These Weeks in Tickets: 23 September 2019 - 6 October 2019

My job pays me money that I spend on movies, but on occasion gets in the way of seeing them, as when they send me to some Dallas-area parking lot with a building in the middle for the better part of a week so that I can sit in on three hours or so of meetings.





Not that this is why I've got a blank page for the 23rd to 26th; sometimes there's just not enough to see, inconvenient times for what does look interesting, and maybe some rain to get in the way. Then there's a bunch of smaller stuff that looks like fun, and I actually make a relatively rare stop at the Capitol for The Day Shall Come on Friday, which is good but not quite what I had hoped for.

Saturday, I wound up doing a double feature of Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles & Monos on Saturday, which is not necessarily a completely strange pairing; both have Spanish-speaking leads and animals dying in unpleasant fashion. I liked Monos more, and am glad that I finally got to it after having missed it at IFFBoston.

Sunday's movie wound up being Abominable, with the time more or less selected around when it was playing in 3D, which has really thinned out in Boston despite the fact that if you've got AMC's A-List, it doesn't actually cost more. That's a bummer, because DreamWorks tends to use that tool well and this particular movie is a perfectly nice, charming family adventure; hopefully the nieces and their friends will dig it.

Then it was home it was to rest up for the next morning when I'd have to be up early to get to Logan to get to Dallas to get to Carrollton, which is not exactly a fun town, but apparently Agile development requires these big PI planning get-togethers. There was "mandatory fun" all three nights, because who doesn't enjoy spending another three hours with their co-workers after being in the office and meetings with them all day? Especially if it means spending your birthday at TopGolf, which combines being a loud bar with stepping out into 90-degree heat to drive golf balls despite really not knowing how to swing a golf club well? It's just fantastic!

Still, the saddest evening was probably "casino night", where some folks from a local casino set up some tables at work and there was so-so food and mocktails with the chips representing not money, but raffle tickets for prizes at the end of the night. I bailed on that to see The Clmbers, wihch was only playing Imax theaters for the exact period when I would be in Texas, and you want the big screen for a Tsui Hark-produced movie about a Chinese team trying to summit Everest. The movie itself wasn't great, but the theater has become a Dine-In location since I was last in Frisco, meaning they brought a milkshake to my seat.

After getting in late Thursday, I was stupidly the only person not telecommuting on Friday, and while that should have been license to bail early - work grabs extra hours the first few days of the week, you get the last off, right? - I wound up not figuring something out until mid-afternoon and staying late, and thus not lined-up well for anything on a weekend where the big opening wasn't something I cared for anyway. Then a lazy Saturday wound up with some plans switched, sending me to Fresh Pond for a double feature of Dilili in Paris & The Parts You Lose, neither of which is very good although Dilili at least has the excuse of a horrible English dub.

So I wound up not seeing the new Takashi Miike, FIrst Love, until Sunday, and it was (as expected) kind of a kick. I hope this means Well Go is going to be distributing more Japanese films on top of just Miike's stuff, since aside from a few art-house names who get some attention (and have recently done European movies), what mainstream-ish stuff makes it out of Japan is mostly what can play a night or two for the anime crowd, and we could use a bit more Miike in theaters here.

I was then going to go back to Fresh Pond for War, but my stomach and intestines were warning me against a 155-minute Indian movie, so it was home with a quick detour for groceries. Maybe it'll be on my Letterboxd page later this week.

First Love

At the risk of making too earnest a joke about its title, I wonder how many people are being introduced to Takashi Miike for the first time with First Love. Having spent most of the last decade and a half getting to know Miike's work from his films playing festivals and a brief period in the aughts when people were throwing everything they could against the wall to see what sticks on DVD, and being too comfortable in my very privileged ability to see unusual movies, I've got no idea how people might discover him today. Do fans of the manga adaptations he's done check out what else the director of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has made? Does Netflix or Prime occasionally have their algorithm cough up his work when you've watched enough weird stuff? Is his work even well-represented on the streaming services considering how indifferent Japanese studios can seem to be about their movies crossing the Pacific? I am old and not plugged into how people discover things like this today.

Which makes me curious about Well Go grabbing this one and putting it into theaters. They haven't done a lot of Japanese genre cinema, concentrating on Chinese, Korean, and American indies, but they've got a channel on Amazon Prime and I wonder if maybe they're going to be pushing into this area a little more. I obviously recommend that they pick up the new Yoshihiro Nakamura movie coming this fall and also dipping into his catalog which has shamefully received little play here.

Or it's random, a festival acquisition the distributor thought would do well that doesn't signal any particular strategy. I kind of hope it's a sign of things to come, though.

Hatsukoi (First Love)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2019 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP)

It's not just that director Takashi Miike has been incredibly prolific over the course of his career - this year's Fantasia International Film Festival was unusual not just in that he didn't have a film on the program, but that he usually has at least two - but in that he's done a bit of everything, from art-house experiments to family adventures to blockbuster comic-book adaptations, even if he's best known for offbeat crime and horror. First Love may not be the gob-smacking experience that his breakout films were, but is some good, old-school Miike, a throwback to when he was cranking out yakuza films on deadline and neither self-consciously weird nor surprisingly mainstream, even if it's also aware that those days are past.

It starts with a young boxer, Leo Katsuragi (Masataka Kubota), who frustrates his coach by being talented but not passionate, like this is a job he fell into because he showed an aptitude in high school - at least until he has an apparent seizure in the ring and is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Elsewhere in Tokyo, yakuza Gondo (Seiyo Uchino) has just been released in prison and if he's not quite spoiling for a fight, he's not going to do anything to make war with the Chinese triads in Shinjuku less inevitable. One member of his clan, Kase (Shota Sometani), has a plan to kick it off now, stealing a shipment of meth from low-level soldier Yasu with the help of corrupt detective Ohtomo (Nao Ohmori) and then sitting it out for a couple year in jail on a minor charge before picking up the pieces when he gets out. They'll make the drug-addicted call girl stashed in Yasu's apartment, Yuri "Monica" Sakakuri (Sakurako Konishi), their fall guy. Or at least that's the plan before Monica hallucinates the father who sold her into prostitution and bolts past a sulking Leo, who thinks Ohtomo is attacking her and lays him out, while on Leo's end, Yasu's girlfriend Julie (Becky) proves unexpectedly difficult to dispose of.

There's more going on, although the traditional power struggles and other tales of yakuza honor are few and far between, which is something the characters themselves seem to find frustrating: Gondo is released into a world where the yakuza, who have often been portrayed as increasingly businesslike in recent years, are at the end stage of it, preparing to consolidate in a massive merger to stand against foreign competition, and is none to pleased about it. The triads' chief enforcer Chia is ironically even more disappointed; she came to Japan expecting to be thrust into a Ken Takakura movie only to find that culture dead or dying, if it was ever real. Miike and writer Masa Nakamura don't overtly harp on the end of the yakuza for much of the movie - we're already past showing prominent back tattoos or missing digits even to complain about the new generation not respecting tradition - but it's probably telling that a climactic moment completely disengages from reality. That's what audiences want now, and that's what they're going to get.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Fantasia 2017 catch-up, part 2: Dead Shack, Pork Pie, A Day, Money's Money, Junk Head, The Laplace's Demon, Love & Other Cults, and The Mole Song 2: Hong Kong Capriccio

Folks, if you're going to attend a festival while having a day job or just otherwise planning to stretch that content out over a while - rough drafting is kind of crucial, along with good notes. You may feel like a tool taking notes during a screening, but if you want to write something up later, it's really incredibly helpful. So is dashing off a couple of quick paragraphs between screenings, whether to post as capsules on your site/Letterboxd/wherever, or to save for yourself - the structure and reminder of what you thought was important and memorable at the time really helps give shape later on.

And sometimes that delay works out all right - it turns out that I posted my full review of Money's Money within a couple of days of its actual release in France. I have no idea if that actually drove views to EFC or not, but I've got to admit, it made me feel just a bit more relevant than when I would do a review and it wasn't actually near any chances for people to actually see the thing.

24 more to go, give or take. This may stretch into November, but the stuff you see at these festivals deserve the write-ups.

Dead Shack

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Axis, DCP)

This movie should have been a complete disaster; it's got the stink of 1980s horror nostalgia executed without many thoughts beyond liking gory old movies but maybe liking them more if they were quippier and less likely to take themselves seriously That's generally a recipe for only making the shell of a good horror movie, but Dead Shack instead turns out, if not great, then not bad. It's good enough that if the filmmakers are able to cash in on a demand for early-teen-centered horror after It, I won't begrudge them their good timing.

After a brief glimpse at what looks like the end of a party that was kind of weird before it went horribly wrong, we see Colin (Gabriel LaBelle) get picked up for a weekend in a secluded cabin with his friend Jason (Matthew Nelson-Mahood) and his family: Jason's sister Summer (Lizzie Boys), upon whom Colin understandably harbors a bit of a crush; father Roger (Donavon Stinson), the perhaps too-laid-back father; and Lisa (Valerie Tian), the hot but kind of snotty potential stepmother. It's not a group that meshes perfectly, so the kids wind up taking a walk in the woods, and when they stumble upon that house from before the credits, there's no way they just say "something smells funny, let's get back home."

To a certain extent, how much someone enjoys this movie is a matter of how well he or she responds to swear-y, sarcastic teens. I'm not a particular fan, and while this one gets a boost from a dumb but likable dad who joins in - Donavon Stinson hits the nail on the head in making Roger enjoyably laid-back, able to improve the kids' banter as he dives in but also making it no surprise that he'll be kind of useless when it counts. The interplay between Colin, Jason, and Summer is kind of boilerplate stuff - Colin's shy, Summer's 75/25 in terms of being annoyed and flattered by his interest, and Jason's the kind of twerp whose constant abrasiveness is not clever but loud enough to make up for it. If it comes off as genuine and frequently funny, it's because the authentically young cast sells it very well; Gabriel LaBelle, Matthew Nelson-Mahood, and Lizzie Boys may not be given the freshest of material, but they bring the right sorts of teen self-doubt and assurance to it.

Full review on EFC.

Pork Pie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

There's something kind of charming about the very existence of this film, the result of a son making his own version of one of his father's films, although it needs a bit more than that for a hook to be more than a curiosity to someone who hadn't seen the 1981 original Goodbye Pork Pie. I'm not sure whether Pork Pie actually finds that, although it plays nicely enough to be an enjoyable matinee, and has a few pretty impressive car bits as well.

It's a bit hampered in its choice of main characters; Jon (Dean O'Gorman) is a blocked and broke writer determined to win the woman he drove away back despite not having done much if anything to improve himself after driving Susie (Antonia Prebble) away decisively. His plan is to meet her at their friends' wedding (to which he wasn't invited), but there's the little problem of his car being on its last legs. Fortunately, he manages to talk his way into a yellow Mini Cooper being driven by Luke (James Rolleston) - which, of course, is stolen. So, sure, when Keira (Ashleigh Cummings) climbs out a drive-through window and into the backseat as she's fired for giving a hamburger joint's customers animal-rights pamphlets with their orders, why not add the rally she wants to attend to their road trip?

That plot is thin enough that the cast had better be pretty darn likable for the movie to thrive. It mostly manages this, even if it does ultimately need to balance Jon with a mother so heavy-handed in her opposition to Susie getting back together with him that his traveling clear to the other end of New Zealand to plead his case sounds almost reasonable. What's impressive is how filmmaker Matt Murphy and his cast don't go for particularly obvious chemistry right off; their banter is never quite awkward but it's not smoothed over by some obvious connection, and for a good portion of the movie, a bizarre or intrusive question will be met with a look that implies the second person can't quite remember why they're traveling with the first. It's never enough to break things, though, because there is an awkward chemistry and a shared impulsiveness to answer it.

Full review on EFC.

Ha-roo (A Day)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

Say this for A Day - it rapidly makes a solid impression that being stuck in this sort of time-loop would be a sort of hell, as nobody in the audience wants to watch a tragedy happen over and over again any more than the people involved do, so by the time it does a bit of a switch-up, we're pretty relieved as well as thankful to see that this movie is going to be more than a hyper-compressed Groundhog Day with violent death. It's still kind of a mess, but it's a quick and often effective one.

The person trapped in the loop is Dr. Kim Jun-young (Kim Myung-min), a doctor famous for his international charity work, just back in Seoul from speaking at the United Nations and eager to see his daughter Eun-jung (Jo Eun-hyung), though the tween is frustrated and annoyed by her frequently-absent father, as such girls are. It's 9:58am when he wakes up on the plane, and he'll be yanked back to that moment at 12:30pm - and, as he'll soon discover, it's pretty much impossible to get where he needs to be to change what happens at noon in time. After at least a half-dozen cycles, Jun-young isn't quite numb to what's happening, but he can still be jolted when one of the EMTs on scene, Min-chul (Byun Yo-han), asks how he's able to react differently as well.

It's more than a bit of a relief when Min-chul shows up, because even though that's likely just about a quarter of the way through a 90 minute movie, it's already kind of a punishing grind. That's a large part of the point of the film, of course - people being put through hell to pay for their sins until they can finally attain forgiveness or see the pointlessness of their anger - and it's writer/director Cho Sun-ho's biggest and most important accomplishment that the audience's heads are likely heading in the direction of Sisyphus (or whatever the Korean equivalent is) and other myths of eternal punishment and torment right away, despite the fact that the opening act never really slows down enough for Jun-young to wax particularly philosophical about what this is like, and neither he nor the film in general spends much time in puzzle-solving mode until later.

Full review on EFC.

Money (Money's Money)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

As much as I suspected going in that this would be a fairly grimy, no-nonsense crime movie, I wasn't necessarily prepared for how little it sends to have going on aside from getting things into position and then getting people killed. That sort of seeming nihilism can be as much feature as bug - a lot of crime stories are about how the big score can seem like the only solution - although it's not necessarily a point that the filmmakers seem to be trying to make here.

It takes place in the port city of Le Havre, the sort of place where people carpool because everybody who has been living in the same run-down neighborhood for generations has also been working the same sweaty job. Take, for instance, Danis (George Babluani), his friend Eric (Vincent Rottiers), and Eric's sister Alexandra (Charlotte Van Bervesseles); it's not much of a living, but it's the one they've got, although maybe that can change; Alex has learned that M. Mercier (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), the local Secretary of State for Public Safety, keeps a lot of cash on hand, relatively unguarded; it should be pretty easy to steal. It would certainly be enough for Danis to pay off his gambling debts (or not) and start over somewhere else with his daughter. It is seldom that easy, though - Mercier keeps a lot of cash in the house because the mob uses him as a conduit, blackmailing him over the matter of a dead escort. The trio are about to walk into a more dangerous situation than they expected.

It's a simple crime thriller, and as a result of that simplicity it sometimes feels oddly small, returning to the same spot in ways that don't necessarily feel natural or otherwise feeling a bit under-populated. When filmmaker Géla Babluani is setting things up, this doesn't feel like much of a problem; there's an old noir tradition of focusing on the people that work in the infrastructure of a place, getting things from here to there but not paid enough to have any sort of mobility themselves, in large part because they're bled by both the big shots above and the bookies or crooks at their own level. Babluani does the feeling of the film a service by establishing these characters' world as so small that their neighborhood feels like a single street, and it's notable that even the attempt to escape it takes place on a train; it's another space too narrow for someone to escape his past that offers only limited options.

Full review on EFC.

Junk Head

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Axis, ProRes)

If nothing else, you've got to respect the very existence of an independently-made stop-motion animated sci-fi film that runs almost two hours. That thing is a labor of love that had one person exercising both amazing creativity and incredible patience. In this case, it looks like he started from an initial short, but that takes little away from the finished product, a dystopian odyssey where even the surface-dwelling human explorer is as changeable as the world around him after his quest to learn about the clone workforce underneath immediately goes awry.

You can sort of see the episodic structure, and how director Takahide Hori may have occasionally used it to recharge his creative batteries, as his (mostly) human explorer occasionally falls down to a lower level of the clone-occupied subterranean world, with each new group to find him building him a new robot body and placing him in a new sub-adventure. It never feels like the stop-and-go sort of episodic, though, with his new form and adventures being a refresh rather than a restart and the flashbacks that emerge from his jumbled memories helping to tie things together even though the focus is often on the here and now. That we don't see much of this explorer in his true form until late gives Hori a lot of room to explore this world from the point of view of a character who is just as much an outsider as the viewer while his outbursts of memory and metamorphoses create just enough of a sense of urgency to move things along.

And while this isn't the sort of animated film you'd call "gorgeous" or the like - it's a post-apocalyptic world whose clones are often mutated and where various forms of worm-like monsters can leap out at any second - the detail is impressive, and the use of CGI to augment the physical puppetry is excellent. It is the sort of film where scaling it up and down in one's head keeps it impressive, as either the small things in a scene are incredibly detailed or Hori has built something fairly substantial, and he's able to use the grotesquerie of his designs to give sympathetic characters a certain pathos and to link the world's creatures without ever seeming to repeat himself too much. Spoken dialogue isn't quite minimized, but the title character, at least, communicates more through action than words. I believe most of the dialogue is nonsense sounds - it didn't sound like Japanese - so everybody is a bit distanced by watching it with subtitles.

Full review on EFC.

The Laplace's Demon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Camera Lucida, DCP)

The Laplace's Demon is the sort of movie that feels like a throwback until you try and remember just what it's throwing back to. After all, when movies had this sort of look, not many people were actually making this sort of sci-fi/horror; the crisp monochrome photography, ornate setting, and trickily-mounted set pieces were too much for genre productions unless they got to shoot one the not-yet-disassembled set of a classier film. Like the films made by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, these films are speculative fiction in terms of style as well as story, though this nifty film is contemporary in its setting.

It's not immediately obvious that it's taking place in the present day until someone pulls out a laptop. Six men (Silvano Bertolin, Fernando D'Urbano, Duccio Giulivi, Walter Smorti, Simone Valeri & Alessandro Zonfrilli) and one woman (Carlotta Mazzoncini) are traveling to "Rock's Nest", a magnificent but isolated mansion on a craggy island in the Mediterranean to meet with the mysterious Dr. Cornelius on the matter of predictive algorithms, brought there on a ship captained by Alfred (Simone Moscato), who naturally is none too pleased to find that there seems to be nobody on the island to give him his money and the weather makes leaving immediately impossible. He's not nearly so intrigued as the self-described "specialists in applied presumption" to find a scale model of the house in the main chamber, connected to a complex clockwork mechanism that controls eight chessmen - pawns - that follow their movements. There is also a queen moving through miniature house, and they are soon reminded that queens capture pawns far more often than vice versa.

From the start, it's extraordinarily easy to imagine the premise of The Laplace's Demon laid out by either the mad scientist in a pulp magazine or the stalwart genius opposing him, a spot illustration captioned with a line from the text on the facing page, but while director Giordano Giulivi and he collaborators will eventually get there, the film is a kick to watch on the way. It's full of grainy black-and-white photography, slightly heightened performances, and effects that are not shy about being visual effects rather than real things, and Giulivi uses that seemingly less-refined style not just to show a winking fondness for genre trappings of a simpler time, but to plunge the audience into a world where what the characters are fighting is more elemental - not just in the striking death-representing visual of its "monster", but in a philosophical determinism that implies that every step a person makes is predictable. The music by Duccio Giulivi announces the film's genre and influences, and that's fine - even if style weren't half of what makes this movie what it is, the score makes a good jump from atmospheric to frantic the same way the movie does.

Full review on EFC.

Kemonomichi (Love and Other Cults)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Despite being one of those Japanese films that not only never actually seems to circle back around to the flash forward where it starts but has no spot where that scene would fit - with a more pointed opening than most films that do that - Love and Other Cults works in large part because, even with the jumps and changes it features, there's a sad inevitability of things getting to that point, that there's no way for its lost girl to avoid the situation she finds herself in at the start. And like a lot of those very same movies, the path that gets everyone to a depressing place is often not just darkly funny, but even exhilarating.

Narrator Ryota Sakuma (Kenta Suga) falls hard for Ai Shima (Sairi Ito) as soon as she arrives at his junior high, but for once the rumors about the new girl in foster care probably don't do the screwed-up life she has led justice: Her mother Kaori (Leona Hirota) is something of a religious maniac, jumping from one belief system to another and eventually sending Ai to her latest obsession's commune, where Ai is declared as the cult's chosen one "Ananda" - at least, until it's raided because Lavy (Matthew Chozick) is a pervert as well as a fraud. So, throughout high school, she winds up bouncing between foster homes and terrible boyfriends, while Ryota himself falls in with a bad crowd in Yuji Mieno (Kaito Yoshimura) and Kenta Kitagawa (Antony), teenage hangers-on to low-level yakuza Hisaya Kida (Denden). Ryota's and Ai's paths frequently intersect over the next five years, but seldom at a point when they can manage to bring out the best in each other.

In some ways, this feels more like a Sion Sono movie than the actual Sono film that played the festival, plunging its too-young characters into desperate and bizarre situations that they sometimes are too inexperienced to understand is wrong and then having to push through because, well, what else is a kid to do? This is very much writer/director Eiji Uchida's territory too, and Uchida tends to have a more cynical, realistic view of these things than Sono; there's nothing uncanny or fantastical about the darkness in these characters' lives. Things get weird, sometimes jaw-droppingly so, but part of what makes Ai's situation is just how changeable it is - Ryota loses sight of her for what seems like a minute, and her whole life seems to be upended in the meantime.

Full review on EFC.

Mogura no Uta Hong Kong Kyousoukyoku (The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)

I honestly retained very little of the first The Mole Song movie Takashi Miike did from when I saw it at the festival a couple years back, and the "previously" reel suggests my brain may have been overwhelmed more than it being a case of it not being memorable; a metric ton of stuff happened, and I have vague memories of musical numbers on top of that (my review suggests I liked it a fair amount even if it did wind up not making a lasting impression). Hong Kong Capriccio benefits from being relatively simple - undercover cop rising in the yakuza uncomfortably quickly must save the boss's daughter from human traffickers and try to take him (and the Chinese mafia) down.

That undercover cop is Reiji Kikukawa (Toma Ikuta), and the sequel starts the same way as the original, with him getting dragged through a crazy situation naked, this time in a cage suspended from a helicopter. He's only got a brief moment to check in with his handlers and his girlfriend Junna Wakagi (Riisa Naka) before being sent back out into the field - where, ironically, the zealous new head of the Organized Crime Task Force, Shinya Kabuto (Eita), is making it hard to operate, in part because boss Shudo Todoroki (Koichi Akawi) has promoted him and his partner Masaya Hiura (Shinichi Tsutumi), making Reiji a person of interest. Shudo has also told Reiji to watch over sexy 19-year-old daughter Karen (Tsubasa Honda) - the sort of girl who inevitably creates uncomfortable situations - even as both the cops and yakuza are trying to deal with a push from China's "Dragon Skulls", led by the mysterious "Papillon".

This plot is exactly the pile of yakuza movie cliches it sounds like, but not quite the one-thing-on-top-of-another marathon that the first was. It is, perhaps, the difference between playing these familiar elements for broad comedy and trying to turn them inside out to mock them, in addition to a sequel not necessarily having to go for every mob-movie joke they can because they might not get another chance; the filmmakers can tell a story simple enough to hang some jokes on without the audience having to struggle to keep up. That gives Miike and the writers a lot of room to do genuinely nutty things - pun fully intended, as the hero takes it in the crotch a lot, and there's a lot of slapstick and other obvious-but-effective comedy. It's got one of the craziest opening bits I've seen in a while, something which doesn't happen on film until the whole idea of giving Miike accrual money to adapt popular comics becomes an actual thing, and the tacky, ridiculous jokes continue through the end, a showdown in Hong Kong that doubles down on the villains being comic-book crazy and pumps the action up to downright ridiculous levels.

Full review on EFC.

Fantasia 2017.01: The Villainess & Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

Ha ha, funny thing - I forgot that the handle on my suitcase broke on my last trip and had a heck of a time carting it around. Combine that with a late check-in time at this year's AirBNB and that meant it wasn't a whole lot of fun hauling it to the bus station in Boston or from the one in Montreal, as I was keeping it with me while finding the new Fantasia offices (walked past them twice because I knew, from previous visits, that that was the campus bookstore) and picking up the tickets I needed to get into the opening night films.

But, get there I did, and even managed to snag a front-row, not-terribly-far-off-center seat despite being pretty far back in line. Then it was time to get started film critic-ing:


Brand new notebook, not yet losing pages in the back because they don't make the back cover out of the same material as the front. Feels good, and I think I'll be able to keep up enough that I won't crap out at 40 reviews and only half the festival blogged this year.

There were also guests:



The fellow in the middle is The Villainess director Lee Byung-gil, who also did Confession of Murder, which played Fantasia a few years back. It seemed to take him a little time to warm up to the Q&A thing, although I couldn't really tell - most of the questions were asked in French, and therefore got answered in French, and the one question that was in English was so long and rambling that by the time it was translated into Korean and answered, it wound up being answered in French because the translator maybe lost track of the original language, as one does when all of the other questions were in another.

Still, he did give what seems like a fair-but-frustrating answer to one of the things about the movie that bugged me, if my terribly high-school French can be trusted:

SPIOILERS!

It sounded like he said that Sook-hee's daughter Eun-hye may or may not be alive, depending on whether or not there's a sequel. If there is, she's alive, if not, she died. Fair enough - I think making the film a tragedy works if it's a one-off, but no need to overburden a sequel - although it's a weird thing to leave unclear, as the audience is invested.

!SRELIOPS

Probably didn't need a ticket for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, but better safe than sorry. It took a while to get to the movie, as The Villainess ran late with the Q&A and then the Japanese Consul spoke for a bit and there was kind of a long pre-show as a local violinist/fantasy fan performed. She was actually really good, and if you weren't up at 5am to catch a bus, you probably didn't mind the wait, but, wow, I was fading by the end.

Anyway, enough grumpiness! Today's plan is Tilt, Super Dark Times, Killing Ground (though I may try to see if I can make Teiichi: Battle of the Supreme High), and Museum. Japanese Girls Never Die is highly recommended.

"No Wave

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2017 in L'Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

First movie of the festival, technically, was this short from the Fantastique Week-end series, and it's a good one. The idea is pretty simple - guy listening to a white-noise broadcast of ocean waves is pretty sure he hears someone drowning, and when he calls the station to complain, well, people can either react sanely to his insane claims or be insane themselves.

What's striking about this short is that writer/director Stéphane Lapointe is able to pivot a number of times within relatively few minutes and get good results each time. The weird noises in the ambient soundtrack? Funny and creepy. Customer service trying to deal with a deranged-sounding customer? Same. The manager after she escalates it? Genuinely unsettling, hinting that maybe we're going for a tell-tale heart thing here. It may make one too many zigzags at the end, but I still found myself kind of interested with the possibilities.

Ak-Nyeo (The Villainess)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2017 in L'Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

The Villainess is a top-tier action movie that nearly gets strangled by a plot so full of new faces, shady organizations, and recurring motifs as to make a viewer start to wonder if writer/director Jung Byung-gil is trying to cover up for there really being relatively little going on. It makes who is fighting who and why such an abstraction that it can be tough to get invested in the outcome, but when things do finally click, the movie works as some crazy, amazing action spectacle.

It opens with a bang, tossing the viewer into the middle of a long-cut hallway fight shot from the first-person perspective of a furious woman. She basically destroys a major meth operation, the police have the place surrounded by the time she's done, and Sook-hee (Kim Ok-vin) is captured. With nothing of her old life left and pregnant besides, she's recruited by a top-secret organization to be a government assassin, told by Chief Kwon (Kim Seo-hyung) that she'll be free to live a normal life by the time daughter Eun-hye starts junior high. So, she is given a new-ish face and, after a couple years of training, a new life as actress Chae Yeon-soo, not aware that new neighbor and would-be boyfriend Hyun-soo (Sung Joon) is also her handler. Life is going about as well as it can given the circumstances, at least until the agency gets a lead on Choi Chun-min (Lee Seung-joo), who seems to have been rising up the criminal organization headed by Sook-hee's late teacher Joon-sang (Shin Ha-kyun) on the basis of a hard drive stolen the night of Sook-hee's rampage. That's the sort of thing that brings all the lies she's been told into the light, probably not great news for either organization that has contributed to making her an unstoppable killer.

That hallway fight is the middle of Sook-hee's story but the logical place to start things, but it makes for a flashback-heavy structure that is big on highlighting events that mirror each other and eventually highlighting the major events in Sook-hee's life from the time between gangsters killing her father to her arrest, but not so much on giving them a lot of texture or giving a shape to the agency and its goals. Lay out the relationship between Joon-sang and Sook-hee, and it's creepy, but director Jung never truly makes the audience feel that. On the other side, Jung doesn't show enough of Sook-hee's training and interaction with her fellow students to show why Kim-sun (Jo Eun-ji) is a rival and Min-joo (Son Min-ji) is a friend; they just pop up when needed later. Nothing really comes of the hard drive macguffin, and something really important is left frustratingly ambiguous for the finale.

Full review on EFC.

JoJo no kimyô na bôken: Daiyamondo wa kudakenai - dai-isshô (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2017 in L'Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

Hiring Takashi Miike to direct an adaptation of a manga that has "bizarre" right in the title seems like it should be a gimme, an easy and obvious fit, even if the idea of Miike directing family-friendly, decently-budgeted adaptations of popular manga still seems a bit peculiar. If audience reaction is anything to go by, he hit a lot of spots that the fans of the long-running series love, although it can be kind of an acquired taste for those encountering the franchise for the first time, though the action is still kind of fun.

After an opening where veteran cop Ryohei Higashikata (Jun Kunimura) runs serial killer Angelo Katagiri (Takayuki Yamada) to ground only to find that he has somehow acquired demonic powers, the audience gets introduced to this world through the eyes of Koichi Hirose (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a high-school sophomore who has just moved to pleasant suburb Morioh Town, although the aforementioned murders are probably going to knock it down the list of Japan's most liveable suburbs. It's a nice school, and the classmate assigned to look out for him, Yukako Yamagishi (Nana Komatsu), is cute but intense. "Intense" wouldn't necessarily be the word used to describe Josuke "JoJo" Higashikata (Kento Yamazaki) unless you insult his pompadour, though the amazing superpowers that he uses to dispatch those who do mostly fix what got damaged. Small-scale stuff until he runs into someone who seems possessed during a convenience store robbery and his older nephew Jotaro Kujo (Yusuke Iseya) shows up to explain that JoJo is summoning something called a "Stand" when he uses those powers, and it seems that the Nijimura brothers (Mackenyu & Masaki Okada) are trying to create new Stand-users for their own purposes.

Give screenwriter Itaru Era credit - the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure saga is a sprawling multi-generational adventure, with the "Diamond Is Unbreakable" series actually the fourth major arc in the series, chosen because it's the first with a mostly-Japanese cast; that he reduces the mythology to something that fits into this film is likely something of a major accomplishment. Nevertheless, it still often feels like there is just too much to fit in: Koichi and Yukako could probably be removed without the plot suffering too much, although they presumably would be major parts of sequels, and it often feels like each mythology-based moment that the fans will go nuts for comes at the expense of something in the immediate story. The movie eventually explains enough, and sets the action up fairly well, but I constantly got the impression that while the filmmakers made something where you don't need to know the source material to understand it, you're probably not going to love it unless you already know the manga or the anime.

Full review on EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2013.02 (19 July 2013): Drug War & Lesson of the Evil

What's there to say here? A Johnnie To movie, and a Takashi Miike movie. Maybe not quite the platonic ideal of a Fantasia day - there'd have to be some animation, some martial arts, and something awesome from a country that you didn't even realize made movies - but those are two of the marquee names that bring me out to Asian/genre festivals, and it makes for a heck of a double feature.

Fun fact that maybe needs checking: The introduction to Lesson of the Evil stated a couple interesting things, that they were the first to play Miike in North America, and that there have been two Miike movies at every edition of the festival since. I could swear there was just one at a festival a few years ago, when he was slowing down a bit to do some bigger-budgeted stuff, but maybe I missed something. Still, that's crazy production from Miike, even if Thursday's Shield of Straw is a lot better than Lesson of the Evil. Give him credit for quickly making new movies, even if they aren't always impressive, when other directors seem to go years trying to find the right next project.

Yesterday was a quick day - I more or less opted to finish all the writing that I'd intended to do on the bus before getting to the first blog post, especially since I awoke to thunder and figured I might be better off not getting caught in one of the thunderstorms that seemed to come out of nowhere. Dropped the temperature down to bearable, though. I ate terribly, though - a Dr. Pepper and an ice cream sandwich for lunch (when it was still really hot) and the traditional Oh Henry and Pepsi (no Max at the concession stand yesterday) during the movies. I didn't stick around for Samurai Cop, because I did that in March and didn't find it to be such a guilty pleasure that I had to do it again.

Anyway, today's plan is Evangelion 3.0, Rurouni Kenshi, Confession of Murder, It's Me, It's Me, and Frankenstein's Army, all at the Imperial. I'll probably break for a late dinner at 9:30ish, as I don't really need to see V/H/S/2 again. I'm the guy in the IFFBoston t-shirt with the ViewMaster design.

Now to just take a moment to find a Wikipedia entry to catch me up on what happened in Evangelion 2.0 before heading out.

Du zhan (Drug War)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2013 in le Cinéma Impérial (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

"Procedural" gets thrown around like it's a dirty word when discussing crime dramas, but it needn't be; in the right hands, it can be a fantastic way to produce taut suspense with the melodrama drained away, while sneakily allowing the cast to create interesting characters without showy theatrics. And as anybody who has been watching genre film for the past couple decades can tell you, Johnnie To has the right hands, with Drug War a fine example of what he can do.

While Captain Zhang Lei (Sun Honglei) and his team are busting a group of drug smugglers at a Jin Hai toll booth, a crystal meth factory belonging to Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) explodes, leaving him temporarily disoriented enough to crash his car. After an aborted escape attempt, he surrenders to Zhang - and since 50 grams of meth can get you the death sentence in China and he processes it by the ton, it behooves him to start talking.

And from there, To and a group of four writers (including frequent collaborator Wai Ka-fai) just keep moving on to the next steps in a quickly-mounted sting operation, injecting themselves into meetings with potential distributor Haha (Hao Ping) and drug lords like Bill Li (Li Zhenqi) and his nephew Chang (Tan Kai), through which they discover other targets of opportunity. Unspoken but obvious is that the anti-drug squad's moves have to be made quickly, lest their targets find out that Timmy is working with them, and this mostly-unspoken circumstance allows To and company to steadily move from one situation to the next without worrying much about transitions or much in the way of subplots. The effect is almost that of a story being played out in real time, with no moments to step back and regroup, although To and editors Allen Leung & David M. Richardson are able to make sure the audience feels the passage of time as the sun goes down or comes up, or signs of fatigue show up in the characters' body language.

Full review at EFC.

Aku no Kyoten (Lesson of theEvil)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2013 in le Cinéma Impérial (Fantasia Festiva, HD)

The late Roger Ebert would use the phrase "dead teenager movie" dismissively, probably with the intention of getting horror fans riled up half the time. And while it's not great form to glibly dismiss an entire genre, sometimes it serves up a movie like Lesson of the Evil (Aku no Kyoten), which seems to have very little purpose but to generate dead teenagers.

Well, it does also give Hideaki Ito a chance to show off a bit. Ito plays Siji Hasumi, the most handsome, popular teacher at a Tokyo high school who is also a homicidal maniac, and he puts the charm to work. The script calls for him to smile wide, tousle students' hair, and otherwise be friendly even once the audience has been made aware of how unhinged he is, and it's to his credit that he doesn't overplay his hand - he shifts down to merely easygoing when necessary and believably blends in because he doesn't overdo being cheerful at the wrong times. Of course, "the wrong times" doesn't include when he's actually committing crimes, part of what makes the movie sneakily fun to watch is that Hasumi enjoys murder the way other people enjoy pick-up basketball.

Such a big character is almost guaranteed to overshadow a great many of his co-stars, though, and that's very much the case here: There are dozens of teenage characters for him to go through, some of who serve rather similar functions, and none of the jump out as worthy adversaries or interesting counterpoints or even exactly likable enough that the viewer will get riled up about seeing that particular kid in danger. At times Miike (who also adapted the screenplay from Yusuki Kishi's novel) goes the serial-protagonist route a la Psycho, but none of the kids have what it takes to make "will this guy be the one to figure things out?" compelling, although Mitsuru Fukikoshi makes a good run with a teacher who is as naturally off-putting as Ito is charismatic.

Full review at EFC.

Boston Fantastic Film Festival: ­Zebraman

You can't have a festival of this type without something from Takashi Miike. Actually, you should generally be able to scare up two or three films by Miike, the man is so prolific. I still haven't watched my DVD of The Great Yokai War yet, so this was my first exposure to "Takashi Miike, family filmmaker", and I liked what I saw. I kind of wish the Festival had scheduled it for an earlier hour and advertised it to families a bit - I would have loved to see how genuine kids reacted to it.

For those unfamiliar with Takashi Miike, him directing a family comedy is roughly equivalent to executives at Warner Brothers getting together and saying "you know who would be a great director for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? David Cronenberg!"

Although, now that I think about it - that needs to happen anyway.

Zebraman

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)

Zebraman actually came out before The Great Yokai War in Japan, although the latter made it to America first. So let the record show that Takashi Miike did have some practice making family films before that better-known one. Though more modestly budgeted, Zebraman is still a bunch of fun, with an injection of crazy that would delight kids it their parents would let them anywhere near it.

Sho Aikawa stars as Shin'ichi Ichikawa, the second-grade supervisor at a medium-sized elementary school. No-one at the school respects him, to the point where the kids are beating up his son. His teenage daughter Midori (Yui Ichikawa) is seeing a much older man. It would probably only be worse if they knew he spent his evenings cosplaying in a papier-mache costume based upon the hero of his favorite 1970s superhero show, Zebraman (which, as if to illustrate how pathetic Shin'ichi is, was canceled after a handful of episodes. The sad thing is, the city is actually in need of a superhero. Midori's boyfriend has a second life as crab-masked villain, and there are enough slimy green aliens lurking underneath the school's gymnasium that the government has dispatched a team to investigate.

The line between playing a superhero story straight and doing parody is hard to find in the best of cases; Miike and writer Kankuro Kudo spend most of their time on the spoofy side, but play it straight enough to earn a bit of suspense. Their pastiche of 1970s sentai programs seems pretty close to spot-on, both in clips and a dream sequence where Shin'ichi fantasizes about the mother of one of his students as "Zebranurse". Affection can come across as disdain when filmmakers try to precisely replicate something that might not hold up to a more critical eye, but they generally find the right mix. The trick, apparently, is that it's okay to initially mock Shin'ichi for dressing up in a stupid costume by having him get his butt kicked early, but the somewhat corny good-intentioned messages of the genre are to be embraced rather than mocked.

Because Miike's name is attached to the movie, I don't know how many kids this winds up playing to outside Japan - the folks who would pick up a foreign family adventure know his reputation. Of course, I don't know who its target audience was over there, or whether it was aimed for the teen and older crowd. If it were remade in the US, Crab-man probably wouldn't be seducing sixteen-year-old girls, and I really doubt that the fungus that has Koen Kondo's military investigator scratching his junk would still be around; they might also tone down the violence with the possessed kids. A lot of the other kid-friendly stuff is done without the slightest hint of irony, though. Kids love green slime, and the CGI for the aliens is almost cute. The hero and the kids who love him are perfectly pure of heart. Some of the details are wonderfully silly, like Shin'ichi's "bedhead" (his hair grows into a zebra's mane when his zebra-sense detects that it's time to save the day!). And the final big action scene is just gloriously over the top.

Sho Aikawa is a lot of fun as the Shin'ichi. He embraces the dorkiness of the character in all its forms - the teacher no-one respects, the loser in a homemade costume, the guy who discovers it's all real but ridiculous. Koen Kondo is similarly fun as the man investigating the apparent alien activity, since he always seems to expect that job would be a little cooler and high-budget, and alternates between trying to elevate it, being disappointed, and finally just giving in to the fact that he's in a low-budget-sci-fi world (but without winking at the audience).

It's great fun, even if the goofiness has a bit more in the way of claws than its American equivalents. Still, it's not too nasty for anyone old enough to read the subtitles, and grown-ups shouldn't find it too terribly juvenile, either.

Also at HBS.