor that the changes in her body that she's really worried about are the bits of webbing starting to form between her toes.
Does it still sometimes feel like the filmmakers have this big fantastical thing in the middle of their story that they spend an hour and a half trying to avoid? Sometimes, yes, and it can be kind of frustrating. Director Lisa Brühlmann and her co-writer Dominik Locher don't necessarily need to build up some detailed mermaid mythology, but the slow doling out of hints doesn't lead to a dramatic pulling back of the curtain, either in terms of transformation or the idea that Mia is part of some larger world in addition to the mundane teenage one she's in. There's tremendous potential in this particular transformation - from the physicality of it to how knowing herself fully will require Mia to go somewhere that her friends and loved ones cannot help her - but Brühlmann often seems satisfied with the vague idea of transforming into a mythological creature as a metaphor for becoming a woman, and as long as the audience recognizes that, there's no need to get more specific.
Full review at EFC.
Chernovik (A Rough Draft)
* * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It's never a particularly good sign when a viewer's first reaction to a movie is "what is this 'to be continued' garbage?"; this is especially true when the film in question comes from a country that does not exactly have a great pipeline to said viewer, as in this case. After all, if Russian popcorn movies can't be expected to show up in North America, one might never see any follow-up. What's worse here is that, two hours later, the question of whether or not that second part would be of interest is still up in the air; A Rough Draft offers an interesting setting but doesn't get very far.
It starts with one of the good science fiction hooks; video-game developer Kirill (Nikita Volkov) ties one on at a company party, only to return to work the next day to find nobody remembers him, and the same goes for his ex-girlfriend Anna (Olga Borovskaya). When he returns home, there's a woman he never met by the name of Renata Ivanova (Severija Janusauskaite) in his apartment, and it appears the neighbors' memories of him are being erased in real time. It turns out that he is being drafted to serve as a sort of customs agent between alternate realities, and while he has been removed from this world, he has a talent for opening doors to others - and who knows, he may be the one who can find a path to "Arkan", which urban legend says is controlling many others, including our own.
There is certainly a lot there that sounds like a lot of fun could be a lot of fun, and maybe it was in Sergey Lukyanenko's original novel. But while the film is filled with neat ideas and fun visuals, director Sergey Mokritskiy and his team are kind of terrible at introducing them and letting them play out in a way that seems in any way natural. As good an opening hook as the film has, Lukyanenko et al use the opening act to introduce a lot of things that won't much matter (and skimp on the bits that will), before ditching it all with a big "wait, what?" moment for a new status quo. They continually jerk the viewer back and forth with things that are needlessly cryptic or just shrugged off like they should be obvious. There's some interesting details to the world-building, but not even much promise of a story that one can get involved in until the movie is almost over.
Full review at EFC.
Bleach
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Unlike many adaptations of Japanese comics which have to guess at the ending, the release of the live-action Bleach movie roughly coincides with the conclusion of the original manga, give or take a few months - not bad timing, considering that series ran for roughly seventeen years of weekly releases. It's not hard to see what made the manga so popular; this adaptation of its "Soul Reaper Agent "arc is a satisfying bit of young-adult fantasy action which promises more without feeling like it's short-changing someone who just wants a couple hours of adventure.
Teenager Ichigo Kurosaki (Sota Fukushi) isn't exactly looking for adventure; though protective of little sisters Karin and Yuzu and his absent-minded father Isshin (Yosuke Eguchi) ever since the death of his mother when he was a kid, he could do without the part where he sees ghosts. It also means he can see soul-reaper Rukia Kuchiki (Hana Sugisaki) as she fights a monster invisible to humans. Injured in the battle, she transfers her power to Ichigo, who has a surprising knack for it - her weapon grows bigger and more powerful in Ichigo's hands, and he is able to dispatch the "hollow" quickly. He apparently has a high spiritual pressure that prevents Rukia from reclaiming her powers, marooning her as a mortal. She has to train him so that he can dispatch more hollows and liberate enough power to recharge Rukia, as not only are there more dangerous hollows out there, but between the reapers who prize their secrecy and their sworn enemies of the Quincy tribe, there are a lot of people gunning for the pair.
Extraordinary teenagers fighting supernatural menaces while still trying to get through high school is not exactly the most original idea, especially in Bleach's original medium, but director Shinsuke Sato and his collaborators show a casual comfort with it that isn't always present. They seldom fall into the traps of fetishizing high school experiences or making everybody act like immature teenagers, or cranking up the melodrama so high that there doesn't seem to be any room for pedestrian concerns. The stakes are high but not so much that Ichigo can't keep a foot in both worlds. Stars Sota Fukushi and Hana Sugisaki are a big part of why it works - Fukushi makes Ichigo a big-hearted but reluctant hero despite his expansive personality, while Sugisaki handles Rukia's straight-faced dedication so that it's often deadpan funny but not a joke. They and the film are at their best early on, when "buddy comedy" is showing more than some of the other genres that have been put in its blender - the chemistry between its two superpowered teens is sharp but, at least for now, thankfully non-romantic.
Full review at EFC.
Donten ni warau (Laughing Under the Clouds)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Over the past decade or so of going to this festival, I've had a chance to see a lot of films based upon Japanese comics (with live action starting to displace animation over that time), and while Laughing Under the Clouds is far from the most aggressively pitched to existing fans rather than new audiences, it does very much feel like most of the intended viewers are going to know whether or not this is their thing before the movie starts. It's not a bad sort of fantasy story, but probably won't win a lot of new converts.
It takes place in a small town, where the three Kumo brothers tend a family shrine, a responsibility passed down for generations, meant to protect the world from a slumbering demon that is now the stuff of legend. Eldest brother Tenka (Sota Fukushi) has a reputation as a fighter that is just sort of legendary, but aims to help the local police more by maintaining an atmosphere of good cheer. Middle child Soramaru (Yuma Nakayama) is always looking to escape his brother's shadow, while Chutaro (Kitaro Wakayama) mostly gets into harmless mischief. The zeal of a ninja being transported to the prison in the middle of a nearby lake - and the strange new behavior of a prisoner who has been held in solitary confinement for years - hints that it may be time for "Orochi" to emerge. The Meiji government takes the threat seriously enough to send soldiers, who see Tenka as a lightweight amateur despite his reputation.
Given this film's English-language title, you might think that the whole "giant snake demon" thing and other bits of attendant melodrama would be played a bit more comedically, but they instead seem to be taken for granted, even when there's relatively little outside the stylized costuming to indicate what sort of heightened setting the filmmakers are playing in (at least to an outsider who knows relatively little about Japan; others may find this take on the Meiji Restoration pointed in what it emphasizes and exaggerates). It means that the film tends to get kind of muddled at times, not always entirely sure what it wants to be about or how much weight to give its supernatural and modern elements. It spends a lot of time putting light soap in the foreground for the first half of the film, enough that the shift to fantasy and action may not entirely seem like a detour, but less important despite the higher stakes.
Full review at EFC.
Panku-zamurai, kirarete sôrô (Punk Samurai Slash Down)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Well, this movie's something. Several somethings, in fact, starting out as a winking con-game movie set in samurai times and eventually becoming five kinds of absurd before a jaw-droppingly insane finale. Somewhere along the way, even the cheery parts get cynical and the biggest hucksters seem to have things right entirely by accident. Some may argue that this makes it a film perfect for modern times, and I don't know that I would disagree.
Junoshin Kake (Gou Ayano) is a samurai and would probably be considered a punk, by some, as the wandering ronin is not above pretending there is a crisis to make sure he gets a new job. In this case, that involves convincing Lord Naohito Kuroae (Masahiro Higashide) that the "belly shaker" cult is a threat to his rule rather than a small group of fairly harmless cranks. Several others, most notably chief retainer Tatewaki Naito (Etsushi Toyokawa), suspect this is malarkey and aim to undermine (or, if necessary, assassinate) Kake, but he's frustrating resilient. As are his lies - and once a disaffected populace knows about the cult, it actually starts to attract members, leading Kuroae to assign Kake to Hanro Chayama (Tadanobu Asano), one of the original founders, to see if he can actually do something about it. At least he's got a cute servant (Keiko Kitagawa), although Ron may be more than she seems.
How closely screenwriter Kankuro Kudo and director Gakuryu Ishii adapt Ko Machina's 2004 novel, I can't say, but if it's close, it speaks to universal the things being parodied are. A viewer determined to bend the film into a metaphor could probably find themselves deep down in a rabbit hole trying to make things that are just jokes fit, but the world is full of opportunists like Kake, trivial issues that take on the scale of real problems because people over-invest in them and the like. Japanese viewers may or may not be able to draw a line to specific targets, but the film works in large part by playing things big and broad enough to seem unmoored from reality, often seeming too ridiculous to have that sort of point until you're talking about it later.
Full review at EFC.
Aterrados (Terrified)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Give Terrified a lot of credit for not screwing around on the way to the good stuff. A lot of haunted house movies will do a slow build, hint at things that could have a rational explanation, or otherwise play things coy. Writer/director Demián Rugna says to hell with that, going all in on the paranormal barely ten minutes into the movie, and rather than having nowhere to go from there, he builds a contained but still grand mythology, finding ways to make things bigger while still placing them within the corners of our world.
The first haunted house belongs to Clara Blumotti (Natalia Señorales) and her husband Juan (Agustin Rittano); and his not believing her "hysteria" goes roughly about as well as can be expected in the opening of the movie. It soon turns out that their house is not the only one in the neighborhood which has had things going bump in the night - neighbors Walter (Demián Salomón) and Alicia (Julieta Vallina) have encountered strange activity - and that eventually attracts the attention of local comisario Funes (Maxi Ghione). He convinces a trio of experts on the paranormal - Jano Mario (Norberto Gonzalo), Mora Albreck (Elvira Onetto), and Dr. Rosenstock (George L. Lewis) - to come to Buenos Aires to investigate. They each take a house for the night, maybe a bit too excited to see actual evidence of the supernatural.
Paranormal experts like these three show up in a lot of movies about the paranormal; the viewer often needs someone authoritative to both argue that there is such a thing as ghosts and to set rules that can either be obeyed or ignored, and three seems like overkill. The neat trick that Rugna pulls here is that there's a sense that the trio is not quite crackpots, but are folks who believe their own press and know where their bread is buttered - they know each other by reputation, and are practically winking at each other during their first meeting. Rugna spends an enjoyable amount of time playing with how, though these people may be right about there being monsters, that doesn't mean that they are not themselves crazy or cynical. Elvira Onetto, Norberto Gonzalo, and George Lewis give the group a collective vibe on first meeting and their own distinct personalities as they split up, ranging from surprise that they're seeing something so concrete to utter mania. Rugna makes the experts into the potential targets, and in doing so gives himself room for unexpected reactions and ways to defy the pressure on sensible people to get the heck out of there.
Full review at EFC.
Nommer 37 (Number 37)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Number 37 is basically an uncredited remake of Rear Window set in an unsavory Cape Town neighborhood, but that's not exactly a bad place to start if the goal is to make a decent thriller, and while the result may not be a classic, it clears that bar. Maybe this version is not as inventive as the things that inspired it, and there's really not a beat that you can't predict once the basics have been put into place, but it does find an approach to the material that makes it worth a new pass.
A few months ago, ambitious crook Randal (Irshaad Ally) and his friend Lester borrowed some money from loan shark Emmie (Danny Ross) to finance a job that, it turns out, could have gone a lot better. Now, Randal is coming home from the hospital paralyzed while Lester isn't coming home at all, but Emmie still wants his money back in a week, and how's Randal going to do that from a wheelchair in a second-floor apartment? Well, there's blackmail - Randal's girlfriend Pam (Monique Rockman) gave him a pair of binoculars, and Randal saw the drug dealer across the way, Lawyer (David Manuel), murder a cop. But Randal will need to recruit help to make this plan work, and that's before the cops start sniffing around.
There's a lot of Hitchcock's classic in Number 37, but it exists at less of a remove than the earlier film. Where James Stewart's Jeff was a photographer, used to placing something between himself and the world before telling its story and effectively meeting his neighbors through his lens, Randal is already part of this neighborhood and world; his being in a wheelchair is not just inconvenient and embarrassing, but directly related to the rest of the story, and more explicitly shameful. That makes the story's themes something of an inversion - where Rear Window told the tale of a voyeur who inevitably must confront danger directly rather than through those who have volunteered to help, this film is about a man used to being on the scene who must, in a way, learn to be like his foes. Not so much as a killer, but as a planner, directing others, even though the last time he made a plan was disastrous.
Full review at EFC.
Gatta Cenerentola (Cinderella the Cat)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Axis, digital)
I feel a bit ungrateful wondering how Cinderella the Cat got made when I enjoyed enough pieces to shade my "it's okay" score toward the positive, but it's a decidedly odd movie that has to stretch to do its most worthy bits and which, as an animated film based on a fairy tale, is often going to have people coming at it with the wrong idea or ignoring it for the same reason. It is, if nothing else, interestingly eccentric, which isn't always enough.
As it opens, Don Vittorio Basile (voice of Mariano Rigillo), a much-beloved tycoon, is set to open a new "Science and Memory Hub" in a future Naples, with his massive high-tech yacht, the Megaribe, as its centerpiece. He's also planning to marry Angelica (voice of Maria Pia Calzone), who has several children to Vittorio's one, but also a lover in Salvatore Lo Giusto (voice of Massimiliano Gallo), who has plans for Angelica to soon become a widow. Those plans come to pass, and ten years on, Vittorio's dreams are in ruins; Salvatore, Angelica, her daughters, and Vittorio's daughter Mia (voice of Mariacarla Norall) live aboard the declining Megaribe, the latter as little more than a prisoner, because Salvatore knows that the only way to control the Basile fortune for good is to marry Mia.
A modern/futuristic retelling of "Cinderella" may seem like a played-out concept, but its four directors and their three co-writers seem to have enough ideas between them that you can certainly see the potential from the attention-grabbing opening all the way through. The movie has a bunch of wonderfully loopy pieces to it, from a yacht seemingly designed to be a ghost ship to a tragic (yet arguably still wicked) stepmother to a transvestite stepsister to glass slippers used to smuggle cocaine to a spunky take on the title character. It's got a new treat for the audience every five minutes, to the point where it could be overwhelming. That it never really seems to go off the rails is at least partially a product of its Italian DNA: The songs are equal parts cheery and mournful, there's a casual sexiness that is only occasionally exploitative (and then knowingly), and a certain fatalism and loyalty where the characters' situations are concerned.
Full review at EFC.
Kuang shou (The Brink)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
"Max" Zhang Jin is certainly well-positioned to be the next big Hong Kong martial-arts star, fresh off a couple fight-scene-stealing turns against Donnie Yen and Wu Jing & Tony Jaa, the sort that make you want to see more of the guy playing the villain. Of course, it's worth remembering that Wu's first starring roles after similar parts weren't exactly impressive, and that's where Zhang finds himself here: Physically gifted, showing enough acting chops beyond fights to suggest star potential, but not yet getting cast in the good lead roles yet.
Instead, he's in this, playing a rule-breaking cop hunting down gold smugglers who are much more interesting to watch before one starts consolidating power and taking charge. It's not quite boring, but it feels like a script built around location availability and what needs to happen, but not really fleshed out otherwise. Zhang's "Sai Gau" Chan Har-dong is often given more intensity than personality, and a subplot about adopting his late partner's daughter but not exactly being an attentive foster father that should say more about this guy but instead feels like it's been copied from another script where it fit better. There's more meat on the story of Shing (Shawn Yue Man-lok), a smuggler disrespected by the triads who see him as only the son of a fisherman, and who intends to steal the chief's underwater cache of gold.
There's a good movie in there, but I kind of suspect that it stars Shawn Yue; there's intrigue and melodrama and a clear motivation to his desire to clean house and pull off a seemingly impossible crime. He's got a colorful, fitting villain, too - triad boss Blackie (Yasuaki Kurata) never leaves his floating casino, and that ostentatious wealth makes a more interesting contrast to Shing and his gang than Shing does to Sai Gau. It's not hard to imagine Lee Chun-fai's script reconfigured to place Shing at the center, with Sai Gau the obsessed cop chasing him, especially if you can put more of a square focus on the nobler parts of his motivations.
Full review at EFC.
Ba-lam-ba-lam-ba-lam (What a Man Wants)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Somewhere in What a Man Wants is a really delightful farce that knows what to do with its female characters and plays with the dissatisfaction that everybody feels in a way that heightens both its screwball nature and possibilities. Instead, it bogs down for a while before getting to the really fun parts, and reduces interesting women to a way for the male characters to come around to something conventional.
It takes place in Jeju, an island town known for its strong winds (the film's Korean title, "Ba-lam-ba-lam-ba-lam", translates to "Wind Wind Wind"), where Seok-gun (Lee Sung-min) drives a cab, though he once traveled the world designing roller coasters, in part because his wife Dam-deok (Jang Young-nam) was tired of the infidelity. They live next door to Dam-deok's brother Bong-soo (Shin Ha-kyun) and his wife Mi-young (Song Ji-hyo), who run a not-terribly-successful restaurant together. Seok-gun hasn't so much stopped cheating as slowed down, with his latest target Jenny (Lee El), a gorgeous new arrival to town who finds herself drawn to Bong-soo instead - and Bong-soo is stuck in enough of a rut that he's willing to be tempted. Circumstances, therefore, find Seok-geun in the strange position of trying to serve as his brother-in-law's conscience for a change, but Jenny is determined, even getting Mi-young to hire her at the restaurant to get close to her man.
"Circumstances" kind of does a lot of work in that description; screenwriters Bae Se-yeong and Jang Gyu-seong move the story from one lane to another with such a sharp turn that it smashes through the median, at which point the movie feels like it should absolutely fall apart. The plot advances in a cruel enough way as to make the viewer question director Lee Byeong-heon's ability to turn things around and get back to being funny. On top of that, the film becomes somewhat unbalanced, even with bits added that seem designed more to fill in the gaps rather than actually add to the story. Fortunately, director Lee is able to temper and use that choice to create a good feeling of melancholy rather than wallowing; the tragedy is not enough to make things mainly sad, but instead seems to spur people to more actively seek out happiness.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, July 26, 2018
Fantasia 2018.14: Blue My Mind and Anna and the Apocalypse
Remember what I said about patterns being easy to see when you have short schedule days? It was teenage girls having high school go to hell yesterday. I can't say I loved Blue My Mind, but it's not exactly for me in one sense, though I suppose it is in terms of "hey, teenage girls spend a lot of time freaked out over their changing bodies and identities, so cut them more slack than Mia's father does".
It's a reminder that we really need to get more female voices at eFilmCritic and in film criticism in general - I can review this, but don't have the same perspective. It's worth trying to find someone who does.
Because this was a day where Hall and DeSève were about an hour out of sync, I had some time to poke around for food, and wound up at Taboo, which (I think) is in the spot where m:brgr used to be, in part because that's where I was when the rain started coming down good. Not bad at all, although if I go in again, I may go for more sliders and regular fries rather than a big ol' poutine. I'm recommending it to my brother to try the next time his bosses send him to MTL on business; he'd probably really go fo the tartares and cocktails.
After that, back to the fest for Anna and the Apocalypse and one of the more energetic Q&As of the fest so far.
Tony Timpone on the left, joined by director John McPhail in the center and co-star Christopher Leveaux on the right, and on the "pleased to be here and having a blast" scale of festival guests, young Scots who have made a Christmas zombie high-school musical are pretty high. Leveaux, it was mentioned, is actually the grandson of The Wicker Man filmmaker Robin Hardy, and mentioned putting a little wicker man easter egg in the movie somewhere. When asked about influences, McPhail said that he was always a big horror fan, but finding musicals that had this sort of feel to them was a bit trickier, and got a big round of applause when he mentioned The Happiness of the Katakiris. They did put down a hard-and-fast rule that the zombies would not be singing or dancing at any point, because that would be the difference between the movie being a comedy and being a joke. They also mentioned dropping one of the more meta moments because they couldn't fit it in, and the film's probably better that way. There were other things they couldn't do because of budget - they wanted more gore, but felt they had to save the effects money for when people the audience knew went down. They're psyched to see the Orion logo in front of their movie.
One of the more amusing audience questions came from someone who asked if Vertigo comics character John Constantine was an influence on Steph, and that got McPhail laughing - no, but actress (and choreographer!) Sarah Swire would love that, especially since she pretty much made that character her own: Steph originally started out as a sportier, more outgoing athlete, and the bleach-blonde, standoffish activist was how Swire saw her. She kind of steals the movie.
After that, I headed to the Forum for Salyut-7, which I liked a fair amount, although it's not exactly a break from summer movie camp. Probably the only one until the end, though.
Instead, today's a much more full day, with Violence Voyager, Pledge, Blood and Black Lace, and DJ XL5's Outtasight Zappin' Party. Searching and Hurt are both pretty darn good.
Blue My Mind
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, digital)
Blue My Mind is the sort of movie where I find myself kind of impatient, waiting for a certain more active story to kick in, but where I am also fully aware that someone who has actually been a 15-year-old girl might look at it and say "yes, this, exactly - this is an uncannily perfect metaphor for having your body and mind suddenly changing and not feeling like you can talk to anybody about it because you've been made to feel like a monster!" It's not for me, and that's okay.
Does it still sometimes feel like the filmmakers have this big fantastical thing in the middle of their story that they spend an hour and a half trying to avoid? Sometimes, yes, and it can be kind of frustrating. It's fortunate that the more grounded bits still work extremely well - lead actresses Luna Wedler and Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen are great, impressively sympathetic even when not necessarily easy to like.
But, really, don't listen to me; find some young women in her teens or twenties who have seen the movie. They're going to know what they're talking about a heck of a lot better than me.
Full review at EFC.
"Netflix & Chill"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
A quick, entertaining short film that does a pretty nice job of playing out as silent, body-language comedy before taking its twist. Yannick Jozefzoon and Romy Gevers are genuinely funny with alternately hesitant and eager teenagers trying to find the right approach. It takes just long enough a detour into suspense before finding a pretty terrific punchline.
Anna and the Apocalypse
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Anna and the Apocalypse at time plays like an actual high-school musical, which works better than you might expect. It could be done as a big production, but there's something that feels right about how it keeps things at a level that can revel in the silliness of its premise but still has room to treat its teens' concerns with respect rather than as overdone melodrama or metaphor.
It's the day of the Christmas talent show in Little Haven, Scotland, but things get off a bit on the wrong foot for Anna Shephard (Ella Hunt) when her best-friend-with-a-massive-crush John (Malcolm Cumming) mistakenly blabs to her father (Mark Benton) that his daughter is not planning on going straight to University, but has purchased a ticket to Australia to start a gap travel year. For the other students, problems seem a bit more minor - Mr. Savage (Paul Kaye) is already throwing his weight around ahead of his promotion to headmaster, spiking a story on homelessness Steph (Sarah Swire) has been writing for the school blog, leading her to ask A/V maven Chris (Christopher Leveaux) to help her film at the soup kitchen, though that might make him late for the number his girlfriend Lisa (Marli Siu) - also Anna's best gal pal - is doing in the show. Of course, before all this has gone on, Anna has switched off a story on the car radio about a super-bad flu outbreak, so when she and John start making their way to school the next morning, they find that they've got bigger problems than her ex Nick (Ben Wiggins) being kind of a pest.
The "New Day"-type number that Anna and John have at this point is probably the movie's best and funniest; it gets to be cheery with zombie mayhem in the background, playing as a bit of a subversion of the form, but not in a sneering manner - it's sincere and with standing behind Anna & John, not making the jokes at their expense. The songs by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly are kind of what you might expect from a modern movie musical - there's about five of them, front-loaded so that the latter half of the movie can be more action-based, and on first pass the impression is more that they fit their slot well enough rather than having their lyrics and melodies embedded into one's heads. They sound a little processed, although not so much that they don't sound like they're coming from the characters. Everybody sings for themselves, which is nice.
Full review at EFC.
It's a reminder that we really need to get more female voices at eFilmCritic and in film criticism in general - I can review this, but don't have the same perspective. It's worth trying to find someone who does.
Because this was a day where Hall and DeSève were about an hour out of sync, I had some time to poke around for food, and wound up at Taboo, which (I think) is in the spot where m:brgr used to be, in part because that's where I was when the rain started coming down good. Not bad at all, although if I go in again, I may go for more sliders and regular fries rather than a big ol' poutine. I'm recommending it to my brother to try the next time his bosses send him to MTL on business; he'd probably really go fo the tartares and cocktails.
After that, back to the fest for Anna and the Apocalypse and one of the more energetic Q&As of the fest so far.
Tony Timpone on the left, joined by director John McPhail in the center and co-star Christopher Leveaux on the right, and on the "pleased to be here and having a blast" scale of festival guests, young Scots who have made a Christmas zombie high-school musical are pretty high. Leveaux, it was mentioned, is actually the grandson of The Wicker Man filmmaker Robin Hardy, and mentioned putting a little wicker man easter egg in the movie somewhere. When asked about influences, McPhail said that he was always a big horror fan, but finding musicals that had this sort of feel to them was a bit trickier, and got a big round of applause when he mentioned The Happiness of the Katakiris. They did put down a hard-and-fast rule that the zombies would not be singing or dancing at any point, because that would be the difference between the movie being a comedy and being a joke. They also mentioned dropping one of the more meta moments because they couldn't fit it in, and the film's probably better that way. There were other things they couldn't do because of budget - they wanted more gore, but felt they had to save the effects money for when people the audience knew went down. They're psyched to see the Orion logo in front of their movie.
One of the more amusing audience questions came from someone who asked if Vertigo comics character John Constantine was an influence on Steph, and that got McPhail laughing - no, but actress (and choreographer!) Sarah Swire would love that, especially since she pretty much made that character her own: Steph originally started out as a sportier, more outgoing athlete, and the bleach-blonde, standoffish activist was how Swire saw her. She kind of steals the movie.
After that, I headed to the Forum for Salyut-7, which I liked a fair amount, although it's not exactly a break from summer movie camp. Probably the only one until the end, though.
Instead, today's a much more full day, with Violence Voyager, Pledge, Blood and Black Lace, and DJ XL5's Outtasight Zappin' Party. Searching and Hurt are both pretty darn good.
Blue My Mind
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, digital)
Blue My Mind is the sort of movie where I find myself kind of impatient, waiting for a certain more active story to kick in, but where I am also fully aware that someone who has actually been a 15-year-old girl might look at it and say "yes, this, exactly - this is an uncannily perfect metaphor for having your body and mind suddenly changing and not feeling like you can talk to anybody about it because you've been made to feel like a monster!" It's not for me, and that's okay.
Does it still sometimes feel like the filmmakers have this big fantastical thing in the middle of their story that they spend an hour and a half trying to avoid? Sometimes, yes, and it can be kind of frustrating. It's fortunate that the more grounded bits still work extremely well - lead actresses Luna Wedler and Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen are great, impressively sympathetic even when not necessarily easy to like.
But, really, don't listen to me; find some young women in her teens or twenties who have seen the movie. They're going to know what they're talking about a heck of a lot better than me.
Full review at EFC.
"Netflix & Chill"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
A quick, entertaining short film that does a pretty nice job of playing out as silent, body-language comedy before taking its twist. Yannick Jozefzoon and Romy Gevers are genuinely funny with alternately hesitant and eager teenagers trying to find the right approach. It takes just long enough a detour into suspense before finding a pretty terrific punchline.
Anna and the Apocalypse
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Anna and the Apocalypse at time plays like an actual high-school musical, which works better than you might expect. It could be done as a big production, but there's something that feels right about how it keeps things at a level that can revel in the silliness of its premise but still has room to treat its teens' concerns with respect rather than as overdone melodrama or metaphor.
It's the day of the Christmas talent show in Little Haven, Scotland, but things get off a bit on the wrong foot for Anna Shephard (Ella Hunt) when her best-friend-with-a-massive-crush John (Malcolm Cumming) mistakenly blabs to her father (Mark Benton) that his daughter is not planning on going straight to University, but has purchased a ticket to Australia to start a gap travel year. For the other students, problems seem a bit more minor - Mr. Savage (Paul Kaye) is already throwing his weight around ahead of his promotion to headmaster, spiking a story on homelessness Steph (Sarah Swire) has been writing for the school blog, leading her to ask A/V maven Chris (Christopher Leveaux) to help her film at the soup kitchen, though that might make him late for the number his girlfriend Lisa (Marli Siu) - also Anna's best gal pal - is doing in the show. Of course, before all this has gone on, Anna has switched off a story on the car radio about a super-bad flu outbreak, so when she and John start making their way to school the next morning, they find that they've got bigger problems than her ex Nick (Ben Wiggins) being kind of a pest.
The "New Day"-type number that Anna and John have at this point is probably the movie's best and funniest; it gets to be cheery with zombie mayhem in the background, playing as a bit of a subversion of the form, but not in a sneering manner - it's sincere and with standing behind Anna & John, not making the jokes at their expense. The songs by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly are kind of what you might expect from a modern movie musical - there's about five of them, front-loaded so that the latter half of the movie can be more action-based, and on first pass the impression is more that they fit their slot well enough rather than having their lyrics and melodies embedded into one's heads. They sound a little processed, although not so much that they don't sound like they're coming from the characters. Everybody sings for themselves, which is nice.
Full review at EFC.
Friday, March 10, 2017
My Life as a Zucchini
Now that I’ve finally got the review written, the showtimes at Kendall Square have been cut down to matinees, but, to compensate, they’re subtitled as opposed to dubbed (when I went Monday, it was English before sunset, French after). I still recommend the movie quite a bit, though; though my horse in the Oscar category was Kubo and the Two Strings at the time, this one likely edges it out now that I’ve seen all of them.
Sticking around through the credits, by the way, is highly recommended; the filmmakers animate the audio of their first meeting with the kid who wound up voicing Courgette and it is adorable, but in a way that complements the rest of the film, as he talks about how his parents’ divorce would probably be something he pulls from before talking about how Zucchini is gross and maybe the kid could have a different name.
Probably won’t get this one for a niece come birthdays/Christmas - the one who will be eleven can probably handle it, but it is often a downer, even if it is ultimately hopeful. It’s very much a “know your kid” movie, but an excellent one if your kid is up for it.
”Le génie de la boîte de raviolis” (“The Genie in a Tin of Ravioli”)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (pre-film short, DCP)
Sent to theaters as part of a package with his rather short feature My Life as a Zucchini to help pad out the runtime, Claude Barras’s “The Genie in a Tin of Ravioli” is a fairly simple film, with the very mildest conflict propelling its story and simple dialog the order of the day to go with its deceptively simple animation. The credits mark it as adapted from a bande dessinée, which makes me wonder if that phrase encompasses children’s books as well as the comics I most often see it used for.
It’s a sweet little thing, though, quickly introducing viewers to Armand, who works daily in a ravioli factory and then eats the stuff for dinner when he gets home, only to have a grand, triangular genie pop out when he opens one night’s can. The genie offers to grant two wishes, and there’s an interesting balance to it: Armand’s wishes are initially small, with the genie having to coax him into asking for more than a flower in a pot. Initially, it’s easy to walk away from the short thinking it’s entirely about his modesty and kindness, and that’s important, but look a little deeper, and maybe Armand needs to be reminded that, even if he is a poor factory worker and an immigrant, he deserves natural beauty and good food as much as anyone.
Barras is artful in how he gets this across using stop-motion animation; the design is simple-looking, with bold colors and relatively little fiddly detail. But look how he uses it - the factory is fanciful enough that Armand’s apartment and the neighborhood around it seems drab in comparison, but the meadow he’s transported to is roomy, with great spaces between the flowers that let him appreciate them more even as they also give characters room to move in a way that a more conventional take, with overwhelming flora in every square inch. The gait and movement of every character is also delightfully individual, the result of tremendously fastidious stop-motion work whose sheer effort can easily be overlooked.
Ma vie de Courgette (My Life as a Zucchini)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)
The charm in this film is appropriately low-key, as there's a clear, earnest darkness to it even before the event that has the title character shipped off to a group home. Fortunately, this doesn't make for a joyless movie; it may have moments of horror and bits of sadness that can't be escaped, but it's as much a film about resilient children rather than broken ones. And it’s a pretty terrific one.
As it opens, 9-year-old Icare - whom his perpetually-drunk mother calls “Courgette”, (“Zucchini” in English) - is making the best of his situation, playing in his attic by flying a kite with a superhero drawn on it out the window and stacking the alarming number of empty beer cans strewn about the apartment into a tower. It draws the ire of Courgette’s mother, and after she falls climbing to the attic, a friendly policeman (voiced by Michel Vuillermoz in French/Nick Offerman in English) brings Courgette (voices of Gaspard Schlatter/Erick Abbate) to a group home in a different neighborhood. Most of the kids there are nervous or timid, but Simon (voices of Paulin Jaccoud/Romy Beckman) is kind of a bullying brat. Courgette will not be the new kid for long - soon Camille (voices of Sixtine Murat/Ness Krell) is in the girls’ bedroom, with a similar story but also a mean Aunt Ida (voices of Brigitte Rosset/Amy Sedaris) whom Camille is afraid to be alone with.
This relatively short feature is playing with one of director Claude Barras’s short films in its American release, and one thing I immediately noted carrying over is how carefully he creates environments. The opening of this movie will not strike a viewer as looking realistic, but there’s something about the barren right angles of the apartment with walls covered by crayon drawings that doesn’t feel like a stop-motion set, especially as Barras pushes his camera in close. It’s the same with the police station, where Barrass zooms into a screen that looks like the sort of MS-DOS application that likely lingers in underfunded government offices, but doesn’t show a keyboard that might look adorably reduced or like an excessively precise miniature reproduction. As Raymond drives Courgette to his new home, though, the feel changes: Simple shapes now seem to reflect a child’s point of view, as do cars making just slightly impossible turns as if guided by someone’s hand and the lack of precisely squared borders. There’s space where there wasn’t before, and even if Mme. Papineau’s home isn’t luxuriously large, there’s room to move around. From moment to moment, the animation style allows this movie to be a fantasy, a memory, and the way a kid might tell his own story.
Full review on EFC.
Sticking around through the credits, by the way, is highly recommended; the filmmakers animate the audio of their first meeting with the kid who wound up voicing Courgette and it is adorable, but in a way that complements the rest of the film, as he talks about how his parents’ divorce would probably be something he pulls from before talking about how Zucchini is gross and maybe the kid could have a different name.
Probably won’t get this one for a niece come birthdays/Christmas - the one who will be eleven can probably handle it, but it is often a downer, even if it is ultimately hopeful. It’s very much a “know your kid” movie, but an excellent one if your kid is up for it.
”Le génie de la boîte de raviolis” (“The Genie in a Tin of Ravioli”)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (pre-film short, DCP)
Sent to theaters as part of a package with his rather short feature My Life as a Zucchini to help pad out the runtime, Claude Barras’s “The Genie in a Tin of Ravioli” is a fairly simple film, with the very mildest conflict propelling its story and simple dialog the order of the day to go with its deceptively simple animation. The credits mark it as adapted from a bande dessinée, which makes me wonder if that phrase encompasses children’s books as well as the comics I most often see it used for.
It’s a sweet little thing, though, quickly introducing viewers to Armand, who works daily in a ravioli factory and then eats the stuff for dinner when he gets home, only to have a grand, triangular genie pop out when he opens one night’s can. The genie offers to grant two wishes, and there’s an interesting balance to it: Armand’s wishes are initially small, with the genie having to coax him into asking for more than a flower in a pot. Initially, it’s easy to walk away from the short thinking it’s entirely about his modesty and kindness, and that’s important, but look a little deeper, and maybe Armand needs to be reminded that, even if he is a poor factory worker and an immigrant, he deserves natural beauty and good food as much as anyone.
Barras is artful in how he gets this across using stop-motion animation; the design is simple-looking, with bold colors and relatively little fiddly detail. But look how he uses it - the factory is fanciful enough that Armand’s apartment and the neighborhood around it seems drab in comparison, but the meadow he’s transported to is roomy, with great spaces between the flowers that let him appreciate them more even as they also give characters room to move in a way that a more conventional take, with overwhelming flora in every square inch. The gait and movement of every character is also delightfully individual, the result of tremendously fastidious stop-motion work whose sheer effort can easily be overlooked.
Ma vie de Courgette (My Life as a Zucchini)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)
The charm in this film is appropriately low-key, as there's a clear, earnest darkness to it even before the event that has the title character shipped off to a group home. Fortunately, this doesn't make for a joyless movie; it may have moments of horror and bits of sadness that can't be escaped, but it's as much a film about resilient children rather than broken ones. And it’s a pretty terrific one.
As it opens, 9-year-old Icare - whom his perpetually-drunk mother calls “Courgette”, (“Zucchini” in English) - is making the best of his situation, playing in his attic by flying a kite with a superhero drawn on it out the window and stacking the alarming number of empty beer cans strewn about the apartment into a tower. It draws the ire of Courgette’s mother, and after she falls climbing to the attic, a friendly policeman (voiced by Michel Vuillermoz in French/Nick Offerman in English) brings Courgette (voices of Gaspard Schlatter/Erick Abbate) to a group home in a different neighborhood. Most of the kids there are nervous or timid, but Simon (voices of Paulin Jaccoud/Romy Beckman) is kind of a bullying brat. Courgette will not be the new kid for long - soon Camille (voices of Sixtine Murat/Ness Krell) is in the girls’ bedroom, with a similar story but also a mean Aunt Ida (voices of Brigitte Rosset/Amy Sedaris) whom Camille is afraid to be alone with.
This relatively short feature is playing with one of director Claude Barras’s short films in its American release, and one thing I immediately noted carrying over is how carefully he creates environments. The opening of this movie will not strike a viewer as looking realistic, but there’s something about the barren right angles of the apartment with walls covered by crayon drawings that doesn’t feel like a stop-motion set, especially as Barras pushes his camera in close. It’s the same with the police station, where Barrass zooms into a screen that looks like the sort of MS-DOS application that likely lingers in underfunded government offices, but doesn’t show a keyboard that might look adorably reduced or like an excessively precise miniature reproduction. As Raymond drives Courgette to his new home, though, the feel changes: Simple shapes now seem to reflect a child’s point of view, as do cars making just slightly impossible turns as if guided by someone’s hand and the lack of precisely squared borders. There’s space where there wasn’t before, and even if Mme. Papineau’s home isn’t luxuriously large, there’s room to move around. From moment to moment, the animation style allows this movie to be a fantasy, a memory, and the way a kid might tell his own story.
Full review on EFC.
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Fantasia 2016.08 (21 July 2016): Aloys, Kaiju Mono, and She's Allergic to Cats
Sometimes, you know just from looking at the schedule that you're making a bad decision, but you figure, hey, do I want to see a likely-good movie that seems like a bit of a downer or the fun movie with a crowd that's into it? That's the logic that had me choosing Kaijyu Mono over Fourth Place, and, no, it wasn't really satisfying. I probably would have also chosen Train to Busan over She's Allergic to Cats if the former was only playing once, since some of the praise I was hearing is the kind that film the first couple times.
Best picture I could get of Cats director Michael Reich, who is, in fact, just this animated on stage. It's the kind of Q&A that convinces you that the guy is just as out-there as his film because he almost seems to jump each time he's got to say something, whether it be answering a question or describing what he's done and how he hopes we'll react.
Aloys
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Filmmaker Tobias Nölle initially entices viewers with a version of Aloys that is not quite so internal, with a mystery to sole and perhaps an unnerving way of things playing out, before settling into something that better matches its withdrawn title character, and it's the mark of how well he handles the film that this never feels like a bait-and-switch; it smoothly moves into more reflective territory while still being more interesting to watch than just a man lost in self-contemplation.
Not that Aloys Adorn (Georg Friedrich) really spends much time considering his feelings or place in the world. A private investigator by trade, he works to be hidden as he follows cheating husbands, although he'll often put something small in his pocket and shoot video of what he sees unrelated to any case - the daughter of a neighbor (Yufei Li) claims he got his cat this way. He ignores her and most everyone else, from Julie (Agnes Lampkin), the old classmate at the funeral home where his father will be cremated, to his next-door neighbor Vera (Tilde von Overbeck). One day, he falls asleep on the bus and awakens in the garage, his camera and several tapes stolen. When the thief calls, she says that he is now the one being watched and they're going to try "phone-walking", an unusual therapeutic technique involving guided visualization. Oh, and that his cat is dying and needs magnesium supplements.
Aloys could probably use some help, there's little doubt about that. What makes him an unusual case is that he doesn't seem to be introverted so much as absent, with no sense of self at all. He seems to eat nothing but plain white rice and his home and office, to the extent that they betray any sense of individual personality at all, would seem to reflect that of his late father Harald; the decor and equipment seems about a generation out of date (at least). It may just be a quirk of the subtitles, but Aloys never refers to himself in the first-person singular, always saying "we". He's been an extension of his father/employer all of his life, it seems, and in some ways it's like he's trying to create an independent self by stealing little tokens or moments, even if he does initially resist the voice's attempts to mold him, at least until he knows who he is dealing with.
Full review on EFC.
Daikaiju Mono (Kaijyu Mono)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016, DCP)
There are a lot of things that are fun to mash up for a couple of minutes or a still image but whose appeal starts to flag as the joke plays out and the folks who like one thing have their fill of the other over the length of even a short feature. On the other hand, I'm guessing that there's a big overlap between the admirer sides of giant monster movies and professional wrestling, enough that there's more of an audience for something like Daikaiju Mono than might first appear. Those folks will have a fair amount of fun with this one, while the rest will most likely nod and say that looks about like what they expected.
As is de riguer when giant monsters are about to appear, Japan is besieged by calamitous weather and seismic activity, on top of plants that haven't been seen for millions of years reappearing. Disgraced Doctor Totaro Saigo (Ryu Manatsu), his daughter Miwa (Miki Kawanishi), and their research assistant Hideo Nitto (Syuusuke Saito) were on the right track but lost funding for their experiments, at least until the monster "Mono" starts tunneling from Monster Pass to Tokyo. Then, they have the chance to put "SETUP X" into action, injecting Nitto with a formula that scales him up to full kaiju size to fight Mono - and makes him more muscular and sexy, much to Miwa's delight! But don't worry, moviegoers - he's also perfected a fabric that allows Nitto's underpants to grow with him.
Director Minoru Kawasaki is an old hand at this sort of thing, even considering that having people dress up in goofy costumes and grapple is kind of a specialized line (he is, after all, perhaps best known for a movie by the name of "Calamari Wrestler"). More generally, he's built a career on skewed but fond takes on the pop culture of his youth, and here he takes giant monsters, pro wrestling, and sentai superhero adventures and sews them together in pretty much the exact way one would expect, but the shared DNA makes it work pretty smoothly, without distracting gear-shifts. He's canny enough to know when to go with decent effects and when cheap is funny, because while there's a giggle or two to be had from pulling out the obvious toy tanks from Mothra for a quick scene or two, Mono looking bad would get old fast.
Full review on EFC.
"Fuck Buddies" (2016)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016, digital)
This particular short by the name of "Fuck Buddies" (there are a lot of them, and a lot of other movies that had the name at one point but changed it because there are a lot of festivals that will happily play something that uses the term constantly but won't print it in their program) has moments when it feels like a real shotgun approach to short filmmaking, as writer/director Nate Wilson takes a simple premise - two roommates/best friends (Sharon Belle & Alexander Plouffe) find that a lot of seemingly innocuous things are triggering the urge to hook up, and as the reason makes itself known, Joseph finds himself growing more attached than Ellie.
Wilson is young - around nineteen - so he's likely still learning what works, so I'm inclined to applaud his ambition in taking what starts out as a goofy gag and running in three orthogonal directions, playing out the comedy that goes with this too-casual compulsive sex, revealing a weird horror plot behind it, and trying to get into what it means for the emotionally all at once. It's kind of a mess, as Plouffe's attempts at sincerity and lovesickness just don't wind up complementing Belle's terrific glibness, and both have problems trying to play against the horror elements, which most clearly betray how little margin there is in terms of production values here.
Still, when the group is going straight at funny, whether in terms of witty narrative banter are gleefully raunchy cartoon sex, they are really good at it, blowing past chuckles and getting the big, guffaw-level laughs, amping up the ridiculousness with ease. So maybe they can't also increase the pathos at the same time; everybody is young enough that it seems likely to come with time.
She's Allergic to Cats
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia 2016: FantasiaUnderground, DCP)
The main character of She's Allergic to Cats spends his time making lo-fi video art and dreams of remaking Carrie with cats, and while it doesn't always work out this way, there's probably a decent correlation between how much a potential viewer finds this a reasonable use of one's time and how much he or she will be into the movie. It aims to be peculiar, so it is probably fortunate that its particular flavor of weird is not exactly hidden away.
Mike Pinkney came to Los Angeles to make movies, but that's a pretty competitive field, especially considering his fairly esoteric ideas, so instead he's barely scraping by grooming dogs and making plaintive entreaties about the ray infestation to his landlord (Honey Davis), who is not particularly inclined to let responsibilities to his tenant distract him from his music career, such as it is. It could be worse, though - he may not be a particularly good pet groomer and most people think his ideas are crap, but Mickey Rourke's daughter's assistant Cora (Sonja Kinski), who takes their dogs to the ship where he works, seems to like him. Maybe a date wouldn't be a disaster.
If writer/director Michael Reich were interested in making a more mainstream film, it's not something that would be terribly far out of reach. Though the details will occasionally emphasize the grimy elements of the life where Mike has landed and his artistic ideas are eccentric at best, he actually approaches the film as a very grounded comedy much of the time - the audience isn't going to spend a lot of time wondering whether or not something really happened or having to work their heads around impossibly surreal sequences of events. The folks Mike encounters may be weird or selfish, but they're kind of familiar comic types at heart - Honey Davis (as himself) and Flula Borg, as Mike's bluntly skeptical German agent, could drop into a more conventional Hollywood story without much issue.
Full review on EFC.
Best picture I could get of Cats director Michael Reich, who is, in fact, just this animated on stage. It's the kind of Q&A that convinces you that the guy is just as out-there as his film because he almost seems to jump each time he's got to say something, whether it be answering a question or describing what he's done and how he hopes we'll react.
Aloys
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Filmmaker Tobias Nölle initially entices viewers with a version of Aloys that is not quite so internal, with a mystery to sole and perhaps an unnerving way of things playing out, before settling into something that better matches its withdrawn title character, and it's the mark of how well he handles the film that this never feels like a bait-and-switch; it smoothly moves into more reflective territory while still being more interesting to watch than just a man lost in self-contemplation.
Not that Aloys Adorn (Georg Friedrich) really spends much time considering his feelings or place in the world. A private investigator by trade, he works to be hidden as he follows cheating husbands, although he'll often put something small in his pocket and shoot video of what he sees unrelated to any case - the daughter of a neighbor (Yufei Li) claims he got his cat this way. He ignores her and most everyone else, from Julie (Agnes Lampkin), the old classmate at the funeral home where his father will be cremated, to his next-door neighbor Vera (Tilde von Overbeck). One day, he falls asleep on the bus and awakens in the garage, his camera and several tapes stolen. When the thief calls, she says that he is now the one being watched and they're going to try "phone-walking", an unusual therapeutic technique involving guided visualization. Oh, and that his cat is dying and needs magnesium supplements.
Aloys could probably use some help, there's little doubt about that. What makes him an unusual case is that he doesn't seem to be introverted so much as absent, with no sense of self at all. He seems to eat nothing but plain white rice and his home and office, to the extent that they betray any sense of individual personality at all, would seem to reflect that of his late father Harald; the decor and equipment seems about a generation out of date (at least). It may just be a quirk of the subtitles, but Aloys never refers to himself in the first-person singular, always saying "we". He's been an extension of his father/employer all of his life, it seems, and in some ways it's like he's trying to create an independent self by stealing little tokens or moments, even if he does initially resist the voice's attempts to mold him, at least until he knows who he is dealing with.
Full review on EFC.
Daikaiju Mono (Kaijyu Mono)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016, DCP)
There are a lot of things that are fun to mash up for a couple of minutes or a still image but whose appeal starts to flag as the joke plays out and the folks who like one thing have their fill of the other over the length of even a short feature. On the other hand, I'm guessing that there's a big overlap between the admirer sides of giant monster movies and professional wrestling, enough that there's more of an audience for something like Daikaiju Mono than might first appear. Those folks will have a fair amount of fun with this one, while the rest will most likely nod and say that looks about like what they expected.
As is de riguer when giant monsters are about to appear, Japan is besieged by calamitous weather and seismic activity, on top of plants that haven't been seen for millions of years reappearing. Disgraced Doctor Totaro Saigo (Ryu Manatsu), his daughter Miwa (Miki Kawanishi), and their research assistant Hideo Nitto (Syuusuke Saito) were on the right track but lost funding for their experiments, at least until the monster "Mono" starts tunneling from Monster Pass to Tokyo. Then, they have the chance to put "SETUP X" into action, injecting Nitto with a formula that scales him up to full kaiju size to fight Mono - and makes him more muscular and sexy, much to Miwa's delight! But don't worry, moviegoers - he's also perfected a fabric that allows Nitto's underpants to grow with him.
Director Minoru Kawasaki is an old hand at this sort of thing, even considering that having people dress up in goofy costumes and grapple is kind of a specialized line (he is, after all, perhaps best known for a movie by the name of "Calamari Wrestler"). More generally, he's built a career on skewed but fond takes on the pop culture of his youth, and here he takes giant monsters, pro wrestling, and sentai superhero adventures and sews them together in pretty much the exact way one would expect, but the shared DNA makes it work pretty smoothly, without distracting gear-shifts. He's canny enough to know when to go with decent effects and when cheap is funny, because while there's a giggle or two to be had from pulling out the obvious toy tanks from Mothra for a quick scene or two, Mono looking bad would get old fast.
Full review on EFC.
"Fuck Buddies" (2016)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Theatre (Fantasia 2016, digital)
This particular short by the name of "Fuck Buddies" (there are a lot of them, and a lot of other movies that had the name at one point but changed it because there are a lot of festivals that will happily play something that uses the term constantly but won't print it in their program) has moments when it feels like a real shotgun approach to short filmmaking, as writer/director Nate Wilson takes a simple premise - two roommates/best friends (Sharon Belle & Alexander Plouffe) find that a lot of seemingly innocuous things are triggering the urge to hook up, and as the reason makes itself known, Joseph finds himself growing more attached than Ellie.
Wilson is young - around nineteen - so he's likely still learning what works, so I'm inclined to applaud his ambition in taking what starts out as a goofy gag and running in three orthogonal directions, playing out the comedy that goes with this too-casual compulsive sex, revealing a weird horror plot behind it, and trying to get into what it means for the emotionally all at once. It's kind of a mess, as Plouffe's attempts at sincerity and lovesickness just don't wind up complementing Belle's terrific glibness, and both have problems trying to play against the horror elements, which most clearly betray how little margin there is in terms of production values here.
Still, when the group is going straight at funny, whether in terms of witty narrative banter are gleefully raunchy cartoon sex, they are really good at it, blowing past chuckles and getting the big, guffaw-level laughs, amping up the ridiculousness with ease. So maybe they can't also increase the pathos at the same time; everybody is young enough that it seems likely to come with time.
She's Allergic to Cats
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia 2016: FantasiaUnderground, DCP)
The main character of She's Allergic to Cats spends his time making lo-fi video art and dreams of remaking Carrie with cats, and while it doesn't always work out this way, there's probably a decent correlation between how much a potential viewer finds this a reasonable use of one's time and how much he or she will be into the movie. It aims to be peculiar, so it is probably fortunate that its particular flavor of weird is not exactly hidden away.
Mike Pinkney came to Los Angeles to make movies, but that's a pretty competitive field, especially considering his fairly esoteric ideas, so instead he's barely scraping by grooming dogs and making plaintive entreaties about the ray infestation to his landlord (Honey Davis), who is not particularly inclined to let responsibilities to his tenant distract him from his music career, such as it is. It could be worse, though - he may not be a particularly good pet groomer and most people think his ideas are crap, but Mickey Rourke's daughter's assistant Cora (Sonja Kinski), who takes their dogs to the ship where he works, seems to like him. Maybe a date wouldn't be a disaster.
If writer/director Michael Reich were interested in making a more mainstream film, it's not something that would be terribly far out of reach. Though the details will occasionally emphasize the grimy elements of the life where Mike has landed and his artistic ideas are eccentric at best, he actually approaches the film as a very grounded comedy much of the time - the audience isn't going to spend a lot of time wondering whether or not something really happened or having to work their heads around impossibly surreal sequences of events. The folks Mike encounters may be weird or selfish, but they're kind of familiar comic types at heart - Honey Davis (as himself) and Flula Borg, as Mike's bluntly skeptical German agent, could drop into a more conventional Hollywood story without much issue.
Full review on EFC.
Friday, March 18, 2016
Boston Sci-fi Film Festival 2016 03: Displacement, Skyquake, and Polder
For a festival day on a weekend, Sunday went strangely quick, as there's apparently not much benefit to starting early or doing a late show on Sunday. Which was fine by me; it gave me a chance to head downtown for one of the two movies opening for Chinese New Year early on.
It wound up being a bit of an interesting theme day, as all three movies were sort of self-negating in one way or another, either via time-travel, unreliable narrators, or virtual reality. It's a broad enough application of the theme that one doesn't necessarily notice it as it plays out, but it looks kind of weird in retrospect. Given how the day went outside of the movies' plots, feel free to make self-erasure some sort of theme.
Like this. What the heck happened here? It came off my tablet with nothing from my phone showing that date, so I must have left my phone at home again. Still, the tablet usually takes a good picture despite how ridiculous one feels using it, so why is this picture of Skyquake writer/director/star/several other jobs Sandy Robson so deserving of the "horrible photography" tag? Heck if I know.
He led a pretty good Q&A, though; as a working actor who has been at it for quite some time, he was very comfortable in front of an audience, good at communicating in a way that other first-time directors (even those who have been in the business) often aren't. I it was fairly impressive that he came out here from Vancouver for a world premiere, although I did sort of wonder if there was anything closer to home that he might have gone for, even Slamdance.
It was kind of interesting that he went pretty dark for his first film and the next one he described sounded like an even tougher sell. Sometimes one might expect a guy who had spent a lot of time doing genre TV to go with what he knows, especially when that sort of procedural/fantastic material might sell on top of being a good way to ease oneself into a new job, but Robson went for what he doesn't often get to do instead. There's something amiable in that, even if the film is frustrating for its canceling large chunks of itself out.
One kind of amusing thing was that someone in the audience asked about the sort of streaking effect you could see in the whole picture but most obviously in the titles, only to be told that it was not deliberate but just an artifact of projection. The folks in charge of the festival seemed surprised to hear that this was fairly evident on everything in that room that wasn't a DCP (and the festival isn't alone here; the same effect was visible when I saw Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong at Apple a week or so later, and I think at another screening using a consumer-grade projector). It's a weirdly specific one - columns a few pixels wide displaying what is to their right at regularly spaced vertical intervals - that would probably make more sense to me if I knew more about how projector hardware works.
It was kind of a number that, after everybody noticed that this was going on, Polder made things worse by apparently being steamed from Vimeo at less-than-Blu-ray resolution. It was darn hard to see, and this movie could really have used a little clarity (there were also some adjustments necessary to get picture and subtitles on the screen at the same time). It made me really wish that more of the festival was handled by the venue's great projection staff rather than the festival organizers, although I don't know what they could do with some of the material.
And, somewhere in there, my festival pass vanished despite how it felt I was really careful about knowing where it was at all times. Which seems like a perfectly fitting way to end a day when the film's weren't bad but certainly did manage to pull a variety of vanishing acts.
Displacement
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)
Short-term time travel is the trickiest sort of science fiction to create; it doesn't necessarily have to be a perfect Moebius strip structurally, but any shortcomings in that department must be more than made up in other ways. Displacement makes valiant efforts in both directions, and while not everything comes together, it does okay; at the very least, many science fiction fans will find as much to like add to nitpick.
It starts, as these adventures do, with grad student Cassie Sinclair (Courtney Hope) waking up in an ice bath with her memory fuzzy, and her boyfriend Brian (Christopher Backus) murdered in the hotel suite to which this bathroom is attached. It turns out that all of this is related to some sort of time-travel experiment which has Cassie jumping forward and back on the t-axis, trying to get information from faculty adviser Peter Deckard (Bruce Davison) and friend Josh (Karan Oberoi) while avoiding a mysterious organization represented by Dr. Miles (Sarah Douglas). Visiting Cassie's recently deceased mother (Susan Blakely) might be nice, though.
It's not a requirement that the female protagonist of a time-travel story be named Cassandra or some variation, but it must be almost impossible to resist giving that name to a lady who knows the future but will, sadly, never be believed. That's not the only familiar element to be found in filmmaker Kenneth Mader's script; there's the combination of one person being amnesiac and others being cryptic, and dire warnings all of this will tear the universe asunder if Cassie's activities aren't carefully controlled. There's also, unfortunately, the frustrating tendency to set up a situation that only works if cause-and-effect form a tight loop in one scene and then having Cassie break that sequence in the next.
Full review on EFC.
Skyquake
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)
There are a lot of ways filmmakers can be too clever for their own good, but the most frustrating involve telling the audience, in one way or another, that the thing they've invested their time, money, and emotions on doesn't matter. Sandy Robson doesn't do that explicitly with Skyquake, and would likely argue that everything on-screen is important to the story or telling in some way, but he's made a movie that yanks the rug out from under the viewer a little too completely.
The "Skyquake", we're told, is a phenomenon where loud, strange noises come from a clear sky, though seldom in places where large groups can document it. No, it's usually folks like Adam (Robson), who lives in a cabin some distance away from any neighbors, and a peculiar type besides: Completely shaved, displaying signs of obsessive-compulsive behavior or some similar disorder, spending his days walking around the woods and nights dreaming of a missing boy (Aidan Kokotilo-Moen). His only contact with the outside world aside from the Internet is Grace (Brownen Smith), who delivers his fresh produce and researches the Skyquake mystery when she hears about it from Adam.
Robson is a Vancouver-based actor who has had a guest-starring role on seemingly all of the shows that shoot there, so it's at least a little to be expected that Adam is a chance for him to take center stage as opposed to being subservient to the regular cast. He certainly doesn't disappoint there; as much as Adam is initially defined by his extreme grooming regimen and other obvious visual cues, it's the way Robson pays attention to the smaller details and gives the character a bit of a personality and specific history even before explanations are offered that make the performance memorable. The cast is small, but he doesn't just make it a solo show with grudging acknowledgment of other people; Brownen Smith gets the time to be a multifaceted complement to Adam as Grace.
Polder
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)
There are likely a great many odd cross-pollinations like Polder that even the most dedicated watchers of world cinema miss because a German art-house adaptation of a Japanese science-fiction novel would appeal to fairly specialized tastes under the best of circumstances, and this one is kind of weird even for that background. I was into it, but I'm usually down for at least half of that equation, and know plenty that aren't. It's worth a look for those feeling adventurous, at least.
Game companies with names like "Neuroo-X" are always trouble, and this case is no exception. Sure, when Marcus (Christoph Bach) and his friends started the company, they were a bunch of hippies with big ideas, but now it's big business and Marcus, their chief engineer, has disappeared on the eve of a major new product launch. The company may proceed anyway, despite the whole "virtual reality that immerses the player so thoroughly that getting out is difficult and/or fatal" problem. They believe the last bit of Marcus's code may be in the hands of his wife Ryuko (Nina Fog), although she's more concerned with their son and actually finding her husband than launching a new gaming system.
There's not a lot more going on than that story-wise, but what there is tends toward the strange and convoluted with plenty of stops along the way to make the viewer question what is real and what is virtual, despite what seemed like simple color-coding. That sort of convolution is not an uncommon feature in Japanese sci-fi - even "light novels" will often include some sort of chart that a reader can use to find where he or she stands at a given moment - and filmmakers Julian M. Grünthal & Samuel Schwarz aren't particularly interested in compromising their art for clarity: If the viewer stops paying close attention for a minute or two, she or he can get lost rather quickly.
Full review on EFC.
It wound up being a bit of an interesting theme day, as all three movies were sort of self-negating in one way or another, either via time-travel, unreliable narrators, or virtual reality. It's a broad enough application of the theme that one doesn't necessarily notice it as it plays out, but it looks kind of weird in retrospect. Given how the day went outside of the movies' plots, feel free to make self-erasure some sort of theme.
Like this. What the heck happened here? It came off my tablet with nothing from my phone showing that date, so I must have left my phone at home again. Still, the tablet usually takes a good picture despite how ridiculous one feels using it, so why is this picture of Skyquake writer/director/star/several other jobs Sandy Robson so deserving of the "horrible photography" tag? Heck if I know.
He led a pretty good Q&A, though; as a working actor who has been at it for quite some time, he was very comfortable in front of an audience, good at communicating in a way that other first-time directors (even those who have been in the business) often aren't. I it was fairly impressive that he came out here from Vancouver for a world premiere, although I did sort of wonder if there was anything closer to home that he might have gone for, even Slamdance.
It was kind of interesting that he went pretty dark for his first film and the next one he described sounded like an even tougher sell. Sometimes one might expect a guy who had spent a lot of time doing genre TV to go with what he knows, especially when that sort of procedural/fantastic material might sell on top of being a good way to ease oneself into a new job, but Robson went for what he doesn't often get to do instead. There's something amiable in that, even if the film is frustrating for its canceling large chunks of itself out.
One kind of amusing thing was that someone in the audience asked about the sort of streaking effect you could see in the whole picture but most obviously in the titles, only to be told that it was not deliberate but just an artifact of projection. The folks in charge of the festival seemed surprised to hear that this was fairly evident on everything in that room that wasn't a DCP (and the festival isn't alone here; the same effect was visible when I saw Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong at Apple a week or so later, and I think at another screening using a consumer-grade projector). It's a weirdly specific one - columns a few pixels wide displaying what is to their right at regularly spaced vertical intervals - that would probably make more sense to me if I knew more about how projector hardware works.
It was kind of a number that, after everybody noticed that this was going on, Polder made things worse by apparently being steamed from Vimeo at less-than-Blu-ray resolution. It was darn hard to see, and this movie could really have used a little clarity (there were also some adjustments necessary to get picture and subtitles on the screen at the same time). It made me really wish that more of the festival was handled by the venue's great projection staff rather than the festival organizers, although I don't know what they could do with some of the material.
And, somewhere in there, my festival pass vanished despite how it felt I was really careful about knowing where it was at all times. Which seems like a perfectly fitting way to end a day when the film's weren't bad but certainly did manage to pull a variety of vanishing acts.
Displacement
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)
Short-term time travel is the trickiest sort of science fiction to create; it doesn't necessarily have to be a perfect Moebius strip structurally, but any shortcomings in that department must be more than made up in other ways. Displacement makes valiant efforts in both directions, and while not everything comes together, it does okay; at the very least, many science fiction fans will find as much to like add to nitpick.
It starts, as these adventures do, with grad student Cassie Sinclair (Courtney Hope) waking up in an ice bath with her memory fuzzy, and her boyfriend Brian (Christopher Backus) murdered in the hotel suite to which this bathroom is attached. It turns out that all of this is related to some sort of time-travel experiment which has Cassie jumping forward and back on the t-axis, trying to get information from faculty adviser Peter Deckard (Bruce Davison) and friend Josh (Karan Oberoi) while avoiding a mysterious organization represented by Dr. Miles (Sarah Douglas). Visiting Cassie's recently deceased mother (Susan Blakely) might be nice, though.
It's not a requirement that the female protagonist of a time-travel story be named Cassandra or some variation, but it must be almost impossible to resist giving that name to a lady who knows the future but will, sadly, never be believed. That's not the only familiar element to be found in filmmaker Kenneth Mader's script; there's the combination of one person being amnesiac and others being cryptic, and dire warnings all of this will tear the universe asunder if Cassie's activities aren't carefully controlled. There's also, unfortunately, the frustrating tendency to set up a situation that only works if cause-and-effect form a tight loop in one scene and then having Cassie break that sequence in the next.
Full review on EFC.
Skyquake
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)
There are a lot of ways filmmakers can be too clever for their own good, but the most frustrating involve telling the audience, in one way or another, that the thing they've invested their time, money, and emotions on doesn't matter. Sandy Robson doesn't do that explicitly with Skyquake, and would likely argue that everything on-screen is important to the story or telling in some way, but he's made a movie that yanks the rug out from under the viewer a little too completely.
The "Skyquake", we're told, is a phenomenon where loud, strange noises come from a clear sky, though seldom in places where large groups can document it. No, it's usually folks like Adam (Robson), who lives in a cabin some distance away from any neighbors, and a peculiar type besides: Completely shaved, displaying signs of obsessive-compulsive behavior or some similar disorder, spending his days walking around the woods and nights dreaming of a missing boy (Aidan Kokotilo-Moen). His only contact with the outside world aside from the Internet is Grace (Brownen Smith), who delivers his fresh produce and researches the Skyquake mystery when she hears about it from Adam.
Robson is a Vancouver-based actor who has had a guest-starring role on seemingly all of the shows that shoot there, so it's at least a little to be expected that Adam is a chance for him to take center stage as opposed to being subservient to the regular cast. He certainly doesn't disappoint there; as much as Adam is initially defined by his extreme grooming regimen and other obvious visual cues, it's the way Robson pays attention to the smaller details and gives the character a bit of a personality and specific history even before explanations are offered that make the performance memorable. The cast is small, but he doesn't just make it a solo show with grudging acknowledgment of other people; Brownen Smith gets the time to be a multifaceted complement to Adam as Grace.
Polder
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)
There are likely a great many odd cross-pollinations like Polder that even the most dedicated watchers of world cinema miss because a German art-house adaptation of a Japanese science-fiction novel would appeal to fairly specialized tastes under the best of circumstances, and this one is kind of weird even for that background. I was into it, but I'm usually down for at least half of that equation, and know plenty that aren't. It's worth a look for those feeling adventurous, at least.
Game companies with names like "Neuroo-X" are always trouble, and this case is no exception. Sure, when Marcus (Christoph Bach) and his friends started the company, they were a bunch of hippies with big ideas, but now it's big business and Marcus, their chief engineer, has disappeared on the eve of a major new product launch. The company may proceed anyway, despite the whole "virtual reality that immerses the player so thoroughly that getting out is difficult and/or fatal" problem. They believe the last bit of Marcus's code may be in the hands of his wife Ryuko (Nina Fog), although she's more concerned with their son and actually finding her husband than launching a new gaming system.
There's not a lot more going on than that story-wise, but what there is tends toward the strange and convoluted with plenty of stops along the way to make the viewer question what is real and what is virtual, despite what seemed like simple color-coding. That sort of convolution is not an uncommon feature in Japanese sci-fi - even "light novels" will often include some sort of chart that a reader can use to find where he or she stands at a given moment - and filmmakers Julian M. Grünthal & Samuel Schwarz aren't particularly interested in compromising their art for clarity: If the viewer stops paying close attention for a minute or two, she or he can get lost rather quickly.
Full review on EFC.
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
The Fantasia Daily 2015.20 (2 August 2015): Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, Outer Limits of Animation, Experimenter, Ninja the Monster, and They Look Like People
I think this is about where I start falling way behind every year, for a number of reasons from these short programs taking an undue amount of time to write up to just having written a relatively large number of words for twenty days straight along with seeing a bunch of movies and pumping my body through of more less-than-ideal foodstuffs than usual. I don't really feel burnt out on the festival, even if I won't mind going home, but at some point, the writing just slows down. I think there are also more early shows at this point, and with the tablet busted...
It's time for the annual "Jay tries to match people to names despite not catching much of the French in the introduction" game! Left to right, I believe we're talking to:
1. Annie Amaya, who directed "Office Paint" and introduced herself in English,
2. Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles, who directed "Noir Manhattan" and mentioned un detectif in her introduction,
3. Alvaro Marinho, perhaps
4. Gabrielle Le Blanc? I caught very little of what she said.
5. Max Woodward, who directed "A Free Lunch" and introduced himself in English.
6. Kelly Harpes?
The lesson, as always, is that I really need to bone up on my French before coming here next year, because I feel terrible wanting to give these talented local animators their due among all the other things looking for their due but only being able to do so halfway.
The next Q&A of the day had Ken Ochiai, director of Ninja the Monster and the terrific Uzumasa Limelight from a couple years ago, giving a remarkably candid Q&A. That doesn't mean it was all about "I know I made a movie that isn't very good and here's how things turned out that way", more that he got into details about the making of the movie that remind you that making things intended to be commercial, there are things not mentioned. I'm not sure how thrilled his producers would be at him describing how this was actually shot a couple years ago and two years were spent on the FX - because instead of hiring a special effects house, they farmed it out to students at a VFX school who would work for free, and were really starting from scratch, many having never touched the software they were using before. They did a fairly good job, and it's probably a more common practice than one might think, but it's kind of not cool.
He also mentioned that it was a project initiated by a new "Blue Line" imprint of Japan's Shokichu studio which was mostly focused producing films for international audiences, with the irony being that if you want to make a ninja or samurai film these days, that's probably the best way to do it, because Japanese audiences generally don't go for that in large numbers unless it's an adaptation of a popular manga (and before you tut-tut, Americans, how many big-budget westerns are we cranking out these days?). They started with little more than a title - and Ochiai, who spent 15 years when younger in Los Angeles and admits to feeling a little bit like a foreigner whether in North America or Japan, did argue the grammar and punctuation with the studio bosses - and shot for ten days around Kyoto. I kind of wonder if it was one of the studios that used to crank out samurai pictures like a factory mentioned in Uzumasa Limelight. Some fun low-budget independent filmmaking talk there - when asked about the locations, he said that in some cases, they would be shooting in the same bamboo forest just outside of Kyoto, but pointing the camera one direction for mountains and the other for water, making it look like they'd traveled farther.
He also talked about how, when he cast Dean Fujioka and Aoi Morikawa, they were rather less well-known, with Fujioka having mostly worked in Taiwan and Morikawa (I think) not yet having done The World of Kanako or Fatal Frame. Interestingly, while mentioning Fujioka's work, I don't think he brought up The Pinkertons, a Canadian mystery series set in post-Civil War Kansas City which is in part funded by Japanese broadcasters, a kind of genuine oddity which might have been applauded for being Canadian.
Last visitors of the day were actors MacLeod Andrews & Margaret Ying Drake and writer/director/many other things Perry Blackshear of They Look Like People, and yes, that's the best picture you're getting from this angle.
Another really fun one, both for their making movies with nothing stories (it was shot in the director's apartment, and they basically forced themselves to get something done by booking tickets before they had a script) and for how this was their first festival with a genre focus - the film has been good enough to more mainstream-oriented fests, so when they name-dropped Absentia during Q&As there, people would just sort of look at them blankly, while at Fantasia it was "oh, yeah, that played here in this room!" Well, they also got a good response at the Brattle in Boston (mentioning them by name) in part because IFFBoston teamed with BUFF for the presentation, so it was a bit more of a horror-loving audience.
SPOILERS!
I also really liked how, when asked about alternate endings, they talked about how when you're doing something like this, you've always got the "gotcha!" ending in mind or the nasty one, but that wasn't really what this movie was about, and how sticking that on may be exciting and kind of satisfying to the gorehounds who were potentially a big part of their audience, it wouldn't be what was best for the the story, which has to lead somewhere. I wish a lot of horror filmmakers would take that to heart.
!SRELIOPS
Well, this being late means that I'm skipping the "where I'll be" for Monday and Tuesday and just saying I'll hit A Christmas Horror Story at 7:30 and then likely try in vain to get into Attack on Titan with my pass afterward. Deathgasm, Assassination Classroom, and Cop Car are all good fun if you want one last bit of Fantasia yourself.
Khalil Gibran's The Prophet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
Khlail Gibran's The Prophet is a labor of love for producer Salma Hayek, and like a fair number of those projects, it's got some rough edges as the desire to realize a complicated project within a window of opportunity may have taken priority over waiting until it could be perfect. Or maybe not; the production may have been perfectly smooth, and some spots are certainly excellent enough to justify the enthusiasm for the film.
The main story is okay. It introduces a trouble-making little girl, Almitra, who has squawked to a seagull but not spoken to anybody else since her father died two years ago. When her mother Kamila (voice of Salma Hayek) is not trying to wrangle her, she's the housekeeper for Mustafa (voice of Liam Neeson), a poet and painter who has been under house arrest for seven years. On the day Almitra follows her mother to work, a man from the government comes to tell Mustafa he is being set free and returned to his home country - although Almitra hears different.
Don't get me wrong, this framing piece isn't bad; it's got a nice voice cast with Hayek, Neeson, Quvenzhané Wallis, John Krasinski, Frank Langella, Alfred Molina, and John Rhys-Davies. The Lion King's Roger Allers directs, and while he doesn't have the same resources he did with Disney, the mostly hand-drawn images move smoothly, the storytelling is clear, and the characters expressive. When he gets to take a flight of fancy, it's neat to see, as are the humorous moments when he can stretch his cartooning muscles. Sometimes I suspect that he has a hard time connecting the heavy and heady material with an intended young audience - this is the story of a man who is a political prisoner in part for publishing philosophy, and trying to present that in a way palatable to kids Almitra's age can leave it feeling like an introductory lecture to older viewers.
Full review on EFC.
"Aubade"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Director Mauro Carraro credits a Mich Gerber concert as the inspiration for this short film of people emerging from a lake, a black sun casting shadows, and paper boats the size of barges, and Gerber's music on the score makes a gorgeous film even more memorable. The whole thing is arguably his introduction, and he gets something akin to a curtain call at the end.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this film, though, is what Carraro does with lighting. This film isn't quite built to look like conventional animation, but is still relatively flat, but the lighting is designed to glow, reflect off the water, and have shadows come from the sun rather than be dispelled by it. It seldom seems the primary purpose, but it's a big part of the impression the film makes.
"Be the Snow"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The description of this one involves a pillow running away from home and then getting homesick, and I don't know if I necessarily got that from the storytelling, more seeing it as the pillow going out to run errands initially then wondering what the skydiving was about. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - the jokes are pretty funny and cleverly animated regardless, and the combination between live-action and the animated pillow character is impressively seamless.
It's super-cute all around, although it shows just how tricky dialogue-free filmmaking can be, especially when you're also relying on FX shots that probably have to be rationed pretty tightly. Not that I'd want this short done any other way, especially since it's quite possible I missed a cue or two at the start. And, hey, any film with a credit for "...as blonde cheating cat" at least has that going for it
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One minute long, but it has some impressive animation. Most impressively, it seems to tell a clear emotional story - a young person going through cancer treatment and being comforted by his teddy bear - without ever spelling it out. Director Gabrielle Le Blanc may be just out of school, but she may have a bright future with this as her calling card.
"Timber"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
"Timber" starts out feeling kind of clever, with anthropomorphic logs from sticks to stumps shivering in the midst of a forest that has been clear-cut, and the pairing we get initially - an enthusiastic young twig and a weathered trunk segment - immediately work as characters. The hint of fear they show when the campfire is first lit is a tease, but then things get crazy.
What comes after that is mean cartooning only partially ameliorated by the cute designs, working in large part because it does get at an underlying truth, that it can be far easier for the poor to turn on each other than the people actually responsible for their situation. It's an even sharper barb that the short started out with, making it even more memorable.
"A Free Lunch"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One of two shorts in the program inspired by the same school assignment, and I think my perception of it may have been skewed by hearing as much, and that it was about a guy who finds an apple, though told via ink blots and sound effects. It works well enough, but I wonder if I would have found the apple munching just random sounds otherwise.
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Not a whole lot to say about this one. It's two minutes of multicolored grains that form images, and I dig it in the same way I really like the work of PES. There's also a context to it that kind of got buried for me in the middle of a 90-minute program
"Junk Girl"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oh, no, now other people are explicitly making Tim Burton movies!
I kid; after all, I found myself liking this movie about a sad young woman "made of junk" who tries to scrape by in a presumably-Iranian city (the clothing matches, although the headlines in the paper are mostly Harry Potter gags) only to face disgust and occasionally violence. It's very nicely done, if a downer, with the expressiveness of the characters' faces seemingly much higher than is typical for stop-motion, or CGI made to resemble stop-motion.
"Late Night Live Jazz"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very nifty little short by Mathias Menten from Belgium, which starts with a busker getting thrown off the Metro and seeming to have nowhere to go until he finds a card from "Le Club" among his change. Maybe he should have been suspicious upon seeing that this place was located in a scary-looking castle.
Menten's got a distinctive style for animation, and the thick blacks do a neat job of conveying the shadowy environment while still the audience to see plenty of what's going on. The jazzy soundtrack is pretty nice as well, and, hey, at least the cute vampire vocalist seems fond of our hero at the end!
"Last Dance on the Main"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Animated documentaries are odd things, and I'm certain that I didn't get as much out of this primarily French-language one as I might have some others, but I liked it. Rather than just rotoscoping talking heads, filmmaker Aristofanis Soulikias gives this picture a cool style that suggests the shabby-but-beloved neighborhood it focuses on - although also tying in with how, at the time Hydro Quebec wanted to demolish it for a new, modern building, it had remained an artistic haven but become more upscale.
It's a nifty little film; I'd like to see it with English subtitles at some point.
"Molinari Mouvement"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
What you get when abstract animation is inspired by abstract art: Director Alvaro Marinho takes works of Guido Molinari and sets their shapes in motion, blending it with music to create a pleasing set of images. Admittedly, I'm artistically ignorant enough that I initially thought Marinho was playing with a test pattern, but it was still nifty to watch.
"Office Paint"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
This is the other short film that came from the same assignment as "A Free Lunch", and I liked it a bit more. Not just because I didn't have an intended plot laid out, but because director Annie Amaya seemed to let the sounds guide the animation, creating something that feels like a new way to see something familiar.
"The Mortal Flame"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A nifty little adventure in which a maquette that seems to start out just wandering around an artist's studio which then becomes a larger, stranger world. The adventure itself is not that memorable - it's another one where I can kind of see what it was going for after reading the description, but not necessarily at the time. I really liked the imagery, though, especially the typewriter revealed as the snow around it thawed.
"Noir Manhattan"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A minute long and pretty much leading up to one joke, but I kind of love this one. Director Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles gives her short a style that's kind of film noir and kind of pin-up, depending on which of the two characters we're looking at, and I love the voice actor she found for the detective, even if I only understood bits and pieces of the untranslated French.
It hit the target, and did it well.
"Semi Sauf"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Another really short one, but it gets some weird but cool cartooning in quickly, as a Frankensteined frog-mouse escapes a lab, discovers a mouse-frog, and... Well, that would be telling.
Quick, adventurous, and darkly funny. I'd like to see director Kelly Harpes do more with this world and its characters, although I'm sure whatever comes next will be worth seeing.
"Deep Space"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Seven minutes makes this one of the longer parts of the program, and it's also one of the most entertaining, although in pretty divergent ways. On the one hand, the art style is very cool and the music was funky in a way that complemented it perfectly. On the other hand, my notes for the film basically read "weird creatures fucking". Which, don't get me wrong, turns out to be very funny indeed, especially as the poor astronaut trying to find one form of intelligent life on this place so he can get home has to deal with a whole planet full of animals with one thing on their minds.
There were some in the audience who felt that this wore out its welcome, but seven minutes doesn't quite get it there (though the final bit is admittedly a bit tired). It's a very funny little picture, although obviously not for everyone.
"Missing One Player"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The latest from Chinese animator Lei Lei ("Ray Lei" in the subtitles here) is a bit more story-oriented and less abstract than some of his previous shorts, although maybe just barely so. It's got an asteroid heading toward Earth, a panicking population that has many acting out, and three people who just want to play mahjongg but need a fourth.
Like his other shorts, this looks like very little else, put together from what look like cutouts from propaganda posters and sometimes limited in small movements but with great sweep on the larger scale. The music by Stars Lee is pretty great too, making for a short that seems to pack a lot into four minutes.
"Disconnector"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very spiffy little thing by Faiyaz Jafri who did everything from music to animation, and while sometimes it's got the feel of a one-man show in that the animation is a little too smooth, it's a look that works for it: By resembling the too-slick look of dance games, it makes the link the the virtual reality harness feel more natural, making it much easier to get across how synthetic those experiences are, even if they do resemble the world outside.
It's fun to listen to, as well - the poppy music fits the story perfectly and makes the whole exciting, even if the ultimate message is that something real is certainly better.
"Oh Wal"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oooo-kay. Notes on this one: "Cat riding in [fake] fish's mouth. Kills land whale w/ sushi kingdom".
It's certainly a trippy little short, though, kind of enhanced by looking like an "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon from The Simpsons in spots. Only in spots, though, as this is very much its own thing that goes in its own weird, surreal directions. It is, sometimes, kind of weird for the sake of being weird, but it pulls the audience along with its strange internal logic and cute-but-violent world.
Experimenter
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I really hope that this one opens in Boston soon, because I'd like to give it a second look. I came out of it with an odd sort of ambivalence, liking almost all of what it did but feeling like there should have been more heft, especially with all the unusual techniques writer/director Michael Almereyda was using to make sure the audience was paying a little more attention. That's kind of unfair, though - isn't one of the things that usually makes biopics kind of eye-rolling the attempt to make a person's individual life a symbol of something else?
Indeed, in some ways I think that Almereyda is explicitly trying to buck this trend with Experimenter, even as he does look to make a point: It spends a lot of time focusing on the work of Stanley Milgram, detailing experiments well beyond the (in)famous "teacher/learner" experiment and pointedly mentioning that he wished he could be remembered for the quality and results of his work rather than the vaguely uncomfortable feelings it inspired in people who had not actually read it. It's paradoxical - it's about trying to take the simple emotional reaction out of an assessment of someone's life and how people behave, but in doing so it lacks the sharpness to puncture those preconceptions.
Maybe it works once given a chance to roll over in my head and recognize that I'm doing something I don't really want to do in judging this on first impressions. I'd kind of like another chance, because it's a really nifty fourth-wall-breaking, stylish-but-understated movie otherwise.
Full review on EFC.
Ninja the Monster
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Director Ken Ochiai was unusually candid in his Q&A after this film, and one of the things he mentioned was that Japanese movies like Ninja the Monster are made with more than an eye toward the foreign market, opening on maybe five screens back home and hoping to make more money on home video elsewhere, and one can feel it straining for accessibility and against budget.
It looks and feels very flat - not bad, per se, just a bit underpopulated in some areas and with Aoi Morikawa putting in performances that feels muted as the Princess and many of the others in the cast seeming to be very one-note without regard to what's going on with the other actors or elsewhere in the movie. The camera is pointed at beautiful things when they're outside, and the sets and costumes are fine, if kind of off-the-rack, but there's very little that's distinctive.
On the plus side, the monsters are pretty great when we get a look at them, although it limits the action to something more FX-based than the actual swordfights you might want from a movie featuring samurai and ninjas. On the other hand, Ochiai does a fine job of making a horror/monster movie, with some cool moments and interesting designs. It just can't help feeling like such a targeted product in some ways, rather than a movie someone wanted to make.
Full review on EFC.
"The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
I was caught up in "The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined" (which I don't think ever had such a memorable title on-screen) enough while watching it that it's a bit of a surprise that, writing three days later, I have a bit of trouble remembering what the thrust of it was. It gets some good humor and anguish out of a man (Adam Busch) who, on a lark, goes in to talk to a palm reader (Ashley Donigan) who knows everything, but what are we supposed to get out of it?
Understand, it's a kind of pleasant surprise that it doesn't lead to them pairing off, although their mindsets are too negative at the time for that to really be entertaining. It doesn't really get into what it must be like for her to know everything and see the Universe as completely deterministic, or him trying to fight his destiny, or maybe she's working with his disbelief to set him down a different path. Instead, things kind of seem to peter out without really saying anything.
They Look Like People
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It feels a bit spoilery to say that They Look Like People is seldom the movie it's expected to be from the description, which talks about how Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews) can see that most of the people around him are being taken over by aliens or demons or the like and is torn about recruiting his friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel) to the cause of stopping them. They don't hide that it's a "he might be crazy" movie, but the truth is, if you'll pardon the grammatical sin, "might" is pretty much superfluous in that description.
The neat thing is, filmmaker Perry Blackshear doesn't really try to play into the possibility that genre film fans might be so used to how these things play out - ambiguously-to-"he's right!", or with obliviousness leading to tragedy - that going a different direction might be a shock. From the very start, it's pretty clear where things stand, and rather than being tragic, there's a great deal of hope to the film, because Wyatt doesn't want to be that way, even if Blackshear and MacLeod do a really fantastic job of presenting just how convincing his delusions are.
A large part of the success may be down to how, while it's Wyatt's delusions that drive the film, it often feels much more like a small ensemble piece. Evan Dumouchel's Christian has his own thing going on that could spin off into a movie itself, and Margaret Ying Drake is a lot of fun as his potential girlfriend (also his boss, promoted over him). They are an entertaining group as opposed to just "normal" people, and that both means that we're able to take occasional breaks from building his world and that he's got a good place to come back to, if it goes that way.
Full review on EFC.
It's time for the annual "Jay tries to match people to names despite not catching much of the French in the introduction" game! Left to right, I believe we're talking to:
1. Annie Amaya, who directed "Office Paint" and introduced herself in English,
2. Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles, who directed "Noir Manhattan" and mentioned un detectif in her introduction,
3. Alvaro Marinho, perhaps
4. Gabrielle Le Blanc? I caught very little of what she said.
5. Max Woodward, who directed "A Free Lunch" and introduced himself in English.
6. Kelly Harpes?
The lesson, as always, is that I really need to bone up on my French before coming here next year, because I feel terrible wanting to give these talented local animators their due among all the other things looking for their due but only being able to do so halfway.
The next Q&A of the day had Ken Ochiai, director of Ninja the Monster and the terrific Uzumasa Limelight from a couple years ago, giving a remarkably candid Q&A. That doesn't mean it was all about "I know I made a movie that isn't very good and here's how things turned out that way", more that he got into details about the making of the movie that remind you that making things intended to be commercial, there are things not mentioned. I'm not sure how thrilled his producers would be at him describing how this was actually shot a couple years ago and two years were spent on the FX - because instead of hiring a special effects house, they farmed it out to students at a VFX school who would work for free, and were really starting from scratch, many having never touched the software they were using before. They did a fairly good job, and it's probably a more common practice than one might think, but it's kind of not cool.
He also mentioned that it was a project initiated by a new "Blue Line" imprint of Japan's Shokichu studio which was mostly focused producing films for international audiences, with the irony being that if you want to make a ninja or samurai film these days, that's probably the best way to do it, because Japanese audiences generally don't go for that in large numbers unless it's an adaptation of a popular manga (and before you tut-tut, Americans, how many big-budget westerns are we cranking out these days?). They started with little more than a title - and Ochiai, who spent 15 years when younger in Los Angeles and admits to feeling a little bit like a foreigner whether in North America or Japan, did argue the grammar and punctuation with the studio bosses - and shot for ten days around Kyoto. I kind of wonder if it was one of the studios that used to crank out samurai pictures like a factory mentioned in Uzumasa Limelight. Some fun low-budget independent filmmaking talk there - when asked about the locations, he said that in some cases, they would be shooting in the same bamboo forest just outside of Kyoto, but pointing the camera one direction for mountains and the other for water, making it look like they'd traveled farther.
He also talked about how, when he cast Dean Fujioka and Aoi Morikawa, they were rather less well-known, with Fujioka having mostly worked in Taiwan and Morikawa (I think) not yet having done The World of Kanako or Fatal Frame. Interestingly, while mentioning Fujioka's work, I don't think he brought up The Pinkertons, a Canadian mystery series set in post-Civil War Kansas City which is in part funded by Japanese broadcasters, a kind of genuine oddity which might have been applauded for being Canadian.
Last visitors of the day were actors MacLeod Andrews & Margaret Ying Drake and writer/director/many other things Perry Blackshear of They Look Like People, and yes, that's the best picture you're getting from this angle.
Another really fun one, both for their making movies with nothing stories (it was shot in the director's apartment, and they basically forced themselves to get something done by booking tickets before they had a script) and for how this was their first festival with a genre focus - the film has been good enough to more mainstream-oriented fests, so when they name-dropped Absentia during Q&As there, people would just sort of look at them blankly, while at Fantasia it was "oh, yeah, that played here in this room!" Well, they also got a good response at the Brattle in Boston (mentioning them by name) in part because IFFBoston teamed with BUFF for the presentation, so it was a bit more of a horror-loving audience.
SPOILERS!
I also really liked how, when asked about alternate endings, they talked about how when you're doing something like this, you've always got the "gotcha!" ending in mind or the nasty one, but that wasn't really what this movie was about, and how sticking that on may be exciting and kind of satisfying to the gorehounds who were potentially a big part of their audience, it wouldn't be what was best for the the story, which has to lead somewhere. I wish a lot of horror filmmakers would take that to heart.
!SRELIOPS
Well, this being late means that I'm skipping the "where I'll be" for Monday and Tuesday and just saying I'll hit A Christmas Horror Story at 7:30 and then likely try in vain to get into Attack on Titan with my pass afterward. Deathgasm, Assassination Classroom, and Cop Car are all good fun if you want one last bit of Fantasia yourself.
Khalil Gibran's The Prophet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
Khlail Gibran's The Prophet is a labor of love for producer Salma Hayek, and like a fair number of those projects, it's got some rough edges as the desire to realize a complicated project within a window of opportunity may have taken priority over waiting until it could be perfect. Or maybe not; the production may have been perfectly smooth, and some spots are certainly excellent enough to justify the enthusiasm for the film.
The main story is okay. It introduces a trouble-making little girl, Almitra, who has squawked to a seagull but not spoken to anybody else since her father died two years ago. When her mother Kamila (voice of Salma Hayek) is not trying to wrangle her, she's the housekeeper for Mustafa (voice of Liam Neeson), a poet and painter who has been under house arrest for seven years. On the day Almitra follows her mother to work, a man from the government comes to tell Mustafa he is being set free and returned to his home country - although Almitra hears different.
Don't get me wrong, this framing piece isn't bad; it's got a nice voice cast with Hayek, Neeson, Quvenzhané Wallis, John Krasinski, Frank Langella, Alfred Molina, and John Rhys-Davies. The Lion King's Roger Allers directs, and while he doesn't have the same resources he did with Disney, the mostly hand-drawn images move smoothly, the storytelling is clear, and the characters expressive. When he gets to take a flight of fancy, it's neat to see, as are the humorous moments when he can stretch his cartooning muscles. Sometimes I suspect that he has a hard time connecting the heavy and heady material with an intended young audience - this is the story of a man who is a political prisoner in part for publishing philosophy, and trying to present that in a way palatable to kids Almitra's age can leave it feeling like an introductory lecture to older viewers.
Full review on EFC.
"Aubade"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Director Mauro Carraro credits a Mich Gerber concert as the inspiration for this short film of people emerging from a lake, a black sun casting shadows, and paper boats the size of barges, and Gerber's music on the score makes a gorgeous film even more memorable. The whole thing is arguably his introduction, and he gets something akin to a curtain call at the end.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this film, though, is what Carraro does with lighting. This film isn't quite built to look like conventional animation, but is still relatively flat, but the lighting is designed to glow, reflect off the water, and have shadows come from the sun rather than be dispelled by it. It seldom seems the primary purpose, but it's a big part of the impression the film makes.
"Be the Snow"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The description of this one involves a pillow running away from home and then getting homesick, and I don't know if I necessarily got that from the storytelling, more seeing it as the pillow going out to run errands initially then wondering what the skydiving was about. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - the jokes are pretty funny and cleverly animated regardless, and the combination between live-action and the animated pillow character is impressively seamless.
It's super-cute all around, although it shows just how tricky dialogue-free filmmaking can be, especially when you're also relying on FX shots that probably have to be rationed pretty tightly. Not that I'd want this short done any other way, especially since it's quite possible I missed a cue or two at the start. And, hey, any film with a credit for "...as blonde cheating cat" at least has that going for it
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One minute long, but it has some impressive animation. Most impressively, it seems to tell a clear emotional story - a young person going through cancer treatment and being comforted by his teddy bear - without ever spelling it out. Director Gabrielle Le Blanc may be just out of school, but she may have a bright future with this as her calling card.
"Timber"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
"Timber" starts out feeling kind of clever, with anthropomorphic logs from sticks to stumps shivering in the midst of a forest that has been clear-cut, and the pairing we get initially - an enthusiastic young twig and a weathered trunk segment - immediately work as characters. The hint of fear they show when the campfire is first lit is a tease, but then things get crazy.
What comes after that is mean cartooning only partially ameliorated by the cute designs, working in large part because it does get at an underlying truth, that it can be far easier for the poor to turn on each other than the people actually responsible for their situation. It's an even sharper barb that the short started out with, making it even more memorable.
"A Free Lunch"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One of two shorts in the program inspired by the same school assignment, and I think my perception of it may have been skewed by hearing as much, and that it was about a guy who finds an apple, though told via ink blots and sound effects. It works well enough, but I wonder if I would have found the apple munching just random sounds otherwise.
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Not a whole lot to say about this one. It's two minutes of multicolored grains that form images, and I dig it in the same way I really like the work of PES. There's also a context to it that kind of got buried for me in the middle of a 90-minute program
"Junk Girl"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oh, no, now other people are explicitly making Tim Burton movies!
I kid; after all, I found myself liking this movie about a sad young woman "made of junk" who tries to scrape by in a presumably-Iranian city (the clothing matches, although the headlines in the paper are mostly Harry Potter gags) only to face disgust and occasionally violence. It's very nicely done, if a downer, with the expressiveness of the characters' faces seemingly much higher than is typical for stop-motion, or CGI made to resemble stop-motion.
"Late Night Live Jazz"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very nifty little short by Mathias Menten from Belgium, which starts with a busker getting thrown off the Metro and seeming to have nowhere to go until he finds a card from "Le Club" among his change. Maybe he should have been suspicious upon seeing that this place was located in a scary-looking castle.
Menten's got a distinctive style for animation, and the thick blacks do a neat job of conveying the shadowy environment while still the audience to see plenty of what's going on. The jazzy soundtrack is pretty nice as well, and, hey, at least the cute vampire vocalist seems fond of our hero at the end!
"Last Dance on the Main"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Animated documentaries are odd things, and I'm certain that I didn't get as much out of this primarily French-language one as I might have some others, but I liked it. Rather than just rotoscoping talking heads, filmmaker Aristofanis Soulikias gives this picture a cool style that suggests the shabby-but-beloved neighborhood it focuses on - although also tying in with how, at the time Hydro Quebec wanted to demolish it for a new, modern building, it had remained an artistic haven but become more upscale.
It's a nifty little film; I'd like to see it with English subtitles at some point.
"Molinari Mouvement"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
What you get when abstract animation is inspired by abstract art: Director Alvaro Marinho takes works of Guido Molinari and sets their shapes in motion, blending it with music to create a pleasing set of images. Admittedly, I'm artistically ignorant enough that I initially thought Marinho was playing with a test pattern, but it was still nifty to watch.
"Office Paint"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
This is the other short film that came from the same assignment as "A Free Lunch", and I liked it a bit more. Not just because I didn't have an intended plot laid out, but because director Annie Amaya seemed to let the sounds guide the animation, creating something that feels like a new way to see something familiar.
"The Mortal Flame"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A nifty little adventure in which a maquette that seems to start out just wandering around an artist's studio which then becomes a larger, stranger world. The adventure itself is not that memorable - it's another one where I can kind of see what it was going for after reading the description, but not necessarily at the time. I really liked the imagery, though, especially the typewriter revealed as the snow around it thawed.
"Noir Manhattan"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A minute long and pretty much leading up to one joke, but I kind of love this one. Director Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles gives her short a style that's kind of film noir and kind of pin-up, depending on which of the two characters we're looking at, and I love the voice actor she found for the detective, even if I only understood bits and pieces of the untranslated French.
It hit the target, and did it well.
"Semi Sauf"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Another really short one, but it gets some weird but cool cartooning in quickly, as a Frankensteined frog-mouse escapes a lab, discovers a mouse-frog, and... Well, that would be telling.
Quick, adventurous, and darkly funny. I'd like to see director Kelly Harpes do more with this world and its characters, although I'm sure whatever comes next will be worth seeing.
"Deep Space"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Seven minutes makes this one of the longer parts of the program, and it's also one of the most entertaining, although in pretty divergent ways. On the one hand, the art style is very cool and the music was funky in a way that complemented it perfectly. On the other hand, my notes for the film basically read "weird creatures fucking". Which, don't get me wrong, turns out to be very funny indeed, especially as the poor astronaut trying to find one form of intelligent life on this place so he can get home has to deal with a whole planet full of animals with one thing on their minds.
There were some in the audience who felt that this wore out its welcome, but seven minutes doesn't quite get it there (though the final bit is admittedly a bit tired). It's a very funny little picture, although obviously not for everyone.
"Missing One Player"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The latest from Chinese animator Lei Lei ("Ray Lei" in the subtitles here) is a bit more story-oriented and less abstract than some of his previous shorts, although maybe just barely so. It's got an asteroid heading toward Earth, a panicking population that has many acting out, and three people who just want to play mahjongg but need a fourth.
Like his other shorts, this looks like very little else, put together from what look like cutouts from propaganda posters and sometimes limited in small movements but with great sweep on the larger scale. The music by Stars Lee is pretty great too, making for a short that seems to pack a lot into four minutes.
"Disconnector"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very spiffy little thing by Faiyaz Jafri who did everything from music to animation, and while sometimes it's got the feel of a one-man show in that the animation is a little too smooth, it's a look that works for it: By resembling the too-slick look of dance games, it makes the link the the virtual reality harness feel more natural, making it much easier to get across how synthetic those experiences are, even if they do resemble the world outside.
It's fun to listen to, as well - the poppy music fits the story perfectly and makes the whole exciting, even if the ultimate message is that something real is certainly better.
"Oh Wal"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oooo-kay. Notes on this one: "Cat riding in [fake] fish's mouth. Kills land whale w/ sushi kingdom".
It's certainly a trippy little short, though, kind of enhanced by looking like an "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon from The Simpsons in spots. Only in spots, though, as this is very much its own thing that goes in its own weird, surreal directions. It is, sometimes, kind of weird for the sake of being weird, but it pulls the audience along with its strange internal logic and cute-but-violent world.
Experimenter
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I really hope that this one opens in Boston soon, because I'd like to give it a second look. I came out of it with an odd sort of ambivalence, liking almost all of what it did but feeling like there should have been more heft, especially with all the unusual techniques writer/director Michael Almereyda was using to make sure the audience was paying a little more attention. That's kind of unfair, though - isn't one of the things that usually makes biopics kind of eye-rolling the attempt to make a person's individual life a symbol of something else?
Indeed, in some ways I think that Almereyda is explicitly trying to buck this trend with Experimenter, even as he does look to make a point: It spends a lot of time focusing on the work of Stanley Milgram, detailing experiments well beyond the (in)famous "teacher/learner" experiment and pointedly mentioning that he wished he could be remembered for the quality and results of his work rather than the vaguely uncomfortable feelings it inspired in people who had not actually read it. It's paradoxical - it's about trying to take the simple emotional reaction out of an assessment of someone's life and how people behave, but in doing so it lacks the sharpness to puncture those preconceptions.
Maybe it works once given a chance to roll over in my head and recognize that I'm doing something I don't really want to do in judging this on first impressions. I'd kind of like another chance, because it's a really nifty fourth-wall-breaking, stylish-but-understated movie otherwise.
Full review on EFC.
Ninja the Monster
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Director Ken Ochiai was unusually candid in his Q&A after this film, and one of the things he mentioned was that Japanese movies like Ninja the Monster are made with more than an eye toward the foreign market, opening on maybe five screens back home and hoping to make more money on home video elsewhere, and one can feel it straining for accessibility and against budget.
It looks and feels very flat - not bad, per se, just a bit underpopulated in some areas and with Aoi Morikawa putting in performances that feels muted as the Princess and many of the others in the cast seeming to be very one-note without regard to what's going on with the other actors or elsewhere in the movie. The camera is pointed at beautiful things when they're outside, and the sets and costumes are fine, if kind of off-the-rack, but there's very little that's distinctive.
On the plus side, the monsters are pretty great when we get a look at them, although it limits the action to something more FX-based than the actual swordfights you might want from a movie featuring samurai and ninjas. On the other hand, Ochiai does a fine job of making a horror/monster movie, with some cool moments and interesting designs. It just can't help feeling like such a targeted product in some ways, rather than a movie someone wanted to make.
Full review on EFC.
"The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
I was caught up in "The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined" (which I don't think ever had such a memorable title on-screen) enough while watching it that it's a bit of a surprise that, writing three days later, I have a bit of trouble remembering what the thrust of it was. It gets some good humor and anguish out of a man (Adam Busch) who, on a lark, goes in to talk to a palm reader (Ashley Donigan) who knows everything, but what are we supposed to get out of it?
Understand, it's a kind of pleasant surprise that it doesn't lead to them pairing off, although their mindsets are too negative at the time for that to really be entertaining. It doesn't really get into what it must be like for her to know everything and see the Universe as completely deterministic, or him trying to fight his destiny, or maybe she's working with his disbelief to set him down a different path. Instead, things kind of seem to peter out without really saying anything.
They Look Like People
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It feels a bit spoilery to say that They Look Like People is seldom the movie it's expected to be from the description, which talks about how Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews) can see that most of the people around him are being taken over by aliens or demons or the like and is torn about recruiting his friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel) to the cause of stopping them. They don't hide that it's a "he might be crazy" movie, but the truth is, if you'll pardon the grammatical sin, "might" is pretty much superfluous in that description.
The neat thing is, filmmaker Perry Blackshear doesn't really try to play into the possibility that genre film fans might be so used to how these things play out - ambiguously-to-"he's right!", or with obliviousness leading to tragedy - that going a different direction might be a shock. From the very start, it's pretty clear where things stand, and rather than being tragic, there's a great deal of hope to the film, because Wyatt doesn't want to be that way, even if Blackshear and MacLeod do a really fantastic job of presenting just how convincing his delusions are.
A large part of the success may be down to how, while it's Wyatt's delusions that drive the film, it often feels much more like a small ensemble piece. Evan Dumouchel's Christian has his own thing going on that could spin off into a movie itself, and Margaret Ying Drake is a lot of fun as his potential girlfriend (also his boss, promoted over him). They are an entertaining group as opposed to just "normal" people, and that both means that we're able to take occasional breaks from building his world and that he's got a good place to come back to, if it goes that way.
Full review on EFC.
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