Yikes, has it been a month? I can't even say it's been that busy at the day job and outside of movies, but sometimes you just can't get traction. I hope I've got some good notes here. Anyway, this is roughly the one-week mark for the festivals, right about where I usually start falling behind at Fantasia because there is Just So Much and I'm stupidly trying to do regular work at the same time. It's good to see that even restricted to press streams and such, I'm still kind of on schedule for being late.
I didn't see these all in the same day even if they're grouped that way, and this is out of order for how they were released to Fantasia viewers in Canada, you could have had this as your Wednesday there. It wound up being a sort of 1+2 day, where a couple of the movies make a decent double feature and the other is kind of separate.
The "other" one was Indemnity, which is a streaming-quality action/adventure from South Africa, and kind of interesting for how it wasn't that long ago that RSA filmmakers were talking about how there was no arts funding for much other than apartheid dramas and not a lot of venues for something commercial. This is slick and kind of empty-calorie, with some visual effects bits stretched, but that's kind of okay. As much as you'd like a film industry to be all brilliance, I suspect that there are more chances to create something great when there's an infrastructure cranking out disposable product like this than when anyone who wants to make a movie has to build up from scratch.
Watching RSA movies is kind of an odd experience at times, because at this point in its history, it feels kind of off to the rest of the English-speaking world, which it is maybe half part of, given how characters in this movie tend to bounce between English and Afrikaans pretty freely. It's not like the USA/UK/Ireland/Canada/Australia/New Zealand are homogeneous, but they do run together a bit, while every once in a while South Africa will show that the place's architecture hasn't entirely left its history behind. The mix of languages can be odd, too, especially in translation: It's weird to hear a character say "cloak and dagger" in the middle of some Afrikaans but have it subtitled as "obscurity", like someone didn't recognize that the phrase was borrowed from English to start with.
Also curious for outsiders is when an Afrikaner villain starts doing the "my evil plan is actually being done for the common good" monologue and lecturing the hero, who is black, about how this will enable them to expel the "colonizers" and reclaim Africa for Africans, completely without irony. I suppose, in its way, it's no stranger than my calling myself an American or some of my countrymen being up in arms against immigrants, although that last bit is dumb too.
"After" that, it was two movies about single women in their early 30s who start out not particularly interested in romance, which is kind of refreshing even if they do sort of become romantic comedies . Hold Me Back is particularly interesting in that regard, because I feel like I've been reading frightened "young Japanese people just not dating" stories for twenty years but never seeing it in the movies I watch, and while it's not really that - it sort of resolves into Mitsuko having had bad experiences rather than focusing on her career - it's closer to it than anything else I've seen. I really like Non as Mitsuko, as well - between this, Princess Jellyfish< and The 12 Day Tale of the Monster that Died in 8, she's staked out a nice space in terms of playing cute oddballs.
As for Ghosting Gloria, I kind of have to talk myself into liking parts of it, because it's got some major consent issues in it's "woman just needed to have sex with the right man (or ghost)" story, and it feels like it could have avoided them. It also could have done a lot more to make use of its gorgeous bookstore location(s); the filmmakers seem to overlook how much Gloria seems to like being a bookseller as opposed to it being a boring retail job until the last act, which is a shame, in part because both the big shop and the smaller one seen toward the end are really charming places. The former may be a chain, but it's got labyrinthine nooks and metalworks and an open elevator cage.
Next up: Road trip!
Indemnity
* * (out of four)
Seen 10 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)
It doesn't seem like very long ago that I was watching a South African crime movie at Fantasia with the director talking about how it was almost impossible to make because the only source of funding was the government and all they wanted to do was prestige apartheid dramas, although it can't have been too long before District 9 happened. Times have changed enough since then that at least a few sleek, commercial films like Indemnity are coming out; and if they're not yet exactly great yet, you can at least see some potential.
Cape Town firefighter Theo Abrams (Jarrid Geduld) survived a major blaze but his PTSD has restricted him to desk duty, although he has bristled at seeing his therapist (Susan Danford). Elsewhere, a former employee of shady corporation M-Tech (Abduragman Adams) and a hacker associate are looking for Theo but are just as happy to make contact with his wife Angela (Nicole Fortuin), a respected reporter, about the strange list of men all across Africa found on the company's serves, over half of whom are either dead or in prison, that includes Theo's name. It's the sort of trail where the target is alerted early, and leads to Theo being on the run for murder, pursued by Detective Rene Williamson (Gail Mabalane), who can see something doesn't add up, although her superior Alan Shard (Andre Jacobs) mostly seems to want the case closed fast.
It's pretty basic direct-to-video material, plot-wise; even when it gets weird or high-concept, it does so in fairly familiar ways, and it often doesn't quite seem like writer/director Travis Taute has a great handle on what might be intriguing and what doesn't quite work. It's the sort of movie that has a massive continent-spanning conspiracy but still feels the need to kidnap Theo's son Wesley (Qaeed Patel) to make sure he's got motivation, along with a conspiracy that seems huge and hyper-competent when they're lurking in the shadows but sloppy once they start trying to murder loose ends. There are moments when characters all but turn directly to the camera to make sure that the audience is included when Theo is being lectured about how PTSD and trauma are real and need to be dealt with like other health problems.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Watashi wo kuitomete (Hold Me Back)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Front72)
Those of us inclined to follow links to Japanese lifestyle stories when we come across them feel like we've been reading about young people - especially women - opting out of the dating pool and what a demographic time bomb that is for the past twenty years, although it has seldom seemed like those women have shown up in exported pop culture as protagonists. Hold Me Back does offer up a romance that the audience can get behind, but it's a relatively rare movie in that it's as interested in its protagonist being single as not.
That would be Mitsuko (Rena "Non" Nounen), who has one of those "office lady" jobs seemingly as much about meeting eligible bachelors as becoming a skilled administrative assistant but isn't committed to either, even at 31. She fills her time and enjoys her freedom, taking art classes, fretting a bit whether it's odd to go to amusement parks on her own, finding herself amused by the crush colleague Nozomi (Asami Usuda) has on handsome but vapid Carter (Takuya Wakabayashi), and exchanging postcards with an old school friend, Satsuki (Ai Hashimoto), who has settled in Italy and has invited her to come for Christmas. She enjoys cooking for herself, and as a result runs into Tada-kun (Kento Hayashi), a somewhat younger salesman who regularly visits her company, at the local market. They hit it off, even if Mitsuko isn't looking for romance.
At first, it seems like Mitsuko isn't quite alone, talking with "A" (voice of Tomoya Nakamura), who initially seems like an especially helpful personal digital assistant, with "A" standing for "answer", but in their very first conversation, Mitsuko says "you're me", and it makes for an intriguing sort of dynamic. Mitsuko isn't presented as someone with a split personality so much as she mostly asks A what norms and expectations are so that she can put that in a corner and do what she wants. It's why A is silent in Italy, for instance, and it lets writer/director Akiko Ohku (adapting Risa Wataya's novel) get a bit abstract toward the end as she confronts both her past and future, because there's trauma in the past when A was in charge and she mostly did what was expected, but things can't go forward with Tada-kun if she decides she wants no part of it.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Muerto con Gloria (Ghosting Gloria)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Vimeo via Roku)
There's enough about Ghosting Gloria that is really clever and funny that the movie being built on a foundation that is, at best, questionable as all heck shouldn't really be necessary. A viewer can deal with that in a couple of ways, depending on their temperament (lamenting that some might be too circumspect for a sexy comedy or saying that the film tacitly acknowledges its issues), if one is so inclined, but one can't help but wonder: Why couldn't a film which is smart and creative throughout do better in one of its biggest moments?
That moment is its title character's first orgasm; Gloria (Stefania Tortorella) is thirtyish, works in a Montevideo bookstore, and isn't exactly a prude but is still annoyed by the continuous sex of her newlywed neighbors on the floor above her inherited apartment. It gets to the point where she decides to rent the place out and move into a spot that her oversexed friend and co-worker Sandra (Nena Pelenur) knows of, cheap because previous resident Dante (Federico Guerra) recently died there. It turns out, he's not entirely gone, and one night he moves from just knocking things over to making some aggressive moves on his new roommate. After that, Gloria knows what she's been missing, and even tracks down a way to make Date visible to her, but is he a lover worth defying nature for, or maybe just what she needs to be ready when Ángel (Marco Manfini) walks into the store and appears to be the direct opposite of most of the appalling customers?
How that first supernatural sexual encounter lands for a viewer will probably color the entire rest of the movie for the audience, and it's going to miss the mark for plenty. Married directors Marcela Matta & Mauro Sarser stage the scenes leading up to it more as standard horror where the destructive poltergeist adds rape to his bag of tricks, and it's frustrating that it didn't have to be this way; it shouldn't take much of a shift to make the sequence more clearly built around Dante's clumsiness and Gloria's repressed desire colliding. If one is generous, it's not hard to see how the film is about someone being overly-romantic about the first person to make her feel a certain way, even if he basically sees her as a way to self-gratification and he can't be part of her life (because he's dead). Sarser and Matta do good things with that idea, but the way into it pushes things just a bit too far.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Showing posts with label Uruguay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Uruguay. Show all posts
Saturday, September 18, 2021
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Fantasia 2017.21: Indiana, Le Manoir, Kills on Wheels, and The Night Watchmen
I've been coming to Fantasia for twelve or thirteen years now and I think I've only ended on the big closing night film once or twice. The first year or two, I wasn't doing the whole thing; for many years, they added encore screenings after the official end of the festival; and then, other times, you have years like this, where I wind up in de Seve all day, right until the end because the big Hall films are going to show up in Boston. Almost wasn't the case - when Well Go first announced where A Taxi Driver was opening, the list didn't include Boston, so that got prioritized, but then Boston got added, so I could see The Night Watchmen.
Interestingly, that movie was one of the fastest to sell out, probably a bit of a combination of de Seve being relatively small, the 9:45pm time marking it as the very last film of the festival, and looking like the sort of thing that could cut a good trailer. It was a quick-enough sellout that they added another screening at 7:30pm. I kind of wonder if that annoyed anyone thinking they were getting the premiere Canadian Premiere, so to speak, but I can't see any practical reason why it should. Still, people get weird about that.
Filmmakers showed up, too, with Fantasia programmer Tony Trimpone (left) talking to producer Jeffrey Allard, director Mitchell Altieri, and producer Cheryl Staurulakis. Altieri has had some other films at Fantasia as half of "The Butcher Brothers", but this is (as far as I can tell) his first time not working with Phil Flores and, indeed, working from someone else's script. They talked about how being able to shoot the movie in Maryland was a bit of a challenge, because while some things shoot there - they said half their crew was from House of Cards - there aren't a whole lot of tax credits, and they got the last one. It was also apparently pretty cold (by Annapolis standards, if not Montreal standards), and while there weren't a lot of exteriors, it was not a whole lot of fun for the folks drenched in fake blood with Kara Luiz in a miniskirt and open-toed shoes despite there being a fair amount of snow on the ground when they were on the roof. One thing I did love is that they gave the short that played before their film props. It's a small thing for the audience, but I love when folks attending a festival aren't so entirely focused on how their own film is received that they can spare a few good words for other things.
Next up… Well, I actually have to go back to days #4 and 5 because it took a couple days to write up the animation package and when that was done, I decided to just jump forward. I'm tempted to do go to the Old School Kung Fu Fest at the Metrograph in New York in August, but I'm guessing there's a niece's birthday party and it'll be fun to just stay home for a few weeks.
Indiana
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
There are three or four kind of fascinating stories in Indiana which are not so much vying for time as falling short of quite pushing each other hard enough to get to the same place. This makes for a generally decent movie, and for some a genuinely great one, although I suspect that it would have to hit you just right to get that reaction.
After some black-and-white interview footage with (presumably) Indianans who have had some sort of encounter with the paranormal, we're introduced to the "Spirit Doctors": Michael (Gabe Fazio), a somber fellow who works as an executive by day and is feeling the desire to quit while Josh (Bradford West) displays unshakable belief even though any connection he has to the paranormal looks terribly unconvincing unless one is primed to believe (and may not have ever worn a suit in his life). Meanwhile, an old man (Stuart Rudin) runs out of gas on an abandoned road, but this is either a ruse to get a neighbor to take him to the middle of nowhere so he can exact some form of revenge or an opportunity he won't miss.
There's a moment when Michael and Josh appear on a radio program with a skeptic who asks if it's unreasonable to expect even a single bit of evidence to have an angry Josh shoot back "yes!", and it's staged in such a way that it's easy to take this as just a joke at their expense, or something that illustrates the growing wedge between Michael and Josh. Director Toni Comas and co-writer Charlie Williams certainly use it for that, but even as they do, they're also setting up how relying on measurable evidence often can't reflect utterly subjective pain people are feeling, and while maybe Josh doesn't consciously recognize that severing "demonic attachments" or UFO-related activity is the placebo effect in action, the idea that people need something to grab onto so they can assert some sort of control is at the center of the film.
Full review on EFC.
"Ratskin"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It would be easy enough to add a frantic epilogue to "Ratskin", although I'm not sure I'd want to mess with the quiet coming of age vibe that the film features at that point. Jade Charbonneau's Emma is realizing that some things are irreversible, and even if she's still got a chance to change something (and we as the audience want her to), that's not the right way for this story to end emotionally.
Going into the sort of dark, somewhat-exaggerated territory that Michael Charron's movie does means you run that risk, though, but Charron and his mostly-young cast handle it well. Charbonneau plays Emma as dry and withdrawn, but not particularly without affect, which is a a fairly crucial difference in this story. The way she says "poor thing" when referring to a dead pet mouse or her realizing what her father's avoidance on the phone means is the difference between the audience thinking she's on the route to being a more caring, responsible sister and her seeming destined to be a serial killer, and it's managed adroitly. There's an impressive precision to how Charron lays out a bunch of the signs, both ones we know might matter mean something and ones to be dismissed, without necessarily being too obvious about what he's doing. He gets good work from young Simon Brousseau as the little brother who clearly clings to his big sister, too; it's also a subdued performance but not a carbon-copy of Charbonneau, and Charron pairs these kids with images that are just still enough to create a short that is just eerie enough for the audience to feel something is off but not quite so much that they're waiting for something overtly blood-spattered to break out.
Le Manoir (The Mansion)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
How did we, as Americans, let France and/or Belgium go full raunchy comedy with their Scream knock-offs before we did? Hollywood probably hasn't completely overlooked this opportunity, but I'm having trouble thinking of something like Le Manoir ("The Mansion") that works as well as it does. It's a bonkers slasher movie with even more comedy than those going for arch irony tend to have, but it doesn't quite play as a spoof. The blend of broad laughs and plentiful blood may not play for everyone, but the often-mean French sense of humor goes fairly well with a killing spree.
It's the end of the year, and the highly-organized Nadine (Nathalie Odzierejko) has rented a mansion in Belgium for a big "Party Like It's 1999" shindig with boyfriend Fabrice (Marc Jarousseau) and their friends - would-be Hollywood star Djamal (Yvick Letexier), uptight ginger Bruno (Ludovik Day), weed & mushroom enthusiast Drazik (Vincent Tirel), recent police academy grad Jess (Delphine Baril), party girl Sam (Vanessa Guide), her ex-boyfriend Stephane (Jerome Niel), and Sam's teenage cousin Charlotte (Lila Lacombe). Should be fun, even if Stephane hasn't gotten the message that he and Sam aren't just "on a break" and doesn't want to dress the part. And they've been told not to go up to the second floor, or in the basement, or into the nearby woods. And there's no cell phone service. And, okay, they couldn't see the maid who was killed in the pre-credits sequence…
It takes a while to get to the first murder/maiming after that; director Tony T. Datis and the four writers are having enough fun with these ten characters - Enzo (Baptiste Lorber), the guy Sam cheated on Stephane with, crashes the party - that they're reluctant to not just start culling the cast of characters, but to take the one that has gone missing completely seriously. It's understandable because having that many characters to potentially knock off means either spending a fair amount of time building them up or not having their death and/or disfigurement mean something, giving the opening a bit of a learning curve until it transitions into things really starting to get nuts.
Full review on EFC.
"[CRIES IN SPANISH]"
* * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
I'm going to guess that "[CRIES IN SPANISH]" hits a nerve or a funnybone or something if you've spent a little more time in places like its setting, a drab, dirty restaurant/bar with a karaoke machine right out in the open where the main character - a tween-ish girl - doesn't really want to be there and certainly doesn't want to get up in front of a mostly-disinterested audience and sing no matter how much Mom pushes. Director Giancarlo Loffredo does well enough in establishing a bit of familiarity for the audience - it's very easy to see where this girl is coming from - but the movie doesn't really go anywhere from there. The end feels basically random; possible from what's been happening as the camera jumps around the room, but if it's going to be the next thing in the story, it can't also be the last; there's no benefit to it.
It makes the short a weird one - moody and precise to certainly show that there's talent and vision to the film, but not a whole lot of point unless the film is going to continue on to something else.
Tiszta szívvel (Kills on Wheels)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
One can look at Kills on Wheels as extremely high-concept or just simply a film about an extremely-underserved audience, and a great deal of its success is in how it moves from being the first to the second: Someone can come in based on the pitch of wheelchair-bound hitmen and come out quite fond of the characters as people and not hugely concerned with their missions. The combination makes some generic crime material fresh and adds excitement to what could be very self-serious and earnest.
Much of the action takes place around a rehabilitation center where Zolika (Zoltán Fenyvesi) and Barba Papa (Ádám Fekete) have spent much of their young lives - Barba with what appears to be cerebral palsy, Zoli with a worsening curvature of the spine that will, within a few years, crush his internal organs. An expensive operation in Berlin could help, and Zoli's father (who now lives there) is willing to pay for it, but Zoli is reluctant to accept charity from the man who abandoned him and his mother Zita (Mónika Balsai) when he was small. Another option may be appearing, though - newcomer Janos Rupaszov (Szabolcs Thuróczy) is just out of prison and doing odd jobs for Serbian gangster Rados (Dusán Vitanovics), and a share of the money he'll pay for eliminating rivals could certainly help. Of course, Rados doesn't exactly want more people knowing about the details of his activities, and that's without knowing about the indie comics Zoli and Barba are making based upon their adventures.
Kills on Wheels is noteworthy in that the majority of its handicapped characters are played by actors with the same physical challenges, and as such it winds up being very conscientious of what those entail. There's no pushing through something because that's what the story wants even if it's not actually likely, for instance, and difficult things are presented as everyday challenges. Writer/director Attila Till takes care to let the subtext of being handicapped inform a lot of the characterization without often resorting to monologues and direct explanations; Rupaszov's anger and confrontational nature is likely different from Zoli's in large part because he lost the use of his legs rather than never having it, and he's more likely to blame the rest of the world for things than himself. Much of these characters' stories is left to the audience to extrapolate, and it's not hard.
Full review on EFC.
"El Peste" ("The Plague")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Describing "The Plague" too much threatens to ruin it, because what writer/director Guillermo Carbonell does is take a few things that are sort of staple horror ideas, find a clever but not necessarily immediately brilliant twist on one, and put it in a very relatable setting before quickly wrapping it up in a way that has the concept fully encapsulated but suggests that he could do a lot with it with a feature-sized budget and running time. Sure, that's what a lot of short filmmakers are trying to do, but Carbonell actually manages it without a lot of obvious fuss.
He does that by keeping things lean without seeming to particularly dash from one thing to another. Maybe the opening sequence feels a little extraneous at the time, but it does a decent job of establishing that there's something unnerving and dangerous out there, before it's introduced us to Gabriela Freire in a thoroughly domestic setting that doesn't immediately connect. Carbonell sets her home-invasion story with a memorable obstacle (Walter Rey as a father suffering from dementia) up quickly and in satisfying fashion, playing it out at the sort of pace the audience is used to from features before cutting things a bit short.
The trick at that point is not to make it feel like things were cut short, but to get the audience to an entertaining place to finish, and Carbonell and his cast & crew manage that well. If they want to do more of this, I doubt many who have seen the short would mind, but even if they don't (or can't), they've put some familiar pieces together in an enjoyable way.
The Night Watchmen
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It's telling that this movie isn't named "Vampire Clowns", because if you're going to tell your friends about the crazy horror comedy you saw the other night, the vampire clowns are what they're going to pick up on even if you purposefully don't lead with that. It's certainly a bigger hook than night watchmen, but ultimately the name is honest, because this movie does wind up being more about the wacky antics between the inept security guards than the actual vampires trying to suck their blood.
They're guarding the Baltimore Gazette, with a new guy(Max Gray Wilbur) - whose last job was fronting a heavy-metal band but seems to be going for something more grounded now - starting and doing all the grunt work for tough-talking Ken (Ken Arnold), dorky Jiggetts (Kevin Jiggetts), and mysterious Sicilian immigrant Luca (Dan DeLuca). There aren't a whole lot of people working the night shift; aside from Willy the janitor (Matter Servitto), just some folks working on the magazine section, and it says something that Ken using the security cameras to follow his crush Karen (Kara Luiz) while ignoring her friend Penny (Diona Reasonover) isn't nearly as off-putting as nearly everything Randall (James Remar) is doing. It's a quiet night even when delivery men drop a crate meant for the biological research lab down the road off. Never mind the question of why such a place would be awaiting the coffin of Blimpo the Clown, the popular local entertainer whose entire troupe mysteriously vanished in Romania.
Whether the filmmakers are going for extra-gory splatter or just having everybody call the new guy "Rajeeve" because that's what the nametag on the uniform he's given says despite his being pretty darn white (although it's arguable that the African-American Jiggetts is even more whitebread), tt's really, really, really broad humor. The writers will go for the easy joke at every opportunity that presents itself, but that's not the worst thing a comedy can do: If a joke is just sitting there, these guys don't feel too proud to pick it up and run with it, especially if it's not going to get in the way of the really good one that might take a little more work. And while director Mitchell Altieri has mostly done straight horror, he's got the rhythms of this sort of rapid-fire comedy down. It's briskly-paced enough and filled with enough splatstick that if one joke doesn't land, one of the next three might, and he's willing to move along to the next one quickly rather than something hang in the air with the stink of death on it.
Full review on EFC.
Interestingly, that movie was one of the fastest to sell out, probably a bit of a combination of de Seve being relatively small, the 9:45pm time marking it as the very last film of the festival, and looking like the sort of thing that could cut a good trailer. It was a quick-enough sellout that they added another screening at 7:30pm. I kind of wonder if that annoyed anyone thinking they were getting the premiere Canadian Premiere, so to speak, but I can't see any practical reason why it should. Still, people get weird about that.
Filmmakers showed up, too, with Fantasia programmer Tony Trimpone (left) talking to producer Jeffrey Allard, director Mitchell Altieri, and producer Cheryl Staurulakis. Altieri has had some other films at Fantasia as half of "The Butcher Brothers", but this is (as far as I can tell) his first time not working with Phil Flores and, indeed, working from someone else's script. They talked about how being able to shoot the movie in Maryland was a bit of a challenge, because while some things shoot there - they said half their crew was from House of Cards - there aren't a whole lot of tax credits, and they got the last one. It was also apparently pretty cold (by Annapolis standards, if not Montreal standards), and while there weren't a lot of exteriors, it was not a whole lot of fun for the folks drenched in fake blood with Kara Luiz in a miniskirt and open-toed shoes despite there being a fair amount of snow on the ground when they were on the roof. One thing I did love is that they gave the short that played before their film props. It's a small thing for the audience, but I love when folks attending a festival aren't so entirely focused on how their own film is received that they can spare a few good words for other things.
Next up… Well, I actually have to go back to days #4 and 5 because it took a couple days to write up the animation package and when that was done, I decided to just jump forward. I'm tempted to do go to the Old School Kung Fu Fest at the Metrograph in New York in August, but I'm guessing there's a niece's birthday party and it'll be fun to just stay home for a few weeks.
Indiana
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
There are three or four kind of fascinating stories in Indiana which are not so much vying for time as falling short of quite pushing each other hard enough to get to the same place. This makes for a generally decent movie, and for some a genuinely great one, although I suspect that it would have to hit you just right to get that reaction.
After some black-and-white interview footage with (presumably) Indianans who have had some sort of encounter with the paranormal, we're introduced to the "Spirit Doctors": Michael (Gabe Fazio), a somber fellow who works as an executive by day and is feeling the desire to quit while Josh (Bradford West) displays unshakable belief even though any connection he has to the paranormal looks terribly unconvincing unless one is primed to believe (and may not have ever worn a suit in his life). Meanwhile, an old man (Stuart Rudin) runs out of gas on an abandoned road, but this is either a ruse to get a neighbor to take him to the middle of nowhere so he can exact some form of revenge or an opportunity he won't miss.
There's a moment when Michael and Josh appear on a radio program with a skeptic who asks if it's unreasonable to expect even a single bit of evidence to have an angry Josh shoot back "yes!", and it's staged in such a way that it's easy to take this as just a joke at their expense, or something that illustrates the growing wedge between Michael and Josh. Director Toni Comas and co-writer Charlie Williams certainly use it for that, but even as they do, they're also setting up how relying on measurable evidence often can't reflect utterly subjective pain people are feeling, and while maybe Josh doesn't consciously recognize that severing "demonic attachments" or UFO-related activity is the placebo effect in action, the idea that people need something to grab onto so they can assert some sort of control is at the center of the film.
Full review on EFC.
"Ratskin"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It would be easy enough to add a frantic epilogue to "Ratskin", although I'm not sure I'd want to mess with the quiet coming of age vibe that the film features at that point. Jade Charbonneau's Emma is realizing that some things are irreversible, and even if she's still got a chance to change something (and we as the audience want her to), that's not the right way for this story to end emotionally.
Going into the sort of dark, somewhat-exaggerated territory that Michael Charron's movie does means you run that risk, though, but Charron and his mostly-young cast handle it well. Charbonneau plays Emma as dry and withdrawn, but not particularly without affect, which is a a fairly crucial difference in this story. The way she says "poor thing" when referring to a dead pet mouse or her realizing what her father's avoidance on the phone means is the difference between the audience thinking she's on the route to being a more caring, responsible sister and her seeming destined to be a serial killer, and it's managed adroitly. There's an impressive precision to how Charron lays out a bunch of the signs, both ones we know might matter mean something and ones to be dismissed, without necessarily being too obvious about what he's doing. He gets good work from young Simon Brousseau as the little brother who clearly clings to his big sister, too; it's also a subdued performance but not a carbon-copy of Charbonneau, and Charron pairs these kids with images that are just still enough to create a short that is just eerie enough for the audience to feel something is off but not quite so much that they're waiting for something overtly blood-spattered to break out.
Le Manoir (The Mansion)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
How did we, as Americans, let France and/or Belgium go full raunchy comedy with their Scream knock-offs before we did? Hollywood probably hasn't completely overlooked this opportunity, but I'm having trouble thinking of something like Le Manoir ("The Mansion") that works as well as it does. It's a bonkers slasher movie with even more comedy than those going for arch irony tend to have, but it doesn't quite play as a spoof. The blend of broad laughs and plentiful blood may not play for everyone, but the often-mean French sense of humor goes fairly well with a killing spree.
It's the end of the year, and the highly-organized Nadine (Nathalie Odzierejko) has rented a mansion in Belgium for a big "Party Like It's 1999" shindig with boyfriend Fabrice (Marc Jarousseau) and their friends - would-be Hollywood star Djamal (Yvick Letexier), uptight ginger Bruno (Ludovik Day), weed & mushroom enthusiast Drazik (Vincent Tirel), recent police academy grad Jess (Delphine Baril), party girl Sam (Vanessa Guide), her ex-boyfriend Stephane (Jerome Niel), and Sam's teenage cousin Charlotte (Lila Lacombe). Should be fun, even if Stephane hasn't gotten the message that he and Sam aren't just "on a break" and doesn't want to dress the part. And they've been told not to go up to the second floor, or in the basement, or into the nearby woods. And there's no cell phone service. And, okay, they couldn't see the maid who was killed in the pre-credits sequence…
It takes a while to get to the first murder/maiming after that; director Tony T. Datis and the four writers are having enough fun with these ten characters - Enzo (Baptiste Lorber), the guy Sam cheated on Stephane with, crashes the party - that they're reluctant to not just start culling the cast of characters, but to take the one that has gone missing completely seriously. It's understandable because having that many characters to potentially knock off means either spending a fair amount of time building them up or not having their death and/or disfigurement mean something, giving the opening a bit of a learning curve until it transitions into things really starting to get nuts.
Full review on EFC.
"[CRIES IN SPANISH]"
* * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
I'm going to guess that "[CRIES IN SPANISH]" hits a nerve or a funnybone or something if you've spent a little more time in places like its setting, a drab, dirty restaurant/bar with a karaoke machine right out in the open where the main character - a tween-ish girl - doesn't really want to be there and certainly doesn't want to get up in front of a mostly-disinterested audience and sing no matter how much Mom pushes. Director Giancarlo Loffredo does well enough in establishing a bit of familiarity for the audience - it's very easy to see where this girl is coming from - but the movie doesn't really go anywhere from there. The end feels basically random; possible from what's been happening as the camera jumps around the room, but if it's going to be the next thing in the story, it can't also be the last; there's no benefit to it.
It makes the short a weird one - moody and precise to certainly show that there's talent and vision to the film, but not a whole lot of point unless the film is going to continue on to something else.
Tiszta szívvel (Kills on Wheels)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
One can look at Kills on Wheels as extremely high-concept or just simply a film about an extremely-underserved audience, and a great deal of its success is in how it moves from being the first to the second: Someone can come in based on the pitch of wheelchair-bound hitmen and come out quite fond of the characters as people and not hugely concerned with their missions. The combination makes some generic crime material fresh and adds excitement to what could be very self-serious and earnest.
Much of the action takes place around a rehabilitation center where Zolika (Zoltán Fenyvesi) and Barba Papa (Ádám Fekete) have spent much of their young lives - Barba with what appears to be cerebral palsy, Zoli with a worsening curvature of the spine that will, within a few years, crush his internal organs. An expensive operation in Berlin could help, and Zoli's father (who now lives there) is willing to pay for it, but Zoli is reluctant to accept charity from the man who abandoned him and his mother Zita (Mónika Balsai) when he was small. Another option may be appearing, though - newcomer Janos Rupaszov (Szabolcs Thuróczy) is just out of prison and doing odd jobs for Serbian gangster Rados (Dusán Vitanovics), and a share of the money he'll pay for eliminating rivals could certainly help. Of course, Rados doesn't exactly want more people knowing about the details of his activities, and that's without knowing about the indie comics Zoli and Barba are making based upon their adventures.
Kills on Wheels is noteworthy in that the majority of its handicapped characters are played by actors with the same physical challenges, and as such it winds up being very conscientious of what those entail. There's no pushing through something because that's what the story wants even if it's not actually likely, for instance, and difficult things are presented as everyday challenges. Writer/director Attila Till takes care to let the subtext of being handicapped inform a lot of the characterization without often resorting to monologues and direct explanations; Rupaszov's anger and confrontational nature is likely different from Zoli's in large part because he lost the use of his legs rather than never having it, and he's more likely to blame the rest of the world for things than himself. Much of these characters' stories is left to the audience to extrapolate, and it's not hard.
Full review on EFC.
"El Peste" ("The Plague")
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
Describing "The Plague" too much threatens to ruin it, because what writer/director Guillermo Carbonell does is take a few things that are sort of staple horror ideas, find a clever but not necessarily immediately brilliant twist on one, and put it in a very relatable setting before quickly wrapping it up in a way that has the concept fully encapsulated but suggests that he could do a lot with it with a feature-sized budget and running time. Sure, that's what a lot of short filmmakers are trying to do, but Carbonell actually manages it without a lot of obvious fuss.
He does that by keeping things lean without seeming to particularly dash from one thing to another. Maybe the opening sequence feels a little extraneous at the time, but it does a decent job of establishing that there's something unnerving and dangerous out there, before it's introduced us to Gabriela Freire in a thoroughly domestic setting that doesn't immediately connect. Carbonell sets her home-invasion story with a memorable obstacle (Walter Rey as a father suffering from dementia) up quickly and in satisfying fashion, playing it out at the sort of pace the audience is used to from features before cutting things a bit short.
The trick at that point is not to make it feel like things were cut short, but to get the audience to an entertaining place to finish, and Carbonell and his cast & crew manage that well. If they want to do more of this, I doubt many who have seen the short would mind, but even if they don't (or can't), they've put some familiar pieces together in an enjoyable way.
The Night Watchmen
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, DCP)
It's telling that this movie isn't named "Vampire Clowns", because if you're going to tell your friends about the crazy horror comedy you saw the other night, the vampire clowns are what they're going to pick up on even if you purposefully don't lead with that. It's certainly a bigger hook than night watchmen, but ultimately the name is honest, because this movie does wind up being more about the wacky antics between the inept security guards than the actual vampires trying to suck their blood.
They're guarding the Baltimore Gazette, with a new guy(Max Gray Wilbur) - whose last job was fronting a heavy-metal band but seems to be going for something more grounded now - starting and doing all the grunt work for tough-talking Ken (Ken Arnold), dorky Jiggetts (Kevin Jiggetts), and mysterious Sicilian immigrant Luca (Dan DeLuca). There aren't a whole lot of people working the night shift; aside from Willy the janitor (Matter Servitto), just some folks working on the magazine section, and it says something that Ken using the security cameras to follow his crush Karen (Kara Luiz) while ignoring her friend Penny (Diona Reasonover) isn't nearly as off-putting as nearly everything Randall (James Remar) is doing. It's a quiet night even when delivery men drop a crate meant for the biological research lab down the road off. Never mind the question of why such a place would be awaiting the coffin of Blimpo the Clown, the popular local entertainer whose entire troupe mysteriously vanished in Romania.
Whether the filmmakers are going for extra-gory splatter or just having everybody call the new guy "Rajeeve" because that's what the nametag on the uniform he's given says despite his being pretty darn white (although it's arguable that the African-American Jiggetts is even more whitebread), tt's really, really, really broad humor. The writers will go for the easy joke at every opportunity that presents itself, but that's not the worst thing a comedy can do: If a joke is just sitting there, these guys don't feel too proud to pick it up and run with it, especially if it's not going to get in the way of the really good one that might take a little more work. And while director Mitchell Altieri has mostly done straight horror, he's got the rhythms of this sort of rapid-fire comedy down. It's briskly-paced enough and filled with enough splatstick that if one joke doesn't land, one of the next three might, and he's willing to move along to the next one quickly rather than something hang in the air with the stink of death on it.
Full review on EFC.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.07: Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and It Follows
You know the drill - 11:05 am movie I'll probably be late for. More another time.
Today's (finale) schedule - I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, The Treatment, and blessed sleep after what looks like kind of a downer of a day.
Man from Reno
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
There's a moment at the end of a lot of the really good "Coen-like" movies (a description unfair to everyone involved, but one people use) where someone sits down, has a long sigh, and considers just what all this insanity means, inviting the audience to do the same. I don't know if Man from Reno quite has that moment, and it's kind of missed. There's still quite a bit to like about this little mystery even without that moment, and maybe it works well enough without it.
We approach the mystery from two directions. First, Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna), the sheriff of a county just outside San Francisco, finds an abandoned car on an extremely foggy night - and then finds the driver when an Asian man jumps out in front of the officer's car. In the city itself, Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) has bailed on a book junket back home to visit friends, also meeting fellow tourist Akira Suzuki (Kazuki Kitamura) in the hotel lobby. But what about the other people lurking in the background?
There are a lot of characters beyond that, from Aki's college friends to Paul's daughter, and their investigations wind up leading to some peculiar areas, although it's often the sort of situation that seems innocently baffling on its face rather than kinky or threatening. Given that there isn't much initial indication of where things are going, it's hard to say that the movie drifts particularly far from its initial destination, but it certainly feels like it does.
Full review at EFC
Fasandræberne (The Absent One)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I swear I've heard of the Department Q books from somewhere, even though I haven't really been keeping up on detective fiction as much as I'd like. If they're going to keep cranking out movies this good in adapting them, I hope they make it over here as well as the Dragon Tattoo books did.
It is kind of a familiar sort of detective set-up - the too-intense sleuth with the partner who grounds him, the case that leads into decadence among the elite going all the way back to boarding school, the finale that, let's face it, involves a lot of things that would get these guys fired from the police force. It's got folks involved who are pretty good at it, though, and a secondary protagonist in Danica Curcic's Kimmie who is downright fascinating and haunting. It's second of a series (the first came out last year), and I wouldn't mind seeing both get US distribution soon-ish.
Full review on EFC
Haemoo
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
This one has received a lot of notice in part because of Bong Joon-ho's involvement as a prodcer and co-writer for long-time collaborator Shim Sung-bo, and if that helps it out, that's great. It's a nifty little movie, the sort of thriller that South Korea seems to do better than anyone else right now - the type that plunges the audience into much darker than expected territory and still keeps one on the edge of his or her seat out of genuine excitement.
It looks great - I joked a couple weeks ago that someone in South Korea built a tank for shooting maritime movies and intends to get their money's worth, but I can't complain about the results, especially with how Shim handles the sea fog of the title, letting it really set the scene when the movie gets into murky territory. I do wonder a bit about the characterization, especially in the second half of the film - a lot of people seem to go way off the deep end, and although they're in a situation where I can't blame anyone for being messed up, I wonder if it's as much a sign of the film's roots as a stage play as anything else.
Full review on EFC
Dios Local (Local God)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I really liked this one from Uruguay, much more than I expected. It's easy to read the description and come in expecting something from like The Descent or As Above, So Below - friends in a spooky cave have to survive and get out - but what we get is a lot of genuinely eerie stuff, and just when it seems like the movie is about to disappear up its own tail, the filmmakers will drop a pretty great jolt on the audience.
It's a bit unorthodox in structure, and that causes a few problems - I don't know that the story which is supposed to set the stage really does the job, and the filmmakers have trouble avoiding "doing the same thing three times" with the set-up they have - but it's a horror movie with some truly memorable moments, and you have to respect that.
It Follows
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It Follows is genuinely weird in a few places, and there are moments when I think writer/director David Robert Mitchell had a great idea for a horror movie without any idea of how he would finish it. This thing is pure distilled "stalker who won't stop and whom nobody will believe exists" without much worry about mythology, and that's okay - it lets Mitchell really get at the emotion of never feeling safe again, and the ending he comes up with certainly works on that level.
The pretty great cast is a big help, too - Maika Monroe is kind of transfixing as Jamie "Jay" Height, described by another character as "annoyingly pretty", and the audience goes for her easily. The group of supportive friends around her is interesting because in some ways they're as much her plainer (by movie standards) sister's friends as hers, but they work as a solid unit while also giving Keir Gilchrist a chance to stand out.
Ultimately, it's a movie about sharing weight even when you can't necessarily see a friend's problem yourself, and that's a pretty great thing to pile on top of a thriller that's already full of inventive, exciting material.
Full review on EFC
Today's (finale) schedule - I Am Here, I Am Trash, Waste Land, The Treatment, and blessed sleep after what looks like kind of a downer of a day.
Man from Reno
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
There's a moment at the end of a lot of the really good "Coen-like" movies (a description unfair to everyone involved, but one people use) where someone sits down, has a long sigh, and considers just what all this insanity means, inviting the audience to do the same. I don't know if Man from Reno quite has that moment, and it's kind of missed. There's still quite a bit to like about this little mystery even without that moment, and maybe it works well enough without it.
We approach the mystery from two directions. First, Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna), the sheriff of a county just outside San Francisco, finds an abandoned car on an extremely foggy night - and then finds the driver when an Asian man jumps out in front of the officer's car. In the city itself, Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) has bailed on a book junket back home to visit friends, also meeting fellow tourist Akira Suzuki (Kazuki Kitamura) in the hotel lobby. But what about the other people lurking in the background?
There are a lot of characters beyond that, from Aki's college friends to Paul's daughter, and their investigations wind up leading to some peculiar areas, although it's often the sort of situation that seems innocently baffling on its face rather than kinky or threatening. Given that there isn't much initial indication of where things are going, it's hard to say that the movie drifts particularly far from its initial destination, but it certainly feels like it does.
Full review at EFC
Fasandræberne (The Absent One)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I swear I've heard of the Department Q books from somewhere, even though I haven't really been keeping up on detective fiction as much as I'd like. If they're going to keep cranking out movies this good in adapting them, I hope they make it over here as well as the Dragon Tattoo books did.
It is kind of a familiar sort of detective set-up - the too-intense sleuth with the partner who grounds him, the case that leads into decadence among the elite going all the way back to boarding school, the finale that, let's face it, involves a lot of things that would get these guys fired from the police force. It's got folks involved who are pretty good at it, though, and a secondary protagonist in Danica Curcic's Kimmie who is downright fascinating and haunting. It's second of a series (the first came out last year), and I wouldn't mind seeing both get US distribution soon-ish.
Full review on EFC
Haemoo
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
This one has received a lot of notice in part because of Bong Joon-ho's involvement as a prodcer and co-writer for long-time collaborator Shim Sung-bo, and if that helps it out, that's great. It's a nifty little movie, the sort of thriller that South Korea seems to do better than anyone else right now - the type that plunges the audience into much darker than expected territory and still keeps one on the edge of his or her seat out of genuine excitement.
It looks great - I joked a couple weeks ago that someone in South Korea built a tank for shooting maritime movies and intends to get their money's worth, but I can't complain about the results, especially with how Shim handles the sea fog of the title, letting it really set the scene when the movie gets into murky territory. I do wonder a bit about the characterization, especially in the second half of the film - a lot of people seem to go way off the deep end, and although they're in a situation where I can't blame anyone for being messed up, I wonder if it's as much a sign of the film's roots as a stage play as anything else.
Full review on EFC
Dios Local (Local God)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
I really liked this one from Uruguay, much more than I expected. It's easy to read the description and come in expecting something from like The Descent or As Above, So Below - friends in a spooky cave have to survive and get out - but what we get is a lot of genuinely eerie stuff, and just when it seems like the movie is about to disappear up its own tail, the filmmakers will drop a pretty great jolt on the audience.
It's a bit unorthodox in structure, and that causes a few problems - I don't know that the story which is supposed to set the stage really does the job, and the filmmakers have trouble avoiding "doing the same thing three times" with the set-up they have - but it's a horror movie with some truly memorable moments, and you have to respect that.
It Follows
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)
It Follows is genuinely weird in a few places, and there are moments when I think writer/director David Robert Mitchell had a great idea for a horror movie without any idea of how he would finish it. This thing is pure distilled "stalker who won't stop and whom nobody will believe exists" without much worry about mythology, and that's okay - it lets Mitchell really get at the emotion of never feeling safe again, and the ending he comes up with certainly works on that level.
The pretty great cast is a big help, too - Maika Monroe is kind of transfixing as Jamie "Jay" Height, described by another character as "annoyingly pretty", and the audience goes for her easily. The group of supportive friends around her is interesting because in some ways they're as much her plainer (by movie standards) sister's friends as hers, but they work as a solid unit while also giving Keir Gilchrist a chance to stand out.
Ultimately, it's a movie about sharing weight even when you can't necessarily see a friend's problem yourself, and that's a pretty great thing to pile on top of a thriller that's already full of inventive, exciting material.
Full review on EFC
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