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.

#LastFourWatched (when I started): Malice '25, Jurassic World Rebirth, 40 Acres, and 28 Years Later

A thing that amused me, earlier this year, was AMC sending me a message about how the price for A-List would go on my next billing cycle but I'd get four movies a week, and then seeing them change the pre-screen ads to emphasize the laser projection. Were they going to have to change them again in a few weeks? So far, no, even though I've been able to do four a week for a month or so. I'm guessing they'll roll the upgrade out to current members first and then launch it later in the year or in 2026.

Obviously, they should do some sort of cross-promotions with Letterboxd's "#LastFourWatched" hashtag when they do. It just occurs to me that it should probably be "#LastFourWatchd", but maybe that's taking things too far.

Anyway, for various reasons, I wound up using them one-a-day for four days in a row this weekend/early week, and while there's almost a pattern - parents having kind of alarming attitudes toward their kids being in danger - Malice doesn't quite fit it. Also, surprisingly, the father in Jurassic World Rebirth comes across looking like a pretty good parent, all things considered, which is usually not the case when your decisions lead to your kids almost being eaten by dinosaurs!


E yi (Malice '25)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Malice (or E yi, to use its Mandarin name and avoid confusion with the Nicole Kidman/Alec Baldwin/Bill Pullman movie from 30-odd years ago) is a pretty good thriller with some interesting things to say until it becomes even more heavy-handed in its last act, and while this is the part where you might expect to ascribe that to Chinese censorship, I'd kind of expect something similar no matter what its origins were. Filmmakers everywhere are vulnerable to twist overload and scolding what media has evolved into since they got their start, after all.

It opens with a heck of a hook, though, as pediatric cancer patient Yu Jingjao (Yang Enyou) races through an eerily empty hospital at night, chased by nurse Li Yue (Chen Yusi), with Jingjing's foster mother Wu Yusie (Ting Mei) following them to the roof when she finds her daughter's room empty, arriving just in time to see them go over the wall. The official investigation of the incident will be led by Captain Liang Guan (Huang Xuan), but it's the work of his soon-to-be-ex-wife, journalist Ye Pan (Zhang Xiaofei) that will have the greatest impact on the case, as she and her team, notably intern Chen (Li Gengxi) post their own findings on Li Yue's lurid history in real time, feeding their website's colorful commentators who shape public opinion.

That opening is the most overtly stylish section of the movie, making it briefly look like a supernatural horror story or the climax of something with a serial killer, but it's soon revealed as something of an anomaly as the film cuts to Ye Pan delivering a lecture about journalistic ethics. That's more the filmmakers' speed for the rest of the movie, and that's not exactly a bad thing; with one of the folks who went off the roof dead and the other in a coma, more action would eliminate more possibilities than it would open, and for most of the movie, the big twists tend to do double duty: When a source caling himself "Lord Dao" (one of a number of cameos and special guest stars I'm not quite familiar enough with the recognize by name) appears on Ye Pan's live stream, it both upends what the audience knows and further highlights the recklessness of real-time journalism and "self-media", which is in many ways the real thing that the film's three credited writers and two credited directors want the audience to ponder as opposed to a murder mystery.

Unfortunately, the film is in some ways too efficient in its tight 100 minutes: Two prior related stories reported by Ye Pan are mentioned just enough to be tied together near the end, along with her crumbling marriage to Liang, and there's a sort of forced parallelism to it, where you can see how this reflecting that and that reflecting this is meant to tie the whole thing together, but so much of it being revealed in the homestretch means the writers' hands are too visible. It's only underlined by how, suddenly, characters are talking about who the "malicious woman" is, especially to non-Chinese ears; it's a phrase that sounds like a trope/attitude that the audience supposed to be familiar with but is so carefully underlined that I suspect it sounds heavy-handed even to the film's local audience.

It's frustrating, because one can see where the mystery story is clearly playing into the idea of the public's willingness to buy into the trope of the malicious woman and the media criticism looks like it fits the idea but maybe doesn't quite. Plus, both the mystery threads and the media criticism are pretty good until the filmmakers decide to stop the film dead with extra twists and lectures that make sure that both the audience and characters get what they're saying, and it's not even crashing in a way that implies censorship or regulation is necessary. Things are going well until the filmmakers suddenly seem to become confident in their bad instincts and timid about their good ones.


Jurassic World: Rebirth

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, RealD 3D laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

When Jurassic World came out, there was an interview with director Colin Treverrow about how the idea behind it was "what if people got bored with dinosaurs?", and while it's not a bad idea, it's potentially poisonous if the filmmaker can't make a film that says this stuff is cool and exciting anyway. Treverrow, it turned out, wasn't the guy to do that; his two movies played out the premise but never gave the sense that he had an antidote for it. Gareth Edwards, working from a screenplay by returning writer David Koepp, seems to have a better handle on the whole thing, as well as a much better handle on what makes for a good adventure movie.

There are different sorts of tragedy in how this attitude manifests as the film opens: A flashback to how the need to engineer bigger and badder dinos has fatal results, a scene where a confused bronto that escaped from a New York City zoo is confused and dying in a modern world the climate and ecosystem are hostile (which also rolls back some of the prior film's unwieldy status quo), and the introduction of Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who studied under Alan Grant and is kind of heartbroken to see how these creatures he loves no longer seem to inspire wonder. This could all be just world-building, necessary extrapolation to get from the previous six movies to a story about an expedition to another island where genetically-engineered dinosaurs have escaped containment, this time to recover DNA that may be crucial in creating human heart medication, but there's sadness here.

And that's a good thing; it's got the audience in the right mood as they're introduced to Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as mercenaries who are too professional to wear their feelings about recently lost comrades on their sleeves, and kind of ready when Koepp and Edwards decide they are going to fight against it. The trailer may have featured a version of John Williams's music that was as slowed-down and lower-keyed as you'd expect by the time a series reaches a seventh film and is playing to people who take The Lore seriously, but it shows up in its full, bombastic glory surprisingly often when we arrive on the island, and there's a spot where one may be expecting an action scene but instead gets an earnest and mostly-successful attempt to recreate the awe provoked by the first movie, or a trip to a natural history museum with a dino skeleton.

And around that, Rebirth is a thoroughly capable adventure movie, occasionally catching one aback with how often other blockbusters often seem to strain for its basic competence. Edwards stages a couple of action sequences on boats really well, taking into account how they move and make everything a little harder without ever letting the audience get lost, for instance. Scarlett Johansson reminds the audience that she's a movie star who can create the right sort of chemistry with everyone else in the cast to make things feel fleshed-out even if they're not actually complicated. The side plot about a family that winds up on the island as well actually works when it would usually be pandering idiocy; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in particular makes the father feel like he knows his kids and is looking out for them rather than like someone annoyed by their presence.

The film stretches on a bit, and the finale doesn't entirely come together as it sinks in that Koepp & Edwards don't have anything new left up their sleeves that six other movies about folks running from corporate hubris in the form of resurrected life forms (with it raining at night to cover any shortcomings in the VFX) haven't covered, with a chase through dark tunnels not the best way to show off the misshapen, almost tragic "D-Rex". It's nevertheless a darn satisfying movie whose makers would rather make it fun than mean and seldom misstep even if they also seldom innovate.


40 Acres

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2025 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

40 Acres is not the first film in the post-apocalyptic survival genre to have Black creators and a majority-Black (and Native American) cast - heck, Breathe just came out last year, so not even the first in a while - but it's got a chip on its shoulder that other films of its ilk don't necessarily carry. Its family does not feel that they have not carved a safe space out of the chaos around them, specifically because of their backgrounds, and the tension of it is a vise that feels specific even as the themes and actions are familiar.

The matriarch of that family is Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler), an army veteran who returned to her family's Canadian homestead - which they arrived at as escaped slaves around the time of the American Civil War - just as ecological and societal collapse began. She has an 18-year-old son, Emanuel (Kataem O'Connor), In the decade or so since, she has married Galen (Michael Greyeyes) who has a teenage daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson) of his own; they now have two daughters, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare). The family are strong farmers and even better at defending their territory, as seen when a group of marauders get too close in the opening. Hailey won't give her location away to anyone, even the people she communicates via CB that she considers friends, which might protect them from a rumored band of cannibal marauders. But Manny is starting to buckle under this pressure, and he's just caught sight of a beautiful woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who is about his age and not his stepsister in a nearby swimming hole.

I suspect that one of the reasons director R.T. Thorne and his co-writers break the film into chapters that shift perspective and emphasis is to prevent Danielle Deadwyler from making it hard to see anybody else with her white-hot intensity. Hailey is the sort of tightly-wound martinet that these films usually reveal to be the real danger compared to the zombies and cannibals, and Deadwyler seldom seems to be holding anything back as she lashes out at the family who occasionally act like children or otherwise don't seem to be at 110% all the time. She's a force of nature and kind of terrifying, even with a load-bearing flashback where what she's seen before returning home seems to have staggered her and the occasional scene with Michael Greyeyes as someone she can't exactly let her guard down with but who can at least talk to her.

But because Deadwyler burns so bright, you've got to get Manny away from Hailey to see what being her son has made of him, and Kataem O'Connor is really great there, cowed but also rebellious as he can be even when he's got no-one to talk to about it. Manny is smart enough and self-aware enough to recognize that being isolated and on a constant combat footing has warped him, and he talks like a guy with holes in his experience who can't be the sort of person his mother wants him to be but can't quite figure out what else he can be. His scenes with Milcania Diaz-Rojas are fun because her Dawn is too worldly to immediately respond to his infatuation in kind and both she and the audience can recognize that his earnest good intentions can read as really dangerous.

Thorne and company keep the audience's eyes on the family dynamics enough that it's not exactly a surprise when he springs the trap doors that will put this blended family into a fight with outsiders - he never gets tunnel-visioned enough to treat what's going on outside the house as a distraction - but it's a flipped switch that leads to things getting slasher-movie bloody with a mean streak that one can't say the filmmakers haven't warned the audience about. It's impressively deployed violence - there's a shot Thorne holds for long enough for everything the film told the audience about mass extinction in passing to line up with everything we know about Galen before the film twists a knife, for example - and it goes to pulpy heights without ever feeling less than serious and potentially deadly. He shows the audience just enough of the marauders to make the audience see how their leaders could be charismatic enough to be followed without tempting the audience to think of them as more than monsters who need to die, even if it's Manny who has to kill them.

And that's the thing at the heart of the film that may be unresolvable: Hailey, Manny, and the rest live in a time where the need to be constantly vigilant and ready for action cannot be denied even if it can't be a healthy way to live, and the Black & Cree characters probably feel it in their bones in the way that Caucasian audiences like myself need to be shown. It doesn't have a single answer for how one stays alert and also stays sane, even as that's becoming the reality for more and more people.


28 Years Later

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

It was interesting to rewatch 28 Days Later and 28 Months Later ahead of this long-awaited third film (which itself is the start of a trilogy), because it really highlighted how much the first clicked into place when the former started to have something to say about rage and how hollow the second felt for not doing much more than building zombie-apocalypse lore. 28 Years Later lands someplace in between - I am deeply uninterested in its new infected variants and how a village isolated by the plague goes about its business, but when the filmmakers focus on the need to create mythology in the face of tragedy so big in one way or another that it beggars comprehension, that kind of becomes fascinating.

(Which, come to think of it, was the theme of Sunshine, director Danny Boyle's last collaboration with writer Alex Garland, back in 2007, and I wonder if their perspectives are a bit more in line this time!)

That doesn't make the first half - and first trip to the mainland from an island that is only connected to the mainland by a causeway at low tide - bad; it opens with a nifty sequence that is clearly going to echo through the trilogy. But it mostly exists to give the audience the lay of the land for when 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) returns in the second half, and introduce new forms of infected - "alphas" and "slow lows" - that don't necessarily follow from the pure blind rage of the previous movies. There's some good zombie action and Boyle does some interesting things with fever-dream flashbacks, but even the things we haven't necessarily seen before feel more like talented filmmakers trying to make the most of a played-out genre rather than an exciting addition to it.

It's when Spike returns home and doesn't see the way father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) misrepresents the expedition as his story that things get interesting. What he's found important is very different from what Jamie intended to show him, and his return seeking a doctor for his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) eventually leads him to a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who represents a sort of traditional take on zombie stories and Ralph Fiennes's Dr. Kelson, who has gotten a bit peculiar over the last 28 years but represents a humanist point of view usually treated with mockery in these movies. The scenes between Fiennes, Comer, and Williams are odd but rich, a commentary on what we lose when we worry about security above all else and how truth hurts more than the well-intended lie but it creates a solid foundation. Spike matures, but not as this genre usually defines maturing - becoming hard and willing to sacrifice - but by starting to question his assumptions and choosing to learn more.

I'm not entirely sure I'm interested in where the last scene(s) indicate the series is going next year, but I can't say there's not potential.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.05: "Ragdoll Dance", Best Wishes to All, Fucktoys, and Escape from the 21st Century

Shorts People!

Honestly, there could have been two groups like this, but even when I don't do the Saturday midnight, I usually look at that Sunday noon slot and wonder if I'm going to be up for rolling out of the bed without an alarm, doing some crosswords, having a big ol' bagel or donut, and making it to the Brattle by the start. I don't pre-order in case there are folks who really want to see this particular "existential" shorts package, and I don't think I've made the first shorts package on time since the festival started having this scheduling template. Certainly not since the pandemic.

I did not take good notes for this, and IMDB lists a lot of producers for Fucktoys (hey, I think this is the first blog post with cussing in the title that might wind up in my teenage nieces' social media feeds!), so I apologize for saying this is a guy I don't know, writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram, someone else I don't know, co-star Sadie Scott, and festival programmer Chris Hallock.

It was a fun conversation, because this was obviously a very low-budget movie and there was therefore a lot of talk about just how much of it was thrifted in and around New Orleans, or shot without permits and the like. The film hit various pandemic and hurricane-related delays, but, one has to admit, there are times when you can't imagine it taking place anywhere else.

Sriram also spent a lot of time talking about how the heart of the film is how, when you're young, especially a young woman, you can sort of know danger but kind of blithely go ahead anyway, and this was about when a person's luck runs out, and how you recognize that and react.

And with that, BUFF is finally wrapped up, and I've blown right past IFFBoston. Here's hoping that is finished before it's Fantasia time!


"Lilly Visits the Hospital"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

"The Bum Family" shorts are kind of BUFF tradition by now - I feel like we've seen them at every festival going back to before the pandemic - and, honestly, they've never been my favorite things in the package, very much "I'm glad you guys had fun making this but I'd never seek this out on my own". As usual, it's got some fun gags and some that feel inside. I kind of feel like this one has the characters feeling a little more self-aware of their weirdness than previous shorts have - not entirely planning to be an agent of chaos instead of just being one while trying to be normal, but with more of that than usual.


"Les Bêtes"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)


I loved the heck out of this at Fantasia last summer, and seeing it a second time months later maybe shaves a little of the novelty off but sharpens the satire a bit - one goes from laughing at the darkly comic awful ways that the aristocrats treat the macabre but lively little animated performers that are brought into the castle to feeling the callousness, especially in the performative cruelty of the little impressario who thinks it will bring him closer to his human masters. No, guy, you're one of the creatures to them.

It makes for a delightful little short, though, as filmmaker Michael Granberry and his crew make a bunch of Weird Little Guys and have them perform, do nifty character animation on the aristocrats, and use the petty bourgeois envy of the folks in between as a catalyst to something more destructive that constantly moves between horrifically destructive and satisfying bits of small-scale revenge. There is something especially powerful about a stop-motion film that ends in flames; for all that one knows that there were probably multiple copies of each little figure made, there's a special horror to the destruction and sense of the miraculous in what survives.


"Peeping"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Four minutes of odd that kind of looks like either the hardware or software used for rendering could use an upgrade in a way that may be deliberate, to give it a bigger underground/raising a fist to the man feeling. The premise is pretty straightforward and not going to be misread - folks just trying to have fun and do picking themselves apart to please a censorious authority - but some of the designs are neat and it's not trying to do too much.


"Pocket Princess"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This one's a neat stop-motion tale that feels like it's adapting a lesser-known fairy tale, one which makes it pretty clear that the cruel priest uncle isn't just an unsympathetic taskmaster but almost certainly molesting his niece, which makes its Grimm-ish finale something between a horrible nightmare and an escape. I suppose that's what makes a lot of those original-recipe stories work sometimes - looking at the world's horrors and admitting that sometimes the only escape you can construct is mental.

It's also kind of nifty-looking, really knowing how to make its various characters have the right balance of innocence and malice, and also making the fantasy world that Anna retreats into both fraught and tight, even when it might seem relatively bigger.


"Pippy and the Typist"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Look, it's got a moment where the main character dropkicks the person controlling the world's actions from the magic typewriter, and that's quality physical comedy. I'm not sure its meta hijinks ever get quite that funny again, but it puts in the effort, very much dedicated to chaos and the idea that just because you're a cartoon character, you may not actually know the best way to deal with cartoon characters, especially if you're already vindictive about your prior bad situation.

"The House of Weird"

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking, what you get when folks self-describe themselves as "weird" ever since the original Weird Tales ceased publication isn't great (yes, there's nuance to be had here, but this is a review of a 4-minute short), even if you can see folks having fun and want to applaud that. That's more or less what "The House of Weird" is - filmmaker Mark Reyes and friends screwing around with various tools to create series of funky looking rooms in a house that doesn't exactly open geometric law, and maybe trying to say something about how today's world is incomprehensible and like an escape room you can't exit, but mostly coming off as lightweight oddity for the same of oddity. But, hey, it's a first film, and maybe a learning experience.


"Poppa"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Hmm.

Yep, weird, but it builds up to the one joke you can fit into its two-minute runtime, and there's something really pleasant about its 1990s TV animation style that makes the gross bits work a little better.


"The Garden Sees Fire"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Another bunch of weird little guys, but drawn out trying to create a sense of importance. Mostly well done, I suppose, but 15 minutes is a lot of abstract weirdness.


"Red Thumb"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

An impressive dark fantasy that does nice work combining story, allegory, and world-building into a tight space.


"Demons in the Closet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

One-minute stop-motion horror story, riffing a bit on Army of Darkness, perhaps. Might have taken months to do, but works out pretty darn nice.


"A Walk in the Park"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

I can't seem to find the particular Jay Marks who made this one on IMDB but I hope folks in Hollywood are noticing this short because he certainly seems like a guy where you try and recruit him for something bigger, whether in animation or live-action. He's got a really good knack for building eerie atmosphere into blockbuster action, makes a twist into a deeper horror work, and inserts comedic bits in that don't undermine the sort of story he's telling.

It turns out to be the sort of big, slick banger that tends to be the grand finale for one of these blocks, except…


"Howl if You Love Me"

* * * ½ (out of four) Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This is also a great one, a zippy little cartoon where a couple manages to work around the lady's lycanthropy until the werewolf hunters come and make everything worse. It's upbeat and adventurous with a fine score and plenty of comic relief from their little dog, and despite the lack of dialogue and the cartoon character designs, there's a moment or two that really captures the best bit of werewolf stories, where someone is absolutely terrified of what their conditions will do to their loved ones. It's also built up in such a way that we can really enjoy the final rampage.

Genuinely fun note to end the package on.


Mina ni sachi are (Best Wishes to All)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)

Where to stream it (when available)

Best Wishes to All is quality Japanese "the world is somewhat askew from what you think" stuff, although very much the sort where I kind of want an argument to be raised with its premise at some point, even if it ultimately fails. This lady wants to push back on nihilism, but doesn't really get a chance to try.

The young woman in question (Kotone Furukawa) is visiting her grandparents for the first time in years while on break from college, with her parents and brother expected to join them soon. Something seems off, though, compared to when she visited as a child; there are strange noises, and a mysterious locked door at the end of the upstairs hallway. Eventually, what she finds shocks her, and the reaction of everyone around her but one childhood friend shocks her even more.

What she discovers doesn't really make sense, but that's exactly the point of this sort of Twilight Zone-ish story: Director Yuta Shimotsu and co-writer have a broad idea here, that the price of one person's happiness is another's suffering, and will generally always err on the side of the mechanism being vague and the feeling being authentic than trying to construct a perfect, detailed set of parallels. The discovery is a quality slow burn, though; the filmmakers have a nice way of raising flags right away so that the audience gets a feel for what they're in for but not the how, so the audience is kind of poking around the corners trying to see what's coming. When things get definitively weird, it gets more ominous.

It's also got quite the nice lead performance from Kotone Furukawa; she quickly sells the audience as a likable, down-to-earth student and recoils in horror well, but she's good at the middle part, too, where the heroine is between the horrible discovery about her world and anything she can possibly do about it, processing without looking blank. There are plenty of complementary folks to make it work, too: The too-friendly grandparents, the friend who knows what she doesn't and suffers more for it, the recluse who had the same reaction she did and had it drive her mad. The performances as a group sell the idea of a world that is (probably) different from ours in one very important way but can seem like it isn't twisted into unrecognizability, at least on the surface level.

It does kind of get scattered toward the end, sort of tossing in every sort of symbolic idea for how this works semi-randomly rather than building something that feels like it could actually be the case or has interlocking bits of meaning, which would be nice. It's effective for most of its hour and a half, though, and doesn't stretch out past that enough to undo it.


Fucktoys

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Fucktoys is probably the most cheery example of this sort of proudly disreputable movie - the type where you can imagine the folks involved taking each gasping patron who flees the theater out of shocked propriety as a sort of victory - that I can recall seeing. It's all sex workers on the margins of a place that is pointedly already marginal, but is never really looking to make the audience feel like they're slumming it, even when it eventually gets to the point when the candy coating starts to wear off.

AP (Annapurna Sriram) is one of them, a sort of flighty young woman who has been able to earn all she needs to get by selling sex she kind of wasn't opposed to having anyway when she feels like it. The thing about trusting fate in that way is that a girl can wind up in a panic about what fortune tellers say, specifically that her recent run of bad luck is due to a curse, and that she needs to earn some money quickly in order to hire someone to get it off her. So, with the help of friend and lover Danni (Sadie Scott), who just got out of jail, she hops on her scooter and starts looking around Trashtown for ways to earn some quick bucks, though her scatterbrained nature means she often finds herself at the same place she started, if not further behind.

That the movie generally seems to be going somewhere is a neat trick, because it's a story that requires a lot of episodic bouncing and things sort of sinking to a slightly lower low that would kind of die if it stopped being fun despite the trajectory. Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram does impressive work in all three areas keeping the energy up, playing AP as the right sort of dim but scrappy-sweet girl who can keep forward momentum for 100 minutes without slowing down for the audience to question anything and keeping things upbeat despite the absurdity. Sadie Sweet is a good foil for her, harder-edged but on the same wavelength, and there are a few other one-off types who match the vibe, notably Danian Young as a politician too genuinely nice for his own good and François Arnaud as a high-roller who might be able to solve AP's money problems himself.

The film is often stripped-down to an extent that approaches surreal, never more so than when hanging out in AP's "bedroom" in the middle of a field - is this literal, the way AP perceives homelessness that includes freedom, or something else again? The film is full of stripped-down locations and characters that could fit some version of them. Sriram lets them move blithely along, suggesting that the inconveniences of living hand to mouth more than make up for being smothered under patriarchal, moralistic expectations. Even a square like me can understand where AP is coming from.

The film is, however, ready for the conclusion it winds up reaching, which delivers the right emotion for every moment after the twist that sets out on a new course. Sriram shows a really steady hand here to make a point without the topical moralizing, and the poetic license taken at that point feels earned even as it lets her not go into what could have been a lot of details about how things would play out that the audience neither need nor wants. The big twist is jaw-dropping for all that it's maybe been in plain sight despite how the vibe is very much anti-twist, and she shows as much skill turning a screw as she had deliberately not doing so.

Some folks are still probably going to opt out pretty quickly; Sriram is certainly not making any effort to include a big, mainstream audience here. It's good work, though, whether she intends to ever make movies for the more easily-upset or not.


Cong 21 Shi Ji an Quan Che Li (Escape from the 21st Century)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Even folks who like and watch a lot of imported movies often tend to forget about the foreign film filter - that they often look better or classier because, with only so much demand for them outside their native territory, only the best or most mainstream cross borders in any meaningful way. China produces a ton of movies, though, both for theaters and its big streaming services, to entertain its population of 1.4 billion, but it's a rare thing for something as decidedly odd as Escape from the 21st Century to push its way into North America in even the tiny way it's managing.

It opens in the summer of 1999 on "Planet K" (which is basically Earth but pointedly not so, which I imagine gets you a little more leeway with the censors), introducing the audience to fat kid Paopao (Kang Qixuan), his dumb friend Wang Zha (Chen Yichen) with a "Hong Kong" wig for hair, and their buddy Wang Chengyong (Li Zhuozhao), who is super-popular, dating the gorgeous and equally popular Yang Yi (Ma Fanding), and will fight anybody who tries to get between them. That's how they wind up exposed to a weird chemical that allows them to take the places of with their future selves while their teenage bodies are unconscious - but in 2019, Paopao is now not only a hunk (Leon Lee Chenhao), but he's the one dating Yang Yi (Zhu Yanmanzi); Chengyong (Song Yang) is gangster working for a mysterious Boss (Wen Zhengrong); and Wang Zha (Zhang Ruoyun) is a photographer partnered with reporter Liu Lianzhi (Elane Zong Chuxi). Worse, they find out that this dystopian world where they're at odds with each other may be their fault, and they may even be putting their past lives at stake!

Story-wise, this movie is wobbly as heck; there's a good sort of time-travel farce set up in the idea that Paopao and Wang Zha are determine to keep the extremely jealous Chengyong from finding out Paopao and Yang Yi wound up together in both the present and future, but it doesn't really work, both because Yang Yi never really becomes enough of a distinct character of her own to make the answer interesting (as is wont to happen to girlfriends in movies about three or more male buddies) and because that piece is mostly a way to get these kids to stumble around and get into bigger trouble, which could have dire consequences for planet K, although it's the sort of "paradoxes just sort of make things blow up for reasons" sort of time travel trouble as much as anything really clever.

Still, that all leads up to an absolutely crazy, apocalyptic climax, with Bonnie Tyler singing "Holding Out for a Hero", missiles flying, characters sneezing themselves between 1999 and 2019 to try and keep a henchman from becoming too good at Street Fighter, and even more ridiculous things. Writer/director Li Yang throws the whole kitchen sink at the audience at hyperspeed with visual effects that do their level best to pull off every gonzo thing in his head, and he mostly does it without the audience getting lost. That doesn't mean one necessarily knows what's happening, but you can keep track of what the various characters are doing and what their individual stakes are, with nobody getting left behind.

Of course, the whole movie is cranked up to eleven even before this The present and the past have different aspect ratios, the film will become animated when live action is simply not sufficiently trippy for what's going on, and why settle for larger-than-life when one can be absurdly larger-than-life? It's exhausting at times and often both over-complicated and without room for nuance, but it's seldom boring, and it really helps that the teenage and adult actors do an excellent job of staying in sync rather than letting the two time periods get away from each other.

It's weird, maximalist filmmaking that was probably lucky to hit the festival circuit and gather up people to tell their friends they won't believe how nutty it is rather than try to cram that into a high-pressure worldwide release.

Samurai and Their Daughters: Tornado & Bushido

I was interested in Tornado just from the trailer, then looked it up and saw it was from the director of Slow West and really got my interest piqued.. Then… Wait, ten years since Slow West? Nothing in between? Well, one music video for his brother's band, but, yikes. I remember people being pretty fond of his movie, even if it was kind of an odd duck of a western, but, yikes, what has he been up to since then? IMDB and other online resources like it aren't definitive - you can be developing stuff and even getting paid for your work and have it never have it logged because for one reason or another it never becomes a credit - but it still seems kind of sparse. You'd expect to see a little TV or something, right? Maybe a movie you never heard of because Netflix picked it up and it was made available without any fanfare?

I've seen it happen before - go back far enough in this blog and you'll see me saying much the same thing about the gap between Jump Tomorrow and Last Chance Harvey - and it makes me wonder anew just to what extent it's harder than it ever was to get a movie made.

Anyway, in an enjoyable theme stretch, the next night Bushido played at the MFA as part of their Japanese Film series, and it too features an unusual samurai and his daughter, which is a really fun bit of serendipity, considering they were made at opposite ends of the world.

Tornado

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2025 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link for pre-order)

Tornado is an impressively mean little bit of pulp that remixes its various influences well but is modest about it. Director John Maclean isn't particularly looking to show off his bona fides or encyclopedic knowledge of various genres, but serving up some creative violence and the grim results of paternal conflict for 90 minutes.

Taking place in the year 1790, it starts in media res, with the title character (Mitsuki "Koki," Kimura) running across the Scottish Highlands, a young boy (Nathan Malone) not far behind, pursued by a gang of highwaymen. Their leader Sugarman (Tim Roth) pursues with patient but ruthless determination while son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) hangs back, watching for details his father misses and planning to act on his own. Before long, we'll see how all this started, with Tornado frustrated by her strict former-samurai father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) and the traveling puppet show where they barely make ends meet, although it's good enough that things go to hell when the highwaymen stop to watch and everyone gets sloppy and greedy.

It's a basic chas/revenge story, but Maclean keeps it from feeling rote, strewing bits of backstory about to casually connect or leave mysterious as best serves the very focused plot. He starts with what is probably the second big chase piece, chronologically, not so much to hide something as to focus on who the core cast is rather than to set the audience up for disappointment because he kills favorites early or introduces potentially critical connections late. You can probably piece together a lot about how Fujin and Tornado wound up traveling alone in Eighteenth Century Scotland and enjoy wondering about the rest, and enjoy how protagonists and antagonists alike feel like natural groups rather than folks forced together by authorial fiat.

That's especially notable during the relatively brief scenes with Tornado and Fujin, who come off a bit dysfunctional, with Mitsuki Kimura playing a modern sort of archetype - the assimilated child of immigrants - without coming off as too Twenty-First Century or being allowed particularly long stretches to show how her brattiness has led to disaster. It's a natural complement to how Takehiro Hira plays Fujin as someone who has left the warrior's life behind but can't quite shake the attitudes it has ingrained in him; you can see their well-intentioned instincts making things worse. The other parent and child probably don't have better instincts and are way too much alike for their own good: Both Sugarman and Little Sugar know they're smart and ruthless, which manifests as seasoned, witty self-assurance from Tim Roth but overeagerness and a smirk about how much more clever he is from Jack Lowden.

It's a set-up for doling violence out in rather casual fashion. The choreography is never really complicated - the point often is that it doesn't really take much to kill a person, especially if you're unsentimental about it, or that being very good with a weapon may not mean much if the other person strikes before you realize it's a fight to the death - but some of the kills have an impressive vicious or absurdity nevertheless, with more than a couple bits quick but ingenious enough to make a viewer search their memories for if they've seen that before. It's a little meta about how much fun this is, with a word about audiences cheering for violence rather than heroes, but doesn't raise itself above its anti-heroine as she maybe trades one piece of her soul for another.

For those who have seen Slow West, there's little doubt it's from the same guy. It's not necessarily relaxed as it pushes through its chase in steady but relentless fashion, but it's got the same sorts of moments where it pauses to show its amoral characters framed in a harsh but beautiful land and preference for just enough dialog to make introspection readable. The music is harsh and discordant at times, as uninterested in messing around as the rest of the film, though it happily adds genre notes where appropriate.

This one isn't for everyone - there's a lot more cruelty than fun to its grindhouse violence - but Maclean does well in shrinking a revenge epic down to size and making it work without a lot of fuss.


Gobangiri

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 May 2025 in Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (Festival of Films from Japan, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I scribbled "go" under "mahjongg" on an imaginary list of board games to learn so I can appreciate asian films early on in this one. It's an entertaining period piece that I suspect is especially charming to those who know the game and can perhaps see its philosophy and strategy throughout.

Its central figure is Kakunoshin Yanagidi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), a vagrant samurai behind on his rent because he is making his living as a carver and not that many people in Edo's Yoshiwada district need personal seals. His true passion is the game of go, shared by pawnbroker Genbei Yorozuya (Jun Kunimura), and they become close friends; it doesn't hurt that Genbei's employee Yakichi (Taishi Nakagawa) is quickly smitten with Yanagadi's lovely and intelligent daughter Okinu (Kaya Kiyohara). Two events throw this potentially pleasing arrangement into chaos: The arrival of old friend Kajiki Samon (Eita Okuno), who informs Yanagidi that rival Hyogo Shibata (Takumi Saito) has been identified as the actual person behind the events that led to Yanagidi's exile, and the disappearance of money during a game between Yanagidi and Genbei which Yanagidi and Okinu go to dangerous lengths to repay.

I find myself very impressed at how what could often be a whimsical premise for a movie quickly becomes dead serious here. The honorable ronin whose true passion is go and who needs his sensible daughter's care reveals a dark side when given a righteous cause; the bushido code itself appears to bring out the very worst in him, and in others. Director Kazuya Shiraishi and his crew often shoot the film in cheery, nostalgic fashion - this isn't a grimy, "you know it's serious because it's dark" film - but it's clear early on that living in this land means potentially being at the mercy of violent maniacs who are far too willing to let a situation escalate to formalized murder.

That's the most fascinating part of Tsuyoshi's portrayal of Yanagidi, which initially presents as stiffly earnest and formal, the samurai who has been restricted to inaction by his training and the expectations of his caste to be an outsider among ordinary people that only occasionally reveals the dark side that lurks within, letting you spend the second half of the movie wondering just how far he will sink. It makes the confrontations with Takumi Saito's Shibata entertaining in seeing how one doesn't know what to do with his dark impulses while the other is clearly just covering them as is convenient. It also lets a couple of character actors used in fun ways; I seldom remember Jun Kunimura playing this cheerful, and Masachika Ichimura seems a bit less rigid than he might. Taishi Nakagawa and Kaya Kiyohara are a likable pair, and Kyoko Koizumi plays a neighbor who seems to have a handle on her own dark side, for better or worse.

It softens one up a bit before getting the more dramatic material with an often cheery first act. Its occasional bits of humor seem to be happily free of anachronism and never make things silly, with a nice way of emphasizing what is universal and familiar in a bygone time. You can feel the shift into darker material like a click as the filmmaker turns a dial to a new setting. The action is exciting but one can see how it could be corrosive.

I've got no idea how well it presents the game - folks near me in the theater seemed not-upset - but the filmmakers know how this stuff works, showing the broad strokes of the game, demonstrating a specific rare strategy that will be important later, but watching the players more than the game to the extent they can. They're tuned into the exact amount that selling these scores with a board game is kind of silly, even if we do take these games seriously.

Lunar New Year 2025.05: Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants

I take photos of the end credits just in case IMDB isn't particularly helpful on occasion, but it seldom looks this good.

AMC switched things up a bit for this particular week, opening the Indian films at Causeway Street while this opened at Boston Common, counter to what's become the norm of late; I kind of suspect they didn't necessarily want three Chinese films at the 13-screen Causeway Street location, and that appears to be where Detective Chinatown 1900 is lingering. Something interesting is that, despite being right next to Chinatown, it's the first opening night for a Chinese film in a while where I didn't feel like I was the only person who needed subtitles. A lot of English being spoken on top of ethnicity, and I kind of wonder if some of the young stars are known for other things.

I don't think it was only playing in 2D because there was only room for one screen - although that was probably why 3D shows for Ne Zha 2 were initially scarce before the chain realized showtimes were going to sell out - because Sony seems relatively less enthused about using it these days, and I don't know how much the hardware side no longer putting out 3D televisions and dedicated Blu-ray 3D players has to do with it (their 4K players do tend to have 3D as an unadvertised feature) or if it's just because they're not getting much return. Doesn't much matter, I guess, except that I'd like to see it that way, and you can't even count on regular Blu-rays out of Hong Kong for Chinese movies these days, let alone 3D. But maybe we'll get lucky!

She diao ying xiong zhuan: Xia zhi da zhe (Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2025 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

There's a certain flavor of Tsui Hark film that you don't see quite so much since he started working with the big Chinese studios, the sort where he's seemingly trying to cram all the good parts of a sprawling epic into 100 minutes and doesn't quite have the FX resources it demands. During his Hong Kong heyday, he'd often have a producer credit while someone else directed, but his fingers were all over those movies. Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants is the closest he's come to that in years, for better or worse (but mostly better).

The Gallants in question are Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan), a son of the Song Kingdom who grew up in the grasslands of Mongolia, raised by the Great Khan, but who joined Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei)on Peach Blossom Island to learn magical martial arts, but rejecting her when it appeared it appeared her father murdered his teachers. The real culprit is likely Western Venom Ouyang Feng (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), who sells the Novem Scripture which Rong-er has hidden and Jing-ge has mastered - and he might well provoke a war between the Mongols and the Jin-dominated Song in order to get it.

That muddies the story up more than a bit; as is Hark's tendency in these pictures, he front-loads with a fair amount of background to get to the stretch of the novel that he figured would make the best movie, but also occasionally jumps into flashbacks like a storyteller who sees his audience getting confused and is like oh, right, that doesn't make sense without this. For a while, it's a bit overwhelming but not much of a problem; the pieces fit even if you have to keep reaching back into the box. Once that's in place, the more serious problems start, as Hark is seemingly trying to include all the cool action scenes and melodramatic heights that there's not a whole lot of room for what goes in between. The back half of the movie has the young lovers dramatically separated and reunited without much time to feel like they're actually apart, and bombastics professions of loyalty that may or may not be enough to get someone killed and are pretty quickly forgiven. The climax is a massive showdown between the Mongol and Song armies that doesn't seem strictly necessary even before considering that all the audience really wants is Jing and Rong facing off against Feng.

It flows well, at least, in large part because, even with tragic backstory and other events pulling at them, Xiao Zuan and Zhuang Dafei have upbeat youthful energy and the chemistry to play scenes so they're not explicitly romantic but establish enough of a connection that there doesn't need to be a lot of hand-wringing about how they really feel later. Tony Leung Ka-Fai is the right villain for them, monstrous and powerful but also kind of amusingly pompous. He's big and rugged but doesn't have the sort of dignity and gravitas Bayaertu brings to The Great Khan in contrast. Zhang Wenxin is good as her daughter, a princess you can watch growing up (although she really doesn't look like the sister of the ethnically-Mongolian actors playing the Khan's sons at all).

And the action, of course, is just as much fun as you might expect; Hark has been honing this sort of high-flying, mystical martial arts for roughly forty years (since Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain in 1983), and though the action here is less aerial than in some cases, it's still larger than life and has the right weight to it, even when it's effectively force fields and chi blasts. There's impact to the blows and some freewheeling creativity to the staging that mostly doesn't quite cross over into slapstick. Even with CGI tools he could probably barely imagine forty years ago, he sometimes seems to want a little more than he has, with the CGI armies and locations not quite being top of the line. The fights between Jing, Rong, and Feng tend to be great fun, though, not quite gravity-defying but big and satisfying.

(I'm guessing that they're even better in a 3D presentation; Tsui Hark clearly plans for the technology and enjoys throwing things at the audience!)

For all that this is a big Tsui Hark fantasy-action movie where his reach exceeds his grasp by a bit, it's also possibly the most grounded of the three films in the genre released for the 2025 Lunar New Year, which is an odd turn of events, when you think about it. The result is a bit messy at times but has personality and assurance; Tsui Hark continues to do Tsui Hark stuff well.

Lunar New Year 2025.02: Creation of the Gods Part II: Demon Force

Been a while since I saw a Chinese movie near this sign, which I still don't quite understand. You would think the Chinese movies would play better in the theater right next to Chinatown, but perhaps the one at North Station is more accessible to students or something? Are Chinese students particular about reclining seats or something? I dunno.

I watched the first to catch up the night before, and found I didn't like it much more than the first time, but it was kind of good to be reminded of the basics before going into the next one. There's going to be a bit more of that going on over the course of the next month - I don't recall much about Ne Zha - but not as much as I'd thought, because apparently The Priests isn't streaming anywhere to prep for Dark Nuns and Operation Hadal does not actually seem to be a sequel to Operation Red Sea, despite how the trailer plays that up. Big "Happy Lunar New Year - Have Some Sequels!" situation this year.

One more thing: These aren't the only movies that literally have a message come up saying to stay through the credits for three extra scenes, but there's something specific about how Wuershan does it that I go back and forth between liking and disliking. Some movies in planned trilogies will say "stick around for a preview of the sequel", and Marvel tends to put in teases that are kind of inconsequential, but Creation of the Gods puts in things that are pretty consequential and which in some cases undoes what happened in the climax. It's as good a place to put these events as anything - they're not really part of either story - but on some level isn't how even serialized movies are expected to work.

I will say, at least, that I kind of felt sorry for the poor folks watching the extended edition of the second Lord of the Rings movie over at the Seaport at roughly the same time - sure, they're good films, but the fantasy adventure isn't as batty as it is here!


Feng Shen 2 (Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force)

* * *¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I zonked out watching Part I to refresh my memory the night before this sequel opened - it's kind of beautifully mounted but nothing special until the finale - but Demon Force is a big improvement, with all the big fantasy stuff from that finale on display right from the start, exciting action that feels like more than CGI armies rubbing at each other, and some romance and sexiness from someone other than the villains. It's a genuine upgrade beyond being past setting things up.

For those that don't recall, the world is beset by a Great Curse that can only be dispelled using the Fengshan Bang, a scroll that absorbs the chi of the dead which can only be opened by the King of All Realms, but the current Shang king, Yin Shou (Fei Xiang aka Kris Philips), is a monster who heard "more death means more power" and obliged, and though defeated in the previous movie's climax, he has been revived by his lover, a fox demon who has taken the body of Su Daji (Na Ran aka Narana Erdyneeva). Speaking of revivals, immortals Nezha (Wu Yafan) and Yang Jian (Sha Chi) have brought the king's beheaded son Yin Jiao (Luke Chen Murchi) to Kunlun Mountain to be resurrected, while formerly loyal hostage Ji Fa (Yosh Yu Shi) has fled to his home city of Xiqi. Yin Shou wishes to dispatch Commander Wen Zhong (Wu Hsing-Kuo), just returned from a ten year campaign near the North Sea, to destroy Ji Fa and Xiqi, the old man wishes to retire, but General Deng Chanyu (Nashi) is eager to step up, and she leads a force of 800 men, and the four giant Mo brothers.

There is immediate "just kiss already" energy between Ji Fa and Deng Chanyu, and it's a sign that writer/director Wuershan is looking to have more fun this time around; the melodrama that drew snickers in the first has given way to actual jokes without sacrificing the implied cosmic scope of the danger or the more grounded stakes of the siege, and there's room for joy rather than just decadence. Maybe, having examined the formal framework the last time around, there's a little more room to have the characters act human within it.

That's especially the case with Yosh Yu and Nashi, who have solid enough chemistry that they don't have to be making eyes at each other to the audience to pull for them, but very enjoyable as leaders trying to outwit each other. It lets Kris Philips and Na Ran step back a bit, and Huang Bo also gets to be a bit funnier even as he takes a more active role as Xiqi's strategist. Wu Hisng-Kuo is formidable as Wen. Even when Chen Muchi returns, the cast never feels nearly as same-y as it could in the first - or, at least, they're able to have a little fun with the endless succession of characters, like when a character's name appears on-screen three seconds before he is killed.

And, also, there are big fantasy battles, with giants and gargoyles, and a pursuit involving horses that plays like a classic cliffside car chase. There's also a scene where the fancy armor that had been so important for the previous movie and a half becomes more trouble than it's worth, which is a delight. The grand finale has a besieged city having to figure out how to defend itself against flying saucers, and it's an absolute gas. The visual effects are maybe not quite Hollywood quality, but if they're short of photorealism, it's in a way that recalls the artwork for these mythic and fantastic stories that the filmmakers are likely referencing.

A third film in the series is promised, and I must admit, I found myself a lot more excited about the prospect than I had been 24 hours before. It's a big, entertaining adventure that audiences can jump into without having seen the first, and hope that they hold to a two-year schedule and the next comes out in 2027.

Lunar New Year 2025.01: Detective Chinatown 1900 & Hit N Fun

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate, even if it's just heading to the movie theater to check out the big holiday blockbusters.

Although one is, frankly, busting more blocks than the other; when I purchased my tickets a few days ago, both were in Causeway #6, one of their large rooms. But while Detective Chinatown 1900 was ready to fill up for its 6:30pm showtime, it was basically just me and one other person for Hit N Fun at 9:30pm, so they moved that to a smaller room (#10) and put another show of DC1900 on. The funny thing is how they handled assigned seating: The app still had me in seat C11, although I'm pretty sure that this would have placed me in the handicapped seating, while the ticket I printed out had me in I20, or as far back and to the left, viewed from the back of the theater, as you can get. Which, considering how I tend to be front and center, and slightly to the right if I can't be on the centerline (left ear better than the right, so that kind of balances things), is not a great guess. Fortunately, I could check Fandango and see that the front was wide open and just grab my usual seat B10.

Anyway, it's a busy year for Lunar New Year movies, the busiest in some time: DC1900, Hit N Fun, and Creation of the Gods II this week, Ne Zha 2 on the 14th, Tsui Hark's Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants on the 21st (hopefully in 3D), and Dante Lam's Operation Hadal on the 28th. Hopefully it's a good one as well; both of these are decent but with room to be a bit better.


Tang Ren Jie Tan an 1900 (Detective Chinatown 1900)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Does the propaganda get laid on fairly thick toward the end of Detective Chinatown 1900? Yeah, absolutely, but it's not like the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't a real thing, and it's not like there aren't parts of the movie which are uncomfortably topical today. I'll give it to them, even if it might be a somewhat bitter pill for the potential Western audience pulled in by the promise of a fresh start and some familiar faces.

As it opens, there is upheaval on both sides of the Pacific, as the Western powers are looting Beijing and Empress Dowager Cixi (Xi Meijuan) dispatches investigator Fei Yanggu (Yue Yunpeng) to San Francisco to track down rebel Cheng Shialang (Ke Bai aka White-K). He is supposed to be met by some noted detectives and translator Fu Qin (Liu Haoran), but Fu is left on his own and taken in by the head of the Hip Sing Tong, "Louis" Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun-Fat), who is due to address the city council on a plan to greatly expand the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act which would have the city reclaim the land under Chinatown. It's being supported by ambitious politician Grant Jones (John Cusack), but everything is thrown into chaos when Grant's daughter Alice (Anastasia Shestakova) is found dead, stomach gutted in a manner reminiscent of Jack the Ripper, with witnesses placing Bai's son Zhenbang (Steven Zhang Xincheng) at the scene of the crime. Also found dead is Navajo chief Six-Hands, who often came to Chinatown to trade furs; and his son "Ghost" Gui (Wang Baoqiang), a Chinese orphan adopted after his parents died building the railroad, must team with Fu Qin to solve the mystery.

There's more going on - an Irish labor gang, a stage magician, more bodies eventually to come, all running at a breakneck pace that's nevertheless impressively coherent given that the credits show both series mastermind and Dai Mo as directors and a whole slew of people contributing to the screenpay. I would not be shocked if the studio were throwing everything they could at the movie to meet a Lunar New Year release date - Chen's previous film, Decoded, came out just six months ago and you wonder if he just asked Cusack to hang around because he had another movie that could use an American shooting the next day - and it's kind of shaggy in that way, as well as in all the other ways Chinese movies with American parts often are: Lots of guys who are clearly Twenty-First Century Russians and who clearly don't speak English as well as Chow Yun-Fat.

Mostly, though, it fits nicely into the series, delivering very broad comedy which often gives way to a surprisingly good murder mystery, maybe the series's best since its first entry. There'a a lot of activity going on, but it's seldom wasted or purely red herrings, and the characters dive in rather than wink at the audience. As usual, you can tell Chen Sicheng loves this stuff; the film comes alive when it's time to reveal all, and if he's hidden a conversation or two, it's not like it's material you can't figure out. There's a very nifty chase in the middle which is full of slapstick, western, and wuxia bits, and a somewhat sillier (but still fun) set piece ahead of it. Mixing things up and throwing other genre elements in at times seems to have revitalized the returning cast and crew.

If the chemistry between Liu Haoran and Wang Baoqing isn't quite what it was in the first film, their parts are a little more balanced than they were in the last couple movies, where the growing confidence of Liu Haoran's Qin pushed Wang's Tang back into a more purely comic relief role. Here they both get to play fishes out of water and bounce off each other in entertaining fashion, and they've got a nice brace of folks supporting them, with Yue Yunpeng and Wei Xiang particularly good at playing their parts as both comic and potentially more than they appear. As in Decoded, John Cusack is kind of an odd presence in the film, in that his comfort in English can make him seem like he's underplaying relative to the other "Americans", but he grounds the climax surprisingly well.

And most importantly, there's Chow Yun-Fat in his first role in five years (One More Chance was delayed by Covid), and he's been missed. He goes from comedic mugging to fearsome authority as this film goes on, and his ability to switch between Mandarin and English lets him pull that off in all of his scenes - if he's dubbed, one wonders why nobody else is dubbed that well. He's giving a speech at the climax and seems earnestly at a loose end at the finale, the film's secret weapon except he's no secret.

(On the other hand, one cannot help but notice that nearly none of the women in the film get to actively do anything, and a lot of Navajo are played by Chinese actors for a movie that leans pretty hard on how racist Americans can be at points.)

Chow's maybe not quite enough to elevate this film where it gets rough, and you'll never really miss the rough spots, but DC1990 does just enough of the things I particularly like about the series fairly well, so that I wound up enjoying it quite a bit.


Lam Si Kyut Dau (Hit N Fun)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #10 (first-run, laser DCP)

Hit N Fun looks like it's going to be a broad, silly New Year's comedy as it introduces its characters and sets up their situations, but winds up going in another directions, like these goofballs haven't quite been made goofy enough and the filmmakers have grown too fond of them to really have fun at their expense. That's far from crippling, but it does mean that there comes a point where the movie is more pleasant than hilarious. Which is still a net positive, and I've got to admit, I don't really know where the zany version of this story would go.

It opens in a dingy muay thai gym in Macau; Bruce Chung Li (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) was once a legend with an unbeatable left fist but he and student Stallone Ko (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung), who has lost 37 straight matches, have been catering to senior citizens and children ever since word got out that he lost a fight to disciple Arnold Chan (German Cheung Man-Kit). Across the estuary in Hong Kong, advertising executive Elsa Lam (Louise Wong Tan-Ni) is bouncing between multiple appointments, including a voice over for "Meno-Peace" where the actress, Bruce's wife Carrie Mok (Gigi Leung Wing-Kei), has not been told what the material is and still isn't ready to be associated with that sort of work at 48; her agent Bridget (Yeung Sze-Man) is Elsa's aunt. That's when Elsa discovers that her boyfriend Daniel (Peter Chan Charm-Man), has another girlfriend, Surewin Suen (Chrissie Chau Sau-Na) - Macau's women's champion, Bruce's former student, and the face of Arnold's gym. Humiliated when their conference goes viral, Elsa shows up at Bruce's gym and offers 200,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $25,000 US) to teach her to fight.

Are there a bunch of nutty coincidences in that rundown? Yes! But that's kind of what makes it work, early on, where a sudden turn around the corner brings them back into familiar territory but from a cock-eyed view, and we get to wonder how the intense Elsa is going to play off the laid-back Stallone, or note that the bad blood that apparently festers between Bruce and Arnold doesn't keep Carrie and Surewin from being friends. There's comedy to be mined from Carrie's vanity or how this insecure artist has drawn the attention of two highly driven women. It should be an invitation to entertaining chaos, but never quite is. The initial friction between Carrie and Elsa vanishes so quickly that it's genuinely weird for the former to be describing the latter as a bitch by a half hour into the movie, for instance, and nothing really develops with Arnold being money-hungry.

At times, it's almost like the characters get too well-rounded. Gigi Leung, for instance, is given what should be a one-joke caricature and somehow makes this kind of shallow and vain woman who hasn't come to terms with her aging very funny and sympathetic without being maudlin, and there's an enjoyably understated opposites-attract thing going with Louis Koo's curmudgeonly Bruce; Koo's "uhh" when Carrie suggests Bruce train her for an action movie suggests he's known this would be a bad idea for twenty years. Louise Wong snaps out orders that make Elsa seem like she's abrasive and a lot but also not unsympathetic, and German Cheung briefly works as an entertainingly exaggerated take on everything one hates about the gym. At some point, though, they all seem to become too aware of their precarity and how the modern world can make comic characters tragic in a second, and there's not much of a back-up plan. There's really no reason for Elsa and Surewin to fight, let alone Bruce and Arnold; instead of the story leading everybody to weird places, it's easy to see them deciding to be mature about everything.

That said, when they are going for the big joke, it tends to land pretty well; Gigi Leung and Louise Wong are especially funny, as is Wong Wan-Ching as the daughter of Bruce & Carrie who is easily as smart as the two put together. Nobody really has a joke die on them so much as the jokes get smaller. It being Hong Kong, even a comedy knows what to do with a fight, from the slapstick chaos of Elsa's first confrontation with Surewin to a finale that is kind of unblinking in how, on a certain level, these two really want to beat the hell out of each other but are also very grateful for rules that tell them that this is enough. That one is intercut with the duel between Bruce and Arnold that is shot in a completely different way; they are expert fighters but their battle seems abstracted more than violent.

It's an enjoyable enough movie to see on a holiday, I suppose, although more a bonus-lazy-afternoon holiday than a big one where you're making a lot of noise. It's not quite tradition, but it's fairly nice.