Fantasia 2025.08: "Methuselah", A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House with Laughing Windows, "Things That Go Bump in the East", and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

This day started early:

3:30am, to be precise, with the alarm right in the room, rather than just the hallway. I don't know what it was about - I just headed out and tried not to bother the firefighters who showed up impressively quickly - but I'm glad it wasn't serious. This is a twelve-story building with 10 rooms on my floor, and there were not 100 people milling about afterward. Maybe it's just usually filled with college students and mostly-empty for the summer (there are about a dozen keyboxes for AirBNB rentals and brokers showing it to prospective tenants locked to the front steps, and that doesn't even include me), but I have a hard time imagining the folks who sleep through that din or say, man, that's a lot of stairs, maybe I'll evacuate when I smell smoke or firefighters pull me out.

So, it was almost 4am by the time I got to bed, which is just shy of the line where I usually say it's not worth going back to sleep. My body was going to wake me up at 8am or so anyway, though, and I wound up dragging something fierce for most of the day. It didn't help that most of the afternoon programming was from the Underground section and I'm not really a giallo guy, so I wound up dozing off or zoning out until the shorts package in the evening.

I mean, after "Methuselah" by Nathan Sellers; his short was 4 minutes long and pretty darn strong. Obviously, Justine was not really looking at my giant lens-covering finger in disdain (why Samsung designed this phone so that ones finger naturally rests there whne using the buttons to snap a picture is beyond me).

On the other hand, Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon made a movie that was often dark and grainy and very easy to zone out to, so I missed some the film, their Q&A gave the impression that Brisbane is not exactly an Australian hive of creative expression, but it was a scene where everybody sort of knows each other, and they wound up working together, if in unfamiliar roles at times.

Mickey Reese and Josh Fadem were really "on" in their intro and Q&A for Every Heavy Thing. I dig the energy which I didn't have, and that Reese wrote it for Fadem, who had played over a hundred supporting roles but never had a lead, so this was made with him in mind, and pretty much the entire cast. I suppose, as with Brisbane, when you're making movies in Oklahoma City, you know who you're working with.

After that, it was The House with Laughing Windows, and, as I say below, I am just not a giallo guy.

At some point after that, though, the caffeine kicked in or something, or maybe the "Things That Go Bump in the East" selections were just more my speed. Here we've got our moderator (Xige Li?), "Mom, Stay Dead" director Lee Na-hee, programmer/translator Steven Lee, "Dhet!" composer Dameer Khan, and "Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension" co-star/producer Eriko Nakamura & director Koji Shiraishi. As you can see, it was a pretty fun session, with Lee talking about how her short was inspired by how her mother actually blossomed once she finally moved out of the house, gaining a bunch of new hobbies and creating art, which got her thinking about how there are a lot of movies about how children grow at times like this but not necessarily parents.

Khan, meanwhile, is local to Montreal, representing "Dhet!" since director Ummid Ashraf had visa issues. There seemed to be more trouble with visas this year then I remember being a case before, although that could just be random variation. It does demonstrate how even relatively small-scale shorts like this have international collaborators, and Khan talked about how the giant highways the protagonist is traveling make Dhaka a very loud city, so the music had to be layered and a bit discordant, enough so that when it is suddenly quiet, the eeriness of it really hits.

If you look at IMDB, "Red Spider Lilies" is listed as "Pilot Version", and Eriko Nakamura said that, yes, they were very much looking do something more with it. I hope they do; it's a fun premise! She also mentioned that she was in another film at Fantasia this year, Dollhouse, but also not to go see it on her account because it wasn't really one of her great acting roles.

Finally, I made it across the street to Hall, where this is sort of the best picture I got of the surprisingly big contingent for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: Writer/director Kenichi Ugana plus actors Lissa Cranadang-Sweeney, Rocko Zevenbergen, Madeline Barbush, Estevan Muñoz, Ui Mihara, and Katsunari Nakagawa. One thing Mihara mentioned is that she felt a lot like her character going into the movie: If you look at her IMDB page, she seems to be have done an episode of TV every week or so for the past couple years, and felt pretty darn burnt out before doing this one. Though she maybe could have done without the amount of gross things she had to put in her mouth to spit out.


That's the start of Week Two on Wednesday the 23rd; Thursday would be Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and my first go at Transcending Dimensions. Today (Saturday the 2nd), my plans are Foreigner, Circo Animato, Mononoke II, and Queens of the Dead. The School Duel and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake are pretty good.


"Methuselah"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP):
:
A poem of a short film, using striking words and imagery to how trees are both dynamic and static features of nature - always growing but persisting for centuries in some cases - and how too many have been used by humans as sites for hangings and lynchings, tainting them forever. The narration by Jordan Mullins walks a line between reverence and rage, and the images from filmmaker Nathan Sellers manage to emphasize the evil men do with these marvelous things.


A Grand Mockery

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A Grand Mockery is engrossing for as long as it feels like an 8mm pseudo-documentary, but as soon as it tries to consciously be transgressive or experimental, it starts to get a bit tiresome. The filmmakers have vision, but it's not necessarily clear.

It follows "Josie" (Sam Dixon), initially seen walking through a Brisbane cemetery, seemingly one of the few green spots in the city and a sort of postal network where folks leave messages and meet up. There's not much going in the city - things are cool with his girlfriend, the father he tends to is mostly non-responsive, and his job at a cinema involves either cleaning up the disgusting messes customers leave behind or trying to handle their obstinacy. It wears on him, both physically and in the increasingly unhinged notes from possibly-imaginary correspondents.

The wear doesn't really kick in for audiences until the film's final scenes; up until then, even the moments when it approaches the grotesque and despairing feel immediate and earnest, the portrait of a man in a place where his artistic instincts seemingly can't take him anywhere, the cemetery seemingly the only source of tranquility. There are drugs and drink accelerating it, but one mostly sees a situation where folks get ground down because there's no seeming mobility. Josie doesn't necessarily seem inclined to make a living out of his drawings and the like, but they go unshared and he seems to have no other avenue to express himself to others.

The finale, though, is just endless. The filmmakers are good at sneaking up on the audience for a while, Josie's increasingly scraggly hair hiding how some health issue is distorting his face until he winds up in a strange bar that may only bear a passing connection with reality. At that point the movie starts banging on past any point it could be making, drawing out its grotesquerie until Josie is a drunken, distorted mess. Fair enough, I guess - that's arguably where lives of quiet desperation wind up - but after a while the filmmakers have eroded a lot of the goodwill the film had earned.

It goes on a bit as he gets outside the city, and the green of the woods and swamp seems like a bookend to the cemetery at the start (8mm green seems like a very specific color), and for a bit I wondered if it was intentional, starting in a city graveyard and ending outside the city in a place dense with life, but, apparently, the decay is too strong at this point, and the film trundles on until it ends in a whimper.


Every Heavy Thing

* * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm mostly giving this a pass, because even though I didn't doze off much, I feel like I missed a lot of pieces that were important to the story.

It starts out conventionally enough, with a Scream-style pre-credits murder before introducing the audience to Joe (Josh Fadem), who sells ads for the local alt-weekly, one of the last in the country, reluctantly accompanying a friend to a show - he and wife Lux (Tipper Newton) seem to have separate social lives - only to enjoy it more than expected, and see the singer get murdered. Killer William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) says he's going to let Joe live because it amuses him, but it will amuse him much less if Joe does anything stupid. Like helping the paper's new writer (Kaylene Snarsky) when she has leads on the disappearance William is responsible for.

The problem in a nutshell is that the story really doesn't have any place to go after William reveals himself, about ten ten minutes into the movie; Joe winds up in this holding pattern but it plays more like awkward social situations rather than walls closing in or real danger. Writer/director Mickey Reese puts in other threads - Shaffer as the vanguard of various tech companies moving their operations to the city, an old friend (Vera Drew) returning to town after her transition, various family concerns - but none of them seem ironically more urgent than the man who is murdering women and apparently disposing of the bodies very well, which isn't presented as a big deal itself versus how it puts a man in an uncomfortable situation.

Plus, the jokes are only about half as funny as the writers seem to think. It gets by on volume for a while, and Tipper Newton is maybe the film's most valuable asset as Lux, seeming to put a weird and amusing spin on just about everything. After a while, though, things just aren't that funny, and the film made in part to give Josh Fadem a lead role after a lot of character work winds up showing why he hasn't been cast in one before: He's affable and has pleasant chemistry with almost everyone else, but it highlights him as a glue guy in a cast the way Joe is in his community, but maybe not with the sort of charisma that puts him at the center of a story.

One admires the attempt that this sort of outside-of-Hollywood indie is making. Unfortunately, it seems too committed to a twist that seems inspired at first but goes nowhere.


La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Order the old DVD at Amazon

I've probably posted some variation of this before, but I think I'm just not a giallo person. No matter the extent to which the director is regarded as a master, or how sexy the cast is, or how shocking or lurid the twists are, I just don't get drawn in, and The House with the Laughing Walls was not an exception to this rule. Like so many things in the genre, it falls in that gap between intriguing mysteries and unnerving horror for me.

(In fairness, all the films this afternoon suffered from my sleep being interrupted the night before, so I wasn't absorbing as much as I'd like.)

It feels like it should be a little more intriguing than it is, with an art expert (Lino Capolicchio) arriving to restore a church's peculiar painting, mysterious disappearances, and secretive villagers, but the film is too arch for much of its running time. Stefano doesn't really feel like anything, drifting through the story as strange things happen around him, not particularly defining himself as an academic or artist, and there seems to be an opportunity missed in using the restoration as a thing to hand the story and investigation on, where immersing himself in this artist's life and techniques draws him closer to the man's demons. Even with a new restoration, everything feels pre-faded, like there's never been any life to the story to start with. The mystery feels too distant.

It gets crazy toward the end, even audaciously so, but maybe it's a problem of genre-awareness, where knowing something is a giallo means that one is awaiting rather than dreading the inevitable, and the finale is surprising just because it's random rather than lying in wait to blindside a viewer. Sure, okay, the sisters are messed up, but not in a way that has anything to do with what Stefano has experienced, so it's not resonating.


"Magai-Gami"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Magai-Gami" has a pretty darn basic premise - folks in a scary place investigating an urban legend come face to face with monsters that will kill them if they look away - but it executes exceptionally well: Leads Ion Obata and Nagisa Toriumi are a fun pairing even as most of their banter is done over the phone, and the audience picks upon their dynamic very quickly even as the movie starts with them already on the ground. Mostly, the monsters are kind of great, feeling like a mix of visual effects and practical work that capture the freaky images of old illustrations while not looking more out of place next to a girl in a puffer jacket talking on a cell phone than a more modern design would.

Filmmaker Norihiro Niwatsukino doesn't have a particularly long résumé, but he seems very assured here, keeping the film moving even when it involves standing still, displaying a good handle on using what his effects team gives him, and setting up a supernatural-containment mythology in the closing minute or two that doesn't feel too much like it's trying to impress with how clever it is. The program guide describe the short as a proof-of-concept, and, yes, I'd like to see more.


"Ba Dong Yao" ("Hungry")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Taiwanese puppet fantasy adventure is one of the best bits of any Fantasia Festival that contains it - I've rearranged schedules to make it work - and it was a really delightful surprise to see it show up in the middle of what initially looked like an animated short. It's a good animated short - it's got a strong style and a story about an ailing kid and his busy father in the middle of a festival that spans the traditional and the modern - but the live-action puppets means this film zigs where one expects it to zag, making his fever dreams feel a bit more real in the moment than his actual world even as they're clearly mythic.

Oh, and bonkers, as these goddesses fight to become his mother and the puppet combat is a kick to watch, fully embracing the capabilities and limitations of what these things can do, especially with a little FX work to eliminate rods and strings. It's great fun that leads into neat music and a satisfying finale.


"Mati Adat" ("Kill Tradition")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Compared to the others, "Kill Tradition" is a nifty slow-burner of a short, keeping just what the stakes are on the horizon as it builds the relationship between Idah (Nik Waheeda), the sort of precocious kid that gets into trouble, and her recently-widowed mother Iman (Ezzar Nurzhaffira) as they prepare a meal for an upcoming ritual. Waheeda is charming, and Nurzhaffira really nails this vibe of how having this girl is wonderful yet tiring. They're highly watchable, especially Nurzhaffira, once the inevitable reveals itself.

That's when the audience sees where the title is going, in a couple of ways, and while Nurzhaffira plays up how this is more than she can take and the devastation of it, writer/director Juliana Reza and the rest of the team emphasize what sort of inertia tradition and ritual have. It's evil tradition - even with what appear to be actual supernatural entities, there's no strong justification that this is effective or necessary - and Reza highlights the callousness of it as much as the grace of those consumed by it.


"Mom, Stay Dead"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Lee Na-hee kicks off her short with a fun image - grieving daughter Sora (Oh Sohyeon) working her way through a book with "101 Ways to Summon the Dead", with #44 being the Ghost Summoning Dance - before coming up with a neat twist: The ghost she summons (Cho Ahra) seems to be roughly her age, having moved on from Earthly concerns, including the daughter she left behind, into her idealized form. There's maybe a fun sitcom premise in here, something about how family members would really relate if you removed the societal obligations and expectations from them.

It's maybe not far from the likes of Back to the Future or Chinese hit Hi, Mom - though I can't think of any that pull someone into the future rather than having their kids in the past - but aside from what Lee discussed in her Q&A about discovering what her mother could become once she was no longer worried about taking care of her daughter on a day-to-day basis, there's something intriguingly weighty here about spirituality. Sora has been using religion and magic as a way to fulfil her desires rather than really contemplating what all this implies, even as the mother recognizes innately that this girl needs something from her.

A very nifty twist on the idea of moving on that feels all the more honest because of how absurd and thought-provoking it can be simultaneously.


"Dhet!"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

There's a really strong theme across short films and anthologies this year of how gig work like rideshares and delivery is a sort of hell designed to be inescapable until it finally crushes a person, and I kind of worry that it will wind up staying in shorts and their equivalents in other media, because if you've got the money to make a feature, the business model behind this is kind of an abstract thing and you mostly see the convenience. It's a longer distance between classes than it used to be.

"Khet!", from Bangladesh, is a pretty decent example. The story itself is pretty basic - motorcycle-taxi guy (Ahsabul Yamin Riad) ignores a homeless man (Fozie Rabby) telling him not to take a certain turn and winds up unable to leave one of Dhaka's highways - and is perhaps ultimately more about the maddening geography of the city than the rider's circumstances. It's not a bad idea, since cities built around such highways are a topic of conversation in themselves, but it leaves writer/director Ummid Ashraf without a metaphorical offramp on top of the literal lack of one; the story kind of runs in circles without much chance of an ending that truly satisfies.


"Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Red Spider Lilies" isn't quite made just for me, but it does take a genre I tend to really like - the haunted family calling the sort of professional exorcist who carries themselves more like an exterminator than a religious fanatic - and eventually twists it into one I like even more (which would be telling). Here, that's the Aoi sisters, living in an old family house, where one night something possesses Kotoko (Tomomi Kono), leaving Nana (Tomona Hirota) to call the famed Teshigawara (Hirotaro Honda), whom younger sister Ami (Eriko Nakamura) has seen a lot on television. Once there, though, Teshigawara finds this to be much more serious than his usual situation.

It's not a new observation that exorcism stories arguably work better in East Asian environs than elsewhere is that there is a sort of formal place for ghosts and demons in local mythologies with the opposing forces less formalized (in the West, there's the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the likes of snake-handlers but not a lot in between). So there's room for Teshigawara to be a professional and a celebrity and a lot of entertainment as the Aois interact with him like that, but also to be able to go in another direction when a twist comes without a whole lot of effort. Honda sells it well and injects dry humor into the film that doesn't undercut what else is going on, but the three sisters are great fun as well: Eriko Nakamura gets attention as the very funny Ami, but Tomona Hirota and Tomomi Kono solidify their older siblings as the short goes on.

Like "Magai-Gami", this is pretty explicitly a pilot/proof of concept, and I would quite like to see more.


I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festiva, laser DCP)

Watching this film, I chuckled at a low-budget horror-film producer being named "Rusty Festerson", and the actor playing him. Are they going to get that this Larry Fessenden cameo is a joke in Japan, or is this a film made for an extremely specific audience? If it is, that niche definitely includes me, and I'm glad to see it.

It opens by introducing two folks from different worlds. Shina (Ui Mihara) grew up in Japan with things coming relatively easy: Naturally pretty and doing okay in school and sports despite not really having to work very hard at them, show business was the first time she really had to apply herself, and really take pride in succeeding. Jack grew up in Eugene, Oregon, without anything ever coming easy, diving into horror movies and heavy metal, and eventually moving to New York City to work for Festerson's company and getting frustrated when it's just a job. Shina is frustrated too, showing disdain for her work, and taking a trip to New York with boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa) to escape the limelight. Once there, though, English-speaking Ren finds himself frustrated by her nonsense and she feels disrespected, and an argument winds up with Shina, with no money or ID, outside a bar where Jack and his friends are commiserating over the star of their movie dropping out at the last minute. When Shina has nowhere to go at closing time, Jack lets her sleep on his couch, and manages to communicate that he'll pay for a flight back home if she acts in his movie, not knowing she's a big star rather than just a pretty face.

All in all, it's a fun little movie, charming as all get-out with the filmmakers keenly aware that a romantic comedy must be that, with everything else a secondary concern. And it works; even if I don't entirely buy that this pair falls in love with each other, I do believe that they fall in love with making movies with each other, and that's nearly as good for the movie's purposes. If that's something writer/director Kenichi Ugana planned for, that's smart, giving him a fallback position in case the romance doesn't quite get over, as the "making movies with friends" energy is solid enough to believe in Shina's half of the story.

That's sort of the film's biggest issue - Shina is a lot funnier and sympathetic, with a stronger arc than Jack, and I don't think it's necessarily a matter of assuming a foreign-language preform meets a certain standard even when you'll notice the flaws in one's native tongue. Ui Mihara is given a lot of assignments and mostly pulls them off, from the celebrity who is shallow enough that one can laugh at her arrogance to the professional kind of appalled by the mess she's found herself in to smitten to hurt; all kind of tying back to her opening mission statement. Estevan Muñoz isn't quite just given one note as Jack, but he's always playing it at full volume, and I don't know that it's a matter of Ugana being more comfortable in his native language and culture. The English-speaking supporting characters are by and large fun, but Jack is not a complementary half of the movie.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is a good time, full of deadpan humor, missed translation jokes, and the ability to walk the line between getting laughs from what a sketchy production this is for what will almost certainly be a terrible movie and earnest respect for them making it. Ugana seem genuinely fond enough of its scrappers and has the knack for getting the audience to smile at them, which not all movies rooting for underdogs manage. He and the cast make the tricky transition from Jack and company clearly exploiting Shina in an uncomfortable way to her being part of the gang, and if you can feel an ending being jammed into place, it is at least jammed solidly into place.

I do kind of wonder how well this plays at places other than Fantasia, which is in large part about this sort of love affair between Eastern and Western pop culture, as well as mixing the global mainstream and the lowbrow. Still, even it's obviously going to play like gangbusters in that specific room, I suspect it's going to really amuse the folks who would enjoy being in that room if they could.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Sasyq (Stinker)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"First Rites"

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

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

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

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


Sweetness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Peau à Peau (aka Nesting)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers"

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

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

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


He ma pi fu (Contact Lens)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend in Taipei

I can't really say for sure, but I feel like there would be at least a couple nifty stories about George Huang in Entertainment Weekly or Cinematical or the like if we had the sort of mainstream film & entertainment media we had when Huang directed his last feature, there'd be a nice, meaty story about just what he's been up to in the 30 years since Swimming with Sharks pushed a bit outside of the indie bubble, because it sure looks like a ride: One raunchy mainstream comedy of the type that were in style in the late 1990s, some TV, including a good chunk of one of those America telenovelas that MyNetworkTV debuted after the UPN/WB merger, a few behind-the-scenes jobs with friend Robert Rodriguez, the script for Hard Target 2, and enough work on scripts with a couple writer/directors to get WGA credit. It's an IMDB page that probably excludes some script doctor work and a number of scripts that probably got pitched, written as treatments, and maybe completed and into pre-production, but just sort of vanished because they never started shooting. I've read interviews where someone said, yeah, I've been working in the ten years between my first two features, but it never became a finished product, and that kind of looks like what happened with Huang.

But we don't really have that sort of coverage today; the nearest thing I've seen to what I'm suggesting look to be clips from a junket interview he did with Sung Kang on websites that are too SEO'd to be worth paying attention to. Which is a real shame; I raised my eyebrow when I gave Weekend in Taipei a cursory IMDB lookup after seeing the trailer in September, and was hoping I'd see something about it, but there just isn't an outlet, and this is the sort of thing that could maybe pique a little curiosity in a reasonably decent movie.

It might also be interesting to hear about EuropaCorp doing a Taiwan co-production when this could maybe be an issue with the Mainland, which seems to be willing enough to let studios cast/hire Taiwanese talent (as in this week's The Unseen Sister) but has on occasion taken a dim view of actually showing the place. Maybe it's okay if you imply all the cops are in the pocket of a Korean gangster and American cops can wave their badges around and make arrests. I don't know if this film would actually play there anyway - they've got plenty of iQIYI stuff to fill screens - but does someone hold a grudge against Besson if he wants to shoot there someday?

(I know, you've got to go to Danvers or Franmingham to see it Thursday, but there was a lot of noir this weekend! I only got to it Tuesday night)


Weekend in Taipei

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, this will show where when it is

Weekend in Taipei is more or less what it looks like - a mid-budget action movie from Luc Besson's factory that has a bit more gloss than the stuff which goes straight to video - but it's fully aware of that, giving the audience what it wants a little earlier than expected and putting in the work even if it's mostly doing the basics. Besson and George Huang mix things up just enough that you won't forget it on the way to the subway.

It opens with "King" Kwang (Sung Kang), a Korean immigrant who had risen to become a billionaire seafood supplier, appearing in court over a number of seemingly minor violations of fishing law, considering how the business is a front door rubbing drugs; wife Joey (Gwei Yun-Mei) was not there, instead buying another Ferrari seemingly on a whim, and Joey's 14-year-old son Raymond (Wyatt Yang) really hates his stepdad. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, a stuff bust has gone sideways, and when DEA Agent John Lawlor (Luke Evans) discovers a possible source within Kwang's business, he wants to go to Taipei for a hand-off, and possibly misinterprets his supervisor's refusal to allow this, "especially after what happened 15 years ago", but suggesting he take a leave of action for a few days, as tacit approval.

Writer/director George Huang looked like he was going to be someone twenty or thirty years ago - Swimming with Sharks was at least a moderate deal - and while there's maybe a bit of rust, he's still got good fundamentals. Indeed, he seems to be having fun here, with an early Breakfast at Tiffany's homage that's a lot of fun and a fistfight in a movie theater that doesn't quite hit the notes he's probably looking for but which at least feels like he's trying something rather than serving up the expected action beats. I wonder a bit how much of the action is him and how much is Besson and his team; there's bits of slapstick violence in some and slick gunplay in others that feels a bit like Besson's house style but It's also kind of quirky, with the first action scene being especially shaggy-but-really-violent. Either the stunt drivers or visual effects crew has great fun when Joey gets behind the wheel.

I like the central pair a fair amount: Luke Evans understands the assignment and doesn't treat this as an audition for something bigger or mail it in, just vibing with the audience that came for some fun action. Gwei Yun-Mei is initially more severe as an elegant, lead-footed mom who takes no guff, and probably gives the movie a bi of a soul as a tomboy hellion repressed by her miserable marriage but ready to leap out at any notice, even as she has matured over that time. She's kind of great and while she's been in a fair number of the few Taiwanese films made it to American cinemas in the last decade or so, but it would be nice if we could see more of her, which didn't exactly happen after Qi Shu was in The Transporter.

Also, the movie handles flashbacks not with digital de-aging, but a grainy filter, a little makeup, and wigs. The wigs are terrible and I love them for it. It's a thing that works better than it should - the characters are relating these stories to Raymond and maybe that's how he's seeing it. It lands right between silly and clever and may not even click as what Huang may be doing until a day or two later, when it's suddenly even funnier.

I don't know that this makes Weekend in Taipei that much smarter or more rewatchable than the average EuropaCorp action flick, but maybe it's just odd enough to not feel like it's disappearing as you watch it. It's only getting one or two shows a day at relatively few multiplexes, but there are, at the very least, worse uses of a couple hours if you've got a monthly membership in those buildings.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.06: In My Mother's Skin, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, Les Rascals, and Marry My Dead Body

Not a big guest day - Lovely, Dark, and Deep director Teresa Sutherland was there to introduce her film but couldn't stay for a Q&A. In previous years I might have said something like, man, if I had a movie at a film festival and it had two shows a day apart, I'd be there for both, hanging around to watch movies, and so on. On the other hand, almost every flight I've tried to schedule lately has either been at a stupid times or ridiculously expensive, and hotel rooms ain't cheap either. Combine that with all the stories you hear about just how middle-class people in this business actually are during the strike, and, well, I get it a bit better now.

Next up: A Chinese Ghost Story, Booger, Insomniacs After School, Things That Go Bump in the East, and Devils. And because this took such an unconscionably long time to post (some early starts and work I couldn't just half-pay attention to), I'll drop two tentative days worth of "where to say hi" in that I'm planning to attend My Animal, Killing Romance, and Mad Cats today (4 August) and God of Cookery, the International sci-fi shorts, Molli and Max in the Future, Onyx the Fortuitious and the Talisman of Souls, and Suitable Flesh tomorrow (5 August), with Piaffe noted as at being least interesting.


In My Mother's Skin

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

The sort of horror movie that can frustrate me, personally, because I've got a brain intent on decoding its uncanny events and true horror in some ways comes from how it resists being figured out or assigned values. That's especially the case when they take place from a child's point of view, and maybe part of the point of movies like this is that the world runs on rules that one can't grasp when it's not just randomly cruel.

So it is here, in the home of a comfortable family in the Philippines as World War II stretches on in 1945: Father Romualdo and mother Ligaya (Beauty Gonzalez), children Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli) and Bayani, with servant Amor (Angeli Bayani) looking after their needs. A collaborator by the name of Antonio has accused "Aldo" of stealing and hiding some Japanese gold as he prepares for a trip into town, leaving the oft-sickly Ligaya to watch the children. As the food runs out, the practical Tala goes to search the woods, finding a mysterious building with a Fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) who sees all through the local insects, and offers some help - and though Tala is smart enough to know these offers seldom come without strings, the situation feels desperate.

There's a strange tightness to this film, with the opening suggesting a much wider wartime-horror scenario and both the question of the gold and Aldo's absence lingering over the story but not actively engaged with. Which is not to say that individual stakes are not worth one's concerns, just that they sometimes wobble - the mix of how even children must do desperate things to survive during wartime, the sins of the parents being visited upon them, and the war perhaps being smaller than the greater forces around it don't always gel into something that really drills into one part of a viewer's mind, unless there's a specific phobia of having insects burrow under one's skin in play. The film winds up trading largely on atmosphere.

Heck of an atmosphere, though: It all takes place in and around this isolated manor that almost feels safe but soon clearly isn't: It's not a grandiose mansion, no, but the ceilings are clearly too high to be in scale with Tala and Bayani, and one can sense that a fair amount of time has passed without Aldo's presence by how the characters have rationed the food down to the last sweet potato. It's just enough for them to have felt safe before the chaotic forces of nature and decay began pushing their way in, so that even without making it a classic creepy house, the danger of the place reveals itself. It's no wonder the Fairy is able to find an easy mark in Tala, as the film's designers make her otherworldly but vibrant, with Jasmine Curtis-Smith doing an excellent job of sweetly smiling as she tells Tala that this is going to cost her dearly while leaving just enough doubt and suggesting that she's a smart and responsible enough child to handle it.

That plays off a very nice performance by young star Felicity Kyle Napuli; she's got the lack of seeming sensible and mature but revealing innocence as the film goes on, which is often the opposite of this sort of film's path, where the unsuspecting heroine discovers inner strength. The audience wouldn't be with her if she were any sort of fool. Beauty Gonzalez seems to have quite the time moving between the weak but respectable mother and the moth-possessed monster.

It builds up to an impressively gory finale, albeit one that has me thinking "so, now what?" as the credits roll. Ultimately, the atmosphere and interesting images are enough.


Lovely, Dark, and Deep

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As a person who quite likes looking at the great outdoors but finds little to be scarier than being stuck in it, I'm an easy mark for movies like Lovely, Dark, and Deep, although it seems like few ever come up with a more interesting idea than making hikers have to deal with serial killers. This one, on the other hand, has some genuinely scary material that it takes its time unwrapping, and the end result may be the best thing the genre has produced in years.

After an ominous opening that explains why there's a job opening at Arvores National Park, we meet Lennon (Georgina Campbell), a newly-transferred ranger who has listed it as her dream job ever since she signed up. Many of the other rangers seem to think something is off about her without hearing the conspiracy-theory podcasts she was listening to on the drive in, but you've got to be kind of off to spend a month in a cabin mostly contacting other rangers by walkie-talkie, though her neighbor Jackson (Nick Blood) is very friendly. What she doesn't advertise is that her little sister disappeared in this park on a visit twenty years ago, and she intends to spend her time looking for any trace, and making damn sure it doesn't happen again when someone like Sara Greenberg (Maria de Sá) disappears from her party, even though head ranger Zhang (Wai Ching Ho) tells her to stay at her station.

Boredom and intermittent strangeness can make a person paranoid or give them heightened awareness of anything just a little bit off, but the trick with a movie is to make this thing that happens over weeks happen in days. What gives Lovely the makings of a nifty little thriller is that writer/director Teresa Sutherland believably gives it a jump-start, in that Lennon is already into a rabbit hole explained by flashbacks and a constant early flirting with the line between reasonably irresponsible. This allows Sutherland to go a good long time without really getting serious about its potential supernatural elements but keeping them around so that the last act needn't feel like a betrayal, and everything winds up fitting together with a little thought.

And even when Sutherland does open things up enough to hint that there may be a pattern beyond Lennon's sister, she's smart to present even the trippiest situations filled with unsettling effects, camerawork, and editing through Lennon's prism. That's great not just because it preserves ambiguity about whether this is something paranormal or just in her mind, but because it means that no matter how strange or unreal things may get, Lennon's obsession and potential ability to find a way to channel it into something positive rather than self-destruction is going to be at the heart of it. No matter how strange things may get, this is Lennon's story, and consequential.

That calls for a pretty nice piece of work by lead actress Georgina Campbell, who manages an impressive level of intensity and obsession even though she's mostly on her own and doesn't have someone else to inflict it on or be measured by. It's the sort of thing that could lead to a lot of gritted teeth or defiant exposition, but instead you get the feeling of someone who has become capable and professional as a sort of by-product of their mania - Lennon is going to be tempted by a lot of things, but isn't necessarily going to scream about them. Interestingly, the three biggest roles are different takes on the professionalism this job in general and the unique circumstances of the park require, with Nick Blood finding a way to jump from gregarious to curt when lives are on the line, and Wai Ching Ho not necessarily having something soft under Zhang's quiet and stern exterior, but perhaps surprising empathy.

(Mai Ching Ho is perhaps the movie's most interesting casting; an accent that implies she immigrated as an adult and appearances in Lennon's flashbacks suggests an interesting backstory beyond how her life intersects with Lennon's and reinforces an idea that these parks belong to and can be enjoyed by everyone that runs counter to a potential "keep out!" message.)

There's something unsettling by the time Lovely, Dark, and Deep ends beyond knowing what happened twenty years ago or during Lennon's first summer as a ranger that's kind of clever: By the end, it has quietly articulated how one can both love the great outdoors and be wary of it, even if that's not always what is going on up front.


Les Rascals

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Typically when one calls a movie frustrating, it's a negative, something said about bad craftsmanship, but at other times, as in Les Rascals, one can take it as a sign of just how well the film has one looking at the rest of the world. Even if you don't know the specifics of how mid-1980s Paris was priced for violence, or exactly how ascendant the far-right is there now, this film tracks in a number of ways, because the where and when of such events seldom changes the forces at work.

It opens in 1977, as Ruddy, a kid from a West Indian family, and his nephew Michel run into Ahmed and his friend ready to take their own frustrations out on the black kids, at least until the chase leads them into a back alley where street tough Loki (Pierre Cevaer) and his friends opt to teach them a lesson and the younger kids forge a bond. Seven years later, Ruddy (Jonathan Feltre), Ahmed (Missoum Slimani), now going by "Rico", and three other friends are calling themselves "Les Rascals", with matching jackets and the like, with "Mitch" (Emerick Mamilonne) a hanger-on despite his brighter academic prospects, but they're mostly just punks even if they exist on the fringes of actual serious criminals - at least until Rico recognizes Loki working in a record store and delivers a beating that puts him in the hospital. Ironically, Loki seems to feel like he had this coming for the sins of his youth, but his younger sister Frédérique (Angelina Woreth) doesn't see it that way, especially once a professor asks her to see grad student Adam (Victor Meutelet) as a tutor. Adam may be handsome and clean-cut, but he's also quite skinhead-adjacent.

One of the first notes things I remembered noting during the screening was that, for something taking place in the mid-1980s, it often gave off a 1950s vibe in the costumes, decor, and music choices, and it turns out to be a really clever bit of construction on the part of the filmmakers: Though much of the early going seems to be looking to trigger nostalgia, even if it's a clear-eyed one that acknowledges racism and violence, the filmmakers remember that the early 80s had an awful lot of looking back at the 1950s - this was the age of Grease, Happy Days, and Back to the Future in America and the French have always had a fondness for that sort of Americana, despite stereotypes otherwise - and the chain formed this way has a lesson about how some dissatisfied people are always looking back, but that you can probably follow that string back forever and not find a golden age. It's no coincidence that Ruddy's family is placing their hopes in Mitch, who is breakdancing rather than appropriating rockabilly; he's the future.

If the family has a future, that is, because Les Rascals is a ticking time bomb of a movie: As Ruddy finds himself kind of adrift - he's not a great student, isn't naturally ruthless enough to be a particularly effective criminal, and can't find a job until he's completed military service that gives him qualms as a black man in a country that hasn't put its colonialist past behind it - the segments with Fred are showing just how easy it can be to slip into radicalism - and how easily calmer voices can be discarded, considering how Loki is sidelined as an influence on his sister once Adam has his claws in her. There's a sense of the whole cast being funneled toward their final confrontation.

It's a nice cast as well, especially Jonathan Feltre, who gives off a ton of quiet frustration as Ruddy grows out of youthful foolishness but doesn't have an appealing way forward, and can't quite articulate how frustrating it is that his own mother seems to think he's hopeless and thinks less of him than her other son, Mitch's father, who is in prison. He projects a fierce but not necessarily virtuous loyalty, like it's the only thing in the world he's got to cling to. On the other side, Angelina Woreth and the filmmakers exploit how quick and easy an earnest young white woman can gain sympathy to create nifty moments of tension entirely built around whether Fred will be seduced by Adam and his way of thinking, hitting sympathetic beats well enough that one maybe doesn't realize just how lost she is until it's far too late.

This leads to a finale of often-shocking violence which director/co-write Jimmy Laporal-Trésor deploys ruthlessly, taking the time to sideline the characters who have no stomach for it on-screen, and while there's often tension, it's never exciting violence that feels like a way to prove righteousness. Indeed, as it goes on, anything like Ruddy swinging his fists, screaming at the person who deserves it, will be reduced in importance, and the politicization will increase, from skinheads attacking more moderate rivals to which bits of bloodshed get used for a narrative in the media.

It's sadly familiar, of course, even across an ocean and forty years. But, then, the good old days are always just one generation back, and breaking the cycle is hard.


Guan yu wo han gui bian cheng jia ren de na jian shi (Marry My Dead Body)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There's a really strong "sure, why not?" vibe to this that I really like even if it may be kind of iffy in some areas - it's willing to go for the joke and surprisingly good at selling it when it's out there. The high concept and the cop story don't really feel like they belong together at times, but the filmmakers execute well enough to realize that they've actually got a situation where people will accept "it's fate!" if they don't abuse it.

The cop in question is Detective Wu Ming-Han (Greg Hsu Kuang-Han), who is homophobic enough after busting a gay man in a gym's locker room for it not to seem like a good look, especially to co-worker Tzu-Ching (Gingle Wang Ching), who is exceptionally competent but mostly gets assigned to duties that highlight how good she looks in her uniform. After they run down drug dealer A-Gao (Chang Tsai-Hsing), Wu picks up a red envelope while gathering evidence, only to find it was planted by an old lady (Wang Man-Chiao) looking to arrange a "ghost marriage" for her gay grandson Mao Pang-yu (Lin Po-Hung). Not going through with it would be extremely bad luck, even beyond being reassigned to a tiny police station, but when Wu discovers he can see and hear "Mao-Mao", they decide that the best way to get him to reincarnate is seeing to his unfinished business, either with boyfriend Chen Chia-Hao (Aaron Yan) or tracking down the car that hit him, which turns out to be tied to the crime boss Tzu-Ching and the rest of Wu's former colleagues are investigating, Lin Hsiao-Yuan (Tsai Chen-Nan).

Writer/director Cheng Wei-Hao is likely best known for directing the first two movies in Taiwan's The Tag-Along horror series, but is obviously going for a much lighter sort of ghost story here, hitting quite a few familiar beats: Wu talks a lot to someone everyone else can't see, while Mao tries to help by giving him information he couldn't actually know, at least once he's through making Wu squirm for being a prejudiced jerk that he doesn't really want to be attached to. Some of the jokes about gay guys and straight guys have whiskers on them - Wu comes off as the sort of man who likes to dress to impress right up until it's time for Mao to sadly shake his head, for instance - but there's also some kind of interesting material about how Taiwan actually making same-sex marriage legal kind of messed with a culture built on the assumption of being an outsider.

Making a movie is in large part execution as much as creativity, though, and a lot of this one is just plain done well. Take that car chase in the first act, for instance; it has a really good rhythm even if it also feels like a lot was built inside a computer; it went from storyboard to shooting to effects very well indeed. Cheng and his co-writers have a good handle on how to manage a zany but friendly tone without making the audience balk at taking shortcuts, both in how it quickly establishes that most everyone here from cops to grannies treats homophobia as, at best, embarrassingly old-fashioned and in how it uses the same sort of supernatural belief in fate that weds Wu and Mao to tie the pieces of its story together without relying on lucky coincidences. Bits like how actually possessing someone isn't good for a ghost keep things from being too easy but also lead to enjoyably goofy things like the visual of Mao taking a deep drag of burning incense to recharge and reform.

Greg Tsu and Lin Po-Hung make a likable enough odd couple; their scenes together are better than just being perfunctory but they fall a bit short of actually growing into buddies rather than people who don't actually dislike each other. They're likable enough once the initial friction is past, and Hsu has Wu grow out of his bad habits nicely. As is often the case, the supporting characters often get to have more fun: Wang Man-Chiao seemingly has a ball as a matchmaking-granny stereotype who is aggressively up for applying that to Mao, while Gingle Wang is exceptionally good at having Tzu-Ching know she's much smarter than a himbo like Wu without pushing it past where it's funny.

One kind of wants more of Gingle Wang despite also being glad that this isn't a movie about a gay person helping two straights get together, and the fact that someone like Tzu-Ching simultaneously gets a lot of attention and overlooked does pay off. The resolution may ultimately be a little long on "okay, I guess that happened", but what can you do when one of the main characters was dead to start with? This sort of broad comedy didn't need more weight at the end than that anyway.

This Week in Tickets: 13 February 2023 - 19 February 2023 (A Couple of Classics)

It was a pretty good week for seeing movies on the big screen, new and old.

I started off with the first of a couple Film Rolls things from South Korea - EXIT on Monday night and lucky Chan-Sil on Thursday, which are both relatively recent and at completely opposite ends of that country's film industry.

On Tuesday, I hit the night-before showing for Marlowe, which has a darn good pedigree - Sam Neill playing literature's second-greatest detective with Neil Jordan directing a script by William Monahan and a cast that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, and Colm Meaney - but which is missing one important name in Raymond Chandler, alas.

It was back to the Common the next day for the new 3D rerelease of Titanic - I made a point to skip the Valentine's Day crowd for that one - and it's kind of mind-boggling that Cameron has only made a couple features (plus some documentary work) in a quarter-century since then, although all those movies are the sort of grand epic that few other people seem to have the ability to do.

Come the weekend, it was a couple days of noting how multiplexes seem to have grown even more hostile to folks catching two, especially if you're cutting across town. I happily caught Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the big screen at the Coolidge - the schedule out from said "screening on digital and 35mm", although I didn't see where the 35mm times were, took the 66 back to Harvard Square to pick up the week's comics, and then wound up hanging around and grabbing a bite to eat at the Smoke Shop in Kendall Square so that I could make it to the 9:15pm show of Living, which was the most convenient time, since I'd dilly-dallied in seeing it.

And I don't just mean I'd waited until it was almost gone from local screens - I could have seen it in Dublin back in November, as that's when it was released there and in the UK, but apparently I had better things to do some evenings, though I can't imagine what.

Then, on Sunday, I'd kind of hoped to pair something else with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the 4pm showtimes for the Imax 3D presentations really don't lend to that. But that's okay; Sunday is crossword & grocery shopping day, after all.

The ticket kiosk ate my ticket, by the way, which is why all that stuff is written in on the page. Not as bad as Assembly Row just not having them, but, c'mon, your loyalty program's name is Stubs, and I need my stubs!

One disappointment aside, a fun week! This coming one looks interesting as well, so catch the first draft of this blog on my Letterboxd or wait around for me to consider things a bit.


Eksiteu (Exit)

Seen 13 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I will, of course, go longer on this one when I reach it in the Film Rolls queue, but it's a thoroughly fun action/adventure that I could probably recommend to the family members with kids even if it's not specifically made for them. Fun, friendly, always moving forward and fairly non-violent once the inciting incident is over; I think I really would have enjoyed seeing it on the big screen, but it had it's miniature North American release right at the end of Fantasia and skipped Boston anyway. I'd feel kind of dumb if I could have seen it in Montreal, so I won't be looking that up.


Titanic

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #14 (25th anniversary, 3D Dolby Cinema DCP)

I'm not sure I've seen this since the original release, and might not have gone to an anniversary re-release without the 3D conversion because, like with Avatar, it is very easy to forget how effective James Cameron's movies are in the moment one you've got a little distance, seen them shrunk to the size of a television, and started to break them down into pieces. The man is a precision crafter of motion pictures, though, and knows how to make a classic story work for a broad audience as well as anybody.

Which is kind of funny - the spectacle has been the hook for Cameron since The Abyss in 1989, with story often considered secondary because he doesn't necessarily surprise or break new ground. And yet, for as much as the grandeur and obsessive detail of this movie's production design isn't nearly so overwhelming as it was 25 years ago, it never feels like it's been passed by. There's a command of the form and knowledge of what rings true here, taking a simple enough story that almost anyone can relate and finding the little details that make it feel alive. One never feels like he's switched over to "blockbuster mode" when the catastrophe and visual effects begin to take center stage, and he uses great action work and some horrific imagery to communicate the scale without changing the type of movie.

And, boy, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are great here, both at a spot to make a big leap after a few impressive parts and both exactly what the film needs, full of youthful energy, their characters more polished and rough around the edges than one might expect, and almost effortlessly in love. Cameron's going for simplicity here means they can't really work at explaining or justifying that - the audience just has to believe it - and they hit that mark. That they'd go on to excel in more cynical material enhances how perfect they were at this time, in a way; you can see them as newcomers who still have some illusions here. A special supporting cast shout out to Victor Garber, whose modest engineer is achingly tragic.

The conversion to 3D is nice, if mostly understated; I'm not sure if they did it anew with the upscale or if it's the one from the last re-release a decade ago. It shines a bit of a light on the rare digital effects that haven't aged as well as the rest throughout the film but impresses in the last act - the extra depth and mechanical structure is nice throughout, but when the stem is vertical and the camera looks down, one sees why they'd do this. The 4K upgrade is mostly impressive a swell, aside from a couple shots where it doesn't quite take; Paramount is going to sell some good looking discs later this year.

As they should. It's easy to forget just how great this is, because it hasn't really been imitated enough to be better than its imitators and romance as a genre doesn't get much respect. But it works like crazy, even when that's harder than it looks.


Chansilineun bokdo manhji (Lucky Chan-sil)

Seen 16 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Blu-ray)

The idea of this movie that I had in my head - director Kim Cho-hee, who had spent much of her career as producer for Hong Sang-soo, making a feature about a producer who suddenly has the art-house figure she'd been working with drop dead - had more potential to be a satire that bites the hand that feeds it than Kim goes for. I'm not disappointed that she went the way she did, but no matter how warm and charming this film is, I kind of still want that other one.

As an aside, the Blu-ray edition is gorgeous from packaging to video, and the simple song over the end credits is weirdly catchy. I really wish there were more English-friendly releases like it.


Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (special engagement, DCP)

I just saw this a few years back (have we really been doing pandemic stuff for three years?), and I once again wonder if Ang Lee would have used flashbacks if the de-aging tech had been available when this came out, and what that would have been like. I think he can be trusted with it as much as anyone, but it's tough to imagine the movie being any better.

Indeed, this film is close enough to perfect that I really don't have that much to say about it: It's some of Michelle Yeoh's and Chow Yun-fat's best work, and what's kind of amazing about that is just how reserved the pair are and how much time they spend basically as sleuths working a case as opposed to would-be lovers totally focused on one another, just really beautiful jobs of revealing who they are through what they do.

And that's considering that what they do is often revealed through impossible action, with Lee and Yuen Woo-ping just making the fact that this group can run up walls and fly feel perfectly natural even though the way they stage it is telling: Chow's Li Mu Bai is a master, defying gravity casually; Zhang Ziyi's Jen is the prodigy, so even if it comes easy to her, she clearly likes to show off; Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien is not quite in the same refined air as Li, so you see her working at it, but always get the feeling that, among normal people, she's one of the best, and never actually looks bad next to the preternaturally gifted folks she meets.

Anyway, I love this movie, and am reminded why every time I see it. I don't know that the new restoration being touted is actually newer than the 4K disc I watched last time, but I have no problem with Sony coming up with a thin veneer of "look, we're going to cash in on Michelle's Oscar buzz". Hopefully they'll have a chance to do so with Chow and Zhang in the next few years.

What I wrote in April '20


Living

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Living is just an exquisitely constructed and photographed film from start to finish. The opening made me wonder why we don't present the main credits like that any more, and I want to know how they managed the trick where it looked like the photograph at the funeral was about to come to life, as if imbued with its subject's new found vitality. At the start, there is also a seamless transition from nostalgic grain to painfully sharp digital capture with rich dark shades, and a formal rigidity to the shots throughout that threatens to crush the viewer but only if they allow it.

There are folks who don't necessarily like to see the filmmaker's hand so clearly, but in some ways, that seems the whole point of the film - the characters need to see the forces that are pushing them into unfulfilling situations, not necessarily out of malice, but inertia, propriety, and fear of blame if something goes wrong. Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro often seem to be tipping their hand so that the audience can recognize it applying to them as well. There are metaphors for this sort of control throughout; note, for instance, how Mr. Williams doesn't quite get the knack of the claw game, while the less set-in-her-ways Miss Harris is able to pull her rabbit out.

In the middle of all that, is Bill Nighy, his wiry figure and precise diction the perfect representation of a man who simply doesn't register, but it doesn't take much for him to become a version with a little joie de vivre, even if the flip side is palpable sorrow despite practicality about how much good it does. He's a perfect fit for the role, especially when he is seen as a template for almost every other male character in the movie, from Alex Sharp's newcomer who could choose not to go down the same road, to how the burlier figure and loud clothing Jamie Wilkes sports as Talbot marks him as Williams's opposite.

For a moment, it seems to go on a bit too long, but there's a certain self-awareness in that, as those left behind have to face how their memorable gesture may not last, and one must find new ways to keep oneself on a good path when the system is built to move one away from the daring. Yes, you may feel like it's time to coast out, but you don't really have that option.


Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)

People often fairly complain about how fake and weightless some of these movies are, but consider this: Maybe it's just because he's a good actor, but Michael Douglas looks like he's having the time of his life imagining what weird creatures will be digitally composited into his scenes and being a giant nerd about ants in this movie. Other guys with his resume would obviously be wondering how it came to this, but I'm not sure anybody is having quite as much fun as him, although Michelle Pfeiffer sure looks like she's going to enjoy getting to be a sci-fi badass as long as she can.

That aside, Quantumania is a pretty good Marvel movie, not breaking new ground but delivering the goods folks have ordered. By now, you've kind of got to meet these things where they are - yes, this will sacrifice some things that would make it a better individual film for the epic material; there's going to be a sky full of visual effects in the climax even if it maybe would have worked better with a tighter focus. But, the folks making it also know how to make a solid, entertaining adventure with enough danger to make you consider whether Paul Rudd is signed for more movies and enough wisecracking to grease the wheels without it quite becoming cringe material. It hits its marks and the guys doing creature work are clearly having as much of a blast as the folks at the top of this three-generation adventure.

Is it mostly solid, competent work built to look good on an Imax 3D screen? Yeah, and it probably only really transcends that when Jonathan Majors is putting in the work to establish Kang the Conqueror as a worthy foil for the next few years of Marvel material, tweaking what we've already seen on Loki for something more overtly villainous but the sort of confidence that feels human as well as formidable. I'm eager to see where he pops up next in these movies.

At a certain point, I imagine most folks get in a rut writing about Marvel movies, because they are unusually consistent and unambiguously commercial in their storytelling. I probably gave this an extra quarter-star because I like 3D goofiness, the way this particular Marvel crew seems to value kid-friendliness a bit more than the rest (really, this is probably a couple easily-replaced cusswords from being a straight PG), and, heck, I even still kind of like Bill Murray showing up and doing Bill Murray. These guys know what they're doing and don't screw it up.