Anyone know a good, English-friendly site for Indian box office? It would probably be a tricky sort of thing, since India has at least three or four movie industries based on language and region and international releases maybe account for more than they do in China, but I do get kind of curious about how (a)typical what hangs around Cambridge is compared to what's popular where it comes from.
I can look up how Dead to Rights did readily enough (although the site for Chinese box office has gotten slow!), although it does make me wonder how manipulated audiences and those numbers are; it's way ahead of other summer releases but it's as far from a fun movie as you'll see, though it may be in the "government/orgranizations heartily recommends this patriotic epic and maybe organizes outings or buys out theaters so tickets are free" category. But that's kind of paranoia about China as much as anything, I suppose, me kind of applying something I've heard about to the data because it explains the popularity of a thing I'm sort of lukewarm on.
At any rate, both of these did well enough to get a second week in and around Boston, and you could certainly do worse if you want to see a big movie during the August doldrums.
War 2
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2025 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Where to stream the first to catch up (Prime Video link), or order the Indian DVD at Amazon
Even when the interval is completely edited out of an Indian movie for US release - you don't even see the word appear on screen before a fade-out/fade-in these days - there's often no missing how much these movies are built around the cliffhanger. That can be a lot of fun when it's a fun twist that makes it feel like you're getting a movie and its clever sequel at the same time, although for War 2, it's more a case of one half being stronger as it tries to be that, leaving enough action to be fun but not quite great.
It opens with the first film's hero, Kabir Dhaliwal (Hrithik Roshan) singlehandedly taking out an entire yakuza family in Japan, though he's no longer working for Indian intelligence but as a freelance assassin. It's actually kind of both - Colonel Sunil Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) has recruited him to go deep undercover in the hopes of his being recruited by the Kali cartel, a loose confederation of criminal and terrorist organizations surrounding India, with Indian businessman Gautam Gulati (K.C. Shankar) looking to use the organization to secretly control the country. He succeeds, but at terrible cost, leading Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), the new head of JOCR, to assemble a task force including Luthra's daughter Kavya (Kiara Advani), a hero in the air force, and top special-ops agent Vikram (N.T. Rama Rao Jr. aka "NTR") to track him down, even as Kali plans an operation that could plunge the whole region into chaos.
I do believe that I outright cackled at the increasingly deranged action of the first half just enough to forgive a pretty leaden second half. The opening segment is kind of a mess - it's full of characters who are described as very important but vanish right after the action sequence they are in is done, for instance - but the sheer glee the filmmakers show in immediately escalating after the last sequence and portraying its super-agents as downright superheroic keeps the energy up even as the story starts to emerge. The second part, meanwhile, starts with a flashback that must run a full half hour desperately trying to create a tragic shared backstory for Kabir and Vikram, and later serves up another that is such an obligatory romantic number that it undercuts its intention by being nowhere near as passionate and entertaning as the song featuring Kabir & Vikram. You could probably cut a whole ton of that out, just focusing on the threat to the country, and have a good action movie without the attempts to make the mission personal bogging things down.
As such, it's a messy movie in the opposite way of the first War, which was ridiculous but in audacious ways in how it was always trying to top the last twist. That one was darn near incoherent by the end, but rose to a crescendo. This feels like the sort of movie where they've pre-vizzed the action scenes before the script was done and then struggled to connect them. Maybe that's why it seemed so front-loaded - that's where the good, nutty action fit story-wise, leaving relatively drab material for the finale.
Still, the good action is a lot of fun, betraying only a passing concern for actual physics, but kinetic and leaning into being larger than life. The bit with the wrecking ball, for instance, has a delightfully hilarious cartoon logic, and it's maybe only the second-most ridiculous thing in that set piece; there's also a quality runaway train sequence (although I do seem to recall something similar in one of the Tiger movies). There are bits where the characters supposedly being secret agents working in the shadows makes the bits of Bollywood musical that still cling to these movies even funnier, because they're really riding the line between "there's a song playing and everyone is stopping to dance" at times.
I still kind of dig Roshan in this role, especially when he gets to do grizzled cockiness rather than having to flail at melodrama, especially in contrast to NRT's battering ram, which is very fun in this context even if I might quickly grow impatient with this character as a lead should the filmmakers fork him off into another corner of the YRF Spy Universe. I kind of wish Kiara Advani had more to do even after they've worked to give her a shared backstory; she's kind of hanging around until they need a pilot. Anil Kapoor's Vikrant Kaul, meanwhile, is one eyepatch away from being Indian Nick Fury, which amused me greatly.
War 2 is a very silly movie, and it's at its best when that's what it's going for instead of grasping for tragedy and emotion.
Nanjing Zhao Xiang Guan (Dead to Rights)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Dead to Rights is one of those movies that is a huge hit in China - $380M+ box office during a summer where few have reached half that - in a way that makes one pause. It's impressively mounted and fairly well made, and between the description and English-language title it has been given, it sounds like a nifty thriller . In actuality, it is a dour film about the horrors visited upon the audience's great-grandparents, and is that really what folks want to see more than anything else when they go to the movies right now, or has attendance been boosted/inflated, as had been known to happen with these patriotic historical films?
In this case, it begins as Nanjing falls to Japan in 1937, and postman Su Liuchang (Liu Haoran) is attempting to flee, as the Japanese are slaughtering them, as their uniforms and mailbags look military enough to their eyes. He flees into a photo studio, only to quickly be confronted by Wang Guanghai (Wang Chan-Jun), who is working as a translator to earn exit passes for himself, his wife, and his son, in this case, for army photographer Hideo Ito (Daichi Harashima), who can shoot but doesn't know how to develop film. Neither does Su, but the actual proprietor Jin Chengzong (Xiao Wang) is hiding under the floorboards with his wife and daughter Wanyi (Yang Enyou). Jin will teach Su (going by the alias A-Tong) the craft if he hides them, but it gets harder - looking to protect his mistress, actress Lin Yuxiu (Gao Ye), Guanghai install her in the photoshop as A-Tong's wife, and she has smuggled wounded soldier Song Cunyi (Zhou You) in via her luggage. It's a lot to keep hidden, and the fact that the photos Ito brings them to develop often contain atrocities, and are they any less complicit than Guanghai for developing them?
There's some irony to wondering if people really want to see this, as one can see; the film is, at times, about its characters being very torn between the feeling that developing photographs of what would later be called The Rape of Nanjing makes them collaborators in these horrors and ultimately realizing that this might be the only way of exposing these atrocities. It's strong medicine, but the generation that experienced this first-hand is almost completely gone, and if you want to reinforce its memory, you've got to make something scarring but compelling enough that people want to see it. A Chinese Schindler's List of sorts, where the horrors are just short of overwhelming, but there's just enough heroism underneath to prevent a message that fighting evil is ultimately pointless.
Is this that movie? I'm not sure. Writer/director Shen Ao has seen the power of the central dilemma but not necessarily made it what drives the movie. The characters talk about it on occasion, but it doesn't really become what they're doing on screen until it's time to reveal how something was accomplished at the end, by which time they've kept the thriller elements off the screen so much that it's barely even partially the sort of movie where one is looking for how the sleight of hand is pulled off. It's almost entirely about how the people of Nanjing have been sadistically murdered by the Japanese by that point, whether they are in the midst of heroics, actively or passively collaborating, or just being in the wrong place at that point in history. It's not a story happening against that background; the background is the story, and the heroes must be utterly steadfast while the corruption of those who are less can't quite become interesting enough to take the center.
Shen does it well enough, as filmmakers who are not particularly subtle or subversive go. Dead to Rights one of those war movies that is relentlessly gray and desaturated, right up until the moment a Japanese soldier wishes they had color film to capture the gore and a river soon runs red with blood for some of the only real color in the film. He puts together a few good scenes and does okay pushing how terrible things can be without getting walkouts (I imagine his crew is well-practiced at staging military action with clearly-depicted violence and martyrdom from the sheer number of war films China produces). He's good with his cast, and they contribute performances that wouldn't be out of place in a movie intending to more thoroughly explore various parts of its story: Liu Haoran is an amiable lead and has enough chemistry with Gao Ye's Lin Yuxiu that you could probably build a good movie around the pair getting to know each other rather than skipping to the highlights; Wang Chuan-jun gives Guanghai enough sweaty desperation to be interesting in a movie that isn't going to moderate its contempt for traitors even while occasionally giving lip service to where the line is. Daichi Harashimo does very nice work showing Ito mature into something more willingly monstrous.
For better or worse, Shen doesn't appear to be a guy who tries to get cute or ironic trying to find nuance or poke at the party line, which works better here than in previous film, No More Bets (that one abandoned flawed but interesting protagonists for an extended lecture). Still, he can occasionally go above and beyond, as when the characters briefly stop to solemnly say slogans or when the film ends on the most extreme "cringe does not pay and justice was done" epilogue a film can have. It's not exactly wrong, but the film is not built in a way to allow its heroes to feel any regret or discomfort for what they had to do in awful circumstances, and one can see that.
Ultimately, Dead to Rights is two hours of solemn misery and while I probably wouldn't have this story be anything else, I might like it to be more.
Showing posts with label action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label action. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Monday, August 04, 2025
Fantasia 2025.09: Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and Transcending Dimensions
This is the last post before flying back south, not quite reaching halfway on the blog during the event, and I don't know how much more I'll get through before everything is just too far in the back of my head to finish if I hold true to form, so I just want to say it's been great seeing you all again, we saw some pretty good movies, dealt with a decent AirBNB in a building that kept making things a little difficult (okay, maybe that's just me), and generally had a good time.
I got a late-ish start on Thursday because I saw Fragment opening night, so for me, the day kicked off with the second screenings of Redux Redux. I was a little disappointed that the McManus clan wasn't there, although it turned out my bladder wanted me out right as credits rolled and just got this picture of actor Jeremy Holm ®, who played the villain, starting his Q&A and saying that he got the role by freaking the McManus brothers out, sending them poetry he wrote in-character. I'm torn over whether that was just the start or whether it couldn't get any better.
Next up in De Sève without guests was The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which has odd in playing late afternoon at the midpoint of the festival and at night on the second-to-last day, when the schedule is usually night then matinee a couple days later. Good for flexibility.
Then I crossed the street for Anna Kiri, the second time in three days where I kind of consider myself lucky that the French-Canadian film listed as having English subtitles actually had English subtitles. I've gotten trapped in the center of a row for something I barely understood before and while that wasn't happening tonight (I am choosing seats with escape routes this year), it would still mean eating a slot. Anyway, there wasn't much of a Q&A afterwards but pretty much everybody involved in the movie was there. That's director Francis Bordeleau in the eye of the storm with a mic.
And, finally, we end the night with Transcending Dimensions director Toshiaki Toyoda. I must admit, I don't know if I've heard his name specifically before, but he's a guy that certainly has a following. among some at the festival. He gave a pretty cheerful Q&A, although one laced with jokes about how difficult it is to make an independent film these days. He also mentioned writing to the cast which meant having to be very fortunate for windows of availability to line up, and that he took a chorus at a buddhist retreat for the specific purpose of getting to blow the conch shell.
I must admit: I zoned out during his movie, so it's a good thing I fell behind enough to see it on the next Monday before writing a review. I was going to see it then in any case, but I'd opted to skip the big Adams Family movie across the way because my experience with their stuff was that it was a fun novelty once, but diminishing returns thereafter. That movie won the Cheval Noir, but I don't regret the decision to zone out during the trippy mystical sci-fi versus the gifted-amateur horror movie.
Huh, no shorts on Thursday the 24th? Unusual! Friday would be The Serpent's Skin, I Live Here Now, Forbidden City, and New Group. Yesterday (the last day!), I was able to run from Burning to A Chinese Ghost Story III, then finished with Holy Night: Demon Hunters, >Fixed, and Tanoman: Expo Explosions.
Redux Redux
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Redux Redux is the sort of genre movie that I arguably go to film festivals looking to discover: Quality, lean sci-fi action that makes sure to deliver the goods right away and then keeps up an impressively steady pace all the way through. It twists and world-builds a bit, but keeps its eye on the prize.
It opens provocatively, with Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) murdering a man (Jeremy Holm) in ways designed to make him suffer, before the last one goes awry and has her leading the police on a desperate chase before she can return to her hotel room, where she has what looks like a steampunk coffin. It's a machine for jumping between realities, and she's been doing that for some time, taking out every iteration of the serial killer that killed her daughter and 11 other girls. This time, though, something is different - she arrives just in time to find a 13th victim, Mia (Stella Marcus), still alive, and the street-smart orphan wants a piece of this revenge even before discovering Irene's secret.
Michaela McManus Irene gives off some Sarah Connor vibes as her universe-hopping avenger, but a lot of the fun comes when Stella Marcus enters the picture and the movie transforms into something snappier and perhaps more entertaining without lowering the stakes or the melancholy. McManus's Irene is plenty capable as the film's antihero, but one of the things that comes across even during the opening badass imagery is that she's tired; not in a way that seems to have her sluggish or unable to meet a challenge, but questions about the point of all this are starting to kick around in her head. Marcus, meanwhile, is playing Mia as someone who was already a smart-ass teen and this is all turbocharging it. The neat trick is that McManus never makes Irene seem like she's regarding Mia as a new daughter, but that she has had a teenage daughter and knows what she's dealing with enough to parry and appear to relent.
The film in general manages to be very funny without abandoning a grim plot; the universe-hoping often means that narrow escapes are followed by awkward entrances, and filmmakers Kevin & Matthew McManus find ways to ease into heavy situations by finding the absurd in Irene's encounters with new-but-not-so-new people and places. It's never a thing that gives the viewer whiplash, but greases the wheels and reminds the audience that there is this spark of humanity left in Irene and Mia despite her self-imposed missions of revenge.
The whole thing moves, too, offering up quick action that finds new ways to challenge Irene even though the audience is well aware of the escape hatch, doubling down and adding mythology in a way that doesn't distract or diminish what had come before. The finale circles back around to the start but also shows how Irene has expanded her intentions.
It's nice work without being overly flashy, a lot like the original Terminator: A simple but striking sci-fi premise that lends itself to human-scale action and elevated through strong execution.
La Virgen de la Tosquera (The Virgin of the Quarry Lake)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is described as adapting two stories in a collection by Mariana Enriquez, and I kind of wonder how it branches out from this: Up and down the line of Natalia's life? Following side characters? Thematic similarities? And, most curiously, is there more magic compared to the hints we see here, because its placement is pretty convenient but not nearly as cringe-inducingly so as other tales of this type can be.
Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) is a teenager, or just out of school but not yet looking to leave the home of her grandmother Rita (Luisa Merelas), where she's been since her mother left for Spain; it's not like there's a lot of opportunity in turn-of-the-millennium Buenos Aires. She's probably the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, the one everybody presumes will end up with handsome Diego (Agustín Sosa), at least until Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) enters the picture. Silvia's not quite so pretty as Nati, but she's a bit older and more experienced, with tales of traveling extensively to Mexico and Europe, and it threatens to bring out the worst in Nati.
Everyone is primed to blow in this movie from the opening scene where a neighbor beats an unhoused person almost to death, especially at somebody who might be considered an outsider, and you don't really need the addition of apparent witchcraft to make that point; the abandoned shopping cart lurks in more shots than one expect, a reminder of the potential for evil that exists in everyone and an omen of worse to come. Indeed, for all that the fantastic elements seems to be a settling point, I kind of wondered if it figured more into the other stories from the adapted collection. It winds up a bit of an unarmed big finale though little more than a series of potentially-coincidental metaphors throughout.
The slow-ish burn getting there is good stuff, at least, as the strain on Nati builds and she finds it easier to be selfish. The filmmakers are well able to be empathetic even as it becomes clear that Nati is not a particularly good person, especially during a particularly brutal phone call where Dolores Oliverio's face reveals stunned surprise that someone could do this to her but also the genuine hurt of her first stabbing heartbreak. It is, we see, somewhat easy to think well of Nati because of her circumstances, and even understand as this young and angry girl does not necessarily respond maturely, but how does one cope when she doesn't always grow in the right direction.
Oliverio is great in the role, transmuting adolescent naivete to cool rage before the audience's eyes, retaining enough of what makes Nati the cool girl people flock to that it's hard to let go even when she's probably passing points of no return. The folks around her are pretty good, too, most notably Luisa Merelas as Rita, whose kindness seems to hold the neighborhood together but which has its practical limits. Agustin Sosa plays Diego as a sort of handsome cipher, possibly worth Nati's obsession but vague enough to emphasize that this isn't the point. Fernanda Echeverría intrigues as Silvia, coming off as someone who puffs themselves up and flaunts their good fortune at first but seeming more mature and well-rounded as one starts to question Nati's perspective.
The filmmakers do an impressive job of immersing this group in what feels like a very specific time and place. Folks around the world will probably grin at the precision of how they ground it in time with fashion, music, and how internet communication is just beginning to be a major part of teenagers' lives, but the rolling power outages, water shortages, and other infrastructure issues will undoubtedly strike a chord with Argentinians who lived through it. Even the quarry lake of the title, a beautiful oasis, requires leaving the city and walking from the last bus stop, and it's apparently haunted, both by the people who died digging it and the idea that there was once going to be a town where people could live a comfortable middle-class life there.
That's where the shocking finale happens, and while I'm normally not exactly fond of the way it plays out, there's no denying that the final line and the way it seems to set things into place are effectively delivered. I don't so much wonder what happened to these girls next, if that's where the book goes, but I sure felt the process of getting there.
Ana Kiri
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)
I was wearing a watch during this screening, so I'm kicking myself for not doing a quick check to see how literally this movie is split down the middle for me when the time jump happened. Sure, things had been going well enough not to be tracking elapsed time, and you can't exactly know in the moment that this is when things are going to go downhill, but in retrospect, I certainly couldn't help but wonder.
It starts with how Anna (Catherine Brunet) and her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotreet) had been on their own since childhood, and though Anna loves him fiercely, she recognizes that he's been buying into his gangster persona too much of late despite their group - Anna, Vincent, his girlfriend Cindy (Charlotte Aubin), and best friend Mirko (JadeHassouné) mostly being small-time crooks at best. And now, Vincent's gotten ambitious - the bowling alley they just knocked over was a stash house for crime boss Micky (Kar Graboshas). Anna loses her diary while fleeing Micky's bar, and it winds up in the hands of French Literature lecturer Phillippe (Fayolle Jean), who is impressed enough to offer Anna a scholarship. She initially refuses, but then realizes it would be a good way to break away from a life that's turned dangerous.
I really loved the grungy crime vibes of the first half, full of Anna's sarcastic self-aware narration, inevitable betrayals, and plenty of colorful small-timers and losers. It just looks and feels right, and even when Anna winds up catching Philippe's interest and visiting his office, there's this nifty tension of how she doesn't feel like she belongs there, whether this is worth sticking her head up for, and what happens when she steps back outside this university building. It's great heist-fallout stuff, and the way the action, Anna's narration, and the scribbled notes that show up on-screen like a telestrator reinforce and contradict each other makes the simple story feel dense and emphasizes just how many directions Anna's mind is being pulled in.
The second half, where Anna is in school and developing her diary into a novel, never quite comes together compared to the first. The filmmakers introduce a bunch of new characters it does little with and their take on the literary world feels broader than their take on crime tropes. The audience isn't given time to acclimate to Anna's new situation before her old life tears its head. And the ending... Oof. The potential is frustrating; there's little exploration over whether Anna fits into this world or not, or the idea that one can hide out in the same city they "fled" by changing social status and associations; working-class neighborhoods and academia can be a block apart and never mingle.
Also, I don't know whether this is a compliment or not, but when we first see Anna's new boyfriend using a laptop, I wondered how he had one because it seemed like this movie took place in 1983 or the like until that point, a pay-phone era crime flick rather than a smartphone-era one.
Catherine Brunet is plenty watchable as Anna regardless; she and the filmmakers do a fine job of capturing a woman who is a little too smart for the life of a small-time crook but too much of that world to truly fit into the art & lit crowd she finds herself in. There are some fun other characters around her - Charlotte Aubin's Cindy plays like a the sort of wannabe femme fatale that wears high heels to go bowling, and Nincolas Michone's Zhao is seemingly trying to work his way up to management of the bar where he sells drugs - though Maxime de Cotret gets a bit caught in between as Vincent, not quite charismatic enough to be as full of himself as he is, even considering that he's not entirely getting away with it..
There's half a good movie here, and half a movie with an interesting idea but not nearly the same execution.
Transcending Dimensions
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Seen 28 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I ran out of gas during my first screening of transcending Dimensions - running the psychedelic movie at 10m works for an audience that rolls out of bed at 2pm rather than 7am - and came out feeling as though I'd missed a lot. The second time through, at a more civilized noon, I think that maybe I didn't miss quite so much as I thought the first time but was maybe just too tired to absorb it. It's actually more straightforward than the trippiness would indicate.
It opens with Ryosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka), a sort of monk, sitting in nature, pondering; but soon it is visiting a retreat run my Master Ajari Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), who wears the robes but has a sadistic streak. He dares one visitor, Yazu (Masahiro Higashide), to cut off his finger because no knowledge comes without sacrifice; another, Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), sees where this going and tries to leave. Another, Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), is a hitman there at the behest of Nonoka (Haruku Imo), the monk Ryosuke was her boyfriend and disappeared here, so she wants Hanzo dead. But is Rosuke in the forest, at the end of the universe, or someplace stranger?
As all this goes on, the extent to which Transcending Dimensions just looks and sounds cool should not be overlooked. A lot of attention will be paid to the scenes in order space or the mirrored rooms, but it looks generally spiffy whether what's on screen is kaleidoscopic CGI or wide-open nature. The jazzy soundtrack with the diegetic sound of monks blowing on conch shells is excellent, and the sound design is terrific as well, whether it's ordinary but enveloping or built in such a way as to imply heightened senses and awareness of every time Ryosuke's staff raps on a stone.
What's maybe most surprising is the extent to which the assassin is perhaps the sanest, most centered character of the whole lot. While the monks and masters appear to spend their entire lives chasing enlightenment, he comes off as a guy who might actually be living outside of his job, separate from conventional morality but having instincts about how things connect. Enlightenment, the film suggests, is not a particularly important goal on its own; the process has not made Matter Hanzo a better man, and Ryosuke, meditating until the end of the world, will not contribute much to it. The cast is impressive playing this out, from Chihara Jr.'s gleeful sadism to Yosuke Kubozuka's earnest disconnection, with Kiyohiko Shibukawa's frustration hilarious and Haruka Imo eventually giving Nonoka perspective that is both human and ethereal.
Having that at the film's center probably makes it somewhat easier to tell a story when it's not quite so important to communicate something grandiose and spiritual. Transcending Dimensions has plenty of strange turns, unreliable narrators, sidetracks, and subtle revelations, but filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is good at using the time to let a joke or shock breathe so that the rest of the film can sink in as well, meaning that stitching it all together is more straightforward than you might thing.
Anyway, I'm very glad that the schedule worked out so I could see it with the director Q&A and the "what did I just watch?" sensation the first time, and give it a second chance a few days later when my brain was operating normally. It is, perhaps, how this sort of movie is best experienced.
Next up in De Sève without guests was The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which has odd in playing late afternoon at the midpoint of the festival and at night on the second-to-last day, when the schedule is usually night then matinee a couple days later. Good for flexibility.
I must admit: I zoned out during his movie, so it's a good thing I fell behind enough to see it on the next Monday before writing a review. I was going to see it then in any case, but I'd opted to skip the big Adams Family movie across the way because my experience with their stuff was that it was a fun novelty once, but diminishing returns thereafter. That movie won the Cheval Noir, but I don't regret the decision to zone out during the trippy mystical sci-fi versus the gifted-amateur horror movie.
Huh, no shorts on Thursday the 24th? Unusual! Friday would be The Serpent's Skin, I Live Here Now, Forbidden City, and New Group. Yesterday (the last day!), I was able to run from Burning to A Chinese Ghost Story III, then finished with Holy Night: Demon Hunters, >Fixed, and Tanoman: Expo Explosions.
Redux Redux
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Redux Redux is the sort of genre movie that I arguably go to film festivals looking to discover: Quality, lean sci-fi action that makes sure to deliver the goods right away and then keeps up an impressively steady pace all the way through. It twists and world-builds a bit, but keeps its eye on the prize.
It opens provocatively, with Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) murdering a man (Jeremy Holm) in ways designed to make him suffer, before the last one goes awry and has her leading the police on a desperate chase before she can return to her hotel room, where she has what looks like a steampunk coffin. It's a machine for jumping between realities, and she's been doing that for some time, taking out every iteration of the serial killer that killed her daughter and 11 other girls. This time, though, something is different - she arrives just in time to find a 13th victim, Mia (Stella Marcus), still alive, and the street-smart orphan wants a piece of this revenge even before discovering Irene's secret.
Michaela McManus Irene gives off some Sarah Connor vibes as her universe-hopping avenger, but a lot of the fun comes when Stella Marcus enters the picture and the movie transforms into something snappier and perhaps more entertaining without lowering the stakes or the melancholy. McManus's Irene is plenty capable as the film's antihero, but one of the things that comes across even during the opening badass imagery is that she's tired; not in a way that seems to have her sluggish or unable to meet a challenge, but questions about the point of all this are starting to kick around in her head. Marcus, meanwhile, is playing Mia as someone who was already a smart-ass teen and this is all turbocharging it. The neat trick is that McManus never makes Irene seem like she's regarding Mia as a new daughter, but that she has had a teenage daughter and knows what she's dealing with enough to parry and appear to relent.
The film in general manages to be very funny without abandoning a grim plot; the universe-hoping often means that narrow escapes are followed by awkward entrances, and filmmakers Kevin & Matthew McManus find ways to ease into heavy situations by finding the absurd in Irene's encounters with new-but-not-so-new people and places. It's never a thing that gives the viewer whiplash, but greases the wheels and reminds the audience that there is this spark of humanity left in Irene and Mia despite her self-imposed missions of revenge.
The whole thing moves, too, offering up quick action that finds new ways to challenge Irene even though the audience is well aware of the escape hatch, doubling down and adding mythology in a way that doesn't distract or diminish what had come before. The finale circles back around to the start but also shows how Irene has expanded her intentions.
It's nice work without being overly flashy, a lot like the original Terminator: A simple but striking sci-fi premise that lends itself to human-scale action and elevated through strong execution.
La Virgen de la Tosquera (The Virgin of the Quarry Lake)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is described as adapting two stories in a collection by Mariana Enriquez, and I kind of wonder how it branches out from this: Up and down the line of Natalia's life? Following side characters? Thematic similarities? And, most curiously, is there more magic compared to the hints we see here, because its placement is pretty convenient but not nearly as cringe-inducingly so as other tales of this type can be.
Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) is a teenager, or just out of school but not yet looking to leave the home of her grandmother Rita (Luisa Merelas), where she's been since her mother left for Spain; it's not like there's a lot of opportunity in turn-of-the-millennium Buenos Aires. She's probably the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, the one everybody presumes will end up with handsome Diego (Agustín Sosa), at least until Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) enters the picture. Silvia's not quite so pretty as Nati, but she's a bit older and more experienced, with tales of traveling extensively to Mexico and Europe, and it threatens to bring out the worst in Nati.
Everyone is primed to blow in this movie from the opening scene where a neighbor beats an unhoused person almost to death, especially at somebody who might be considered an outsider, and you don't really need the addition of apparent witchcraft to make that point; the abandoned shopping cart lurks in more shots than one expect, a reminder of the potential for evil that exists in everyone and an omen of worse to come. Indeed, for all that the fantastic elements seems to be a settling point, I kind of wondered if it figured more into the other stories from the adapted collection. It winds up a bit of an unarmed big finale though little more than a series of potentially-coincidental metaphors throughout.
The slow-ish burn getting there is good stuff, at least, as the strain on Nati builds and she finds it easier to be selfish. The filmmakers are well able to be empathetic even as it becomes clear that Nati is not a particularly good person, especially during a particularly brutal phone call where Dolores Oliverio's face reveals stunned surprise that someone could do this to her but also the genuine hurt of her first stabbing heartbreak. It is, we see, somewhat easy to think well of Nati because of her circumstances, and even understand as this young and angry girl does not necessarily respond maturely, but how does one cope when she doesn't always grow in the right direction.
Oliverio is great in the role, transmuting adolescent naivete to cool rage before the audience's eyes, retaining enough of what makes Nati the cool girl people flock to that it's hard to let go even when she's probably passing points of no return. The folks around her are pretty good, too, most notably Luisa Merelas as Rita, whose kindness seems to hold the neighborhood together but which has its practical limits. Agustin Sosa plays Diego as a sort of handsome cipher, possibly worth Nati's obsession but vague enough to emphasize that this isn't the point. Fernanda Echeverría intrigues as Silvia, coming off as someone who puffs themselves up and flaunts their good fortune at first but seeming more mature and well-rounded as one starts to question Nati's perspective.
The filmmakers do an impressive job of immersing this group in what feels like a very specific time and place. Folks around the world will probably grin at the precision of how they ground it in time with fashion, music, and how internet communication is just beginning to be a major part of teenagers' lives, but the rolling power outages, water shortages, and other infrastructure issues will undoubtedly strike a chord with Argentinians who lived through it. Even the quarry lake of the title, a beautiful oasis, requires leaving the city and walking from the last bus stop, and it's apparently haunted, both by the people who died digging it and the idea that there was once going to be a town where people could live a comfortable middle-class life there.
That's where the shocking finale happens, and while I'm normally not exactly fond of the way it plays out, there's no denying that the final line and the way it seems to set things into place are effectively delivered. I don't so much wonder what happened to these girls next, if that's where the book goes, but I sure felt the process of getting there.
Ana Kiri
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)
I was wearing a watch during this screening, so I'm kicking myself for not doing a quick check to see how literally this movie is split down the middle for me when the time jump happened. Sure, things had been going well enough not to be tracking elapsed time, and you can't exactly know in the moment that this is when things are going to go downhill, but in retrospect, I certainly couldn't help but wonder.
It starts with how Anna (Catherine Brunet) and her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotreet) had been on their own since childhood, and though Anna loves him fiercely, she recognizes that he's been buying into his gangster persona too much of late despite their group - Anna, Vincent, his girlfriend Cindy (Charlotte Aubin), and best friend Mirko (JadeHassouné) mostly being small-time crooks at best. And now, Vincent's gotten ambitious - the bowling alley they just knocked over was a stash house for crime boss Micky (Kar Graboshas). Anna loses her diary while fleeing Micky's bar, and it winds up in the hands of French Literature lecturer Phillippe (Fayolle Jean), who is impressed enough to offer Anna a scholarship. She initially refuses, but then realizes it would be a good way to break away from a life that's turned dangerous.
I really loved the grungy crime vibes of the first half, full of Anna's sarcastic self-aware narration, inevitable betrayals, and plenty of colorful small-timers and losers. It just looks and feels right, and even when Anna winds up catching Philippe's interest and visiting his office, there's this nifty tension of how she doesn't feel like she belongs there, whether this is worth sticking her head up for, and what happens when she steps back outside this university building. It's great heist-fallout stuff, and the way the action, Anna's narration, and the scribbled notes that show up on-screen like a telestrator reinforce and contradict each other makes the simple story feel dense and emphasizes just how many directions Anna's mind is being pulled in.
The second half, where Anna is in school and developing her diary into a novel, never quite comes together compared to the first. The filmmakers introduce a bunch of new characters it does little with and their take on the literary world feels broader than their take on crime tropes. The audience isn't given time to acclimate to Anna's new situation before her old life tears its head. And the ending... Oof. The potential is frustrating; there's little exploration over whether Anna fits into this world or not, or the idea that one can hide out in the same city they "fled" by changing social status and associations; working-class neighborhoods and academia can be a block apart and never mingle.
Also, I don't know whether this is a compliment or not, but when we first see Anna's new boyfriend using a laptop, I wondered how he had one because it seemed like this movie took place in 1983 or the like until that point, a pay-phone era crime flick rather than a smartphone-era one.
Catherine Brunet is plenty watchable as Anna regardless; she and the filmmakers do a fine job of capturing a woman who is a little too smart for the life of a small-time crook but too much of that world to truly fit into the art & lit crowd she finds herself in. There are some fun other characters around her - Charlotte Aubin's Cindy plays like a the sort of wannabe femme fatale that wears high heels to go bowling, and Nincolas Michone's Zhao is seemingly trying to work his way up to management of the bar where he sells drugs - though Maxime de Cotret gets a bit caught in between as Vincent, not quite charismatic enough to be as full of himself as he is, even considering that he's not entirely getting away with it..
There's half a good movie here, and half a movie with an interesting idea but not nearly the same execution.
Transcending Dimensions
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Seen 28 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I ran out of gas during my first screening of transcending Dimensions - running the psychedelic movie at 10m works for an audience that rolls out of bed at 2pm rather than 7am - and came out feeling as though I'd missed a lot. The second time through, at a more civilized noon, I think that maybe I didn't miss quite so much as I thought the first time but was maybe just too tired to absorb it. It's actually more straightforward than the trippiness would indicate.
It opens with Ryosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka), a sort of monk, sitting in nature, pondering; but soon it is visiting a retreat run my Master Ajari Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), who wears the robes but has a sadistic streak. He dares one visitor, Yazu (Masahiro Higashide), to cut off his finger because no knowledge comes without sacrifice; another, Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), sees where this going and tries to leave. Another, Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), is a hitman there at the behest of Nonoka (Haruku Imo), the monk Ryosuke was her boyfriend and disappeared here, so she wants Hanzo dead. But is Rosuke in the forest, at the end of the universe, or someplace stranger?
As all this goes on, the extent to which Transcending Dimensions just looks and sounds cool should not be overlooked. A lot of attention will be paid to the scenes in order space or the mirrored rooms, but it looks generally spiffy whether what's on screen is kaleidoscopic CGI or wide-open nature. The jazzy soundtrack with the diegetic sound of monks blowing on conch shells is excellent, and the sound design is terrific as well, whether it's ordinary but enveloping or built in such a way as to imply heightened senses and awareness of every time Ryosuke's staff raps on a stone.
What's maybe most surprising is the extent to which the assassin is perhaps the sanest, most centered character of the whole lot. While the monks and masters appear to spend their entire lives chasing enlightenment, he comes off as a guy who might actually be living outside of his job, separate from conventional morality but having instincts about how things connect. Enlightenment, the film suggests, is not a particularly important goal on its own; the process has not made Matter Hanzo a better man, and Ryosuke, meditating until the end of the world, will not contribute much to it. The cast is impressive playing this out, from Chihara Jr.'s gleeful sadism to Yosuke Kubozuka's earnest disconnection, with Kiyohiko Shibukawa's frustration hilarious and Haruka Imo eventually giving Nonoka perspective that is both human and ethereal.
Having that at the film's center probably makes it somewhat easier to tell a story when it's not quite so important to communicate something grandiose and spiritual. Transcending Dimensions has plenty of strange turns, unreliable narrators, sidetracks, and subtle revelations, but filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is good at using the time to let a joke or shock breathe so that the rest of the film can sink in as well, meaning that stitching it all together is more straightforward than you might thing.
Anyway, I'm very glad that the schedule worked out so I could see it with the director Q&A and the "what did I just watch?" sensation the first time, and give it a second chance a few days later when my brain was operating normally. It is, perhaps, how this sort of movie is best experienced.
Monday, July 28, 2025
Fantasia 2025.06: Cielo, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, "The Traveler & The Troll", and Dog of God
Man, I remember when weekdays at this festival were shorter than weekend days and you could get out touristing before the first movie!
First stop in de Sève for the day was Cielo with producer John Dunton-Dowser and director Alberto Sciamma, who mentioned seeing the first couple images in a dream but had no idea where they would fit in any sort of story. He mentioned this to Dunton-Dowser, whose wife is from Bolivia, and learning about it started to give the story shape. Because a movie takes time to come together, the three young actresses they were considering for the lead aged out, which led them to Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda, whom they describe as a truly remarkable young lady. She sent a video greeting that played before the movie in what sounded to my ears like pretty darn good French; she's been in a French-immersion school for the past year and Sciamma boasts that she's caught up with most of the kids who have been learning since kindergarten. Part of their goal for the movie is to help fund her education, the filmmakers describe it as a place where the drop-off between the private and public schools is very steep.
Sciamma really seems to have fallen in love with the place, praising the local crew and how they made it a Bolivian film rather than one by a Spanish filmmaker. He also took care to mention that the altitude in Bolivia can really throw you for a loop: La Paz is the most altitudinous capital city in the world, 2km above sea level, so the air is thin and the deserts get far chillier than you would think just from looking at them. A beautiful country, by all accounts, but not for the weak of spirit.
Next up, Ruppert Bottenberg hosting Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers director Amélie Ravalec, who discovered this strain of post-WWII Japanese art relatively recently and did a deep dive into it. Having made this sort of broad-overview documentary before, one thing she noted was that while Western artists in previous projects would often agree to participate quickly but maybe not be incredibly helpful, the Japanese artists often took quite a bit of convincing but were very giving of their time once they assented. There was more she would have liked, but given the timeframe, several people she wanted to interview had passed, and including even seconds of archival footage from television interviews (for example) would have ballooned the feature's budget.
The film would be back in town with French subtitles at the end of the week (now, if you're in Montreal), and has also been reworked into an artbook that was promoted in the closing credits, and it should be a good companion, considering just how much material is in the movie.
There might have technically been time to fit the Korean shorts package in at de Sève before crossing the street, but with everything running a few minutes late, but not the consistent same few minutes, I decided not to chance it, got some food, and then saw Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards in Hall (can't quite make the shift to Alumni Auditorium). Good fun.
I'm not going to lie, I was worn down by the time we got to Dog of God, but you've got to respect the bling the Abele brothers wore to their screening. I think I dozed through a lot of their movie, which seems hard to believe, but is true. On the other hand…
Here's Adam Murray, with Ruppert to the left and Daniel in the background, and his short "The Traveler & The Troll" was worth the price of admission (or time on the schedule). I'm not sure I've seen anything that recalls Weird Jim Henson so well since his passing!
And that's last Monday in the books. Tuesday would be Stinker, Sweetness, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens. Today (the next Monday), I'll be at Transcending Dimensions, The Woman, Looking for an Angel, Hi-Five, and Kazakh Scary Tales, if all goes well.
Cielo
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The filmmakers admitted to being concerned with aesthetic over story in the introduction, and there were times I felt it, down to having to more or less invent a theme that doesn't quite work to make elements palatable (see below). Still, Cielo ultimately worked in ways that this sort of contemporary South American fantasy film often doesn't work for me, finding a way for its flights of fantasy to bring me in rather than take me out.
It opens serenely, with seven-year-old Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) sitting by a beautiful lake, before she catches and swallows a large goldfish. She walks back to the stone house her father is building, but what happens next is shocking, and soon she is on the road, pulling a cart with a large barrel on it, bound for the sea. She makes a trade for a truck with a priest (Luis Bredow), who probably didn't think she was going to drive away in it. That she only gets so far is more on the truck than her, but she'll soon be met by others, including a luchadora going by "La Reina" (Mariela Salaverry) and policeman Gustavo (Fernando Arze Echalar), thoroughly puzzled by the trail Santa has left behind.
The film is, if nothing else, gorgeous from start to finish. Director Alberto Sciamma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe are certainly aided by finding great things to point a camera at, drawing upon the landscape without seeming to push into the fantastical. The film has one of the most beautiful opening shots you'll see, and whether Santa winds up in small towns, the desert, or the city, there are surprising compositions and delightful combinations of colors. These are also environments where people seem at home, with faces and costumes that seldom seem exaggerated.
Young lead Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is also fantastic on her own, 8 years old and with the ability to play a magical, precocious child who seldom sounds like a teenager or like she's saying the words of an adult screenwriter trying to sound like a child. She's a confident kid who sells having a little girl's perspective on her unique experience, and it's why one believes she can accomplish miracles in this world; she never seems not part of it. There is authority covering warmth in the performances of the people she meets - men like Luis Bredow's priest and Fernando Arze Echalar's cop who maybe need someone as remarkable as Santa to unearth the decency between their world-weariness and women Mariela Salaverry's empathetic entertainer.
The story, though... Well, it very clearly follows the imagery of the idea for a scene, and I suspect that it's useful that the violent opening will mea some folks are just going to be out less than ten minutes in. Santa may be a wondrous enough girl that a found family coalesce around her, but to the extent it does, it is all on the performances. The story has the right shape and the cast sells it, but it's a framework, not something that one can dig into.
That's enough, for the most part. It's a great movie to look at with some great pieces, just all aesthetic and emotion as opposed to the sources of that emotion.
(The structure I found myself trying to impose on the film is that I think you've got to posit that this whole plan comes from a desperate mother who places too much weight on an 8-year-old, even one who can perform miracles, but it's not something the movie really examines. Maybe Gustavo recognizes that what Santa does is not truly her fault, but there are things a policeman has to do once the scene is discovered that are elided over.)
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is firmly in the category of documentaries that I treat like an introductory university course, right down to taking three times as many notes as I normally would for a feature of its length. Obviously it's not even that, but it's a solid chunk of good information to get someone started on the topic.
As these things go, it is pretty darn solid. The filmmakers break things down into logical sections that touch upon the context of these artists' work without ever straying to the point of the film really being about something else, and get what seem to be fairly open, unguarded interviews with the surviving subjects. Even in the earlier sections of the film, where its roughly-chronological nature has them discussing the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, they tend to focus on it shaping them as opposed to releasing a lot of raw emotion, but they are the survivors who found outlets long ago.
Mostly, though, director Amélie Ravalec includes a ton of art - plenty enough to be a good sampler, with the narration relevant but not like someone standing behind your shoulder in a museum, explaining everything in detail rather than letting you experience it and make your own connections. Clearly, she feels, the best way to start to understand a work is to look at it, and while contextualization is useful, one's appreciation of a work must ultimately come from the work itself. It's overwhelming at times, though, with seemingly a new work to examine every minute (the citations part of the credits is long); the companion book is probably going to be great.
There's also a very nice soundtrack, not exactly recognizable needle drops to me, but reinforcing the energy of the period and movement(s) and providing a rhythm that keeps the film from feeling like either a fire hose of information or like it's waiting for you to catch up. It's a really nice presentation.
(Fair warning: There is a lot of bondage, enough to make you wonder if this is what caught the filmmaker's eye originally, with a section attempting to explain why there's so much after so much has gone by without much comment. By the end, it's more like a bit of an odd emphasis.)
Akabane Honeko no Bodyguard (Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Purchase the manga at Amazon
My friend Tony, who owns the local comic shop, often talks about how his son is into manga and anime but tends not to overlap them for the same property: If he reads the manga, he'll probably skip the anime, and vice versa. I don't know how the live-action adaptations tend to figure in for him, but I do find myself feeling the same way about them lately: As much as I dig movies like Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards and see where they've been compressed, I'm not sure I need to go back to the source material. This is fun but you can burn a lot of time getting the same story twice.
Honeko Adabane (Natsuki Deguchi) is an ambitious high school student - she's got dreams of being both a dancer and a lawyer like her parents - and not the sort who has a hundred-million dollar bounty placed upon her head. That's because her birth father is Masahito Jingu (Ken'ichi Endo), head of the Japanese equivalent of the CIA; he grabs roughneck Ibuki Arakuni (Raul Murakami), a childhood friend of Honeko's, off the street and asks him to be her bodyguard, although part of the job is making sure she is not aware of the forces attacking her. Ibuki agrees, but stumbles on his first attempt. Fortunately, Honeko's best friend and dance teammate Nei Toyega (Hikaru Takahashi) is also working for Jingu - as is all of class 3-4, led by dorky-looking Sumiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), and trained in various specialties since pre-school. But with the price on Honeko's head so high, will Somejima's "23 tarot cards" be enough?
Honeko Akabane's bodyguards definitely falls into the trap where folks adapting a manga have trouble fitting the whole story into a two hour movie - there's a spot where original manga-ka Masamitsu Nigatsu probably milked two or three cliffhangers in weekly serialization out of what's an annoying 5-minute delay here - even when you don't have 25 title characters. You could streamline the heck out of this, except that doing so would probably not just lose one of the most entertaining subplots, but the sheer excess of it is part of what makes it so much fun as the filmmakers frantically pile more on well past the point where they actually need to, a hilarious surprise if you're going in fairly blind and probably still entertaining for the sheer audacity of it if not.
It's pretty goofy all around, with some very winning performances in the center, particularly the very fun chemistry between Raul Murakami and Natsuki Deguchi who actually feel like opposites attracting; Murakami is great at suddenly dropping Ibuki's tough-guy pretenses to present a very affable doofus with a massive crush on Honeko, while Deguchi is good at catching how Honeko is smart, assertive, and kind of dorky (when it comes to the law) underneath the sort of pleasantness that can often read as bland. Ken'ichi Endo makes Jingu a funny character whom one can nevertheless believe is a wily spy master, and Tao Tsuchiya is a real delight swinging Masachika from genuinely dangerous villain to socially maladjusted weirdo and using the same backstory for each.
The filmmakers also find a good balance between using the premise for groan-worthy gags and good character based comedy, and there's style to spare. I presume the look is comic-accurate, and both the white-and-black school uniforms (with the assassins in all black a helpful inverse) and the slick outfits Masachika's crew sports. It's fun and poppy while still giving its weirdos room to be likable teenagers even amid the spy movie hijinks.
There's some fairly entertaining action, too: The filmmakers do a nice job blending slapstick with some actual danger, dedicated to keeping it hand to hand and selling that these spy kids might hold off a few professional assassins.
Not sold: Folks thinking Tao Tsuchiya's character is a guy. But, then, that's also a manga trope dialed up to the max, and that's what makes this movie work.
"The Traveler & The Troll"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I don't know that writer/director Adam Murray is directly influenced by the late Jim Henson here - he could be young enough to have been born after Henson's passing - but his short hits a particular Henson vibe that maybe isn't represented as much among his successors as kid-friendly Muppets: A world where the macabre creatures are possessed of dry wit, moving about in such a way that a viewer can see that they are puppets but where the uncanniness makes them a little creepier. The effect is ultimately still comic, but with the lingering feeling that it could have been scary.
Instead, it's kind of charming, with the troll (voiced by Dave Child) demanding an answer to three riddles when the traveler (Erika Ishii) who has passed through his territory has no money, only to find that she really likes riddles and he's seldom had to actually pose three. It's a goofy little thing, but that sort of flipping the script from unnerving to amusing is a big part of this sort of piece's appeal.
Dieva suns (Dog of God)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Dog of God has a hell of an opener, as its blindfolded werewolf protagonist squares off against a giant and rips its testicles off. It's metal as hell and brothers Lauris & Raitis Abele know how everything works together here, with grandiose physical acting enhanced by rotoscoped animation and a no-messing-around soundtrack, going for "hell yeah!" right away.
It falls off, though, and I found myself unable to hang with it much after that, whether because I was worn out from it being the last film of the day or because the story was pretty darn dull. There are audiences for nasty medieval fantasy where everyone is some degree of cruel or cynical, but it doesn't create a rooting interest in me, and later bits of violence struggled to match the operatic intensity of the opener.
Still, I'm not sure how I slept through so much of a movie this loud.
Sciamma really seems to have fallen in love with the place, praising the local crew and how they made it a Bolivian film rather than one by a Spanish filmmaker. He also took care to mention that the altitude in Bolivia can really throw you for a loop: La Paz is the most altitudinous capital city in the world, 2km above sea level, so the air is thin and the deserts get far chillier than you would think just from looking at them. A beautiful country, by all accounts, but not for the weak of spirit.
The film would be back in town with French subtitles at the end of the week (now, if you're in Montreal), and has also been reworked into an artbook that was promoted in the closing credits, and it should be a good companion, considering just how much material is in the movie.
There might have technically been time to fit the Korean shorts package in at de Sève before crossing the street, but with everything running a few minutes late, but not the consistent same few minutes, I decided not to chance it, got some food, and then saw Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards in Hall (can't quite make the shift to Alumni Auditorium). Good fun.
And that's last Monday in the books. Tuesday would be Stinker, Sweetness, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens. Today (the next Monday), I'll be at Transcending Dimensions, The Woman, Looking for an Angel, Hi-Five, and Kazakh Scary Tales, if all goes well.
Cielo
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The filmmakers admitted to being concerned with aesthetic over story in the introduction, and there were times I felt it, down to having to more or less invent a theme that doesn't quite work to make elements palatable (see below). Still, Cielo ultimately worked in ways that this sort of contemporary South American fantasy film often doesn't work for me, finding a way for its flights of fantasy to bring me in rather than take me out.
It opens serenely, with seven-year-old Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) sitting by a beautiful lake, before she catches and swallows a large goldfish. She walks back to the stone house her father is building, but what happens next is shocking, and soon she is on the road, pulling a cart with a large barrel on it, bound for the sea. She makes a trade for a truck with a priest (Luis Bredow), who probably didn't think she was going to drive away in it. That she only gets so far is more on the truck than her, but she'll soon be met by others, including a luchadora going by "La Reina" (Mariela Salaverry) and policeman Gustavo (Fernando Arze Echalar), thoroughly puzzled by the trail Santa has left behind.
The film is, if nothing else, gorgeous from start to finish. Director Alberto Sciamma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe are certainly aided by finding great things to point a camera at, drawing upon the landscape without seeming to push into the fantastical. The film has one of the most beautiful opening shots you'll see, and whether Santa winds up in small towns, the desert, or the city, there are surprising compositions and delightful combinations of colors. These are also environments where people seem at home, with faces and costumes that seldom seem exaggerated.
Young lead Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is also fantastic on her own, 8 years old and with the ability to play a magical, precocious child who seldom sounds like a teenager or like she's saying the words of an adult screenwriter trying to sound like a child. She's a confident kid who sells having a little girl's perspective on her unique experience, and it's why one believes she can accomplish miracles in this world; she never seems not part of it. There is authority covering warmth in the performances of the people she meets - men like Luis Bredow's priest and Fernando Arze Echalar's cop who maybe need someone as remarkable as Santa to unearth the decency between their world-weariness and women Mariela Salaverry's empathetic entertainer.
The story, though... Well, it very clearly follows the imagery of the idea for a scene, and I suspect that it's useful that the violent opening will mea some folks are just going to be out less than ten minutes in. Santa may be a wondrous enough girl that a found family coalesce around her, but to the extent it does, it is all on the performances. The story has the right shape and the cast sells it, but it's a framework, not something that one can dig into.
That's enough, for the most part. It's a great movie to look at with some great pieces, just all aesthetic and emotion as opposed to the sources of that emotion.
(The structure I found myself trying to impose on the film is that I think you've got to posit that this whole plan comes from a desperate mother who places too much weight on an 8-year-old, even one who can perform miracles, but it's not something the movie really examines. Maybe Gustavo recognizes that what Santa does is not truly her fault, but there are things a policeman has to do once the scene is discovered that are elided over.)
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is firmly in the category of documentaries that I treat like an introductory university course, right down to taking three times as many notes as I normally would for a feature of its length. Obviously it's not even that, but it's a solid chunk of good information to get someone started on the topic.
As these things go, it is pretty darn solid. The filmmakers break things down into logical sections that touch upon the context of these artists' work without ever straying to the point of the film really being about something else, and get what seem to be fairly open, unguarded interviews with the surviving subjects. Even in the earlier sections of the film, where its roughly-chronological nature has them discussing the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, they tend to focus on it shaping them as opposed to releasing a lot of raw emotion, but they are the survivors who found outlets long ago.
Mostly, though, director Amélie Ravalec includes a ton of art - plenty enough to be a good sampler, with the narration relevant but not like someone standing behind your shoulder in a museum, explaining everything in detail rather than letting you experience it and make your own connections. Clearly, she feels, the best way to start to understand a work is to look at it, and while contextualization is useful, one's appreciation of a work must ultimately come from the work itself. It's overwhelming at times, though, with seemingly a new work to examine every minute (the citations part of the credits is long); the companion book is probably going to be great.
There's also a very nice soundtrack, not exactly recognizable needle drops to me, but reinforcing the energy of the period and movement(s) and providing a rhythm that keeps the film from feeling like either a fire hose of information or like it's waiting for you to catch up. It's a really nice presentation.
(Fair warning: There is a lot of bondage, enough to make you wonder if this is what caught the filmmaker's eye originally, with a section attempting to explain why there's so much after so much has gone by without much comment. By the end, it's more like a bit of an odd emphasis.)
Akabane Honeko no Bodyguard (Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Purchase the manga at Amazon
My friend Tony, who owns the local comic shop, often talks about how his son is into manga and anime but tends not to overlap them for the same property: If he reads the manga, he'll probably skip the anime, and vice versa. I don't know how the live-action adaptations tend to figure in for him, but I do find myself feeling the same way about them lately: As much as I dig movies like Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards and see where they've been compressed, I'm not sure I need to go back to the source material. This is fun but you can burn a lot of time getting the same story twice.
Honeko Adabane (Natsuki Deguchi) is an ambitious high school student - she's got dreams of being both a dancer and a lawyer like her parents - and not the sort who has a hundred-million dollar bounty placed upon her head. That's because her birth father is Masahito Jingu (Ken'ichi Endo), head of the Japanese equivalent of the CIA; he grabs roughneck Ibuki Arakuni (Raul Murakami), a childhood friend of Honeko's, off the street and asks him to be her bodyguard, although part of the job is making sure she is not aware of the forces attacking her. Ibuki agrees, but stumbles on his first attempt. Fortunately, Honeko's best friend and dance teammate Nei Toyega (Hikaru Takahashi) is also working for Jingu - as is all of class 3-4, led by dorky-looking Sumiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), and trained in various specialties since pre-school. But with the price on Honeko's head so high, will Somejima's "23 tarot cards" be enough?
Honeko Akabane's bodyguards definitely falls into the trap where folks adapting a manga have trouble fitting the whole story into a two hour movie - there's a spot where original manga-ka Masamitsu Nigatsu probably milked two or three cliffhangers in weekly serialization out of what's an annoying 5-minute delay here - even when you don't have 25 title characters. You could streamline the heck out of this, except that doing so would probably not just lose one of the most entertaining subplots, but the sheer excess of it is part of what makes it so much fun as the filmmakers frantically pile more on well past the point where they actually need to, a hilarious surprise if you're going in fairly blind and probably still entertaining for the sheer audacity of it if not.
It's pretty goofy all around, with some very winning performances in the center, particularly the very fun chemistry between Raul Murakami and Natsuki Deguchi who actually feel like opposites attracting; Murakami is great at suddenly dropping Ibuki's tough-guy pretenses to present a very affable doofus with a massive crush on Honeko, while Deguchi is good at catching how Honeko is smart, assertive, and kind of dorky (when it comes to the law) underneath the sort of pleasantness that can often read as bland. Ken'ichi Endo makes Jingu a funny character whom one can nevertheless believe is a wily spy master, and Tao Tsuchiya is a real delight swinging Masachika from genuinely dangerous villain to socially maladjusted weirdo and using the same backstory for each.
The filmmakers also find a good balance between using the premise for groan-worthy gags and good character based comedy, and there's style to spare. I presume the look is comic-accurate, and both the white-and-black school uniforms (with the assassins in all black a helpful inverse) and the slick outfits Masachika's crew sports. It's fun and poppy while still giving its weirdos room to be likable teenagers even amid the spy movie hijinks.
There's some fairly entertaining action, too: The filmmakers do a nice job blending slapstick with some actual danger, dedicated to keeping it hand to hand and selling that these spy kids might hold off a few professional assassins.
Not sold: Folks thinking Tao Tsuchiya's character is a guy. But, then, that's also a manga trope dialed up to the max, and that's what makes this movie work.
"The Traveler & The Troll"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I don't know that writer/director Adam Murray is directly influenced by the late Jim Henson here - he could be young enough to have been born after Henson's passing - but his short hits a particular Henson vibe that maybe isn't represented as much among his successors as kid-friendly Muppets: A world where the macabre creatures are possessed of dry wit, moving about in such a way that a viewer can see that they are puppets but where the uncanniness makes them a little creepier. The effect is ultimately still comic, but with the lingering feeling that it could have been scary.
Instead, it's kind of charming, with the troll (voiced by Dave Child) demanding an answer to three riddles when the traveler (Erika Ishii) who has passed through his territory has no money, only to find that she really likes riddles and he's seldom had to actually pose three. It's a goofy little thing, but that sort of flipping the script from unnerving to amusing is a big part of this sort of piece's appeal.
Dieva suns (Dog of God)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Dog of God has a hell of an opener, as its blindfolded werewolf protagonist squares off against a giant and rips its testicles off. It's metal as hell and brothers Lauris & Raitis Abele know how everything works together here, with grandiose physical acting enhanced by rotoscoped animation and a no-messing-around soundtrack, going for "hell yeah!" right away.
It falls off, though, and I found myself unable to hang with it much after that, whether because I was worn out from it being the last film of the day or because the story was pretty darn dull. There are audiences for nasty medieval fantasy where everyone is some degree of cruel or cynical, but it doesn't create a rooting interest in me, and later bits of violence struggled to match the operatic intensity of the opener.
Still, I'm not sure how I slept through so much of a movie this loud.
Saturday, July 26, 2025
Fantasia 2025.05: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark
Unusually short day, but a long post because it started with a shorts package. Well, didn't exactly start with it; I spent the first slot back in the apartment, finishing a post covering Friday, because the two things on offer were Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, which would run again the next day, and Bullet in the Head, which I've watched a couple times in the last couple years and believe has already been announced as the group of Hong Kong classics from the Golden Princess collection that Shout! Factory will be touring soon. You're welcome!
Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:
Let's split that up a bit.
So off at the very far left, we have the event's host, then "Filther" filmmaker Simen Nyland, from Norway; "Lola" director Grace Hanna & executive producer Derek Manansala, from the US; "Weird to be Human" director Jan Grabowski, art director Agnieszka Adamska, and production designer Juliusz Dabrowski, from Poland; and "Disappeared" director Jeong Eun-uk, from South Korea.
Jeong's interpreter was next, then finally representing "Fingerprints of the Gods" were writer/director Wei Zhenfeng, producer Zhong Yu, and one more member of the crew, with their interpreter hiding behind.
I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.
After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.
Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.
"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.
Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.
"Lola"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.
Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.
"First Sight"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.
I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.
Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.
"Disappeared"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.
I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.
"No Nation"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.
The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.
"Weird to Be Human"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.
All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.
"Fingerprints of the Gods"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.
"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.
"Filther"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.
I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.
Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon
The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.
Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.
It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.
They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.
It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.
And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.
Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.
(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)
As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.
I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.
There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.
Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.
So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.
Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:
I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.
After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.
Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.
"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.
Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.
"Lola"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.
Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.
"First Sight"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.
I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.
Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.
"Disappeared"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.
I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.
"No Nation"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.
The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.
"Weird to Be Human"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.
All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.
"Fingerprints of the Gods"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.
"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.
"Filther"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)
Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.
I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.
Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon
The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.
Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.
It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.
They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.
It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.
And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.
Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.
(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)
As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.
I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.
There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.
Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.
So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Fantasia 2025.04: Anime no Bento, "The Story of the Three Sisters", The Devil's Bride, "Check Please", Blazing Fists, "Look Closer", and Good Boy
Busy Day!
Programmer Rupert Bottenberg was justly proud of having the anime shorts program all independent works by up-and-comers, which probably makes getting four of the six to Montreal - Yasuteru Ohno ("Mamiko's Poop"), Shuzuku ("Dreaming of a Whale"), Ryusei "Vab.png" Hasegawa ("Beyond the Trail"), and Kim Sung-jae ("Redman") - even more remarkable. It was a fun introduction, although one that kind of underlined for me just how odd doing an event like this in a foreign land must be: You stand there kind of stoically while folks are going on in another language, and then become very animated when given a chance to speak about your film. Must be a crazy thing to do so young. Still, they had fun with it, including Ohno challenging the whole auditorium to rock-paper-scissors for a copy of a compilation DVD containing all the final film projects for his school (which you may not be able to play in North American players because it's Region 2, although at least it's NTSC).
After that it was across the street for The Devil's Bide, which I'm going to need another run-through to really appreciate; hopefully it hits the Brattle in the fall ahead of its Blu-ray release.
Then back across the street for the rest of the night, with programmer Steven Lee (man, seems like he was just an intern yesterday!) introducing "Check Please" writer/director Shane Chung and director of photography Tristan Baumeister. It's one he pushed for, because apparently picking up the check is a Big Deal for a lot of Asian and Asian-American folks, especially Korean[-American]s, which I've seen referenced occasionally. They got a nice slot ahead of the new Takashi Miike film, Blazing Fists, which was cool.
Although, about Blazing Fists... So, I heard programmer King-Wei Chu mention that there was a miscommunication and a movie they believed to be an hour and twenty minutes (1:20), was actually two hours (2:00), and it was this one, which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the evening's schedule. Not a really big deal - the next film would be the rest of the day, but it meant that by the time I got out of Blazing Fists, the press line for Good Boy was good and long, and I was in the last group of six to get in, meaning this was my view:
Not really complaining - I try to just be grateful the festival thinks this blog is worth a pass in these situations - although I was glad that this was a really quick short and feature because I didn't have a chance to prioritize an easy exit from my seat should my bladder act up.
Crazy the zoom the camera in one's phone has, huh? Here we've got actor Thompson Sewell, producer Mackie Jackson, and writer/director/DP Tyson Edwards of "Look Closer" (and programmer Mitch Davis on the side) talking about their nifty little short; I gather Jackson created the painting in the center, which they built the short around.
And here, Mitch welcomes director (and co-star) Ben Leonberg, who left the titular good boy Indy at home because this situation would probably freak a dog out and it's not like his dog knew he was starring in a movie anyway. As he put it, there's a good reason why most folks make movies with humans; this was apparently 400 shooting days over three years, with a mind-blowingly ratio of usable footage to what was shot. The set-up often took longer than shooting time because dogs don't actually have a great attention span.
It was, though an interesting shoot to describe, with Leonberg acting in the film just because he's Indy's human and the one he'll respond to, although his face was often out of frame or occulted so that a real actor could dub his lines. The sound guys, he said, were heroes, because almost every shot had Leonberg and his wife talking over it to coax Indy around, so the whole thing had to be re-recorded. And while there wasn't any digital work done on Indy, they created a shattering window when he jumped through an empty frame, composited a shot where Indy follows a ghost dog up some stairs together because Indy and the other dog were buddies and would have just played together if they weren't shot separately, and used a fake dog (mostly used for lighting setups) to jump off a roof with Indy coming out from behind the bush.
Just an absolutely crazy project, and it's kind of amazing how good it came out. I don't know if it will get a wide release - it's genuinely eccentric - but given that the audience was giving it the same reaction as a I remember a preview audience giving Flow, I suspect there's a lot of folks out there who will go for it.
Anyway, long Saturday ; Sunday was more spread out with the sci-fi shorts, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark. Since I'm up to posts running two days behind, my plans for Tuesday are Stinker, Sweetness, the "Perilous Ports" program, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens, with Fucktoys (seen at BUFF) a good time.
"Loca!"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Maybe not the single most cheerful post-apocalyptic movie you've ever seen, "Loca!" nevertheless has its two little kids who may be the last people on earth full of energy as they explore rural Japan, where the plant life has started to overrun the cities, although there's apparently enough pre-packaged food to eat and there's somehow still power where there needs to be. They're surprised when the train they find starts to move after they press the Big Red Button, but writer Takeru Kojima and directors Ion Miyamoto & Yuta Uchiya do not show any particular worry about the future or burdens of loss for them; the closest they come is mentioning that the people from before must have been really clever.
Which is sometimes disconcerting, maybe making this a brightly-colored horror story for the adults in the audience. But there's also something kind of joyous about it as one watches these two explore, learn, help each other out and start to build. The style is made to sort of evoke crayon drawings even though the actual ones that the kids are making in a notebooks are a different thing, a bright and colorful world that hasn't been specifically nailed down and is full of adventure, with the voice acting bouncing back to excited shouting quickly after every time it starts to get a little down.
"Dreaming of a Whale"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Seeing the two in sequence, one almost wonders if the girl wandering an empty Japan in "Dreaming of a Whale" with her dog Joanne is one of the kids from "Loca!" five years later or so, but it's a different vibe, as she is seeking something out and less protected from danger as she falls into a derelict (but unusable) train car of her own. She's frustrated by cryptic messages coming through on her radio, but still hoping to find another human being.
It's a more traditional anime style than the previous short, but director Shuzuku makes a nice-looking film and the voice acting from Myu as the girl and Sumito Owara as the voice at the other end of the radio are very nice. Shuzuku uses enough of the eight-minute running time to give her journey heft and suggest something larger, but also builds up to a climactic revelation that is simultaneously horrible and also something one appreciates for its cleverness, and which gives her a new path forward.
"Mamiko's Poop"
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Ten out of ten, no notes. "Mamiko's Poop" - the end result of a schoolgirl eating her feelings after seeing her crush with another girl - packs as many outright guffaws into its two-minute runtime as movies fifty times longer. It feels like a manga where the art style suggests someone drawing in a caffeinated fever for its crazy designs and accelerating pace, and somehow has time to ramp up from sadness to binging to "ewww" to hilarious violence.
Director Yaasuteru Ohno did this for school, and who knows what he'll learn in professional apprenticeship by the time he gets a chance to make something bigger, but it should be a ton of fun.
"Dungeons & Television"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
I don't know if I'd necessarily watch a "Dungeons & Television" anime series or read it as a manga - I can actually see myself chuckling at the high concept but not wanting to commit to a long-term series the way I do when I come upon Delicious in Dungeon in previews, but as someone whose idea of stringing telegraph lines across a kingdom always got shot down when playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I appreciate the idea. This could be fun.
How fun? That's kind of tough to tell. Writer/director Junchukan Bonta seems to have the basics down for his six-minute short, in that the designs are just nifty enough to make one believe in the possible invention of television five hundred years or so ago, the adventuring party looks decent, and there are a few very solid gags in there, it's also moving way too fast for a viewer to really get attached and involved, seemingly just showing the highlights and almost having no time to tease effectively.
Heck of a calling card to show producers as a pitch, though.
"Redman"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
This is definitely a case where I feel like I might like it a lot more if I was a bit more familiar with the context. I kind of get the idea of a tokusatsu hero trying to live a normal life (though is he depicted with his helmet because he's wearing it and everyone thinks it's normal or because this is his self-image?), wanting to stay away or get involved as something mysterious is going on with his old teammates, and I dig the noirish style of it. But I do wonder if greater knowledge of the sort of story it's either sending up or grittifying (to coin a word) would allow me to see general patterns or fill in the blanks because I knew what references it was built out of.
As it is, it's tantalizing and the craftsmanship is darn good, but I'm not up on the shorthand.
"Beyond the Trail"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
A nifty little anime that could probably handle expansion to a feature, with two junior members of a team that is helping to clear away biological weapons left behind after a devastating war admiring a legend in their unit, although she holds some dark secrets. It's a mash-up of familiar sci-fi anime bits - people transforming into monsters, cool vehicles, the source of power being related to the monsters and slowly killing the heroine, mysterious foes whose interests are actually aligned - but they're familiar because they often work. The designs that the filmmakers have come up with are pretty cool, and there's a potentially pretty nice emotional core with the hero-worship Leichte has for Esus maybe not an entirely healthy complement to Esus having lost a daughter.
There is some difficulty balancing all this at 30 minutes, though - Leichte & Esus is probably the thing you want to focus on, but it leaves all the lore they're supposed to clean up feeling more like Macguffins rather than something that shaped them, and getting cut off because the story can only go so far in any direction. It also means Leichte's partner Gros winds up disappearing for a bit when their pairing is a lot of what's fun about the movie in its early portion. Just no room to work and I don't fault the filmmakers for prioritizing pretty aggressively on an independent, crowd-funded production like this, and I hope they get to do more.
"The Story of Three Sisters (or How the World Came to Have Four Seasons Instead of One)"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
A charming little storybook feature that has seven directors for its seven minutes, but doesn't necessarily impose a strict separation on them, even as one sees the style of its mythic tale of how three goddesses of the sky, time, and life found their static world collapsing into constant change as one found her curiosity getting the better of her. The rapidly changing style feels like the origin of a myth, taking new shapes in the telling.
The thing I kind of dig after thinking about it, though, is how well these three concepts map to certain human family dynamics: Ida, the sky, is the responsible elder sibling, very fixed in her ways and seeing safeguarding her sisters as her responsibility; Tia, the tiny youngest sibling, is the baby who is more or less allowed to run amok and get into trouble; May, the middle child, is dissatisfied, chafing at her older sister's authority and envying Tia's freedom even as she loves her. This strict alignment must eventually fall, scary as that is, for the three to not resent each other and work together, because a family is not strict assignment of roles.
Neat.
Velnio nuotaka (The Devil's Bride)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Pre-order the disc at Amazon
I am very much hoping this one comes around to the Boston area at some point, because to be completely honest, I think that I zonked out for about ten minutes in the middle or missed a subtitle indicating a time jump and just absolutely, completely lost the plot. It was like I was suddenly watching a different movie with most of the same cast and locations, also an opera, but I had no idea how the start and end were connected.
I do want to see it again, though, because where it's great, it's really great. The manic, probably sacreligious opening scene is reason enough to catch a pretty short movie, there's plenty of wit to be found around afterward, and the music - have we mentioned that this story of an angel who falls to earth and is immediately enslaved by a miller and caught up in various strange romances is a rock opera - is pretty darn good. I suspect that my biggest issue might be that the style of the music doesn't vary much from start to finish, which is how you get into a sort of reverie and eventually look up to wonder what's going on.
"Check Please"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Pretty dang simple when it comes down to it, as two co-workers out for dinner in New York - one a Korean ex-pat, one a Korean-American born and raised in the city - both try to pick up the check, only for things to escalate quickly into slapstick martial arts.
The action is pretty darn good - it's smartly staged so that one admires the athleticism and choreography, and winces occasionally at how that would hurt, but kind of stops short of feeling violent or dangerous; we're kind of having fun here and sort of representing things as larger-than-life so one can see the intensity of the feeling more clearly. I like that, ultimately, it ends on a sort of feeling of desperation to cling to this as part of their identity as a Korean man, with Jay (Richard Yan) lamenting that his (presumably non-Korean) wife knows more K-pop lyrics than him and he has to use a dictionary when he calls his grandfather, while Su-bin (Jeong Sukwon) notes he had to uproot himself from his home to provide for his family. It's maybe a sneaky second layer that the cashier is a woman, staring at her phone while guys go at this again.
Mostly, though, it's good jokes and physical comedy with appealing participants.
Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors (aka Blazing Fists)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Has it actually been a while since Takashi Miike delivered a movie about a bunch of juvenile delinquent fighting, or does it just seem that way? This one is maybe not quite a masterpiece of the genre; it feels a bit like the genre as seen through the eyes of comfortable, older filmmakers rather than something bursting with rebellion, anger, and energy. That happens to us all, I guess, and who knows, maybe Miike and company are acknowledging that with the 18-year-old in juvie clearly played by someone twice that age.
He's around when a new resident of a juvenile detention facility, Ryoma Akai (Kaname Yoshizawa) meets Ikuto Yagura (Danhi Kinoshita), who has been there for a year. They become fast friends and are inspired to take up mixed martial arts during a visit by a fighter and internet celebrity whose webseries "Breaking Down" combines confessional and fighting elements. It's not long before they are paroled, join a gym, and find work in a factory, though they've also got marks on their backs from a local gang consolidating their power and a crush on an influencer Ryoma knew from high school (whose ex is teetering on the brink of winding up a thug himself). Oh, and Ikuto was in juvie after being fingered for a crime he didn't commit (this time) and has vowed to take revenge on the person who did, not knowing it's Ryoma.
If this sort of movie is going to be comfort food now, Blazing Fists is at least enjoyable and amiable enough. The script is a bit on the wink-y side when it celebrates the power of friendship and happily walks through the genre tropes; though writer Shin Kibayashi is not adapting a fighting manga, he knows how the structure works but has the freedom to build it so that the expansive cast, regular fights, and sudden twists fit a movie rather than a serial. The cast is likable and each knows what they're there to do, not necessarily subtly (the scenes with the kids' mothers are fun, if kind of slight).
The movie also pleasantly recalls the V-cine aesthetic from when Miike started out with these films; things feel like they were shot quickly and allowed to be a bit flat or low-res (though today's low-res would have been top of the line thirty years ago). It's consciously not fancy, rather coming off of professionals getting the job done without a lot of fuss or pretension. It is, maybe, a love letter to the juvenile-delinquent movies that figured prominently in Miike's early career that doesn't treat them as more than they were.
Plus, the fighting is fun, eventually upgrading from earnest martial arts to the over the top brawls one expects from these movies. It's action that knows it's larger than life, where Miike and company enjoy throwing colorfully costume heroes against a horde, with as many jokes as battle cries thrown in. At the end, they're maybe looking to prove a point, both acknowledging the fakeness of these cinematic brawls but not giving a lot of credence to the stage-managed fights produced as mere web content either; even the main villain recognizes that the point of this is to fight like hell for the people you care about.
It's all right on the edge of self-parody, with the main characters' earnestness keeping it on the other side, but, then it's not like these movies are ever far from that, it's it?
"Look Closer"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
"Look Closer" is an impressively well-balanced horror comedy, making the audience feel just tingly enough to be uneasy but delivering solid dark laughs as an exhausted painter (Thompson Sewell) trying to power through to meet a deadline suddenly finds another work on his easel featuring a creepily distorted figure.
It's just on-the-nose enough to make one chuckle, as the painter seems to half-suspect that he's in some sort of nightmare, but niftily executed: Not only does one get the idea that the painting came first rather than just being a prop created to reflect the live-action make-up job, but there's a nifty effect of the painting seeming to throb with a heartbeat, alive in its own right. Filmmaker Tyson Edwards gives it all just enough time to breathe and make an impression and gets out before things have to make more than emotional dream-logic sense.
Good Boy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Good Boy could easily be a movie that is remarkable for simply existing - getting even a very well-trained dog to do everything required to serve as a movie's protagonist is a daunting challenge - but this impressed beyond that. It walks a line between genre film and drama, getting viewers inside its canine hero Indy's head without necessarily anthropomorphizing him.
Something is wrong with Indy's human Todd (writer/direct Ben Leonberg dubbed by Shane Jensen), but he's not quite sure what; he's sleeping a lot and his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) seems very worried. Soon after Indy stays with Vera a few days, Todd decides to uproot them from their Brooklyn apartment to the house upstate that Todd inherited from his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), but that seems even more wrong, and not just because Grandpa had a lot of dogs that didn't necessarily have long lives: Todd doesn't feel quite right, there are things in the corners that the human can't see, and a strange threatening presence in the dark.
What's perhaps most surprising about Good Boy is just how stylish the movie is. Some of it is perhaps a matter of necessity, where keeping the camera near Indy's eye level is necessarily going to create a different framing that everything else in the film must respond to. But the lighting is terrific, often a hellish red to highlight the dog's emotional turmoil, or kept low to emphasize how he and his human are out of their familiar crowded city. Humans often appear in backlit silhouette, eerie for human viewers, but a reminder that dogs don't read faces so much as body language, so those are the emotional cues we get without seeming to cheat to limit information.
And it works as a horror movie. The filmmakers seldom go for jokes about dogs finding vacuums scary, but seed something vague about what might be haunting this house before presenting it in a way a dog might experience it. The shadow game is strong, and the score highlights what's unnerving to Indy nicely. Some of the effects work, when it comes to that, may seem like it doesn't match the live action footage, but I like that somewhat, having given it a little thought. There's a wrongness to what Indy detects in a way that's not quite equivalent to human senses, and this gets that across.
Plus, Indy? Such a good boy! The best boy! We've been seeing more CGI dogs in movies lately, which is fine - it's not like animals can agree to participate or emote on demand - but they often seem too blank or too human, while Indy is all dog, with an expressive face and the right sort of whine. He's not really giving a performance, of course, but the editing is convincing and the raw material is charming.
I suspect the film may seem too experimental or gimmicky to some - even at 72 minutes, it's probably roughly at its limits - but the material is pretty universal and both the human and canine emotion feels genuine.
After that it was across the street for The Devil's Bide, which I'm going to need another run-through to really appreciate; hopefully it hits the Brattle in the fall ahead of its Blu-ray release.
Although, about Blazing Fists... So, I heard programmer King-Wei Chu mention that there was a miscommunication and a movie they believed to be an hour and twenty minutes (1:20), was actually two hours (2:00), and it was this one, which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the evening's schedule. Not a really big deal - the next film would be the rest of the day, but it meant that by the time I got out of Blazing Fists, the press line for Good Boy was good and long, and I was in the last group of six to get in, meaning this was my view:
It was, though an interesting shoot to describe, with Leonberg acting in the film just because he's Indy's human and the one he'll respond to, although his face was often out of frame or occulted so that a real actor could dub his lines. The sound guys, he said, were heroes, because almost every shot had Leonberg and his wife talking over it to coax Indy around, so the whole thing had to be re-recorded. And while there wasn't any digital work done on Indy, they created a shattering window when he jumped through an empty frame, composited a shot where Indy follows a ghost dog up some stairs together because Indy and the other dog were buddies and would have just played together if they weren't shot separately, and used a fake dog (mostly used for lighting setups) to jump off a roof with Indy coming out from behind the bush.
Just an absolutely crazy project, and it's kind of amazing how good it came out. I don't know if it will get a wide release - it's genuinely eccentric - but given that the audience was giving it the same reaction as a I remember a preview audience giving Flow, I suspect there's a lot of folks out there who will go for it.
Anyway, long Saturday ; Sunday was more spread out with the sci-fi shorts, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark. Since I'm up to posts running two days behind, my plans for Tuesday are Stinker, Sweetness, the "Perilous Ports" program, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens, with Fucktoys (seen at BUFF) a good time.
"Loca!"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Maybe not the single most cheerful post-apocalyptic movie you've ever seen, "Loca!" nevertheless has its two little kids who may be the last people on earth full of energy as they explore rural Japan, where the plant life has started to overrun the cities, although there's apparently enough pre-packaged food to eat and there's somehow still power where there needs to be. They're surprised when the train they find starts to move after they press the Big Red Button, but writer Takeru Kojima and directors Ion Miyamoto & Yuta Uchiya do not show any particular worry about the future or burdens of loss for them; the closest they come is mentioning that the people from before must have been really clever.
Which is sometimes disconcerting, maybe making this a brightly-colored horror story for the adults in the audience. But there's also something kind of joyous about it as one watches these two explore, learn, help each other out and start to build. The style is made to sort of evoke crayon drawings even though the actual ones that the kids are making in a notebooks are a different thing, a bright and colorful world that hasn't been specifically nailed down and is full of adventure, with the voice acting bouncing back to excited shouting quickly after every time it starts to get a little down.
"Dreaming of a Whale"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Seeing the two in sequence, one almost wonders if the girl wandering an empty Japan in "Dreaming of a Whale" with her dog Joanne is one of the kids from "Loca!" five years later or so, but it's a different vibe, as she is seeking something out and less protected from danger as she falls into a derelict (but unusable) train car of her own. She's frustrated by cryptic messages coming through on her radio, but still hoping to find another human being.
It's a more traditional anime style than the previous short, but director Shuzuku makes a nice-looking film and the voice acting from Myu as the girl and Sumito Owara as the voice at the other end of the radio are very nice. Shuzuku uses enough of the eight-minute running time to give her journey heft and suggest something larger, but also builds up to a climactic revelation that is simultaneously horrible and also something one appreciates for its cleverness, and which gives her a new path forward.
"Mamiko's Poop"
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Ten out of ten, no notes. "Mamiko's Poop" - the end result of a schoolgirl eating her feelings after seeing her crush with another girl - packs as many outright guffaws into its two-minute runtime as movies fifty times longer. It feels like a manga where the art style suggests someone drawing in a caffeinated fever for its crazy designs and accelerating pace, and somehow has time to ramp up from sadness to binging to "ewww" to hilarious violence.
Director Yaasuteru Ohno did this for school, and who knows what he'll learn in professional apprenticeship by the time he gets a chance to make something bigger, but it should be a ton of fun.
"Dungeons & Television"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
I don't know if I'd necessarily watch a "Dungeons & Television" anime series or read it as a manga - I can actually see myself chuckling at the high concept but not wanting to commit to a long-term series the way I do when I come upon Delicious in Dungeon in previews, but as someone whose idea of stringing telegraph lines across a kingdom always got shot down when playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I appreciate the idea. This could be fun.
How fun? That's kind of tough to tell. Writer/director Junchukan Bonta seems to have the basics down for his six-minute short, in that the designs are just nifty enough to make one believe in the possible invention of television five hundred years or so ago, the adventuring party looks decent, and there are a few very solid gags in there, it's also moving way too fast for a viewer to really get attached and involved, seemingly just showing the highlights and almost having no time to tease effectively.
Heck of a calling card to show producers as a pitch, though.
"Redman"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
This is definitely a case where I feel like I might like it a lot more if I was a bit more familiar with the context. I kind of get the idea of a tokusatsu hero trying to live a normal life (though is he depicted with his helmet because he's wearing it and everyone thinks it's normal or because this is his self-image?), wanting to stay away or get involved as something mysterious is going on with his old teammates, and I dig the noirish style of it. But I do wonder if greater knowledge of the sort of story it's either sending up or grittifying (to coin a word) would allow me to see general patterns or fill in the blanks because I knew what references it was built out of.
As it is, it's tantalizing and the craftsmanship is darn good, but I'm not up on the shorthand.
"Beyond the Trail"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
A nifty little anime that could probably handle expansion to a feature, with two junior members of a team that is helping to clear away biological weapons left behind after a devastating war admiring a legend in their unit, although she holds some dark secrets. It's a mash-up of familiar sci-fi anime bits - people transforming into monsters, cool vehicles, the source of power being related to the monsters and slowly killing the heroine, mysterious foes whose interests are actually aligned - but they're familiar because they often work. The designs that the filmmakers have come up with are pretty cool, and there's a potentially pretty nice emotional core with the hero-worship Leichte has for Esus maybe not an entirely healthy complement to Esus having lost a daughter.
There is some difficulty balancing all this at 30 minutes, though - Leichte & Esus is probably the thing you want to focus on, but it leaves all the lore they're supposed to clean up feeling more like Macguffins rather than something that shaped them, and getting cut off because the story can only go so far in any direction. It also means Leichte's partner Gros winds up disappearing for a bit when their pairing is a lot of what's fun about the movie in its early portion. Just no room to work and I don't fault the filmmakers for prioritizing pretty aggressively on an independent, crowd-funded production like this, and I hope they get to do more.
"The Story of Three Sisters (or How the World Came to Have Four Seasons Instead of One)"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
A charming little storybook feature that has seven directors for its seven minutes, but doesn't necessarily impose a strict separation on them, even as one sees the style of its mythic tale of how three goddesses of the sky, time, and life found their static world collapsing into constant change as one found her curiosity getting the better of her. The rapidly changing style feels like the origin of a myth, taking new shapes in the telling.
The thing I kind of dig after thinking about it, though, is how well these three concepts map to certain human family dynamics: Ida, the sky, is the responsible elder sibling, very fixed in her ways and seeing safeguarding her sisters as her responsibility; Tia, the tiny youngest sibling, is the baby who is more or less allowed to run amok and get into trouble; May, the middle child, is dissatisfied, chafing at her older sister's authority and envying Tia's freedom even as she loves her. This strict alignment must eventually fall, scary as that is, for the three to not resent each other and work together, because a family is not strict assignment of roles.
Neat.
Velnio nuotaka (The Devil's Bride)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Pre-order the disc at Amazon
I am very much hoping this one comes around to the Boston area at some point, because to be completely honest, I think that I zonked out for about ten minutes in the middle or missed a subtitle indicating a time jump and just absolutely, completely lost the plot. It was like I was suddenly watching a different movie with most of the same cast and locations, also an opera, but I had no idea how the start and end were connected.
I do want to see it again, though, because where it's great, it's really great. The manic, probably sacreligious opening scene is reason enough to catch a pretty short movie, there's plenty of wit to be found around afterward, and the music - have we mentioned that this story of an angel who falls to earth and is immediately enslaved by a miller and caught up in various strange romances is a rock opera - is pretty darn good. I suspect that my biggest issue might be that the style of the music doesn't vary much from start to finish, which is how you get into a sort of reverie and eventually look up to wonder what's going on.
"Check Please"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Pretty dang simple when it comes down to it, as two co-workers out for dinner in New York - one a Korean ex-pat, one a Korean-American born and raised in the city - both try to pick up the check, only for things to escalate quickly into slapstick martial arts.
The action is pretty darn good - it's smartly staged so that one admires the athleticism and choreography, and winces occasionally at how that would hurt, but kind of stops short of feeling violent or dangerous; we're kind of having fun here and sort of representing things as larger-than-life so one can see the intensity of the feeling more clearly. I like that, ultimately, it ends on a sort of feeling of desperation to cling to this as part of their identity as a Korean man, with Jay (Richard Yan) lamenting that his (presumably non-Korean) wife knows more K-pop lyrics than him and he has to use a dictionary when he calls his grandfather, while Su-bin (Jeong Sukwon) notes he had to uproot himself from his home to provide for his family. It's maybe a sneaky second layer that the cashier is a woman, staring at her phone while guys go at this again.
Mostly, though, it's good jokes and physical comedy with appealing participants.
Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors (aka Blazing Fists)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Has it actually been a while since Takashi Miike delivered a movie about a bunch of juvenile delinquent fighting, or does it just seem that way? This one is maybe not quite a masterpiece of the genre; it feels a bit like the genre as seen through the eyes of comfortable, older filmmakers rather than something bursting with rebellion, anger, and energy. That happens to us all, I guess, and who knows, maybe Miike and company are acknowledging that with the 18-year-old in juvie clearly played by someone twice that age.
He's around when a new resident of a juvenile detention facility, Ryoma Akai (Kaname Yoshizawa) meets Ikuto Yagura (Danhi Kinoshita), who has been there for a year. They become fast friends and are inspired to take up mixed martial arts during a visit by a fighter and internet celebrity whose webseries "Breaking Down" combines confessional and fighting elements. It's not long before they are paroled, join a gym, and find work in a factory, though they've also got marks on their backs from a local gang consolidating their power and a crush on an influencer Ryoma knew from high school (whose ex is teetering on the brink of winding up a thug himself). Oh, and Ikuto was in juvie after being fingered for a crime he didn't commit (this time) and has vowed to take revenge on the person who did, not knowing it's Ryoma.
If this sort of movie is going to be comfort food now, Blazing Fists is at least enjoyable and amiable enough. The script is a bit on the wink-y side when it celebrates the power of friendship and happily walks through the genre tropes; though writer Shin Kibayashi is not adapting a fighting manga, he knows how the structure works but has the freedom to build it so that the expansive cast, regular fights, and sudden twists fit a movie rather than a serial. The cast is likable and each knows what they're there to do, not necessarily subtly (the scenes with the kids' mothers are fun, if kind of slight).
The movie also pleasantly recalls the V-cine aesthetic from when Miike started out with these films; things feel like they were shot quickly and allowed to be a bit flat or low-res (though today's low-res would have been top of the line thirty years ago). It's consciously not fancy, rather coming off of professionals getting the job done without a lot of fuss or pretension. It is, maybe, a love letter to the juvenile-delinquent movies that figured prominently in Miike's early career that doesn't treat them as more than they were.
Plus, the fighting is fun, eventually upgrading from earnest martial arts to the over the top brawls one expects from these movies. It's action that knows it's larger than life, where Miike and company enjoy throwing colorfully costume heroes against a horde, with as many jokes as battle cries thrown in. At the end, they're maybe looking to prove a point, both acknowledging the fakeness of these cinematic brawls but not giving a lot of credence to the stage-managed fights produced as mere web content either; even the main villain recognizes that the point of this is to fight like hell for the people you care about.
It's all right on the edge of self-parody, with the main characters' earnestness keeping it on the other side, but, then it's not like these movies are ever far from that, it's it?
"Look Closer"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
"Look Closer" is an impressively well-balanced horror comedy, making the audience feel just tingly enough to be uneasy but delivering solid dark laughs as an exhausted painter (Thompson Sewell) trying to power through to meet a deadline suddenly finds another work on his easel featuring a creepily distorted figure.
It's just on-the-nose enough to make one chuckle, as the painter seems to half-suspect that he's in some sort of nightmare, but niftily executed: Not only does one get the idea that the painting came first rather than just being a prop created to reflect the live-action make-up job, but there's a nifty effect of the painting seeming to throb with a heartbeat, alive in its own right. Filmmaker Tyson Edwards gives it all just enough time to breathe and make an impression and gets out before things have to make more than emotional dream-logic sense.
Good Boy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Good Boy could easily be a movie that is remarkable for simply existing - getting even a very well-trained dog to do everything required to serve as a movie's protagonist is a daunting challenge - but this impressed beyond that. It walks a line between genre film and drama, getting viewers inside its canine hero Indy's head without necessarily anthropomorphizing him.
Something is wrong with Indy's human Todd (writer/direct Ben Leonberg dubbed by Shane Jensen), but he's not quite sure what; he's sleeping a lot and his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) seems very worried. Soon after Indy stays with Vera a few days, Todd decides to uproot them from their Brooklyn apartment to the house upstate that Todd inherited from his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), but that seems even more wrong, and not just because Grandpa had a lot of dogs that didn't necessarily have long lives: Todd doesn't feel quite right, there are things in the corners that the human can't see, and a strange threatening presence in the dark.
What's perhaps most surprising about Good Boy is just how stylish the movie is. Some of it is perhaps a matter of necessity, where keeping the camera near Indy's eye level is necessarily going to create a different framing that everything else in the film must respond to. But the lighting is terrific, often a hellish red to highlight the dog's emotional turmoil, or kept low to emphasize how he and his human are out of their familiar crowded city. Humans often appear in backlit silhouette, eerie for human viewers, but a reminder that dogs don't read faces so much as body language, so those are the emotional cues we get without seeming to cheat to limit information.
And it works as a horror movie. The filmmakers seldom go for jokes about dogs finding vacuums scary, but seed something vague about what might be haunting this house before presenting it in a way a dog might experience it. The shadow game is strong, and the score highlights what's unnerving to Indy nicely. Some of the effects work, when it comes to that, may seem like it doesn't match the live action footage, but I like that somewhat, having given it a little thought. There's a wrongness to what Indy detects in a way that's not quite equivalent to human senses, and this gets that across.
Plus, Indy? Such a good boy! The best boy! We've been seeing more CGI dogs in movies lately, which is fine - it's not like animals can agree to participate or emote on demand - but they often seem too blank or too human, while Indy is all dog, with an expressive face and the right sort of whine. He's not really giving a performance, of course, but the editing is convincing and the raw material is charming.
I suspect the film may seem too experimental or gimmicky to some - even at 72 minutes, it's probably roughly at its limits - but the material is pretty universal and both the human and canine emotion feels genuine.
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