Fantasia 2018.22: Piercing, The Field Guide to Evil, What Keeps You Alive, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, and Brothers' Nest

Bonus day! At least, it feels like a bonus day, though I'd have to check to see just when my emails went from describing the festival as running through the first to ending on the second. I think it was before the schedule was announced, although I didn't notice it until I had paper in hand. Still, it was kind of cool that the 22nd annual festival had 22 days, even though that's a lot of film festival and I was kind of wiped out by the end, to the point where I kind of dragged for my two free days in the city.

So let's take some time to thank the festival's volunteers. It would be interesting to see how much turnover there's been - while the programmers and such have stayed pretty consistent, the volunteers at this festival tend to be a young group, and you move and pick up other obligations in your twenties. The old front row crew is almost gone too. Still, Fantasia remains a fantastically-run festival, better than the more corporate ones I"ve been to and really astonishing for the scale of it. Normal festivals don't run three weeks, and seeing so many of these people here from beginning to end just underscores what a labor of love this is - it's a big commitment during the summer when you could be doing a lot of other things with your afternoons and/or evenings for the better part of a month

The schedule was almost entirely repeats, with the sole exceptions being the two screening at Hall that evening, one of which had already had a limited release (although given that Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum didn't hit Boston, I don't know if it hit Montreal), while Lords of Chaos wasn't announced until midway through the festival. It got a lot of good press, but having already really liked Heavy Trip, I kind of felt like I was set in terms of my metal consumption for the festival and way ahead in my metal enjoyment. So I ended the festival across the street with Brothers' Nest



That's Brothers' Nest director/co-star Clayton Jacobson on the right, and he really is the exact sort of laid-back, chatty Aussie you want to ease you out of a 22-day festival, and he himself seemed low-key honored to have the last film of the festival even if it wasn't officially the closing film. Like, we've all been here a while, but we'll stick around a couple hours longer for his movie. Kind of fit my mood at that point more than Mitch earnestly screaming his excitement across the street would have.

It was a fun Q&A afterward, too. He pointed out that he and his brother are often confused with each other back home in Australia, although you really wouldn't necessarily think so to watch their movie. The film itself was one of those odd little indie shoots where everyone is basically living in the house that serves as the film's main location, since it's kind of out of the way, far enough that the city-based actors thought it was kind of unnerving. They shot in sequence so that they could make a mess, and did a lot of nifty things that might be worth a closer look (for instance only one brother makes the floors creak).

(I have a note from this Q&A just labeled "Movie 'Rams'", which I guess is the Icelandic one about a pair of brothers trying to save their flock. I should either take more detailed notes or not let these things age a month before writing them up.)

That's not quite a wrap on the festival - I've got to circle back and the write up all the other stuff that just got Letterboxd-sized capsules - but it's the end of my time at Fantasia for the year. I'll be back next year, even if I may try to find a way to make it less overwhelming, and I can't wait to see everyone I only see once a year and a bunch of sometimes great, but always interesting movies again.

"Clean Blood"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

There are like three or four things going on in "Clean Blood" that could make for an interesting short genre film, from the opening moments that seem like a flash-forward to a slasher-style ending, the fact that one of the main characters is an exceptionally pregnant man and nobody seems to be saying boo about it, and the otherwise-contentious scene at a family dinner that would, if none of the other things were going on, make this entire clan remember it as "The Christmas with the Really Stupid Argument". It's like writer/director Jordan Michael Blake had a bunch of ideas that he could see connecting but kept cutting down so that he could achieve some sort of artistic minimalism.

It almost works, I think - you can see every single bit of that working, and Blake does a nice job using structure to build a sense of unease, with title cards and act breaks that suggest the little eyebrow-raiser from a moment ago was even more significant, along with a handheld camera that feels like a person rather than a machine. There's skill, and if the goal is just to make the audience feel an odd combination of off-balance, worry, and the mixed emotions of family, it hits that. If there's a more solid storytelling goal, it doesn't quite come together for me, even though it feels like it's teasing, introducing, advancing, and climaxing in all the right places.

Piercing

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

It does not particularly surprise me to see that this comes from a novel by Ryu Murakami, the same author who provided the source material for Audition. One can see a lot of the same DNA that went into that here, though expressed in a garish, colorful manner that's fun to watch in the moment but which never comes together into much more than screenwriter/director Nicolas Pesce showing us just how much affection he has for film and the genre.

Reed (Christopher Abbott) and Mona (Laia Costa) are new parents, which is an exhausting state to be in, and you might not be surprised to find out that Reed is anticipating an upcoming business trip just a little bit. The trouble is, he seems to have snapped - the baby has looked at him and said "you know what you have to do". He's got to sacrifice a prostitute, and one who speaks English so that he can't shut her suffering out. He's already called an escort service for the second night in the hotel, but when he decides he wants to get it over with a night early, the service sends him Jackie (Mia Wasikowska), who is groggy, detached, and not really what he had planned for at all.

There may, someday, be more promising casting for this sort of material than "Mia Wasikowska as a young woman who is more/other than what she seems", but not at the present time. She is, as usual, an exceptional pleasure to watch, playing up Jackie's muted, possibly depressed exterior like it's a thick garment that even her more shockingly unstable moments don't entirely pierce. She never entirely drops a sex worker's reticence to reveal her whole self, which makes the violence that eventually emerges more fascinating - the audience is never quite sure whether it's a reaction or something that was there all along.

Full review at EFC.

The Field Guide to Evil

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

The Field Guide to Evil is not a bad horror anthology, really - it probably averages out to something a notch or so above average by the time all eight countries in its world tour of frightening folklore have checked in. It's just that it quite possibly peaks with its first entry, and even some of the better ones that follow never quite live up to how smart and thrilling that one is.

That first one is Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz's "The Sinful Women of Hollfall", a take on an Austrian myth that at least seems to subvert its folkloric roots while still cranking up some tension. It follows Kathi, a young woman (Marlete Hauser) who witnesses another drawing blood so that she can at least temporarily hide her pregnancy by showing stained undergarments when the village women do their laundry; they grow closer, a danger in itself, as Kathi's mother warns that it will draw The Trud out of the woods. Franz & Fiala engage with what makes this fable frightening on a gut level, but also find ways to interrogate and question it, recognizing both its original intent but also the power myth has over a community itself, and how one can fight those forces.

Turkey's Can Evrenol attacks similar material in "The Haunting of Al Karisi the Childbirth Demon", which features Naz Sayiner as another woman less than satisfied with the slot she is expected to fill, in this case a miserable mother-to-be caring for her bedridden mother-in-law, her possibly abusive husband mostly absent, while a dark force calls from the well. Evrenol creates a palpable sense of menace, and Sayiner a compelling anti-heroine, enough to make this an effective little horror story on its own. It's simply hard to miss how traditional its interpretation of the myth is compared to its predecessor, despite this being the one set in the modern day. This becomes more acute in the next segment, "The Kindler and the Virgin", which plays like an attempt to compact its story into ten or fifteen minutes without highlighting any specific aspect; a disappointment considering director Agnieszka Smoczynska made The Lure.

Full review at EFC.

What Keeps You Alive

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I haven't perused the listings for the local LGBTQ festival as closely as I have others in recent years, but I don't recall many entries that seemed as unrepentantly pulpy as What Keeps You Alive. It doesn't exactly have main characters who just happen to be gay, but it's also not a niche film, or an introduction, or really outside of the mainstream in any way. It's just a darn good thriller that shows that everyone should watch their backs when they go out to the pretty country with the spotty cell phone reception.

That's where Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) and wife Julie (Brittany Allen) are headed, to a really beautiful lake house that has been in Jackie's family for years. It's not entirely idyllic - the boathouse seems to have collapsed over the winter, for a start - but Julie is impressed, looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend. She's excited to meet Sarah (Martha MacIsaac), a close friend from Jackie's childhood, and her husband Daniel (Joey Klein), although it's a little odd that Sarah called Jackie "Megan".

Writer/director Colin Minihan lets that stew for a while, letting the audience file it back in their heads as something where they are expecting another bit of related information so that when the two connect, there's that thrilling "oh, shit!" moment before things go to hell. Instead, he jumps straight to the violence, kicking things into high gear early and not leaving a whole lot to be explained. Details will be filled in, sure, but for now, it's about running, hiding, recovering from what may be the year's second-nastiest fall after the one in Revenge, and trying to out-think an exceptionally crafty opponent. It's not a completely streamlined thriller, but it doesn't waste time on building sympathy for its villain or trying to build a metaphor. It is what it is, and it's good enough at being that to not feel like it's just going through the motions.

Full review at EFC.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Before anything else, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is a good horror movie, one that gets the audience to jump at the right times and does a fair job of creeping them out in between. It also arguably represents the evolution of a certain part of the genre, either a transitional step between found-footage movies like The Blair Witch Project and screenshot entries like Unfriended or an impressive job in cross-breeding the two. It's a good enough haunted-house movie that the format never feels like a cheap gimmick.

That format is a live horror webcast hosted by Ha-joon, where a few of his collaborators along with some randomly selected fans will spend the night inside Gwangju's Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital - closed for twenty years, infamous for a 1979 mass suicide during which the director disappeared, and rumored to have been a site where prisoners (both political and North Korean) were tortured. Nobody, it is said, has been room 402 on the top floor since it was shuttered. The group heading out there includes site regulars Je-yoon and Seung-wook, along with nursing student Ah-yeon, major fan Ji-hyun, Korean-American Charlotte (who has been visiting haunted sites while part of a touring dance crew), and Sung-hoon. They're well-equipped with plenty of maps, cameras, and flashlights, but sometimes even the smallest things can freak you out - and some things don't seem so small.

Once upon a time, something like Gonjiam might have been trying to fool an audience into thinking it was real, or at least been standing back in half-convincing mock surprise that one would accuse the filmmakers who cast unknowns playing eponymous characters in a movie shot on consumer video equipment of that, but the audience has seen too many of those movies while the drones and 4K cameras available at any electronics store are good enough to blur the line between amateurs and professional, at least on the surface level. Gonjiam plays into this, both by establishing early on that this group has enough gear on hand to never really worry about missing anything and by blurring the lines between truth and fiction in different ways, notably by Ha-joon being as much showman as genuine paranormal enthusiast, with eyes on monetizing a video stream that certainly aims to be a more professional production, to the point where the characters are often making sure to create multi-camera set-ups and wear camera harnesses that also capture their faces, driving the visual language of a found-footage film back toward the more conventional.

Full review at EFC.

"Bloom"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

"Bloom" was, if nothing else, an extremely well-programmed short at this festival, serving as a perfect appetizer for Brothers' Nest. Both Australian, both featuring tight casts that allow the filmmakers to focus on one strained relationship, both defined by their space. Both pretty good.

It's immediately and darkly funny, as director Kieran Wheeler establishes mood with cigarette butts and empty beer cans all over a messy little house, so that when star Andrew Faulkner enters the door and seems to match the environment more or less perfectly, the audience immediately gets just how his immediate reaction to seeing rose petals strewn about is to jump to extreme jealousy - this just does not fit! It becomes a row when the audience meets the girlfriend (Emily Wheaton) who insists that there's nothing going on, hot and cool by turns until…

Well, that'd be telling. The climax is as stupid as the fight, which is completely fitting, but Wheeler and his group don't just make this a movie about yelling; this pair is enough of a mess by this point to just not be working when they're at the kitchen table, although it's clear that insults and shouting aren't far behind. They get plenty of laughs out of it, including a nasty one or two at the end, and then get out before it becomes heavily tragic.

That, in this case, is the sort of thing a short saves for the feature.

Brothers' Nest

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

There should, by now, be a name for the class of crime film that starts as a screwball comedy but ends far from it in either feeling or deed, so that one can say a movie is this thing in just a few words and the person to whom it has been recommended won't feel misled. Whatever you call it, Brothers' Nest is an impressive example of that thing, dark as heck but often roaringly funny.

It starts with Australian brothers Jeff (Clayton Jacobson) and Terry (Shane Jacobson) surreptitiously approaching the family homestead in Victoria. The family has, individually and as a whole, fallen on some hard times lately, with the father's death, the mother's cancer, Terry's marriage falling apart… It's a whole bunch of things. So Jeff's come up with a plan, established an alibi, and now they've just got to wait until old farmhand and family friend Rodger (Kim Gyngell) comes by to groom the family's horse Freddie (who will be handed to a new owner next morning). But when he comes early, and their mother (Lynette Curran) is in the car, that messes everything up.

There's a pleasant idiocy to the way Jeff and Terry play off each other, the sort of poor planning that manifests as excessive complication and each brother pointing out something obviously foolish that the other is doing in turn. It's reliably funny stuff, and everybody involved is careful not to lose the fact that most people are just not naturally gifted in criminal situations as the movie darkens. There's bloody slapstick and dumbfounded double-takes, and even though it becomes less inherently funny, things going to hell in an absurd way still bring a reluctant chuckle and a shake of the head, because these guys, right?

Full review at EFC.

Fantasia 2017.04: Wild Blood, Outer Limits of Animation, Animals, Replace and Tokyo Ghoul

If it had just been one shorts program the first weekend of the festival, I might have been able to keep up. But two on consecutive days, and it's going to take me a long time to get those shorts written up, enough that it made sense for my process to just leave a hole in the blog and catch up later. So, here it is, later!

After scooting out of the apartment to get to Wild Blood - not really worth it, but I'd seen the other features and I hate to leave a hole in the schedule, because while I don't necessarily get a lot of hits per review, I'll try to write up everything - it was across the street for the Outer Limits of Animation, which is always one of the best shows, but as you might expect, the guests were Canadian as heck



First up were "Skin for Skin" directors Kevin D. A. Kurytnik & Carol Beecher (second and third from left, with Ruppert Bottenberg, director of the animation programs, second from right), who actually weren't local, but you could tell they were Canadian as soon as they opened their mouths, and they seemed please as punch to be premiering their short film about Canadian history at a big Canadian festival in Montreal, not far from the NFB/ONF (right down to making sure they used both English and French initials), during the 150th anniversary of the confederation. There were a number of people in the audience who had traveled specifically to see this short, including some educators. Everybody involved seemed pretty pleased, as well they should - it was clearly the centerpiece of the block, and exceptionally well-done, with a great deal of research behind it.

Truth be told, I wish I'd gotten more of a chance to get out and see some of the "Canada 150" (and "Montreal 250") stuff being done around the city; between the schedule of the festival, the schedule I set for myself, and the weather, I did relatively little but the festival this trip, and I tend to love learning about our northern neighbor's history, how it parallels and differs from that of the United States. We're like close cousins (with Australia and New Zealand a more distant branch of the family tree), and we should know each other better.

Also making an appearance was Lori Malépart-Traversy (far left, with Marc Lamothe, far right), who made the pretty darn adorable "Le Clitoris", and there's little screwier about words having gender than that one being masculine. Which is all the insight I've got from this mostly-French introduction. I liked how irreverently educational the short film was, though.

No guest for Animals, which wasn't surprising - it was an oddball European thing - and by the time it was over, we were being shuffled in and out of the room quickly enough that I don't think many of us had had times to check our phones before Mitch Davis came in to introduce Replace looking like he'd been punched in the stomach. He had just gotten the word that George Romero had died, and though I don't think I'll ever doubt that the Fantasia folks absolutely love what they do, seeing how gutted he was by this news should allay any future doubts.



He was a bit more composed afterward, introducing writer/director Norbert Keil, co-writer Richard Stanley, and co-star Barbara Crampton, even having a self-deprecating laugh at himself when he pointed out that the movie's star, Rebecca Forsythe, was the daughter of William Forsythe and the audience collectively couldn't quite recall him. As usual, he led a pretty good Q&A, although what struck me was what an interesting cross-section of genre film the guests were. Keil is the up-and-comer, directing what I believe is his first English-language feature, fairly excited to be collaborating with the other two but also carving out his own career. Stanley is sort of a fringe figure and iconoclast, because as much as folks may know the name, his movies are often an acquired taste and he's probably just as famous for being a very distinct personality and, as a result, not getting his big mainstream break. I swear he was wearing the exact same outfit the last time he had a movie playing the festival (that one about him more than created by him). Crampton, meanwhile, has probably handled a career that made her a horror icon impressively well; where a lot of actresses will probably resent winding up most famous for Re-Animator and the like, she seems to genuinely like the genre, making the festival rounds with enthusiasm and getting excited about horror movies she's got nothing to do with on social media. She'll probably wind up saying that, yeah, there's a lot of Jeffrey Combs's Dr. Herbert West in the mad scientist she plays in this one a lot as it makes the festival circuit, shows up on VOD, and is then released on home video, but she'll be gracious and sincere throughout.

Not a bad day, movie-and-guest-wise. Next up: A day in De Seve with Tom of Finland, The Honor Farm, The Senior Class, Shock Wave, and Free and Easy.

Vahsi kan (Wild Blood)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Tribute to Cüneyt Arkin, HD)

Every few years, the festival will have a sidebar that is basically "movies that have an important place in pop culture history somewhere in the world, even though they're kind of objectively terrible", and it's probably worth checking one out so you've got some idea of that chapter of cinematic history in your head. But, don't look too much more closely than "right place, right time" for why these action movies were a big deal in Turkey; the likes of Wild Blood are not good movies, no matter how excited the people of Turkey were to see this sort of home-grown action at the time.

This one opens with a flurry of witnesses in a potential trial against Hasmet (Hüseyin Peyda) being rubbed out, mostly at the hands of son Osman (Osman Betin). Unfortunately for him, his most bitter enemy, Riza (Cüneyt Arkin), escapes from the military police escorting him, although not until after saving the lives of his guards. As he moves through the wilderness, making his way to Hasmet's well-guarded stronghold, he meets up with another escapee, the daughter (Emel Tümer) of one of the other witnesses.

It's barely seconds into the film before the audience is struck by how choppy the editing of this movie is, especially for something made in the early 1980s, bouncing all over the place, with random cuts to weird angles and a tendency to leave a conversation midway through, but without a pause to indicate it's a bit of a cliffhanger moment. It seldom reaches the point of complete incoherence, but it reflects a "throw it all together" feel, content to explain some bit or piece of Riza's deal whenever they get around to it. There aren't very many transitions or bit of exposition in the movie that aren't somehow bumpy, like it doesn't matter how things are connected so long as they're all there.

Full review on EFC.

"Il Etait 3 Fois"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

My French has apparently atrophied to the point where I can't quite understand what little kids are saying, even with visual aids. It's sad.

Still, this short is cute as all get-out, looking and sounding like it was animated to a group of toddlers trying to one-up each other improvising a story of kings, princesses, and knights, leading to absurdity and physical comedy. The art is the sort of colored pencils you associate with children even if most kids that age struggle with getting lines that straight and scales that consistent, at least a bit. Charmingly chaotic.

"Birdy Wouaf Wouaf"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

Another quick but funny cartoon from France, "Birdy Wouaf Wouaf" tells the tale of a baby bird that gets booted out of the nest because his tweets occasionally come out as barks, stumbling around the area until he finds a friend with a similar speech impediment.

Good, funny stuff with a spare style that really helps focus on just how frantic things are for the poor little bird, with pauses just brief enough to prime for the next disaster and spots of greater detail that hint at horror. Director Ayçe Kartal is also sharp in terms of building and undermining expectations of just where things will go as the bird meets cats and dogs. Generally, just a lot of fun.

"Untamed Truths"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

A spiffy-looking bit of cardboard-cutout-style animation that seems like a conventional bit of animal ABCs with fun facts until you get to "D", which is about how even though dolphins have flippers, they do have one member that can actually grip things, and then parents might start rushing kids out of the screening. It's funny stuff, and more fun besides because most of what it talks about is kind of interesting well beyond the combination of cute pictures and gross-out material.

"Skin for Skin"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

The block's centerpiece and standout is easily "Skin for Skin" by Kevin D. A. Kurytnik & Carol Beecher, a downright gorgeous tale of "The Emperor of the North", as the head of the company that controlled much of the fur trade in Canada was called when he toured his territory, checking the books in 1832. It is a perilous journey, as you might imagine, with dangers aplenty and revelations to be had.

The mythology they synthesize eventually chooses the crow as its particular trickster god, serving as pest and beacon before shooting one purges the rest of the trip into horror. It's a genuinely striking, unrelenting horror show, sometimes not entirely clear that it is supposed to be metaphorical to some extent, with imagery of bones and mayhem and disaster indicating the sort of damage that unbalanced, unwavering profit-seeking can do to a place but also just effective on their own, It's genuinely nightmarish, especially for how it leaps to the fore after a stiff sort of opening to reflect the Emperor's dour character.

The animation is impressively styled, too, with plenty of detail and weight to its 3D rendering, not just going for parallax but an expansive world to roam. The often-brown palette suggests autumn and potential endings with the need for later renewal, as well as giving the look of faded history while still being sharp on its own. The sound design is very nice as well, with the traditional songs on the soundtrack gradually verging closer to dirges as the film goes on.

Educators in the audience reported coming out to get a look at this, so I wouldn't be surprised if the NFB makes sure it has a life beyond the festival circuit. It certainly hits its targets well enough to impress.

"Inhibitum"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

More fun knowledge to be gleaned here, as Atelier Collectif presents five twentieth-century inventions that were suppressed or diminished for commercial or political reasons - the aero-train, durable nylons, safe cigarettes, the water engine, and bio-resonance. It's not necessarily the best medium for this - compacting this much contrariness into an eight-minute short can make it look like the work of cranks and diminish even the factual material - but it's still impressive work of presenting the information in a concise, easy-to-understand way, even with the sarcastic end to each segment about how it's all for the best.

It's also a very nice bit of playing with style, though, as each of the "avoided inventions" is presented with a different look, but this never prevents the short from feeling unified as a whole. It feels like the sort of anthology whose bits could be scattered throughout a program, but also unified enough to work as a single short.

"Decibels"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

Léo Verrier's "Decibels" certainly has one of the most striking visual looks, with huge heads on small bodies making for a hyper-expressive group at a party trying to take control of the soundtrack, with our sad-sack-looking hero always pushed away even though he's got a really good mix on his USB drive. It's a nifty design, and that Verrier pulls it off is more impressive than it looks at first - those tiny bodies don't seem particularly suited for dancing, and a lot of things have to be designed just so for the hands to be able to get past the heads and manipulate it.

Someone who responds to music a little more than I do will probably get a bit more a kick out of some of the jokes that run along those lines, but it's not needed to really enjoy this - it gets a lot of good character animation in and does a nice job of telling a compact story.

"First Snowfall"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

It's a bit strange to see something as thoroughly commercial as "First Snowfall" in the middle of a program of what is not necessarily independent animation, but not really promoting anything else - the Mattel logo on either end doesn't even suggest that this "Masters of the Universe" piece is a fan film like we used to see when "Square Jaw Theater" was a regular part of the fest. Take that away, though, and it's a pretty decent piece, with He-Man and Skeletor battling in a snow storm with a decidedly different animation style.

It's not a whole lot more than a fight, and while it's nicely staged and animated, it's not quite a nifty enough bit of work that it would work for me despite my not being a fan of those particular toys and cartoons. It will be worth looking out for some of director Sam Chou's other work, though.

"The Absence of Eddy Table"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

I've not seen any of Dave Cooper's Eddy Table comics (and I've probably skipped right over Cooper's stuff in the comic shop generally), so I've got no idea how well this adapts them. It is, on its own, a pretty surreal bit of animation, starting off looking like a somewhat awkward attempt to convert something two-dimensional to three. It's surprising how Cooper's curvy, rounded characters don't look quite so right as you'd think when CGI'd, although director Rune Spaans puts Table into an environment rendered beautifully. It feels like a small world whose curve you can see and feel, with everything made of little thriving nodes, and it's impressively if unevenly enveloping.

Then Eddy spots a will-o-the-wisp, and some super-curvy girls, and they lead him to some genuinely creative and bizarre horror material, although it often plays out as other genres in cartoony fashion. I don't know if Spaans and Cooper quite hit the emotional beats that they're going for, but it doesn't matter that much, as the singular, oddly-well-connected strangeness works on its own

"La Bite"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

"La Bite" is, in many ways, French satire at both its best and worst - fearless, anti-authoritarian, and happy to be vulgar if it gets a point across, but also so full of blanket cynicism and "both sides though" that it might as well not be saying anything. So it is here, where cops beat up a jackass spray-painting a penis onto a wall, get caught on video which goes viral until… Well, you can guess how it turns out.

It's fun, and directors Jérôme Leroy and Pierre Tolmer have a genuine knack for zipping through casual violence and vulgarity to make them play as well-timed jokes; there's a lot of laughs and you can't say that much of the cynical viewpoint isn't well-earned. But "hey, everyone's awful eventually" isn't really that clever a statement, and getting there leaves things a bit hollow.

"Richard Twice"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

Matthew Salton's film is in that odd "animated documentary" genre, and it's an interesting-enough story - an interview with Richard Atkins, who was half of the title duo that made one album and then walked away, with Atkins becoming a woodworker and not performing for 40 years. It's an interesting story backed up by some good music and the further hook of Atkins having lost a leg in a motorcycle accident some years earlier.

The animated nature hurts it, though - maybe finding footage to use or recreating it would have been prohibitive, but the squiggly, not-particularly-striking style used here never really feels like showing things that the filmmakers otherwise can't; it's more off-putting than intriguing. It also never makes the incident that ended things seem like the watershed moment it was. That may be fair - the point of the story may just be that sometimes show business is just that random - but it doesn't really communicate that, either.

"Le Clitoris"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

Another animated documentary, albeit on a somewhat different subject. This one is an appropriately cheery thing, as would seem appropriate for "the only organ devoted exclusively to pleasure", though writer/director Lori Malépart-Traversy is sneakily clever on that one - an early comment about how the clitoris has been "repeatedly rediscovered by men" gives a bit of hint to how, while Malépart-Traversy will mostly focus on basic biology that both men and women in the audience may not be aware of, there's an important undercurrent to what she's saying about how science and knowledge are often defined in terms of male experiences and how it fits into cultural norms, making this sort of basic primer more necessary than it should be.

All that, and it's a cute, fun picture to watch - it may technically be a lecture, but it's an enjoyable one.

"Vibrato"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

Things stayed sexy with "Vibrato", a somewhat unconventional narrative that focused on the Paris Opera House through the eyes of architect Charles Garnier's wife, who points out that they made love just about every one of its many nooks and crannies as it was built, breathy narration not normally used for architecture and generally more metaphorically for music. It's an odd but clever choice - architecture is an art form that can easily be reduced to mathematics or appreciation for scale, and this pushes the viewer to experience it on a more raw, direct level.

The animation is beautiful, naturally, but more often impressionistic than detailed, occasionally making use of interesting transparency to show multiple layers. It also shows mechanical marvels within the building, and allow reminders that this is a performance center rather than a cathedral accrue.

You can see all the architectural details in photographs or in person; this is about showing the building as a living place with an energy of its own.

"Yin"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Outer Limits of Animation, DCP)

The program finishes up with "Yin" by Nicolas Fong, a funny and striking short which opens on a cosmic scale, zooming in on coupled gods before finding the one grumpy, solitary one at the center. He goes on to create a world with one creature with male and female halves, splits it, and then devises various obstacles to the pair reuniting. The message: Patriarchal monotheism is a path to misery.

Well, not the only message, but I suspect that would be a fun place to start when pulling apart the symbolism in Fong's movie, which seems delightfully deep but also charmingly whimsical - it gives the viewer a vast, beautiful universe to consider even if it puts the focus on a small corner, and then plays with big ideas and emotions with a smile. As the male and female figures pursue each other despite their miserable creator's attempts to keep them separate, they're occasionally separated as much by scale as distance as something that goes in a door small comes out large because this is no simply physical portal. The temple they climb is an Escher-like edifice even without the creator's interference; take the message about how faith and ritual can create both obstructions and connections as you like.

But mostly, enjoy the fun, upbeat atmosphere, the black-and-white visuals which incorporate and eschew grey scales as necessary, and the general sense of fun. There's a brain and a heart to "Yin", but never without a smile.

Tierre (Animals)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

Greg Zglinski at times gleefully dispenses with basic narrative logic and consistency in Animals, and often seems to taunt the viewers who would be inclined to to navigate it on the basis of symbolism or some sort of dream logic besides. Instead, he takes a simple-seeming situation, loads it with inconsistency and alternate realities, and tells the audience good luck with that. But for all that his movie is peculiar and self-contradictory, it's never exactly confusing, letting the audience both digest and laugh at its strangeness.

It opens with a set of quick snapshots - popular chef Nick (Philipp Hochmair) chatting with customers at his restaurant, his wife Anna (Birgit Minichmayr) practicing asking him about the affair she's sure he's having, and a woman throwing herself out the window of her apartment. The camera implies she disappears before hitting the street, though, and soon we're seeing Nick and Anna preparing for a six-month working trip to Switzerland, where Nick will collect local recipes and Anna will work on her first novel for adults after many successful children's books. Mischa (Mona Petri), a friend of a friend of Nick's, will apartment-sit. All well and good, except for the furtive call from Nick's depressed lover Andrea (whose familiar window is directly above their own), the sheep Nick hits with his car on the way, and how, after Andrea finally does jump, her ex-boyfriend Harald (Michael Ostrowski) comes to Nick's apartment to confront him, only to be certain that Mischa is actually Andrea.

There's more strangeness on tap - more doppelgangers, missing time, memories that seemingly come from the future rather than the past, doors in both Mischa's borrowed apartment and the cottage rented by Anna and Nick that don't open, etc. - and though Zglinski initially seems to offer a logical explanation in how both Anna and Mischa have sustained a head injury that they don't necessarily tend as well as they should, that soon proves not to be enough; the men are also seeing double. And yet, as the movie goes on, the idea that there might be some sort of in-story explanation becomes less important. After all, as the potential concussions remind us, human memory is not a perfect mechanism. Maybe, when we see things from Anna's perspective, she's confusing faces because in her mind, the two people already both represent her husband's infidelity. Things are shown, shown not to have happened, and then happen later, but that can represent a struggle - Andrea seems depressed the one time the viewer sees her, and it's not hard to see her as contemplating suicide every day, and this is the day she finally goes through with it. Maybe what seems prophetic is just a coincidence, or influenced by the earlier impression. On top of that, Anna is writing a book about a woman who kills her husband. Life is a series of reflections, roads not taken, and things which seem inevitable at the time, imperfectly recorded by a process we do not truly understand.

Full review on EFC.

"Emily"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

A genuinely nifty little short that I'd like to see expanded into a feature, as writer/director Mamady Condé hits the same sort of intersection between superhero and horror material that M. Night Shyamalan did with Unbreakable and Split, giving us Lindsey Shaw as the title character, narrating to a friend how she survived a disaster while on a cruise with her family which should have been impossible. It's found-footage, doing a quick build to a sort of inevitable reveal, but Condé, co-writer Kyle Meade, and Shaw do a nice job in keeping the tone appropriate, remembering that Emily is grieving even as they build to an exciting finale with potential for different directions.

Replace

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

Replace has a creepy, au courant premise for a horror movie about a woman afraid of losing her looks to the aging process - in fact it's got two, and that may be its biggest issue - though the two attack the same idea, they do so from decidedly opposite directions, and combining the two, as necessary as it seems for the plot, often has the movie feeling like it's at cross-purposes, and not in a way that creates interesting moral ambiguity.

That young woman is Kira Mabon (Rebecca Forsythe) - she's hot and knows it, letting tonight's boy Jonas (Sean Knopp) know he's lucky to get her into his crappy apartment. It's a funny thing, though - she barely seems to have left when she finds herself coming back, like it's her apartment and she's been there a while with no sign of Jonas. That's the way her next-door neighbor Sophia Demeraux (Lucie Aron) seems to see things, and that's not the only strange thing going on - the skin on her hand is decaying, and the spot seems to be spreading quickly. The researcher she's referred to, Dr. Rafaela Crober (Barbara Crampton), prescribes Kira some drugs, but Kira discovers something else - her skin will quickly integrate with that of someone else, although the tissue needs to be fresh. So, just how badly does Kira want to stay young and pretty?

Director Norbert Keil and co-writer Richard Stanley seem to have come up with two answers to that question - one where she goes out with a knife and gets replacement parts and another where she unwittingly trades something precious for it in a way that explains her missing time, and while that may seem like too much for one movie, the links Keil and Stanley build between the accelerated decay that leads to the violence and the missing time are tantalizing, especially since Kira needs to be doing something while she and the audience figure out what is going on in the part of the story where she's relatively passive. They just seem to have a problem stretching things quite far enough - they're almost there on the desperation that leads to Kira taking other women's skin but never quite manage for there to be consequences - murder-for-beauty may be graphically presented, but remains a sort of moral abstraction when they need to have Kira as a protagonist and victim of someone else's horrific machinations later.

Rebecca Forsythe generally seems more comfortable doing the latter, in part because that's when her material makes a bit more sense - though most people will accept the reality that they are presented in most situations, there's something more immediately easy to believe about how Kira picks at the corners of her life later on; Forsythe has a way of communicating that her character is perhaps more curious out of obligation, that her youthful self-centeredness needs cracking to get to the better woman inside. She's able to sneak an impressively sympathetic performance out as the film goes on, convincing enough when communicating horror, fear, and regret that the fact that she was a bit flat earlier on is a bit of a positive: She wasn't so convincingly monstrous that a viewer can't get past it.

Full review on EFC.

Game of Death (2017)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)

Even when manga adaptations like Tokyo Ghoul start to seem like they are covering the same territory - it's not hard to read the description in the festival program and think "wait, didn't we just have two Parasyte movies last year?" - they at least tend to have enough off-center to not just be another secret-monster-society riff with slight difference. Even this one, which comes pretty close to being familiar mopey-vampire fare, it occasionally gets just weird enough to be worth it.

Ghouls, in this case, are human-looking folks who live in hidden communities, are pretty damage-resistant, have at least one hidden limb that tends to be useful in a fight and, of course, can't eat much besides human flesh. They are mostly urban legends to the general public, although there is a Commission of Counter-Ghoul Operations that fights them in the shadows. Ken Kaneki (Masataka Kubota) doesn't know much about any of that; he's a bookish college student who only winds up on a date with longtime crush Rize Kamishiro (Yu Aoi) because his friend Hideyoshi Nagachika (Kai Ogasawara) pushes him into it. Thanks a lot - Rize is a ghoul and the only thing that stops her from finishing him off is a very convenient industrial accident, and when Ken wakes up in the hospital, he finds out his life was saved by transplant organs… from a ghoul. Now stuck with a glowing red eye and an unseemly appetite, he's fortunate to find "Antieku", a coffee shop run by Kuzen Yoshimura (Kunio Murai), a ghoul who tries to ensure his people have a low impact on the human world, joining Toka Kirishima (Fumika Shimizu) on the wait staff. Unfortunately, his senpai Nishiki Nishio (Shunya Shiraishi) is a ghoul who isn't so inclined to defer to humans, and CCG agents Amon (Nobuyuki Suzuki) and Mado (Yo Oizumi) are following a trail of bodies that can't help but reach Antieku eventually.

It's a bit surprising to see that Sui Ishida's manga comprises relatively few volumes, as these things go, because that is a whole bunch of characters to juggle, and it doesn't even include the regulars at Antieku, supporting cast at both the school and CCG, and so on. It's a setting that seems more apt for an ensemble-based television show, and the film does eventually feel like that - once Ken settles into Antieku, it has the feel of a status quo, where stories will start, characters will meet, and where everybody will regroup before the next thing gets started. As screenwriter Ichiro Kusuno and director Kentaro Hagiwara are getting the audience familiar with the ghoul world, it's not exactly a bad arrangement; they're able to ground things in the familiar while still popping in a gross image or two, pushing things forward bit by bit. It does, however, lead to a movie that perhaps seems to stop more than end, with the characters who are still left around more or less in the same in-between position as they were two or three times before, with what had read as hints of secrets still simply potential, waiting for the next episode.

Full review on EFC.

The Red Turtle & Kedi

I wasn’t exactly planning a family-friendly Kendall Square double feature originally, but I forgot my book of tickets when going out for a bunch of movies over the weekend and was actually kind of wiped after my second movie on Saturday. So, no chance to see Oscar-nominated The Red Turtle before the ceremony, although I wasn’t necessarily going to be rooting one way or another in that category beyond pulling for Kubo.

Animation fans have been saying goodbye to Studio Ghibli a lot over the last few years, with The Wind Rises, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and When Marnie Was There, each seeming to close off a period of the venerable animation studio’s history, at least in terms of feature films. The announcement that they would be co-producing The Red Turtle seemed like yet another final chapter, as it sounded like a one-off. Since then, it’s been announced that Hayao Miyazaki will be making the short he was working on into a feature, so things will at least be briefly “back to normal”.

After that, I stuck around for Kedi, kind of surprised that it wasn’t in theater #9 - the smallest room in the place, where things either on a one-week booking or on their way out usually play - but instead on screen #1, the main theater. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by that - I know a ton of local film people who are also big cat people, so it’s maybe not surprising that demand for the documentary about Istanbul alley cats found an audience here despite originally being one of those one-week bookings. Granted, I don’t know how many of those folks also saw the Turkish cat movie I saw at fantasia last year, with Bad Cat being a very different take on Istanbul cats, but I found it funny to see that the cartoonist whose work was adapted into it was one of the interview subjects. I wonder how many folks outside Turkey caught that.

Whenever I see a relatively family-friendly movie, I think about getting it for my nieces as a Christmas or birthday present, but these movies are tough calls there: The Red Turtle is kind of artsy with no dialogue, after all. And as to Kedi... I’ve done some eccentric movie choices where they’re concerned, but a Turkish-language documentary might be a weird choice, even coming from Uncle Jay.

La Tortue Rouge (The Red Turtle)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run, DCP)

The Studio Ghibli logo at the start of The Red Turtle invites a lot of commentary on its own, representing as it does Japan’s most beloved animation studio giving a boost to up and coming animators worldwide in the wake of its founders’ retirements. But while most watching the movie will have just the vaguest idea of what sort of guidance Isao Takahata gave director Michael Dudok de Wit, we can certainly appreciate the signal boost the Ghibli name gives it, as this is the sort of beautiful but unconventional animated film that might otherwise struggle to find the visibility it deserves.

It is clearly a different beast from many other animated films visually, most notably for the black dots that serve as the eyes on the characters’ faces, a design quirk that combined with fairly realistic proportions may remind the audience of Tintin or other European comics that add a dash of artistic license to carefully-rendered images to simultaneously ground their world and hint that things out of the ordinary can happen. De Wit and his animators fill the movie with beautiful draftsmanship that can capture tremendous detail but will often sacrifice it for effect - consider the opening act of the movie, when a nameless castaway has just arrived on an island and the relatively plain rocks he climbs on and carefully chosen backgrounds give an impression of him being shrunken, surrounded by danger too large to fight, though he will fit the setting better later on without much visual change.

The man’s story is, of necessity, fairly simple - the lifeboat he’s in has been smashed, but he is able to land on an island relatively protected by a sandbar and with sources of food and fresh water. Naturally, he tries to build rafts and escape - there is plenty of bamboo - but something unseen keeps smashes them just before he gets too far to return to shore, eventually revealed as a large red turtle. Furious, he fights back, only to be surprised when a beautiful young woman appears on the island with little explanation.

Full review on EFC.

Kedi

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 February 2017 in Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run, DCP)

Toward the end of Kedi, the viewer might start to see director Ceyda Torun making a broader point about modern cities in general and Istanbul in particular, and how room for the organic rather than planned and parceled-out is precious but vanishing. That may not be her intention, of course; though the human subjects of the film certainly discuss things like that at times, it’s always in a way that relates to their feline friends. If one doesn’t see it that way, it’s fine; for all I know, she was simply trying to make a sweet little documentary about the stray cats of the city, and it is thoroughly adorable even if one doesn’t buy into it having a second layer.

Istanbul, the audience is told, is home to thousands of street cats; they originally came on trade ships from Norway and came to be considered useful when rats started infesting one of the world’s first sewage systems. Today, housecats are not uncommon but many more cats live on their own, domesticated to some extent but far from the property of any particular human, and Torun follows a number of them around the city, getting a look at their daily lives and hearing stories about the people they interact with.

Torun mostly tells the cats’ stories first, introducing them before the humans in their lives appear, giving the audience a chance to observe them a bit before the narration and interviews start being played directly off clips which highlight the point being made or certainly direct someone watching to recognize specific human traits in the cat’s expression. For the most part, these interviews are ordinary people, many of whom live and work around the waterways, although it likely amused some in Turkey that cartoonist Bülent Üstün was among those interviewed (his comics about Shero, a far more profane and horny orange fat cat than Garfield, were recently made into the animated feature Bad Cat). As the film goes on, the interviews tend to focus a bit less on the cats’ independence and a bit more on how their presence is good for the person in question, with the effort and expense some put into feeding these strays a bit eyebrow-raising.

Full review on EFC.

Fantasia 2016.04 (17 July 2016): Parasyte: Part 2, The Bacchus Lady, Bad Cat, In a Valley of Violence, and As the Gods Will

Another busy weekend day, although a little more compact than Saturday.



First guest of the night was Will Blank, who made a pretty good short film in "Limbo", although playing before a feature means he basically just got up to say hi and that he's excited to have his movie playing Fantasia; the short-film guy doesn't exactly come out after In a Valley of Violence to answer questions about how he got Sam Elliott to do a voice for a dying dog in your tiny picture or what made him decide to adapt a comic instead of doing an original script. I'm kind of curious on how that works unless he knows Marian Churchland personally. I can't figure short films make a whole lot of cash, so they can't be paying her much, although anything she gets for what was probably an eight-page story in an anthology is probably found money.



Hey, it's Takashi Miike again, this time with As the Gods Will. In a lot of ways, the Q&A was kind of a repeat of the one from the night before, as the folks who didn't get tickets to the big awards presentation came to this movie and asked certain questions about genre or whether he'd be interested in doing a film in Hollywood, especially given how specifically Japanese a lot of the iconography in his films are. He said that if he did, it would probably be like the Masters of Horror episode he did, mostly shot in Japan with his usual Japanese crews rather than coming to Los Angeles (or wherever it winds up shooting) and dealing with all the overhead associated with that.

He also mentioned that his next project was going to be a TV movie for three-to-eight-year-old girls, so it probably wouldn't play Fantasia, to which programmer Nicolas Archambault basically said "we'll see about that". This means that it's very possible that, within the next couple of years, I will quite possibly be giving one of my nieces a Miike DVD for her birthday, and I would like to apologize to my brothers/sisters-in-law in advance.

Kiseiju Kanketsu Hen (Parasyte: Part 2)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2016 in the SGWU Alumni Auditorium (Fantasia 2016, DCP)

A mere six months passed between the releases of Parasyte parts 1 & 2 in Japan, and it feels like that's the case within the films as well - something has changed, taking a turn for the darker, and is easy to feel that it isn't for the best. It's natural for this to happen, of course; opening acts are for discovery and finales are for not just using those discoveries but whittling them down. It can make something that originally thrilled with its invention and make for a bit of a drag, although the filmmakers do at least make an exciting chase out of it.

Though the man-eating parasites introduced in the first are merely the subject of urban legends as far as the general public is concerned, the police are taking them seriously, and their newest weapon is Uragami (Hirofumi Arai), a serial killer with an uncanny ability to recognize those whose heads are not human anymore. He doesn't quite know what to make of Shinichi Izumi (Shota Sometani), a teenager who had his hand rather than his head replaced, and who is doing all he can to eliminate all the parasites he can find. Because they can detect each other, including "Migi" (voice of Sadao Abe), parasite leader Ryoko Tamiya (Eri Fukatsu) is using a human journalist (Nao Omori) to keep tabs on Shinichi and Migi. Tokyo mayor Takeshi Hirokawa (Kazuki Kitamura), who leads a City Hall full of parasites, has decided they're better off getting rid of Shinichi, and Mr. Goto (Tadanobu Asano) is more than happy to take on the job; every fiber of his being says to devour them all.

One of the odd things about these movies, noticeable in the first but more pronounced in the second, is how Shinichi is actually much less central to the larger story than one might expect, although there's something eminently reasonable about it. Sure, he's unique in this world, but be honest - is an infestation of murderous shapeshifters with a taste for human flash really going to be thwarted on the larger scale by a kid on his own looking for revenge on the creatures that killed his mother and classmates? No, the are probably going to be trained professionals who know how to think tactically and have the arms to match. It's odd to watch the big story shift away from Shinichi, although in some ways it's stranger to see him brought back to center stage toward the end.

Full review on EFC.

Jug-yeo-ju-neun Yeo-ja (The Bacchus Lady)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2016 in the J.A. de Sève Cinema (Fantasia 2016, DCP)

There's a moment toward the start of The Bacchus Lady where writer/director E J-Yong goes just a bit overboard in making the intentions behind making the movie clear as a character who also makes films spells out how, while South Korea is one of the world's most productive economies, it has one of the worst rates of the elderly living in poverty among developed nations. So, get ready; this is not going to be cheerful story even if it is one heck of a heartfelt one.

How bad is it? Well, Youn So-young (Yoon Yeo-jeong) is going down to the park to turn tricks every afternoon in her mid-sixties, although she'll have to reduce the services offered thanks to the gonorrhea one of her elderly clients saddled her with. While at the clinic getting it diagnosed, she witnesses a panicking Filipino woman stab her doctor and yell at her son Min-ho (Choi Hyun-jun) to run. A kid who can't speak Korean or English is not the sort of extra burden So-yeong needs, but she takes him in anyway, although she'll often ask her neighbors to watch him while she works. Soon, she meets old acquaintance Yong-su (Jeon Moo-song), and his news about many of their contemporaries is not good.

The title of the film refers to how selling a "Bacchus drink" (a local brand) is code for solicitation, and the prostitution angle has been played up some in the descriptions, and it is certainly jarring to not just see someone the age of the ironically named So-young in the world's oldest profession, but relatively casual about it, standing in a line-up of other grannies, seeming more annoyed than frightened in the clinic, calmly telling a john what to do when the police conduct a periodic sweep of the hotel that rents by the hour. At times, the casual way E J-Yong establishes So-young's world gives it the feel of something marginalized but viable, akin to her neighbors (her landlady Tina is trans, another neighbor is disabled, and immigrants abound), and that's likely very deliberate: E is giving the audience a taste of how these people are outsiders but aren't exactly harmful or dangerous.

Full review on EFC.

Kötü Kedi Serafettin (Bad Cat)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2016 in the J.A. de Sève Cinema (Fantasia 2016: Axis, DCP)

It's not like people ask me if I've seen "the Turkish Star Wars" on a regular basis, but I suspect I get it more than most and saying "no" by itself just leads to people trying to sell me on a movie with "being terrible" as one of its selling points. Now, at least, I've got a good redirection - I may not have seen that, but I've seen the Turkish Garfield, and this one at least manages to be kind of funny in its violent, vulgar insanity.

Serafettin (voice of Ugur Yücel) - "Shero" for short - is a big orange cat, but instead of being a lazy curmudgeon, he's more of a thug, stealing liquor, hanging out with vermin, and otherwise making life miserable for his nominal owner "Tank" Tonguç (voice of Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan). Today, he's looking to hit that sexy new Siamese that his buddy has spotted, but let's put that aside for a second, as orphaned kitten Tacettin/"Taco" has shown up claiming to be his son - not that he cares; only human dads care about their litters. Still, Taco is crimping his style with classy white Angora Misscat (voice of Demet Evgar), although that might not be quite so bad as that Siamese's owner coming back as a zombie hell-bent on getting revenge on Shero (I told you that didn't turn out well).

Although I've known many a sweet cat in my time, even the most die-hard cat lover will admit that some of them can be real jerks, and Bülent Üstün's "Kötü Kedi Serafettin" appear to take that as a starting point, with Shero a grouchy, selfish monster who smacks his friends around, probably has many more bastards than Taco, and has a number of other unsavory habits, and a lot of the people and animals around him aren't much nicer. It's the sort of unpleasantness that would probably feel like a little too much even with the movie a mere eighty minutes long, so Üstün and co-writer Levent Kazak do a few things to ameliorate it, making sure to bounce Shero from one situation to another, having his heart not be very big but probably not totally nonexistent, and, when all else fails, giving him a thoroughly unhinged adversary. It keeps the comedy black but not quite to the point where the audience is supposed to pump its fist at Shero being nothing but mean.

Full review on EFC.

"Limbo"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2016 in the SGWU Alumni Auditorium (Fantasia 2016, digital)

Like a lot of things, "Limbo" becomes roughly twice as good when Sam Elliott's voice is added. It's not a bad short before that, with a couple funny moments and some enjoyably odd bits, although it's got a sort of whiff of self-pity as we see a man (Raúl Castillo) have a funny but petulant reaction to an unwanted text on his cell phone and then just seemingly walk into the desert for no reason, the implication being that whatever is going on with the wife/girlfriend we see in flashbacks (Anahi Bustillos) is just too awful to bear until he finds the dying dog and is granted a wish for showing a little kindness in its last moments. It's just the sort of thing that is supposed to evoke a young person feeling like the world is going to end because of a setback but, in an attempt to be universal, winds up not being specific enough to get hold of.

Once the dog talks with that great voice, filmmaker Will Blank seems to get to what he wants, cutting between the desert and all of the places where this guy figures a single wish could send things in a different direction. The music speeds up, we get glimpses of things that have been hidden, and, yeah, Elliott's voice add this mournful quality to counter the idea that you can fix everything for free. It's a pretty great cheat code to have at your disposal, really.

In a Valley of Violence

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2016 in the SGWU Alumni Auditorium (Fantasia 2016, DCP)

At some point in Ti West's new film, I wondered if this was an early sign that Ethan Hawke was going to follow the Kevin Costner aging curve, getting lean and squinty and without time for young people's foolishness even if he doesn't exactly look old. That may yet happen, but for the time being, Hawke doesn't really seem like he should be playing the parts that Costner and Clint Eastwood aged into yet, and that's part of what makes In a Valley of Violence kind of an off-kilter kick rather than another dreary, too-somber take on the western.

He plays Paul, who describes himself as a killer but not a thief but recognizes that this doesn't really represent any sort of moral high ground, and is headed to Mexico with his dog Abby. He'd like to avoid other people if he could, but he needs some water and supplies, with tapped-out mining town Denton the best place for it. Once he gets there, the usual things happen - hothead Gilly (James Ransone) picks a fight; Mary Anne (Taissa Farmiga), the sweet girl behind the desk at the hotel, takes a shine to him and Abby - and it naturally leads to the Marshal Martin (John Travolta) suggesting Paul leave town. He does, continues to Mexico, and the movie ends, an enjoyable fifteen minutes long.

At least, that's what would happen if characters in westerns knew when to let things lie, which is not the case here. No, things go pretty much as expected, and to a certain extent, people can see it coming: John Travolta's marshal is described as the sort of corrupt tyrant that often has that job in these movies, but he's smart enough to know where this sort of thing goes and try to put a stop to it. It's initially not quite enough to feel like a parody or a deconstruction, but this sort of sensible behavior at the start gives West openings that he can use to poke at westerns, movies, and genre fiction in general. West loves this stuff and really isn't interested in taking it apart and putting it back together, but if he can have a laugh at characters having derogatory nicknames or how dramatic moments interrupt the action, or maybe just remind the viewers that age differences in prior centuries would make most of them uncomfortable, he will, just so long as he's pushing these things aside and not saying they make things ridiculous. It's the best kind of winking at the audience because it's made up of reactions that make sense even without a fourth wall to break.

Full review on EFC.

Kamisama no iu tôri (As the Gods Will)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2016 in the SGWU Alumni Auditorium (Fantasia 2016, DCP)

There's honesty in the title of As the Gods Will, although sheer caprice is not necessarily the best way to build a movie. Having Takashi Miike at the helm with a bit of a CGI budget doesn't hurt - if nothing else, it will boost the "well, never seen that in a movie before" count - but after a while you'd really better enjoy absurd and arbitrary murder rooms for their own sake, because the movie doesn't have a whole lot else.

We're thrown into the first right away, a lethal game of "red light/green light" controlled by a living daruma dolll at the front of a high school classroom, with friends Takahata (Sota Fukushi) and Sakate (Shota Sometani) apparently the most level-headed and therefore least likely to be exploded by the doll's death beams. That bloodbath leads to another, as the survivors of the other homerooms - including school bully Takeru Amaya (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Takahata's longtime crush Ichika Akimoto (Hirona Yamazaki) - are thrown together with folks from other schools, such as former classmate Shoko Takase (Mio Yuki) in a sort of lethal tournament run by giant cubes floating over almost every city on the planet.

Say what you want about the lack of any sort of thematic coherence to this movie - and, trust me, I will a couple paragraphs from now - but there's little denying that at least the first two legs of it are a demented sort of work of art. To a certain extent, killing a bunch of teenagers is not necessarily an audacious move in Japanese cinema these days (or at least, not the sort of movies that Miike makes or which make it to North American genre festivals), but Miike plays it as physical comedy with precisely honed timing while also rapidly shifting gears into a tense action sequence or a look of horror as the camera pans over a ton of headless bodies and marbles, and on top of that, he's also flashing back to the kids arriving at school to fill in their characterization a bit. The giant "beckoning cat" sequence that follows it is similarly brilliant, pushing the absurdity even further while showing that just because an action bit is ridiculous does not mean it can't be well-staged. As much as Miike will often be praised for the outrageous, over-the-top content of his movies or how he can actually stage one heck of an action scene, it's somewhat rare to note both of these skill sets in play at once, feeding each other.

Full review on EFC.