Fantasia 2024.08: "You Don't Read Enough", Darkest Miriam, "Piggy 1/2", Animalia Paradoxa, Rita, and This Man

Two sets of photos from the first show of the Day!

First up, the co-writer/director/star of "You Don't Read Enough", Emilia Michalowska, and co-writer/director Noa Kozulin, who commented that they were both the children of immigrants whose mothers both said the title to them on the regular.

After the feature, programmer Carolyn Mauricette welcomed Darkest Naomi writer/director Naomi Jaye and original novelist Martha Baillie; like the title character of Jaye's film, both Mauricette & Baillie have been library workers, mentioning that you find a lot of people in real life like in the film, waiting at the door for them to open in the morning and hanging around until closing time. They talked about how it was a tricky adaptation because the novel took the form of various incident reports, which wouldn't translate to film.

And we finish with Mitch talking to Rita director Jayro Bustamante. The film hails from Guatemala, which is a small country that doesn't have a lot of infrastructure for even a film of this scale, especially one where the cast was almost entirely young girls: They basically had to create an academy from the ground up - with 500 prospective actresses! - and then cast the graduates. If I recall correctly, roughly half made it into the film in one way or another, and some were finding other work since.

There were a number of folks from Guatemala in the audience - well-represented in the Q&A period, especially - which added something to the "thank you for this movie" intros which I often find kind of odd (especially when it's more or less the entire comment). There are variations on scandals like this all over the world - Native American boarding schools in Canada and the U.S., church-run sweatshops in Ireland, etc. - but it's got to be weirdly gratifying to see your small country's horror story memorialized well enough to play foreign film festivals because that probably means it is well-done enough to stick at home.


"You Don't Read Enough"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

I love that the title of this short would be comprehensible nonsense even if it's not actually mentioned within the film; there are just things about parental relationships of this sort that feel universal even if the specifics are extremely personal and random. The actual story is basically nonexistent: At 4:10pm, Kasia (Emilia Michalowska) gets a call from her Polish-immigrant mother saying she'll be home in about twenty minutes. This does not happen, and Kasia worries, resolves not to worry, and worries some more, all while thinking about how fraught their relationship has been.

The kick to it, though, is the moment when she starts thinking about what a burden would be lifted if something has happened to her mother, and the presentation and cutting is close to marvelous, keeping this undercurrent of guilt as opposed to doing a hard cut in and out of a pleasant reverie, but that's not how it works most of the time. It's just enough to have the ending bit not just be an amusing anticlima.


Darkest Miriam

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Titles are funny; this movie with the name "Darkest Miriam" really didn't do much for me, but seeing in the end credits that the original novel was named "The Incident Report" made it click into place a bit more. How often is the title a marketing tool and how often is it the hub to which one is connecting the other pieces of the story? It doesn't change the movie much, but it does reframe it.

The audience doesn't hear much from Miriam Gordon (Britt Lower), dark or otherwise at first, as she leaves home and bikes to the library where she works, near a nice park in the center of Toronto, leading story hours and reshelving books. Soon, though, she is giving a list of the various oddballs who frequent the branch but still mostly reserved. Things change, though, when a fellow cyclist knocks her into a hole that has been excavated in the street and she stares up, dazed, for some time. The next morning, she awkwardly leaves her medical examination over the personal questions, but she seems okay and more assertive, actually approaching the cute slovenian cabbie/artist, Janko Priajtelj (Tom Mercier) who often takes lunch in the park at the same time.

Apparently the novel consists of the incident reports of the title, letting the documentation of something odd happening in the library and elsewhere rather that focusing on Miriam directly, and they're the moments of the film that often have the most punch: They're where we get to hear Miriam's voice and get a point of view that's wry rather than flat, and Lower's delivery is arch enough to emphasize both the remove and the insight into her mind. Once the film finishes, it can maybe sink in that it's been a series of incidents to be filed away and sorted, discrete and more indicative of the larger world than the entirety of her story.

Britt Lower is great, at least, slowly adding to what initially seems like an informed blankness as the film goes on, occasionally displaying a powerful anxiety as she realizes just how blank she maybe is. Through long stretches where one maybe starts to wonder if this is leading anywhere, she, at least, is always fascinating. She and Tom Mercier play well off each other, with Lower, Mercier, and screenwriter/director Naomi Jaye having a good sense of how to make Janko pushy and prickly where Miriam tends to retreat without looking like he's steamrolling her. They don't have to be soulmates here, just a couple folks who at least work together now, and the film is comfortable at that level.

They and the interactions with relatively random folks at the library work well enough that it can sometimes highlight that Jaye doesn't do quite so well when it's time to unambiguously center Miriam. The story that has her at the center (a stalker placing unnerving letters in books) is too centered around a reference rather than her interactions with people; unpacking her past happens piecemeal and often in quiet, possibly-metaphorical images and memories that aren't quite flashbacks. There's a certain logic to it - Miriam is who she is in large part due to things that happened at a slight remove, rather than to her directly - but it makes it possible to disengage.

I never did, not entirely, but it was hard not to feel that while the film created a number of small segments that mostly work together, the effect was often not to increase their importance in the moment but to diminish the larger tragedies. One can get to the end and feel like it should have been more affecting.


"Piggy ½"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Animation Pllus, laser DCP)

Writer Kuo Po-shen and director Fish Wang are not exactly subtle with their intentions in "Piggy ½"; it's a science-fiction film that is meticulously constructed to make a specific point, and that construction is heavy-duty: They do not want to simply posit a world that makes the horrors of ours sharper by creating analogs that feel truthful because of their intent, but a machine where you can see each part working, how they interact, and how they came to be constructed. Where some might avoid that level of detail lest a viewer feel that some specific piece invalidates the point or causes the story to fall apart, they apparently consider rigor convincing.

They're not wrong, although it can make bits slow going as anthropomorphic piglets Bob and Mei await the "ritual" that will determine whether they and the others of their generation will be become laborers or "canned goods", because their homeland does not have enough resources to support them all. Bob, in particular, is a natural rabble rouser and rebel, but his defiance and exile will, if nothing else, help sharpen his instincts as he learns more of what goes on behind the curtain maintained by the priests.

There's a lot of work to do, getting all the world-building in and also building it as an adventure for Bob and creating some nifty images. Wang doesn't exactly do two things at once all that much, so things can be rather deliberate at times, not so much obviously shifting from one gear to another, but concentrating very hard on the current goal, even as it shifts to new goals cleanly. It's never dull, though; the designs and animation are quite nice, the voice work is strong and emotional even if you're getting the actual dialogue from subtitles because you don't speak mandarin, and the finale is suitably big and bold. It maybe meanders a bit there, but a viewer can enjoy the audacity of it without worrying too much about it undercutting the central metaphor.


Animalia Paradoxa

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground/Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Animalia Paradoxa is the sort of movie where, after a certain point, each fade to black has the audience wondering if the movie's done. Not necessarily because one is ready after a half hour or so (though one may be), but because the story is wispy enough and so much about examining its present rather than pushing to a conclusion that it could be. When it doesn't, for better or worse, you repeat the process in another ten minutes or so.

It takes place in an urban dystopia, the sort of place where seemingly only the most blandly brutalist buildings have survived, although with enough density that there's not much chance of seeing anything other than a sky that is never anything other than gray. Somehow, an amphibious humanoid has wound up in the center of all this, trying to gather enough water from scant rain and occasional leaking pipes to take the occasional bath, scavenging food and trinkets which he can use for trade, hoping to find a way back to the sea.

Filmmaker Niles Atallah doesn't necessarily leap straight into this creature's tale, though, opening with stop motion that leads to found footage of newsreels and educational footage, kind of building one of those things where the main narrative is a couple layers deep so that one doesn't take it quite so literally or as hard science fiction, although it's not really necessary. These bookends and occasional digressions are enjoyable enough in their own right, and they're where the various different artists and craftsmen who came together to make this film get to show their stuff. It's dark but playful in the same way as Guy Maddin or Jan Svankmajer.

There's plenty to like in the main film between those bits; it's the sort of mixed media creation that intrigued by its juxtaposition of marionette, contortion, and stop-motion animation, the exaggeration and decay especially effective in this post-apocalyptic setting, where you're never entirely sure whether the world is now populated by actual mutants or just a twisted society. There's an impressive manner of getting a lot out of a little; our amphibian protagonist gets a lot of mileage out of a mask, grippy-lookimg sneakers, and odd posture, for example.

It's a slight story, though; this creature and many of the humans it interacts with are silent, and thus any goal of teaching the sea rather than just surviving day to day has to be inferred from relatively little. The residents of this crumbled city are more a handful of interesting designs than a community, as is the big (and striking to watch!) finale. It's also dusty and gray enough that one might think the film is black and white until the occasional hit of color, so the film will only occasionally startle with its incentive world.

It's kind of boring, really, a piece of art that often demands a lot of investment for relatively scant returns. This sort of thing isn't particularly meant to be mainstream or commercial, but it would be nice if all of the individual pieces performed some sort of alchemy as they came together to become an interesting movie rather than nifty little bits.


Rita

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Rita is better than a lot of films where the push is how true and important the story is. That's perhaps both because of and despite how magic-realist the film is; if you can get through the first ten or fifteen minutes where it is practically shouting how eccentric and fantastical it is, it manages to establish the right amount of distance and not be an exercise in fetishistic recreation of atrocities. It's familiar, in some ways, to the audience which will actually seek out and watch this film, and the challenge is to make an impression, which it meets.

It opens with a police vehicle driving deep into the Guatemalan jungle to a fortress; the prisoner, Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) is a 13-year-old girl who has run away from home and has now fought back against her father because he was targeting her even younger sister. She's assigned to a room where the girls where angel wings, and after some hazing, the other girls - tall, abrasive Sulmy (Ángela Quevedo), young Bebé (Alejandra Vásquez), leader Terca (Isabel Aldana) - begin to accept her, and in fact believe she is to be a crucial part of their plan to flee and stage a protest on international Women's Day.

The angel wings and other dorms where girls sport different fantastical accouterments are not entirely for show; there's a current of magic realism in the film that is maybe a little stronger than just symbolism. Even with all that, though, the film is still at its most affecting when it's matter of fact, with young teenagers speaking plainly about their abortions or having the staff taking glamor photos of the inmates that they more or less openly exploit. The filmmakers do pretty well in terms of finding a way to both give the villains respectable veneers and also play up how a lot aren't actually hiding.

The young cat is pretty darn good, especially when you consider they are almost all not just making their debuts but basically spent a few months learning the trade because Guatemala doesn't have much of a film industry. Giuliana Santa Cruz and Ángela Quevedo, the young ladies playing Rita and Sulmy, respectively, could become stars if there's any opportunity for them, displaying toughness that never feels like just imitating adults. The adults are solid enough, too, but after thinking about the film, it's impressive how much they stay back most of the time, letting the young women be front and center for their story. A climactic scene views them almost entirely through bars even as they're driving the action (or, in a way, inaction); they are not the focus here.

It's a grim film even with the veneer of fantasy and bursts of action and activity; writer Jayro Bustamante stays resolutely on-message, by and large avoiding moments of relief when some sort of good fortune gets Maria or one of the other girls out of trouble. There is something unsettling on how he makes use of the vast majority of the cast being adolescents - it's a tropical climate with no air conditioning so the girls are often stripped down but there's a sense that there are adults enjoying the view - which increases the creep factor without necessarily having to pummel with cruelty, and he's also good at creating a thrill when the girls put a plan into action. He also often twists the knife by having visitor's days that show the nice woman who had taken Rita in, just to point out that there could be a better way, and this system is designed to maximize cruelty rather than solve problems.

In some ways, the scene that's going to stick with me is one of the simplest and most against the grain, as a bus full of people pulls a girl in and tries to protect her; for all the power evil has in this movie, it is still hiding and covering up, because those are people's instincts, and one hopes the world can remember that. Rita is far from a hopeful movie, but it's one that recognizes that evil is not a universal constant.


This Man

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

What the hell happened to Japanese horror? It used to be a major draw for genre festivals like this and surprisingly strong on home video, full of stylish images and genuine dread on the one end and nutty Yoshihiro Nakamura gore on the other, and this year there only were only live-action movies in the genre at Fantasia this year and one of them is this thing. I mean, it's horror - someone should be doing something weird and interesting!

It gives us a somewhat extended introduction to Yoshio Yasaka (Minehiro Kinomoto) and his eventual wife Hana (Arisa Deguchi) before introducing others - schoolgirl Rei (Miu Suzuki), teacher Nishino Yoshikawa), Yoshio's co-worker Anatsuji, Hana's friends Amie and Saki, etc. People around them start dying gruesome deaths, and word gets around that some had been speaking with their therapists about seeing the same man in their dreams before they died. As the police have no leads on a seemingly supernatural phenomenon, and people around the Yasakas begin to fall, they eventually consult with freelance sorcerer Unsui for answers.

That it sort of starts off from the same premise as the more respectable Dream Scenario is most likely bad luck, but not only does this not have the Japanese equivalent of Nicolas Cage, it doesn't have any really interesting characters, just some generic types whose intersections seem random and whose impulses to kill are random but not disconcertingly so. There's no recognizable hook to its mayhem, whether it be a darkly understandable motive or character one feels some particular affinity for, or even dread at the nihilistic meaninglessness of it. Like another recent horror movie, In a Violent Nature, it's the surface of the genre, the gory aftermath of attacks and the arcane remedies, with anything for those signifiers to represent stripped out.

That other movie was at least competent in its filmmaking; This Man mostly feels sloppy. It turns out to be very easy to get lost or think that something might be significant when it's not when there's nothing that demands particular emphasis, and the human brain tends to see patterns where none exists in that case. I've got a note about how many women in the film are wearing yellow sundresses, for instance, but it's not a trigger or the sort of wardrobe choice that helps one tell a number of characters with the same figure and haircut apart, but just a seemingly random choice that makes the movie more confusing than it has to be.

The filmmakers don't seem up to making its supernatural weirdness weird. When a cop jumps to "malevolent dream entity" as fast as one does here, that's a story that this movie isn't telling, and one can't help but think of what Kiyoshi Kurasawa would have done with reports that this was escalating. The world sure wouldn't have looked as normal as it does from that point, for sure. And while the filmmakers probably couldn't afford something like the exorcism at the end of It Comes, what they do instead is just a poor substitute, almost a comical parody of how often we've seen these repeated Buddhist prayers showing how it's the pacing, editing, and sound design that make those scenes work, because there's no power in their absence.

Maybe I'm unfairly comparing it to classics here, but festival selection is a filter, and this feels like something that wouldn't have passed through in previous years. It's got the surface aspect of those J-horror movies, but none of the chilling core that made them thrilling even before they had style applied ot them.

MR-9: Do or Die.

Oof.

I've mentioned the idea that for foreign and indie movies really have to get lucky with their release date to show up at the local multiplexes here in Boston, and MR-9 feels like it got just about as lucky as one can - it's not very good at all, but its distributors found a week where not much of anything was coming out in the USA to the extent that some theaters had a couple of showtimes and apparently figured that the crossover between the local Bangladeshi population (which has shown up occasionally for movies at Fresh Pond) and fans of direct-to-video action might get a kick out of seeing Michael Jai White and Frank Grillo. And, hey, it worked; between all that, having seen some good Bangladeshi stuff at Fantasia, and figured why not?

Well, because it's bad. Really bad. Like, wondering if the folks booking it even saw a trailer, and if the market for the Korean sci-fi film that opened elsewhere last week would really have dried up just because it wasn't opening weekend. It may have - I wouldn't have been surprised if Well Go just completely shifted its promotion elsewhere after the first week - but who knows? It's odd AMC chose this over the animated Chinese adventure they've been advertising for a while.

I hope the Bangladeshi-Americans in the audience had a good time with it, although I wonder, because it almost feels like there's some kind of scam going on, between it looking so cheap and often only barely seeming to have a toe in Dhaka with a mostly-Western crew and cast. Like, someone got the rights to this long series of novels that haven't been made into a film in 50 years after the writer died, raised good money off just how popular they are in Bangladesh, and then did the absolute minimum necessary to show their funders that they were making a movie while pocketing their funds.

Or, I suppose, the Bangladeshi-American direct-to-video filmmaker might legit love the Masud Rana books, or have family who does, and was shocked to find the rights were available so cheap. Maybe a little of both. If that's the case, well, I'm sorry your passion project turned out so poorly.


MR-9: Do or Die (aka Masuda Rana)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 August 2023 in AMC Boston Common (first-run, DCP)

Look, if you're going to make a shot-on-VHS-quality James Bond knockoff, at least have the common decency to have it clock in at 85 minutes rather than over two hours. It's not like cutting the better part of an hour from this thing is going to render it more incoherent than it already is. And, who knows, maybe picking up the pace and cutting out a bunch of repetition and filler keeps the viewer occupied enough to not be cataloging all the ways in which it's a story-telling disaster.

When a CIA plan to turn TLF financier Subir Shen (Kolten Jensen) before his meeting with R&R Robotics head Roman Ross (Frank Grillo) goes sideways, agents Duke (Michael Jai White) and Paul (Niko Foster) recruit Masud Rana (ABM Sumon) of Bangladesh's Bureau of Counter Intelligence to take his place, which will also require "MR-9" to fool TLF's Shula Devi (Sakshi Pradhan), although she seems to be onto him very quickly.

It's at least amusingly bad to start, as Shen falls to his death after trying to land a flying kick on Duke only to basically bounce off and over the side of a building when the latter doesn't even stagger a bit. That's maybe a joke, at least, but the film follows it up by introducing the title character in the most obviously doubled assault on a rich guy's compound with the worst sense of action geography you'll ever see, at least until later in the movie, as Rana puts up a hood and is mostly shot from behind for good measure, with the interior of this South African mansion apparently made of easily destroyed plasterboard that never catches a stray bullet because the gunplay is all CGI muzzle blasts and people breaking blood packs as they clutch at their wounds. It's an early warning that this movie is not going to be very good at all, in any way, and that the earlier eccentric bit was apparently an accident.

And it somehow gets worse, like they were scripting and shooting scenes at random without any idea how they'll fit into a movie. MR-9's Q equivalent shows him devices he never gets close to using, the villains are owners of a robotics company that never does anything with robotics, just planting a bomb at Hoover dam (and, maybe, one set to explode in Dhaka at about the same time) for some reason. Devi switches sides for little reason. The moment an action setup threatens to be good, it's full of cuts to establishing shots and people with no part of the fight at seeming random. Even a pointless flashback to the title character winning a swim meet as a kid looks like the producers couldn't bother to find kids who are actually good at swimming. It's a damn near constant mess, right up to the elongated, incredibly pointless epilogue that threatens the audience with "to be continued".

I can't speak to how well ABM Sumon embodies Rana, the lead character of a 550+ book series by the late Qazi Anwar Husain (that's a new pulp cranked out every month for 46 years or so); maybe the character is supposed to be sort of blandly handsome and quietly cool until he encounters a genuine supervillain, but he never comes off as cool enough for a new audience to feel like he deserves the deference the other characters give him. Sakshi Pradhan does do more than fill out a nice dress, at least, recognizing that this sort of spy needs to cop an attitude in meetings where everybody is thinking of killing each other. Michael Jai White seems to either be aging out of this sort of role or picking up a paycheck, at least compared to producer Niko Foster, who lands somewhere between "pro wrestler" and "bad James Remar impression" chewing scenery as his partner.

The film gets a grudging extra half star for a couple fight scenes with White where the action crew seems to have at least tried to give the other filmmakers something useful, even if it does wind up terribly edited, and for Frank Grillo showing up and growling like he has some pride in his work and figures someone casting a good movie could be watching. Still, it's kind of shocking that something this inept cracked a multiplex screen even on a slow week: It looks cheap and mailed-in, and not like the work of actual professionals.

Film Rolls, Round 18: Coffin Homes and Husband Killers

As mentioned in the last update, we're getting into the last of the general Hong Kong/China sections here, and it's a bit rickety - no more to pull in at the end, but not quite to the point where I can put a spacer in to keep it steady.

Which is sort of the point of the whole exercise - creating empty space by watching a bunch of movies without agonizing over choices- but it's kind of inconvenient in some short-term situations!

Mookie starts this round off with a 9, meaning he heads almost all the way to the end of Hong Kong #3 and lands on Coffin Homes, one of the most recent arrivals/releases! I was kind of excited to see the new Fruit Chan picture and the latest Hong Kong horror about real estate prices.

Bruce gets a 4, so he rolls a little behind, landing on Husband Killers, which may have been purchased in the same DDDHouse order, though it's recent enough that I may have gotten it as a new release as opposed to a "sure, I'll add a disc that's basically the price of a movie ticket if I'm already having stuff shipped from Hong Kong" purchase. After all, I do like Chrissy Chau and Stephy Tang.

So, how'd it go?

Gwai tung nei jyu (Coffin Homes)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

It's odd that my first encounter with Fruit Chan was the sleek, star-packed "Dumplings" short in Three… Extreme, a genuinely unnerving bit of horror, because he seems most at home when he's not just indie but nearly underground, and he doesn't quite get close enough to that vibe here. It's mainstream-oriented even if there's an intended sharp bite, and even that is softened by Chan poking at too many related things at once.

The film at least opens with a banger of an opening sequence, as a 98-year-old woman ("Susan Shaw" Siu Yam-Yam) is propped up at a family dinner but, just as she seemingly expires, she goes out with a bang, apparently demon-possessed and attacking most of the family planning how to profit from the house sitting on prime Hong Kong real estate. A step or two down the economic ladder, broker Jimmy Lam (Wong Yau-Nam) and his colleague Lily (Chelffy Yau Mei-Mei) use an apartment that hasn't sold for the price they want because a tenant died there for trysts, which suits the place's ghost (Paul Che Biu-Law) just fine. Further down the list, Jimmy's father Cheung (Tai Bo) continues to subdivide his apartment into smaller and smaller units, barely large enough to hold a bed, which means everybody gets to be haunted by the four-year-old ghost who still resides there.

The high price of real estate and the way it and other economic factors but the squeeze on Hong Kongers has long been a motivating force in local films from comedy to crime to horror (I am honestly kind of shocked that nobody has tried to relocate Pang Ho-Cheung's Dream Home to San Francisco or London but also wonder if westerners are willing to confront its themes), and at its best, Coffin Homes has the ability to target certain absurdities precisely, especially when Jimmy's boss (Cheung Tat-Ming) proposes paying the poor people crammed into apartments like Cheung's to stay overnight in empty luxury units so that the buildings will look lit and occupied, as long as they're out by morning. When he has the chance to focus on this aspect of the project, Coffin Homes is kind of brilliant, reminiscent of his grimy, funny, and observant indies.

He seems to have a harder time finding the vibe where satire is absurd and the horror is also unsettling, let alone where these things can reinforce each other. Ghosts and fear of haunting just don't seem like the right metaphor for the way modern economics make it hard to own a home, and the end result is often that, aside from how he's got these three types of properties sharing Jimmy's presence, each of them seems to have supernatural and satirical situations happening in parallel, not particularly tying themselves together.It may work better for locals, but from the outside it feels like a lot of ideas struggling to connect.

If the big picture is often fuzzy, the details are often cannily done: Chan seems to observe the working class and the poor as well as any filmmaker, for example, and he's able to use the supernatural both for blood and guts that reaches absurd levels of excess and unnerving, unexplained situations. Little bits like how people are left hanging in their lives because nobody is really working to identify a body, or the way Fourth Sister Wai Shan (Rachel Lee Lai-Chun) is shaken by a paranormal situation she can't understand while Cheung's kids often find "L'il Keung" to be just another playmate.

Coffin Homes may not necessarily be among Fruit Chan's best, but it's paradoxically one that I might have an easier time recommending to people unfamiliar with his work than some of his other films - it's imperfect but accessible, a good jumping-on spot if nothing else.

Lui si fuk sau (Husband Killers)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I feel like I've seen and liked Stephy Tang and Chrissie Chau in more movies than I actually have, and it appears that I rather liked Fire Lee's previous film Robbery, but I'm.not enough of a fan of any of them to readily describe Husband Killers as "disappointing" in any sort of context rather than just "bad". It's just a mess of an action movie that seems like it shouldn't be that hard to mess up.

David Chow, it would appear, has a type: Wife Chanel Tsui (Stephy Tang Lai-Yan) and girlfriend Dior Mok (Chrissie Chau Sau-Na) are both freelance assassins, good enough at the sort of research their job entails that when he leaves each alone on his birthday, they are each able to quickly discover the other through images on social media, and arrange to meet with the intention of putting a rifle bullet through the other's head when she arrives at the meeting first. That's when they realize that if David wasn't with either of them, he must have been with someone else - and, in fact, has an appointment with Hermes Tong (Gaile Lok Kei-Yi) at the out-of-the-way Lung Wah Hotel coming up, and decide to head there to take out the one he's cheating on both with. Hermes, of course, is a SWAT team captain and no pushover herself, although none of them really seem the type for trysts at a seedy place run by Ling (Pauline Suen Kai-Kwan) and her two adult sons, one skeevy (Kevin Li Kin-Wang) and one apparently developmentally disabled (Lai Man-Wang).

Writer/director Fire Lee has two good ideas for enjoyable genre movies here in "three lady killers in love with the same man decide to eliminate the competition and/or real problem" and "three women who would like to see each other dead can only survive if they work together", and they're not necessarily even at cross-purposes if handled well. Unfortunately, Lee stumbles the execution of it pretty badly - the movie is more than half-over before David's three lovers really start to go at it with each other, much less get themselves into the other tight spot, and he doesn't do close to enough to square the fact that these women who have been dropped into a fairly standard slasher situation are really good at violence. It's not insurmountable - you could say that Hermes is much better with guns than knives, that Dior mostly works undercover, or that Chanel plans better than she improvises, for instance, and have them fill each other's blind spots, or even state that being drugged had them sluggish - but Lee doesn't do much of any of that. He also doesn't do so great in terms of differentiating Chanel and Dior personality-wise even when the movie is just the two of them sparring verbally.

He seems to have a fairly tight budget, which explains a fair chunk of running in place and somewhat bland action set-ups, but he's able to lean into a knowingly tacky 80s/90s exploitation aesthetic to blunt the feelings that it looks cheap, and the bits that feel like live-action cartoons often work even when combined with awful dialog. I'm not quite sure where I land on blocking most of David's face so the audience only sees his smirk - the audience doesn't really need to see what the women saw in him or feel like they might feel a single iota of sympathy, but it's so obvious that Lee is Doing A Thing that one expects it to lead to a payoff of some sort, but it doesn't.

The cast could maybe do a little more with what Lee gives them, even if the script is actively making it more difficult to give a good performance. They do a bit more than fill their tight costumes nicely, and sell what jokes are worth selling. Some of that may be Cantonese wordplay not translating well; I certainly got a better individual read on the personality of Hermes, who mostly speaks English (with the others finding that annoying), than I got from Chrissy Chau and Stephy Tang.

It's the sort of Girl Power! movie that was clearly written and directed by a man (although that's maybe it's own kind of stereotype), from how there's really not a whole lot of difference between how the camera ogles its stars and how the characters who get shot for it do to the cast full of Strong Women primarily concerned about their relationship to a man. I wonder what this same plot and cast would look like with, say, Jody Luk Yi-Sam writing and directing rather than Lee, who makes it exceptionally clear that his heart is in the right place, but may not necessarily have a great ear for women's voices.


Giving both of these a quick re-watch because I was behind shifted the ratings a bit so things tighten up:

Mookie: 63 ½ stars
Bruce: 64 ½ stars

Next up: John Woo!

Sunday double feature: Sundown and The Battle at Lake Changjin II

I miss writing on the bus to and from work - it was an hour a day with pretty much no distractions, and it made it much harder to fall behind like this, where I'm posting this three weeks after the fact because even though I want to keep this blog up because there's movie stuff I want to do that doesn't fit anywhere else - I don't think Letterboxd and eFilmCritic will disappear any time soon, and it's not out of the question that Google will decide to axe Blogger before that, but this seems like the safest haven - it's kind of easy not to it's just so easy to not do so, or wind up running so late that one movie from this afternoon has already hit streaming (not that it takes much longer than a couple weeks in some cases) and Lake Changjin II has gone off into whatever limbo where Chinese movies with no obvious streaming home in the USA go.

It's worth noting that both shows were very sparse. Not surprising for Sundown - it's sort of an art-house-y movie from a small label, so it didn't get much of a publicity push, and I saw it in its second week - but when I saw the first Lake Changjin, it was legitimately crowded with me probably the only non-Chinese person there, making the "us vs them" stuff in the closing credits awkward. I'm not sure what the reason is for the drop-off - did word that this was kind of cheap and rushed make its way across the Pacific, or did the Chinese-American audience find themselves more interested in Only Fools Rush In, which got a second week?

Anyway, I recommend Sundown, and my only defense of Lake Changjin II is, what, do you expect me to not go when a new Tsui Hark movie is in theaters, even if it's obvious propaganda he maybe doesn't feel he can refuse?

Sundown (2022)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2022 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)

If you're going to make your whole movie out of "hm, I wonder where they're going with this*, it helps immensely if said movie is 83 minutes long, you've got Tim Roth to focus on, and just enough happens to pique a viewer's interest. It's still not going to be for everyone.

Start with a family vacation at a fancy resort in Acapulco, where Neil Bennett (Roth) is the cool laid-back uncle to Colin (Samuel Bottomley) and Alexa (Albertine Knotting McMillan) while sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is always checking her phone. One message, it turns out, is not about the family business - their mother back in the UK has had a stroke. Upon arriving at the airport, Neil can't produce his passport, and sends the rest of his family ahead - but instead of going back to the resort, he checks into a cheap beach-side place, and then grabs a chair, starts ordering beers, and starts flirting with Berenice (Iazua Larios), the girl at the convenience store. Calls from Alice are met with excuses about the consulate he hasn't visited, until finally she and family lawyer Richard come to find out just what is going on.

There's something more than a bit horrifying about how quietly Neil just decides to ignore his family responsibilities, but fascinating given the way that Roth and writer/director Michel Franco choose not to push some sort of petulance at the audience. Most in the audience will probably admit that there's a great temptation here - who hasn't idly imagined getting out of something that looks like this level of hassle with one easily-told lie? That levelness quickly becomes unnerving, but Roth and Franco do well to not tip their hands - as Franco presents complications and explanations (if not justifications), Roth tweaks his performance just enough to play into or against them, but always has a clear idea of what's driving it and why this guy might react in a certain way.

As great as Roth's central performance is, this one may work as well as it does in large part because of the moments when the other characters acknowledge that something isn't quite right with Roth's Neil; Franco isn't overly cute in how he avoids giving too many details too early, arranging things so that one believes in how characters talk around the subject and shuffling from characters who know to those who need to learn details alongside the viewer. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Henry Goodman, and Iazua Larios do well working off him someone out of the expected sequence sequence - Gainsbourg showing how Alice is not sure what she should be feeling in these circumstances; Goodman's Richard detached but friendly; Larios initially making Berenice not quite mercenary but clearly knowing what you can expect out of a fling with a moneyed gringo before being pulled in to the point where more may be going on.

With the story ultimately being relatively simple, Franco and his crew have some time (and need) to noodle around, to sometimes interesting ends. He's got an eye on how the upper class often get a pass but doesn't let it take things over - he'll emphasize the clean lines of the resort compared to working/middle-class Acapulco, for instance, in a way that shows he's at least given some thought to how those barriers are often so strongly reinforced because they are so thin, but doesn't let it become the movie. When violence is necessary to move things forward, it's impressively shocking and non-fetishized. Somewhere in between the two is a thread about the Bennetts' business being slaughterhouses and provides some unnerving visuals but doesn't quite have the punch it could have if class and exploitation were more focal to the movie rather than just something that enabled Neil's actions.

Eventually, everything falls into place in a way that makes sense even if it's perhaps inelegant, but that itself is ultimately oddly respectful, as the filmmakers seem to value ultimately understanding a decision rather than justifying it. A big-time revelation is the opposite of what they're going for, even if the film is built like a thriller, but it nevertheless gets to a point where all the noodling about winds up being justified.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Chang jin hu zhi shui men qiao (The Battle at Lake Changjin II, aka Water Gate Bridge)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2022 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)

So, how much sequel does four months, some unused footage, Tsui Hark, Wu Jing, and rush service at every special effects house in China get you? About 150 minutes, but not exactly the best two and a half hours of anybody's career. This movie is bloated and chaotic, as if the time to shoot the action left no room for second takes of anything connecting it. It looks cheap, more so as it tries to be more elaborate, and tries to force a story that is naturally about the sheer pointless waste of war into a narrative of honor and duty.

This film picks up right where The Battle of Lake Changjin left off, with the Americans routed and fleeing and the Chinese Army intending to deal them such a crushing blow that even a madman like Douglas MacArthur (Jame Filbird) will know to stay out of their sphere of influence. So rather than returning home, the 7th Company of the 9th Corps of the People's Volunteer Army led by Wu Qianli (Wu Jing) and including his now more experienced younger brother Wanli (Jackson Lee) is being dispatched to get ahead of the retreating Americans and destroy the bridge that will let them escape via Hunguon Port.

First, though, they've got to literally turn around and seemingly refight the first movie's climactic battle, ostensibly to capture more weapons and ammunition but in reality more because that's the unused footage they have from the previous film that can be repurposed. It is, as one might imagine, a weird mess of a sequence; even though this footage wasn't cut from the first film because it was bad material but because it was superfluous, and the result is akin to master tailors trying to construct a bespoke suit from the scraps left over from the last one they made, and the result can't help but look patched-together. It's an early warning that things are going to get stretched awful thin.

It gets better in some ways and worse in others when it comes to the main battle - Tsui and his action crew are able to build what they need rather than around what they have, although the short production time means that they really only have the resources for that one set-up and it's not quite as flexible as one might think. There are points when a viewer might feel like they've seen an action beat before and quite recently, and though most everybody involved is a seasoned pro, time is a factor - there are some obvious miniatures, some CGI that could maybe have used another pass for a little more detail and other uses where one suspects it simply takes less time to build something virtually than it would on a soundstage. There's enough slow motion to make one wonder if the idea was purely to pad the running time because a two hour sequel to a three-hour epic would be too much of a step down. Not unexpectedly, the film comes most to life when Qianli is on his own and running through American defenses like a madman - Wu Jing may have been taking more dramatic roles compared to straight-up martial-arts recently, but he's still good at getting through a scene and selling a fight.

The material around it is iffier; especially if you're watching it as an American. The writers grasp at the thread of how MacArthur considered using nuclear weapons in Korea and President Truman (Ben Z. Orenstein) nixed this, but it feels like badly integrated propaganda, warning the Chinese people of what Americans are capable of in war but not really making it part of the story (and also making how this film once again presents General Oliver P. Smith in an oddly sympathetic light compared to the other American warmongers something which seemingly deserves some exploration). Few of the bearded, shaven-headed American officers actually look like Americans of the 1950s - I'd guess that they're mostly Russian MMA types - and you'd never know that there were Korean people involved in the Korean War to watch these two movies. The repetition of the big battle gets dull, and by the nature of this movie Hark and company can't really pause to consider how each noble sacrifice to destroy the bridge being momentarily triumphant is ultimately hollow as the US Army throws some new bit of technology at the problem.

I'm not sure why, exactly, the filmmakers felt the need to roll a follow-up out so quickly - it wound up stepping on the toes of other big Korean War movies slated for Lunar New Year release - because working against such a tight deadline doesn't do this movie any favors. Hopefully, doing this helped Tsui Hark solidify a good enough reputation with the Chinese film community that it will be easier for him to finance that Detective Dee time travel crossover he's supposedly wanted to do, or whatever other more ambitious project he might need support for.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Freaky Dolls in 3D: Baby Blues & Coraline

Most of the time, I prefer Ned at the Brattle or someone else to program my double features; as someone who has trouble choosing just one movie when standing in front of the "unwatched discs" shelving unit, asking me to assemble a themed pairing is, well, ridiculous. I am so legitimately terrible at choosing between likely-good options that I come up with ways to take the decision about what to watch/read/etc. next out of my hands.

In this case, I saw G Storm the night before and, for the fifth time in that series I said something like "hey, I like the actress who plays Tammy; what else is she in?" This time, though, I went to IMDB or HKMDB, saw that I actually had one of them on the shelf, and pulled it down.

This was a mistake.

I mean, I wasn't expecting greatness; I don't know whether I grabbed Baby Blues more or less and random because I figured I'd never see it again while poking around one of the video stores in the basement of the Ladies' Market during my HK vacation or if it was something I got off DDDHouse because they've had their 3D stock on sale for a while and I figure I should try and grab every 3D disc I can before they're impossible to find. At any rate, let's just say that this thing was on my shelf less out of curation than hoarding, and its obscurity/blowout pricing was deserved.

Not wanting to go to bed on that note, I figured I'd grab something else, and a Coraline chaser seemed pretty natural - it also involved a creepy doll, I already had the 3D glasses on, and, hey, that disc was already on my shelf for similar reasons: When Shout Factory announced that they had acquired the license for the Laika catalog, I went on Amazon and found the 3D editions of Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls (I already had Kubo and I don't know if Missing Link got a 3D release anywhere).

This was not a mistake; I don't know that I was quite so taken with the movie as before, but it's still pretty darn good, and what Laika does with the stop-motion/3D medium never ceases to amaze.

The lesson? Dunno; maybe something about running with an idea when you've got it rather than worrying about finding the right answer. Yeah, it gets you Baby Blues sometimes, but it also reminds you to watch Coraline - and you've got time, because there's no twenty minutes of dithering up front!

Gui ying (Baby Blues)

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-Ray)

The first thing you think when watching Baby Blues is "I have never seen a doll so obviously cursed in my life" and, okay, sure, it's the 21st Century so "cursed doll" is not going to be anyone's first explanation for things, but when the creepy thing appears to be bleeding from its eyes, get rid of it! It was left behind by the house's previous owners, so it's not like you've got any real attachment to it.

That aside, this isn't what you'd call a good movie by any means; it's full of inexplicable decisions, things that are just vaguely connected, and a last act that feels like the filmmakers shot a lot of possibilities so that they could figure out what ending they liked while editing. None of it makes a damn bit of sense, and it's not even in the headspace to run with its randomness and its goofy, never-believable killer doll, which at its most ambulatory makes it clear there's no CGI budget and that they haven't really figured out how to manipulate the puppet so that the audience can suspend disbelief just enough to worry. You also can't just tease the audience with a song that's so sad that it apparently drives people mad and only have it show up kind of obliquely.

Maybe all of this being a little more winking would work, with Tao (Raymond Lam Fung) and/or sister-in-law Qing (Karena Ng Chin-Yu) kind of incredulous about the whole situation or something, or new mom who somehow previously made a living by blogging Tian-Qing-(Janelle Sing Kwan) not shifting to obviously crazy like a switch was flipped. Or maybe if the writers had just found some way to make all the various pieces have a unifying theme - you have to stretch things a great deal to get from the doll inspiring Tao's tremendously sad song to the other ways it drives people mad - it would be creepy. Instead, it's just a bunch of pieces of other scary movies.

Someone had fun with the 3D camera rig, at least, not going for subtlety at all but always making sure a pointing finger or flying knife is ready to enhance a jump scare. It figures - the one thing which this movie kind of does right is the part that will be harder and harder to appreciate as time goes by.

Coraline

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-Ray)

As mentioned, this is an exceptionally good thing to notice on one's "unwatched disc" shelf right after watching a disappointing 3D evil doll movie, and I am very glad I got my hands on the Canadian 3D disc before it became impossible to find!

I'm not sure I've seen this since its original theatrical run, and the amount I loved it then makes me suspect that I was more or less completely floored by the 3D stop-motion animation and was not yet wondering who the heck this movie was for. I'm probably more pro-horror-movies-for-kids than most, but if you're going to do that, I'm not sure you want the burlesque sequence in the middle, for instance. I've probably got even less instincts for what's age-appropriate than I did at the time, so maybe it's just hitting me weird. At any rate, the film is eccentric in the way Neil Gaiman and Harry Selick things often are individually, only more so, either striking a deep chord or keeping you at arm's length and hoping you admire the individual eccentricity, which is about where I was this time.

It's close to unparalleled on a "look at this!" basis, though, with gorgeously colorful designs used to offset the initially bland world in which Coraline lives, and a world that's just busy enough without going overboard the way Laika could occasionally find themselves doing in later films. It's still one of the most fantastic uses of 3D in a movie and has just enough of a visual stutter at times that a viewer can't forget that someone made this and maybe pays slightly closer attention because that means that there is meaning and intent in every detail.

Every time I see a Laika movie, I find myself kind of stunned that they aren't more popular; they're clever and meticulous and don't talk down to kids. It's the second time around when one maybe finds oneself nodding and thinking that, okay, maybe these things are going to be hard sells for both parents and kids expecting something a little more straightforward.

Original review from 2009

At the slightest provocation: Deluge (and The Back Page)

Some people, when they see a cool clip of New York City being taken out by a tidal wave from a movie early in the talkie era, watch it, say "cool!", and then, like, move on to the next hundred things in their Twitter feed. I, apparently, stop it after fifteen seconds, saying I should probably see the whole thing, and see if the movie is on disc. It is - on Blu-ray, even! - so I order that and, a week and a half later, sit down and watch the movie. Then, because it was only an hour, watch the second feature that was included.

There are better ways to spend an evening, I suppose, but because these were 1930s B-movies, it only took about two and a half hours, total, and that's including the three disaster-movie previews included: Hurricane looks like some severely ugly exoticism, Avalanche made me smirk because I suspect we're supposed to cheer for Rock Hudson to get the girl rather than Robert Forster, and Meteor feels a lot like either a trailer that had to be released way before the effects were done or one that put every bit of effects work in the trailer.

As not-great as the main feature is, I still kind of love having it. As I mention here and here, and probably a lot of times before, I love and am fascinated by early-twentieth-century fantasies and science fiction, and discovering things like this always makes me wonder what could have been if more people were taking cracks at it. In this case, it seems to be one of about five films listed as "post-apocalyptic" on IMDB from 1935 or before. One was a German silent, and three were versions of the same thing, with It's Great to Be Alive the sound remake of Last Man On Earth (with an Italian remake as well), comedies about some guy who winds up isolated from the "masculitis" which killed off the rest of the male population. They are probably dire but I'd like to see them anyway.

Speaking of looking stuff up there, let me just insert this little reminder to never read the bio when you discover someone from early cinema who has a five or ten year career with prominent roles concentrated toward the beginning. You almost never want to know how that ends.

Deluge

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Deluge was not the first film to offer up the end of civilization as we know it on screen, but may be the first to do so in such spectacular fashion, even if the film itself was not a blockbuster or major release. It is, in fact, not far off from the end of the world tales that would appear more frequently decades later, just done in early-talkie style.

The exact cause of the disaster is not exactly specified (or may just tough to suss out with the way the first act is presented with not-great sound) - some combination of earthquakes and massive tides from an eclipse - but the result is a flood of Biblical proportions, wiping out first the west coast, then Europe, then causing the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to overflow before a tidal wave finally hits New York. That's when the focus moves from frantic scientists to the likes of lawyer Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer) and his wife Helen (Lois Wilson), in a cabin upstate but thinking a move to a quarry would be safer; Claire Arlington (Peggy Shannon), who had been planning a record-breaking swim before the disaster; and then the likes of Jepson (Fred Kohler) and Norwood (Ralf Harolde), two toughs who find Martin's cabin later, or Tom (Matt Moore), the closest thing a small town has to a leader.

If Deluge is noteworthy for anything in 2020, it's the visual effects, but what's kind of fascinating is that it's in many ways an early primer on how to use them and where they may not convince. One may laugh at the miniatures which show the lines on which they will soon fall apart, but it's nevertheless fair work for the period, especially once a wave is in motion. The filmmakers are smart in how they deploy it, though, cutting to stock footage of actual fires and collapsing buildings and doing some strong matte work to get moving people in front of the destruction. The matte paintings and background work is solid throughout, in fact, enough to blend location and stage shoots better than other films that would follow later.

It also doesn't hurt that the film is pre-code, which not only means that Peggy Shannon can wash up on shore wearing nothing but her underwear twice, but that there can be a few bits of pretty nasty violence implied and shown. There's actually a fair balance between ruthlessness and sentimentality for a while, but eventually one has to give the film a lot of credit for what sort of novelty it must have been in 1933, because even by the standards of B-movie-makers not having a lot of practice, the script is a mess, throwing out a bunch of nasty villains and half-interesting ideas but not really having much idea of how to connect them other than happenstance, with the sort-of-interesting melodrama that the film has been building to eventually sputtering, like the writers didn't know what to do with a situation once they'd gotten there.

On top of that, this is one of those 1930s movies where the women are the first-billed stars but the filmmakers never really let them take control of the story. Peggy Shannon gets to play Claire as ambitious and brassy and is probably the best thing about the movie besides the special effects, and more than holds up her end of scenes with a baby-faced Sidney Blackmer, whose Martin is likably capable in action but bland through much of the film, especially when he needs to be feeling some sort of turmoil. Like much of the rest of the cast, he makes one appreciate how Fred Kohler makes Jepson an honest ogre.

Not bad for 1933 even if it's a novelty now, having been rediscovered after twice being thought lost. Its most impressive two minutes have been kicking around the internet recently, but the other 65 aren't exactly terrible, especially once you recognize that this came out mere months after the original King Kong and probably had less to work with.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Back Page

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Expectations were necessarily low for The Back Page - a feature film generally doesn't get relegated to the "special features" section of the Blu-ray of a film with whom it shares a cast member if it has a lot of individual merit - but I was unprepared for just how dull a bit of theater-filler this was. Even at just over an hour, it drags, and not just because I watched it as the back half of a double feature with disc-mate Deluge.

The funny thing is, it never feels like it has to be bad - the story of a reporter (Peggy Shannon) who gets fired from her big-city newspaper job and uses her ambiguous name ("Jerry Hampton") to get hired as the editor of a small-town paper and then uncovers the convoluted scheme to cheat the townsfolk out of the money they've invested in an oil well is a lot of material for a film that size, but not more than it can handle, and it only really feels sloppy when something loops around to suddenly connect the story Jerry was working on at the start to what's happening during the rest of the movie. It's absolutely one of those movies where more connects than necessary,

And yet, for having a halfway-decent script, the filmmakers don't seem to be confident in it. They spend precious time explaining situations that don't necessarily need it and, indeed, might be better if they just did the thing, like Jerry challenging her sexist boss and getting fired/blackballed for it, without a lot of pregaming. There's a whole lot of people explaining themselves rather than just showing how they feel or have changed over time, enough that it eventually feels like watching bad radio. Maybe the people who make movies for small studios like Pyramid Productions know what they've got to work with and are realistic about what they can get - and, maybe, what they can give. There's something to be said for clarity at the expense of style, but this seems to be an extreme case.

It starts to feel rough quickly, a bunch of stock characters playing off each other in uninspired fashion. Peggy Shannon hadn't necessarily felt like a star during Deluge, but she's weaker here, too desperate in her attempts to sound like a young go-getter and seldom able to find the sweet spot where we like Jerry rather than just relate to her, or think much of what she's got going with her boyfriend. The newsroom feels like types rather than personalities, a bunch of stock characters that never gel and could mostly be jettisoned. The story ends in a way that marks Jerry as clever but not the reporter who was too good and passionate for the big city.

Slogs like this are almost worse than disasters, because everybody just needs to be better, and not just a little better. Eighty years later, this is a Lifetime movie, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but even those just get the job done in a way this one doesn't quite manage.

War!: 1917 and Liberation

Will wonders never cease - AMC accidentally set the times for a couple of movies in such a way that you could build a thematic double feature without having to kill an hour in between!

It also gave me a nice chance to check out the new Dolby Cinema screen at Boston Common, which is basically the same as the ones at Assembly Row and South Bay, except maybe smaller - the screen's a good size, but it doesn't seem particularly deep, with just fifty or sixty seats. Not bad, considering they're recliners and all, and even the first row isn't right up under the screen, but kind of a shock when it pops up in the app, compared to the old-school auditoria next to it which seat a couple hundred.

After that, it was downstairs to screen 1, where I was apparently the only person catching the 10pm show of Liberation despite being right next to Chinatown. Not necessarily surprising, considering it's only playing three cities in the U.S. (New York, Los Angeles, and Boston); a good chunk of exhibitors must have taken a look and figured the audience would say "nah", even without a good number of movies hitting screen this week after the post-Christmas lull. I don't know how much it being obvious propaganda played into it, but it was kind of strange to be reading social media about the Taiwanese elections (a rejection of closer ties with the Mainland) and then seeing what would become the Taiwanese flag used for this movie's villains, even if most are played as misguided more than evil.

The previews were an odd batch, too; usually, when there aren't enough Chinese-language trailers on the hard drive, it's just big action movies, but this was mostly a reel of foreign-language films with award hopes. Most look pretty neat, especially Les Miserables, which I am surprised and delighted to see has more or less nothing to do with the musical. On the other hand, the last was for Dante Lam's new one, The Rescue, which looks like it's as big as Operation Mekong and Operation Red Sea, but which also had its trailer pretty badly dubbed into English. I wonder if the studio is going to try to push this particular Chinese New Year picture onto more screens around the world, even if I'm pretty sure that this particular theater will be showing it in Mandarin.

1917

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, Dolby Cinema DCP)

It occurred to me, when I first heard this was put together a certain way, that I would have liked to go in without knowing, even though that's kind of an odd, meta way to approach watching and thinking about a movie. Still, it's very difficult to just get caught up in things the way one is meant to in these cases, rather than watching what the camera does and guessing how many objects in the foreground are effects meant to hide seams. Rather than drawing me in and not giving my mind time to jump elsewhere, it had me thinking about a lot of things that weren't on screen.

Maybe it improves on a second view, once that's out of one's system. I suspect that once you get past that and the often stunning cinematography/lighting/design, 1917 is a capable-enough war movie of the new school, careful to foreground the horrors lest the audience get too excited by the ticking clock. Sam Mendes wants the audience invested but not excited, and that's a very fine line for him to walk. The film often feels calculatedly random, like everything happens in such a way as to reinforce the idea of chaos, and outright cheats in others, such as how sound design is very important for much of the film but a whole division in trucks can just suddenly be right there.

It's still too good to dismiss, of course - Roger Deakins and company do amazing work, Mendes's decisions may be cynical but they're effective, and the cast is terrific up and down. There's something about the tendency to cast great, recognizable character actors as the officers in this, like we're expected to trust Colin Firth or Mark Strong rather than question things, although, again, it works; it's one of the best little roles Strong has had recently (he is so much more interesting when not playing villains).

Liberation

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 January 2020 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

Coincidentally arriving in a few American cities the same weekend that 1917 opens wide, Liberation suffers from opposing faults. It's busy to the point of frenzy rather than meticulous, rushing through every cheap play for audience sympathy it can with bigger firefights and explosions coming at a rapid pace just in case that's not enough. It's lurid but made to please crowds, even though the filmmakers aren't that great at making the action effective. It's one of the tackier bits of recent myth-making to come from the Chinese movie industry, which is saying something.

Starting out in January 1949, days before the Tianjin campaign that would serve as a turning point in the Chinese Civil War, it initially introduces the audience to a team of Communist soldiers aiming to infiltrate the city to help get artillery sightings, because the revolutionaries aim to take the city with relatively little damage. Cai Xingfu (Zhou Yiwei) has other reasons to lead this mission - wife Xiuping (Yang Mi) is still in the city. Among the Nationalists, Director Qian Zhuoqun (Philip Keung Ho-man) is especially cruel, lording his power over entertainer Yan Mei (Elane Zhong Chuxi) and locking up quartermaster Yao Zhe (Wallace Chung Han-Liang) for a ferry accident, though he is using the aftermath to attempt to push that Nationalists into a harder line. Zhe attempts to escape with six-year-old daughter Junlan (Audrey Duo Ulan-Toya) only to run headlong into Cai's mission, and the two would be at odds even if it weren't likely that Cai's son Jifeng was on the sunken ferry.

There's a lot going on and the filmmakers spew it at the audience in rapid-fire manner to start, efficiently and earnestly talking about firing solutions that will not in fact be a major part of the film, finding the hackiest possible way to reveal Yan's hatred for Qian, and letting major parts of the story just hang there uncommented upon. It puts Yao Zhe directly at the center of the action but doesn't particularly do much to establish his interests and loyalties beyond his daughter, to the extent that it's easy to initially peg him as a spy rather than someone pushed up against the wall. Things start to shake out later on, but initially viewers are likely to have their attention on the wrong things, and when characters show up later so that there can be action in more places, it's hard to be sure whether they've been introduced but offscreen until needed or if they're new.

Full review on eFilmCritic

This Week in Tickets: 9 December 2019 - 15 December 2019

Enjoy my week of seeing movies and losing things!



Like, start with the stub to Little Joe. Just not in my pocket when I got home, and I don't know that I was pulling things in and out of that pocket enough on the way home that it could have slipped out. Ah, well, I'll buy it on Blu-ray when it becomes available and have a more permanent souvenir because it's a really nifty little independent science fiction film with a bunch of people I like and an often-creepy feel despite also making its setting feel like a place where real people work as scientists.

On Tuesday, I did some playing with pictures from my 3D camera and also received a couple shipments of discs from various end-of-year sales, although the one I put on was from an earlier Amazon order where I bought 3D things before they went out of print and, well, that "The Secret Life of Cars" disc is kind of a rip-off. Not the low point of the week, though, which came when I somehow lost my Fargo toque at the comic shop the next night. It is too cold and snowy in Boston right now to go without a hat.

On Thursday, I extended my feature-films-directed-by-women streak to five with Black Christmas, which feels like it could have had a better build-up/mayhem balance, but I'm seeing a lot of posts online from women saying "yes, this!", so maybe I'm just missing something. The streak came to an end the next evening with a 3D screening of Jumanji: The Next Level, which isn't great, but I liked it better that the last one, which is something. Though it looks like I lost my state ID card between getting it out to show the ticket-taker and trying to get everything put away while handling my snacks. Honestly, AMC, why are you doing this? Do you really care if two people are sharing an A-List membership so long as they don't try to both use it at once and buy popcorn with each visit?

Avoiding the Red Line for the weekend took me to the new Arclight on Causeway street for Pain and Glory, which I really should have seen by now, but somehow hadn't. I probably won't do a full review of the place until I've seen something on its "Wide Screen", but they make a decent pretzel and the projection is decent. I didn't realize until going into the theater that there wasn't assigned seating for this show, which is unusual for a new, fancy theater.

That evening, I decided to make a bit more of an effort to watch my unwatched discs, and put on Manhunt. Not John Woo's best, but, like I say in the review, there's no gunfight like a John Woo gunfight. Sunday night, after an afternoon non finding as much as I'd like for Christmas gifts in the craft fairs, I went back to the shelf for The Invincible Dragon, and geez, someone get Max Zhang (or John Zhang, when he likes to be closer to his name of Zhang Jin) a good movie of his own. He's been a great opponent for the likes of Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa, but his best leading role was a spin-off of the Ip Man movies.

Maybe not so much on my Letterboxd page, as the new season of The Expanse has dropped and I'm trying to stretch it to Christmas with an episode per day and maybe trying to finish off Too Old to Die Young while my Roku is "tuned" to Prime.

"The Secret Life of Cars"

* * (out of four)
Seen 10 December 2019 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, 3D Blu-ray)

I paid $25 for this not quite realizing that the short itself is two minutes long. Sure, you could pay $20 for the 2D version, although with maybe 10 minutes of content on the disc, including an ad for the word processing software that the people involved make that runs before the menu, I'm not sure why they had to make two separate releases with this one a two disc set. Even for those of us who like 3D and are trying to pick up as many discs as possible before they go out of print, that's not great value.

The short film itself? The animation is neat, I suppose, and I kind of dig the idea of making models out of graph paper so that it looks like a physical version of the wire-frame renders used for CGI pictures' first drafts (so to speak), but even accounting for how this is two minutes of stop-motion, nothing actually happens and none of the cars show any personality. It's a reasonably clever way to show off what you can do with your 3D camera but not much else.

Black Christmas '19

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

As great as it is to see Sophia Takal making a movie that gets a big wide mainstream release, and one which has its politics and heart in the right places, I got kind of fidgety at points during this version of Black Christmas. It it somewhat methodical in getting started, doing all it can to establish where its characters are coming from but giving exposition a fair berth, which means there's a lot of "what happened to you" and taking time to establish things that would be easier to just say. That would leave it a little more time to really dig into the swerve it goes for later on in really convincing fashion, because I think one of the most clever things that the script sort of buries is that, while it's clearly and obviously about the dangers women face, its big twist is about how men are indoctrinated and radicalized by the system. The ideas are good but the details don't quite fit.

At times, the whole movie can feel like the silly accent Cary Elwes goes with as Professor Gelson, which has a point - he's playing the exact sort of conservative bully who makes a show of erudition but drops the facade once he figures he's got women in his power - but it feels silly and affected in a way that the film as a whole hasn't quite tipped its hand to yet, so that buying into can be more effort than a viewer is going to put into watching a slasher movie.

There's a fun slasher underneath, though. Imogen Poots feels like a bit of a ringer in the cast (on top of the deal where it's weird to see her playing college age when I recognize her from "grown up and starting a family" roles), but she's got a great team of girls too cool to just be potential victims to lead, with Aleyse Shannon putting more life into Kris than "the group's activist" usually gets. Takal and co-writer April Wolfe know this material and make each horror scene play out as a bit better than rote. They're good enough that my biggest complaint may be that they show us potentially fun things that don't get enough space, like when a group of young women show up with improvised weapons and one's got a sled. As much as I appreciate the rest of what they're doing, I could go with more of that nameless character taking someone out with its runners and all the other lunacy that shot implies.

Dolor y gloria (Pain and Glory)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2019 in ArcLight Boston #1 (first-run, DCP)

Pedro Almodóvar may have reached a point where he's been immersed in filmmaking and art for so long as to have trouble relating to much else, but he at least seems to sense that here There's a general melancholy and a sort of understanding of the absurdity of it, as he makes a semi-autobiographical film about a filmmaker (played by his most famous collaborator) making a semi-autobiographical work starring his most famous collaborator, before finally having the snake swallow its own tail. He doesn't quite wink until then, but he doesn't do much to hide what he's up to, either. Fortunately, it's a pretty gentle work.

That may also be the best way to describe Antonio Banderes's performance here, just a really beautiful demonstration of pain and insecurity filtered through the knowledge of his good fortune. He's seldom on the brink of tears - a lifetime of physical ailments has taught his character how to keep those in check, although a lot of little things that go from putting a pillow under his knee every time he needs to kneel to slightly stiff body language reinforce that there's believable chronic pain there beyond the early exposition. Banderas gets a chance or two to let an ego out, but he mostly comes off as kind and uncertain, extremely enjoyable to spend a couple hours with.

The film's also visually beautiful in small ways. The solid colors and memorable spaces that aren't quite as brash as those seen in the comedies of Almodovar's early career, but of a piece with them, like the frantic characters of those movies have aged and mellowed but still kind of have the same taste. The "cave" where the young Salvador lives seems like it inhabits the same place in Almodóvar's psyche as the silent-movie section of Talk to Her, while the machines in the hospital are frightening but reassuring. It's a movie that looks aging squarely in the eye and accepts it but doesn't allow it to overwhelm the people involved.

Fantasia 2019.20: And Your Bird Can Sing, Dare to Stop Us, Jessica Forever, Tokyo Ghoul S, and Dachra

Look, folks, I got the review for Tokyo Ghoul S up on eFilmCritic (under whose auspices I was awarded a pass to this festival) before its two-night run, and I've been covering a lot of other movies while they're in theaters, and somehow it means that these just kept getting pushed forward to the point where I'm trying to see if I can watch these things online now because it's been so long since the specific festival and the circuit in general. So a couple of these are basically going to be me saying I saw them.

Kimi no tori wa utaeru (And Your Bird Can Sing)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

It would be nice to say that this film make enough of an impression on me that some part of my brain flashes to it when I read its English-language title, but that's not really the case; I just get a loud rendition of the Beatles tune (and, for that matter, just that line of the song). It's okay enough as a movie, but feels like a lot of the Japanese indies that have been playing Fantasia of late - a main character in his early twenties who doesn't betray much ambition, the pretty girl who seems to have a little more going on in the same orbit, and a fair amount of drinking, karaoke, and hook-ups that lead to the potential relationship sputtering or flaming out. There are a couple of funny moments and the sort of clear, disappointed take on the world as it is today that might make this group of films be recognizable as a movement in ten or fifteen years, but not a moment that makes it a must-see.

It's good enough, though. Director/screenwriter Sho Miyake has probably inherited the narrator (Emoto Tasuku) just being credited as "me" from the source novel, which had me confusing him with his roommate Shizuo (Sometani Shota) a lot in the early going, as Shizuo seems more the focus, with Sometani delivering what you might call a dull-knife's-edge performance - there's not necessarily a lot about Shizuo to be impressed with - his lazy passivity probably invites more disdain - but there's just enough spark to him, especially his powerful crush on co-worker Sachiko (Ishibashi Shizuka) to make the audience want more from him. Ishibashi is thankfully given just enough material to make Sachko more than just an idealized girl who's more than the guys deserve, even if the film is not going to stretch its focus far enough to compare how young women are handling this seemingly dead-end life to their male contemporaries.

That's probably in part because they're seeing the manager and there's this perception that sleeping with older guys is a path to mobility that young men don't have (which may have the tiniest grain of truth but is also a sign of other problems), which is too bad, because it camouflages how the movie also has some solid ideas about generational issues. Even when they haven't vanished down a self-destructive hole like the narrator's mother, the're people like humorless, petty assistant manager Moriguchi or manager Shizon, who aside from sleeping with his young female employees always looks at least a little drunk. If the previous generation is so impressive, how does the next find the inspiration to "mature"?

Lots of Japanese movies seem to be asking that question lately, and this one does too, even if it doesn't exactly have that memorable an answer.

Tomerareru ka, oretachi o (Dare to Stop Us)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I have probably, over the course of attending this genre festival and other events like it, gotten myself a pretty warped perspective on what filmmakers are a big deal. When it comes to Japanese filmmakers, for instance, I know very little Ozu, but a movie about fringe icon Koji Wakamatsu? Let me clear my festival schedule for that! Truth be told, there's probably more drama to be found in that anarchist maniac's orbit than that of a respected genius, although some may be a bit disappointed that Dare to Stop Us takes place more within that orbit rather than focusing on Wakamatsu himself.

Instead, it's told from the perspective of Megumi Yoshizumi (Mugi Kadowaki), a young woman who seems to be on the fringes of the art world when she meets a friend Michio "Spook" Akiyama (Soran Tamoto) in a cafe, asking if she knows any girls that could pass for 15 for a pink film he's working on (the producers of these short skin flicks didn't care what sort of messages the filmmakers put in so long as they had the requisite number of sex scenes). She will wind up before the camera in films with names like "Female Student Guerilla" for Wakamatsu (Arata Iura), whose anti-establishment cinema is rooted having been arrested when authorities thought he was a yakuza. He attracts a varied group of writers from Atsushi Yamatoya (Shima Ohnishi) to critic-turned screenwriter Haruhiko Arai (Kisetsu Fujiwara) to Megumi's crush Kenji Takama (Ku Ijima), and Megumi eventually becomes a good assistant director, but as Wakamatsu's fame grows and stabilizing force Spook leaves, the situation at his studio becomes more unpredictable as he's emboldened to take on more radical projects.

Wakamatsu is the leader of this cohort and the one whose name is best known nearly fifty years after the events of these movies, but the film does not spend much time demonstrating his genius; the filmmakers show fleeting glimpses and recreations of his work from this period or spend much time demonstrating any particular genius in his methods. Arata Iura doesn't go the full "abrasive, abusive genius" route, instead recreating the sort of charisma that has a person floating just far enough above the rest to seem extraordinary while still being close enough to grasp onto. He's magnetic, but just certain enough of his own genius that he can shrug off turmoil underneath him.

Full review at EFilmCritic

Jessica Forever

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

At some point during Jessica Forever, I started wondering if maybe this whole thing was a fantasy of some character or other, because that's the only way it starts to make some sort of sense, but absent some more concrete indication from the film itself, it's hard to justify that interpretation, even if it does leave the movie a weird mess of uncertain wish fulfillment badly masquerading as world-building. At best, you can say it's a fable, but it's a dull one, unsatisfying as entertainment.

The film opens with a group of lost boys conducting a sort of raid/rescue; Michael (Sebastian Urzendowsky) is about to be captured or put down by a bunch of drones, but other orphans like himself, led by the beautiful Jessica (Aomi Muyock) save him, and whisk him away to a sort of camp in a large house where they stay together, hunting for food and supplies in disciplined units. When the authorities track them down, they relocate, this time to an island, where Michael meets Camille (Maya Coline) while he and one of the other boys are bathing at the beach, and she seems to like him. The thing about tight-knit groups like Jessica's teenage orphans, though, is that things start to unravel once you add a new element to it.

So, just what is this thing that filmmakers Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (with script collaboration from Mariette Désert) have made? It feels dystopian for a while, but that falls away as Michael and a few of the other boys start coming into contact with outsiders on the island. There's maybe something to say about how life goes on otherwise even if an oppressive regime is cracking down on vulnerable people like these orphans, but it's not something people talk about. So maybe it's a fantasy, either of Michael's or of these dozen boys collectively, where they're still basically children even if their bodies have passed adolescence, the only girl they have to deal with a crush-worthy babysitter who never scolds and showers them with toys, leading them on adventures of the sort that boys like this find thrilling. It makes as much sense as anything.

Full review at EFilmCritic

Tôkyô gûru 'S' (Tokyo Ghoul S)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Tokyo Ghoul S is a "more of that" sequel; it doesn't particularly expand the mythology or have its characters grow and change that much, but delivers audiences another serving of what they enjoyed about the first. Folks who liked the live-action Tokyo Ghoul movie that came out a couple of years ago will likely have fun with this one, and those who missed it won't be overwhelmed. It's not the most ambitious franchise entry, but it doesn't send the series off the rails.

As established last time, "ghouls" live hidden among humanity, unable to eat much other than human flesh and able to fight with extra limbs. Ken Kaneki (Msataka Kubota) is unusual in that he started out human but was given transplant organs from a ghoul; he now works at the "Antieku" coffee shop that caters to ghouls, alongside Toka Kirishima (Maika Yamamoto). Most of the ghoul community understandably keeps out of sight, but Shu Tsukiyama (Shota Matsuda) is not most ghouls - known as "The Gourmet", this trouble-making idle riche type lives to dine on the finest and most unusual human specimens, like the model with different colored eyes he hunts in the opening. A chance encounter with Ken sends his cravings into overdrive - a human with the flavor of a ghoul? How delicious and transgressive!

You would think that some of the ghouls that Ken met in the first movie would have noticed that he smelled incredibly delicious, but to be fair, most of them are trying to live quiet, minimally-murderous lives, and have thus made a habit of repressing their predatory instincts. Not that the screenplay by Chuji Mikasano shows any particular need to explain that in such a way, and it's actually rather striking in its relative lack of ambition: After the first film introduced a whole semi-hidden world, the people making this one banish the Commision of Counter-Ghoul Operations to the sidelines despite the exceptionally high-profile murder that opens the movie, and tend to tread water with Ken and Toka keeping their secret from their human classmates/best friends. The supporting characters from the first are, at best, used as potential hostages and victims here, as the scope narrows to focus on Ken and his immediate problems, making it personal.

Full review at EFilmCritic

"Limbo"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I saw this, but can't say that any particular details are coming back to me four months later. But this here's a log so I'm logging it.

Dachra

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Dachra is being described as the first horror film from Tunisia, and that alone makes it worth seeing for some - aside from it being fun to have one's cinematic passport stamped by as many countries as possible, this sort of genre film often says a lot about how people see themselves in general and by what frightens them. And if that's not something one is particularly curious about, it's also a pretty darn decent scary movie, even if it does occasionally show some rough edges.

It follows a group of three journalism students, Yasmine (Yassmine Dimassi), Bilel (Bilel Slatnia), and Walid (Aziz Jbali) who, looking for a story that will really excite their professor, decide to investigate a girl in a mental hospital (Hela Ayed) who emerged from the woods twenty years ago and seems almost feral. They learn just enough to find where she was found, and it leads them through a path to a hidden town, where they meet a friendly host in Saber, though a pregnant goat-herder tells them to run. Alas, their car is broken, it's about to get dark, and Saber can't help them get to town until the next morning. But there's an empty house or two, and maybe this dairy from a couple decades ago will make interesting reading for Yasmine.

Writer/director/editor Abdelhamid Bouchnak doesn't stray far from the basics here; there are definitely moments when it feels like he dropped a cult compound in the middle of The Blair Witch Project, and seasoned horror movie fans are going to have immediate suspicions about what all the meat drying between on the outsides of the various buildings really is. He never goes about it in half-hearted manner, though, making the path the team follows to this Dachra area enjoyably lurid, with the other end matching it with every attempted step out of this place seeming to put the characters into a bigger hole (at least, those that don't meet impressively bloody ends).

Full review on EFilmCritic