Boston Underground Film Festival 2018.04: Top Knot Detective, "Comedy? Maybe!", The Ranger, Revenge, and Ghost Stories

I've been pretty fortunate that, as BUFF has expanded enough to have a few weekend matinees at the Harvard Film Archive over the last couple of years, it hasn't presented me with a lot of really difficult choices. I'm generally cool with skipping the music videos and sleeping in long enough to miss the Saturday morning cartoons, so it was pretty easy to choose Top Knot Detective for the first show of the day, with a little room to eat and poke around Harvard Square before catching the comedy shorts block for the second. I could do that because I saw Spoor at Fantasia last summer, and it was fantastic.



That gave me a chance to see shorts by all these lovely people: J.B. Sapienza & Jim McDonough, nearly the entire cast and crew of of "Tiny Clones"; "Mailman"'s Eric Levy; Brian Petillo of "I Remember My First Beer, Man"; Devi Snively, who directed "Bride of Frankie"; Nicholas Santos, director of "Mother Fucker"; and Neil Cicierega & Kevin James, of "Year of the Snake", with Ryan Murphy sadly cut off because my phone doesn't take quite as wide a shot as I'd thought. It was a 14-film program and Kevin pointed out with some surprise that there were folks who left in disgust during #4, and if they couldn't make it that far, it's probably for the best. There's no way that they were up for all the menstrual blood coming later.

It was a fairly entertaining QA, although sometimes short by the nature of the comedy shorts block, because there's a point where the answer to pretty much any question is going to be "we did what we thought would be funny and I guess the programmers thought it was". One of the most memorable bits was Devi Snively saying it was a bit of an odd experience because it was the first time that her short had been part of a comedy program. She also mentioned that "Bride of Frankie" actually served as a sort of prequel for an upcoming feature, and I don't know about that; it sounded like more of a steampunk adventure than the relatively contained thing the short was.



The Ranger director Jenn Wexler was there for her movie, which was a pretty good time. She opened her Q&A with a bit of a rant against cell phones making horror movies hard, which I generally don't have a lot of sympathy for; if your horror story can't work in the face of modern technology, then there's a good chance that it's not about what really frightens a contemporary audience. It worked for hers, though - setting it in the 1980s fits for a lot of other reasons.

Amusingly, she also mentioned that the movie wasn't really her idea; it came from a horror script that a friend had written back in their film school days, a hook that she kept thinking about until the opportunity to make a feature came along. Then she ran with it, putting together a pretty strong film, one of my favorites of the festival.

Finally, we wrapped up with a secret screening, which is something I tend not to like at film festivals unless it's an open "we technically can't advertise it but we're not going to create a situation where you pass up something that interests you for something you may hate" situation. Both this year and last, BUFF avoided that by having it play unopposed, although the not-fun some friends had at last year's Buster's Mal Heart had them deciding to skip a mystery midnight. Unfortunately for them, Ghost Stories was really good, though the good news is it soon came out on both VOD and a week in local theaters. The bummer is that my guess for the movie, The Endless, didn't play, which is a shame, because it hasn't made it to Boston yet won't play Boston until late June (the Brattle just announced a "late show" booking).

"Viola Vs. The Vampire King"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

The BUFF guys are good enough at matching shorts to features that I briefly thought that "Viola vs the Vampire King" was a clip of the fake TV show in Top Knot Detective, which had me worried, because while it's kind of cute and funny, 80-odd minutes of it might have been a little much. It's kind of right on the border of where making do with relatively little goes from being impressive to ostentatious, with the crayon-drawn map and spider-web forest that seems pretty open and title character who seems like she should be a kid but clearly isn't. Like, you could have made it fit what you had, but chose incongruity.

Still, it's a fun and energetic short film that goes all in on its action, fast and frantic but, though over-the-top, not ever bad-looking the way other bits of the movie are. It's big, often-bloody action - vampires being nearly-indestructible and blood-based gives the filmmakers room for a lot of gore and mayhem to back up both combatants' trash-talk. And while it's got one of those endings that is expected less because the story leads there than because some twists are de rigueur by now, the filmmakers milk it for all it's worth, playing it out long enough to be more than just a cheap gotcha moment.

Top Knot Detective

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

Top Knot Detective is a whole heck of a lot better than the typical "fake pop-culture spoof", for a lot of little reasons. That is generally the way these things work: It's not necessarily easy to come up with a fun idea for a mock-documentary, but it's also not exactly hard, and the gap between the obviously dumb and obviously brilliant ones is thin; enthusiastic improv can spin that into enough material that the filmmakers will need to cut down rather than pad out most of the time. It's the folks who consistently make the silly bits engaging or show that there is an actual plan without seeming to rein themselves in that create something worth a look.

The fun idea here is "Ronin Suri Tantai", a short-lived Japanese television series in the 1990s that developed a cult following in Australia despite running just once under the name "Top Knot Detective", with VHS tapes passed around since. It was created by and starred Takashi Takamoto (Toshi Okuzaki) as Sheimasu Tantai, a masterless samurai looking to avenge his master and defeat his former best friend Kurosaki Itto. Ostensibly a mystery show, it soon had Tantai having ever-more bizarre adventures, as the self-destructive Takamoto feuded with his employers at Sutaffu Corporation - with Chairman Moritaro Koike's son Haruto (Masa Yamaguchi) playing Itto. The early recasting of the show's female lead turns out to be just the start of the chaos involved.

It's not a real show, of course, but filmmakers Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce put some care into making it feel just genuine enough, and not just by getting Des Mangan and folks at an anime convention to play along. They create just enough in the way of Top Knot Detective artifacts to sprinkle in the background of interview sequences to make it seem like part of the culture but not overwhelming enough to give the game away. There's the usual loving attention to cheap/tacky detail in how they stage the fake clips, but also the sort of restraint that isn't always there; there's little (if anything) here that crosses the border between "stuff that looks authentically 1990s" and "goofy things they might have done in the 1990s with modern CGI". The behind the scenes details feel right; it's kind of generally insightful about the entertainment industry without seeming to hit anything too specific.

Full review on EFC

"I Remember My First Beer, Man"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Ah, the escalating-unfortunate-voicemail gag, the very similar-looking brother to the escalating-bad-message-on-the-answering-machine gag, and apparently not quite so endangered despite people hating voicemail. It just doesn't work as well with texts, though, so it's quite possible that Brian Petillo's take on it could be something close to the format's last hurrah.

If it is, it works in large part because it's even more off-kilter than usual, with a weird sort of desperation from caller Richard (Richard Chiu), drinking to excess to try and find some common ground with the guy he dropped off a few nights earlier. It's not just the usual bad decisions which will be soon regretted, but more basic uncertainty; Richard isn't really sure he wants to drink, and there's a certain question of whether his new friend is into other guys. It's a fun play on how weird it is that society has built this whole system on behavior that impairs good judgment, but played loose enough that it's the awkward jokes that show up, not any looking down on it.

"The Break-Up"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

It's kind of easy to overdo talking about why goofy shorts like this work, because it almost seems like a paradox: It hits something square on the head amid a lot of good lines, and while those good lines are what make it work as comedy, the idea is what holds it together, and gives you something to talk about rather than just rattling off jokes.

In this case, that means hopefully not minimizing what is actually a fun set-up well-executed, as a nervous guy tries to break up with his lady-friend who has clearly instigated every bit of trouble he's ever been in in his life. They play it as a fun role-reversal and banter about the escalating insanity well, well enough for that to be the entire joke. The short is simple visually - two people on a park bench - but filmmaker Tim Butcher knows when to get both characters in the same shot and when to jump between. But ultimately it's the punchline, which is kind of funny but not a great joke in and of itself, that winds up working in large part because it does provoke something in the audience like, yeah, this might be tougher than what's typically associated with the title. Which is pretty nifty, but it's pretty easy to get carried away and give it more importance than how this short movie has a lot of funny jokes.

"Mother Fucker"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

I'm not saying that reviewing this is pointless - it's a funny little short that does a nice slow burn, turning the awkwardness up before springing the end on the audience quickly - but the title is pretty much the punchline, and talking about it even this much has probably ruined it.

It makes for a kind of weird existence for this movie - it works perfectly well as something kind of anonymously buried in the middle of a shorts block, but go looking for it on its own, or stick it on the front of a feature where everyone has seen what short is attached from the program, and it's maybe 50% as effective. I wonder if the filmmakers were thinking of that when they were making it.

"Year of the Snake", "Third Wheel", "Gene Lover"

* * ¾-ish (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

It's been a month and I've pretty much got just the vaguest memories of these three shorts from the middle of the festival. They weren't bad at all, though they all kind of played like YouTube shorts with a couple good absurdist images and trouble with sticking the landing.

"Tiny Clones"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

This one is kind of in that bucket in terms of being a wacky idea without a whole lot to brace it, but it at least sticks out because near-one-man-band Jim McDonough makes it striking, playing multiple roles, setting it in a weird, memorable location, and hitting the proper deadpan attitude toward its fantastical premise head-on in a way a lot of shorts don't.

It's mean, though, in a casual way that doesn't make me laugh the way a lot of other dark comedy does. Combine it with the look that seems as much intentionally cheap as scrappy, and I have a hard time digging the dark whimsy that went into it.

"Robo Greaser"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

"Robo Greaser" appears to be the official title of this short, but I'm pretty sure it appeared on-screen as "Robo Greaser Fag" - which is what the title character is called through much of the movie - and that kind of puts a different spin on it, highlighting the cruelty visited upon the guy as much as the goofy mash-up nature of the title character. And I kind of don't get it - sure, I know that there are a ton of people out there that indicate their disdain for anyone around them with that particular three-letter-word, and I guess there's something to making a short about people treating the weirdo like crap even when he's kind of a miracle of engineering, but it seems like a carefully considered way to do this in the least funny way possible. It's blunt and cruel but not twisted into something clever.

Which is a bummer, because Eli Gottfried plays the earnest but occasionally inappropriate android in broad, entertaining fashion, and co-writer/director Dakota Arsenault is good at creating a vibe of eccentric innocence about him, even if she is frequently going to puncture it. There's not a lot of story, but there's just enough to sew the plentiful physical comedy together.

"Flow"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

It's not sophisticated humor, but "people arguing over bathroom stuff when there is arguably much more serious stuff going down" is one of the most solidly reliably comedy tropes there is. It can be messed up by getting too scatalogical too fast, or getting too cutesy, but there is something undeniably delightful about the embarrassingly mundane making its way into the melodramatic.

So, yeah, I laughed pretty hard at this short about two guerrilla fighters grumbling about how impossible it is to remain supplied with tampons in the middle of a revolution. It's got a neat bantering/bickering pair in Jamie Birkett and Lucy Clements, and writer/director Shelagh Rowan-Legg has it paced nicely, making the comedy dark without bringing the audience down and finishing up before the joke stops being funny.

"BFF Girls"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Coming right after "Flow", "BFF Girls" feels like a lot of menstruation humor, but we're probably kind of due until they catch up with the number of random erection jokes that have been a staple of raunchy comedy for the past forty years. It stretches a bit further to make them, a bit more into the range of "hey, we're sticking something gross into something cute, isn't that edgy?" territory, but there's broad wackiness to it for that to work. Director Brian Lonano and co-writer Victoria Cook go from the goofy starting points of magical girl anime/manga and the foreign fandom thereof and do a nice job of escalating the gags in both big and little steps, and the cast and crew hit the target with just the right blend of wide-eyed innocence up front and self-awareness behind the camera.

This does kind of leave the satire in the movie feeling about a mile wide and an inch deep: Every bit of the way they put it together seems to be saying that when you look at this stuff, even the most charming gets kind of pervy, from the obviously adult actresses playing pre-teens, to how these North Americans actually become Japanese when they transform, to the creepy older dudes paying a lot of attention to them coming of age. It's actually good material, but it does kind of play like the filmmakers are saying "hey, we noticed this!" and then stopping there.

Which is fine, they've got the jokes and the energy to make it work. I've still got to wonder what "BFF Girls" would have been like if the claws were out.

"Bride of Frankie"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Somebody is going to watch "Bride of Frankie" and describe it like "what if Frankenstein had been written by a woman, and that's an invitation to a well-deserved roasting, but it's also a fair way to describe the film's feel if not its intent, as it tweaks Bride of Frankenstein by positing that Baroness von Frankenstein is just as sharp a scientific mind as the Baron, and there will be no simply creating the Bride just to please the Monster, spending a lot of time on how both the Monster and his creator take their brides for granted, mulling relationships rather than spreading carnage.

But that's by no means a bad thing, and writer/director Devi Snively gets a lot of solid laughs out of the premise despite, as she points out, never really looking at the movie as a comedy when she was making it. She winds up investing the short with an impressive melancholy without allowing that sort of material to make a movie where most of the main characters are sewn-together corpses and the most reliable comic relief is a ⅙-scale homonculus ballerina (a loving reference to the most off-handedly bizarre part of James Whale's Bride) mundane. It's a nifty take on the material that works better as it becomes clearer that Snively isn't going to steer it hard in either the spoofy or horrific directions.

"Freelancer", "Postman", "End Times"

Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Another set of three short films that didn't make enough of an impression on me that I can honestly give them a true review a month later. "Freelancer", at least, had a memorable concept, in which a videographer believes he is being hired for some sort of boring rich-person event and winds up in the middle of the summoning of an elder demon, with all hell literally breaking loose. It's probably the one that I'd most enjoy seeing expanded to a full feature, as it feels like it could hit a real sweet spot between high-concept adventure and nasty farce.

The Ranger

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)

The Ranger is a damn fine 1980s throwback slasher that does every facet of the genre just a little better than you might expect. That's not necessarily enough to earn a recommendation - enough movies are made about folks getting cut up with an axe every year that even with a 95% failure rate, that's a fair amount of "pretty decent" - but Jenn Wexler hits the sweet spot here, making a movie that's got something on its mind aside from the genre itself but still manages to be bloody and entertaining before everything else.

It's sometime in the 1980s, Chelsea (Chloe Levine) is in her early twenties and into punk rock, in one of those situations where the line between a band and its hangers-on is kind of fluid. That's how she ends up in a van with boyfriend Garth (Granit Lahu), "Jerk" (Jeremy Pope), Abe (Bubba Weiler), and Amber (Amanda Grace Benitez), running from the cops after a whole drug-gun-car situation gets messy. She's told them that she inherited a cabin upstate, and they immediately figure that would be a great place to hide out. It soon seem like a less-than-great idea - her friends don't know the first thing about the outdoors, even without a ranger (Jeremy Holm) warning them that the area around the national park isn't same. Kind of unnervingly, he's the same ranger that was there the last time she was up, finding her after her Uncle Pete (Larry Fessenden) died suddenly.

Director Jenn Wexler and her co-writer Giaco Furino give the audience and the punks some getting-to-know-you time before the carnage starts, but when it does, the filmmakers have an enjoyably traditional take on it: They're (mostly) in the woods, the weapons are basic rather than supernatural, and they leave ugly, bloody wounds that give the kids obstacles and let the killer hit people twice. It's not winkingly self-referential, and it's not terribly subversive; it's a maniac hunting young people down, executed by folks who know their gore, working better because Wexler and her crew edit in a way that continuously tightens the noose after giving the audience just enough lay of the land to figure out just how dangerous a situation can be. It's sharp filmmaking that knows how these movies work.

Full review on EFC

Revenge (2017)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)

Revenge does what it says on the package - it's a gory, effective rape-revenge picture with moments that are not for the squeamish. It's a lot of violence, maybe more than some are going to be up for, but it's well-staged and good-looking as well as blood-soaked.

It opens with Richard (Kevin Janssens) and his mistress Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) arriving at a fancy vacation house isolated enough that they have to arrive by helicopter. It's fun for a day or two, at least until the other guests - Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive a bt early. Richard, it seems, was planning two vacations, a romp with his girlfriend and then a hunting trip with the guys, and while they seem to get on well enough, Jen is attacked almost as soon as Richard steps out for a bit - and he does not respond as his girlfriend would hope at all. Lucky for them, she seems to have been pretty definitively dealt with.

Or not; the film is not a ten-minute short named "Rich Men Get Away with Everything". Taking that as a given, writer/director Coralie Fargeat creates an impressive amount of uncertainty as things kick off with a jaw-dropper of a big moment that puts the audience on its back foot and then leads to a bunch of sympathetic groans through much of the film. It's a gruesomely symbolic way of showing the audience how Jen has been violated, one that she carries around for as long as the movie can justify it. It lets Fargeat work her way back up, and she doesn't back off handing the audience another few strong visual cues - not only does Jen soon emerge from a cave as if reborn, but the camera goes up and down her body in the same way it did when she sashayed off the helicopter, this time highlighting tense muscle instead of soft curves.

Full review on EFC

Ghost Stories

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Secret Screening; DCP)

Ghost Stories is an effective anthology of sorts, the cinematic equivalent of variations on a theme that certainly has room to play. It perhaps puts a little too much effort into giving itself a clever twist in the last stretch so that it can be a feature rather than a set of short stories, but the three episodes that make up the bulk of the film are impressive on their own, combining classic supernatural situations with humans' willingness to scare themselves.

That's the explanation offered by Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman), introduced shooting a documentary meant to debunk "psychic star" Mark van Rhys (Nicholas Burns). Goodman was inspired by another paranormal investigator, Charles Cameron, who faded from public view decades ago. A mysterious message summons Goodman to meet his mentor, and he's handed three cases that the old man wasn't able to completely debunk: Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse), a former security guard who saw something at a shuttered mental hospital; Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther), a teenager who hasn't been the same since his parents' car broke down on the way back from a party; and Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman), whose unused nursery has allegedly been haunted by a poltergeist since the loss of his wife (Emily Carding).

These are all elemental, well-worn tales of the supernatural; there's nothing in the main three or the initial framing sequence of skeptics wrestling with their own expectations that horror fans haven't seen before, and even those that don't consume large amounts of spooky stuff can recall a tale or two around those general themes. Filmmakers Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman don't necessarily break new ground with the specific stories, but they've built themselves situations where they don't need to: With each getting twenty-five minutes or so, they've got just enough room to stick to the basics, add in a few memorable details, and then get out before things start to collapse. It's the right amount of detail to keep things ambiguous, too, with nothing that would necessarily convince a skeptic but plenty to freak a person out.

Full review on EFC

BUFF 2017.04: Fraud, Neighborhood Food Drive, Most Beautiful Island, and The Void

It figures - the times when BUFF has two screens running, there are tricky choices, but when there’s just the one, it’s something I’ve seen elsewhere and don’t need to do again. On the other hand, that does leave one a nice window for the grocery shopping and other errands that I had no time for what with no just normal being at home after a week on vacation.

Most of what I missed out on by spending Saturday afternoon at the Harvard Film Archive was shorts of one sort or another. Someday, at some festival, I’ll actually make it to Keir-La Janisse’s Saturday Morning Cartoon show with the cereal bar, even though I doubt the cartoons I watched as a kid have aged well. I’m probably never going to prioritize something else over the “Sound & Vision” music video program. I was disappointed to skip out of the dark comedy block (called “Don’t Look Back into the Sun” this year), but it was up against what wound up being one of my two favorite films of the festival, so I wasn’t too disappointed.

And they were apparently lucky to get that favorite film. According to the introduction, after Most Beautiful Island was an upset winner of the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW (if you can call festival prize winners “upsets”), the producers apparently stopped booking it at other festivals, probably thinking this could net them a better distribution deal but a niche film showing at the festival might prevent regular theaters in the area from booking it. No idea if that’s how it works, but it seems like the only explanation for some of the odd behavior around booking this year.

Anyway, my first three shows of the day were at the Harvard Film Archive, and the middle one, Neighborhood Food Drive, had these folks in attendance:



I didn’t get the name of the host on the left, but that director Jerzy Rose and co-writer/producer Halle Butler on the right. They delivered a lively Q&A, the sort that often feels like it comes from people making a far less planned-out, specific movie than they have, either an indication that they’re exceptionally laid-back in some ways, or that a great deal is instinctive.

After that, I bailed on She’s Allergic to Cats, although looking at my Fantasia review from last year indicates that I liked it more at the time than I remembered. Still, with a festival scheduled as tight as this one - it’s not uncommon to leave the theater, go back around to the box office for the ticket to the next movie, and not really have time to get snacks before heading back to one’s seat, the ability to get something done and then actually sit down to eat was a big deal. And it gave me plenty of time to make it back for The Void.



For that, we were once again visited by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, with Chris Hallock leading the Q&A. It’s kind of funny that last time I saw them, they talked about not making your film both horror and comedy, because it was awfully difficult to get distributors to pick something like that up, and this time they had a few words about how it’s a little harder to make a straight horror movie when you don’t have jokes to lean on. Not much, but I did get the sense that this was something where they were a little more concerned about the reaction. So much of the Astron-6 stuff was movies for their own amusement, while this was something more for an audience that didn’t necessarily share their view of the genre.

It did have one of my favorite Q&A questions ever, though, when someone asked about references and they flatly said “we are not referencing any movie”. Fair for people to ask, but the answer underscored what I liked about The Void and the potential that’s always been in the filmmakers’ previous work in terms of creativity, and hopefully it doing well will inspire them to do more movies about more than their own influences.

”Troll: A Southern Tale”

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Harvard Film Archive(Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

I’m curious as to whether Marinah Janello started “Troll: A Southern Tale” with the intent of doing a short documentary about an internet troll only to find the interview wandering, or if that’s what she picked out of her interviews . The idea is most likely to take a guy who spends time causing grief on the internet and figure out what makes a guy who maintains 75 Facebook profiles for the purpose of making people think that they’ve kicked a bigger hornet’s nest than they have tick, but the film wanders enough that it’s not obvious what the starting point is.

Not that it necessarily matters; though “Troll” doesn’t necessarily pose and explore a question quite so explicitly as it could, it’s unusually good at presenting a concept in the nebulous form in which it exists in reality despite film generally being a specific medium. Her subject is a bearded guy in his twenties, a pleasant enough interview that he doesn’t come across as particularly hostile to either Janello or, through her, the viewer. He is, one thinks, the product of an environment that has let him down; he’s filmed in a number of buildings that have burned, collapsed, or otherwise decayed, and he talks enough about The South with a certainty born of both first-hand experience and detached consideration that one is inclined to connect dots, maybe figure out what can be done.

And yet, I can’t help but think that the dots don’t really connect, and that’s a part of what Janello is getting at. There’s not actually much passion coming from the subject, whether toward the people he trolls or when talking about his own music, which he describes as sucking but he’s made a lot, and that’s something, right? The portrait that emerges is a sort of nihilism, which is a reasonable-enough response to the situation at hand, but the presentation of it is a little less than it could be. Voids need to be brought into sharper relief than excesses, and Janello only hints at the emptiness here.

Fraud

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

I am reasonably certain that “Fraud” is not a documentary, despite several film festivals labeling it as such and the lack of credits identifying the cast and crew at the end; it simply commits to its found-footage conceit more completely than is typical. It’s convincing even for those who know otherwise, and that may be an issue for some; it’s convincingly amateurish enough to not be a smooth watch and for the “subjects’” bad acts to come off as repellent rather than generic. Get past that, though, and it’s on point.

It’s presented as a collection of home movies from a North Carolina family with two young kids, a young mother, and a father who likes to film them. He mostly seems to do it on Sundays when the tapes start in May of 2012 with a number of jittery segments that often focus on trips to the mall or other prosaic matters. It’s not long before the viewer starts to notice overdue bills piling up. By late July, mother Paige is learning about filing an insurance claim, and soon after that, you’ve really got to question the wisdom of the father filming this stuff as they give themselves reason to do so.

That, of course, is an obvious plot issue with a lot of found-footage films, and there’s a certain non-intuitive realism to the way that director Dean Fleischer-Camp doesn’t bother to explain it. Sure, folks might shoot themselves committing a crime - it’s probably the most exciting, thrilling thing they’ve ever done - but monologuing about why is a step too far. Besides, the compulsive way the father shoots, right down to the way shots will linger on his wife’s well-maintained body, can be all the explanation needed: Pulling out the camcorder is something he does on his day off, to the point where the rest of the family has likely learned to ignore it, and that’s before you even get to the question of whether they think they’re doing anything wrong.

Full review on EFC.

”Discontinuity”

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, digital)

Lori Felker’s “Discontinuity” is the very epitome of an underground-festival comedy short - it’s got a sense of humor that zips past “offbeat” to “random”, characters who often act in ways that just don’t seem recognizable as the actions of human beings. It’s got an abrupt ending that may seem something of a relief after its frequently cringe-worthy moments.

And yet, it works, a whole heck of a lot better than many, probably because the very title suggests that Felker sees how there’s something potentially powerful in the randomness. It opens with Tabitha (Sam Howard) returning “home” after working and caring for her ailing father for the better part of two years, only to find that her boyfriend Stephen (Ben Johnson) has become quite peculiar in that time, accumulating cats, getting particular about what they watch on DVD, and being beyond awkward when talking about the funeral. The cats multiply, a kid appears, and things just don’t seem right moment-to-moment.

It’s weird, sure, but you get what it means, that Tabitha’s finding a situation that should be familiar, normal, and what she’s been wanting to get back to utterly alien. It’s just odd enough to not be entirely creepy, with things absurd enough that it gets a laugh. Sam Howard makes Tabitha thoroughly likable, with a nice balance of enthusiasm and stress at the situation; she plays into the metaphor enough that the audience can see her wonder if it’s just weird from her point of view and sympathize. Ben Johnson goes deadpan as Stephen, and it’s generally a good enough joke to mostly cancel out what a head-scratcher it is that Tabitha went for him in the first place. Which, in some ways, is the short in a nutshell: The weirdness and symbolism mostly works, even if the set-up is something you just have to run with.

Neighborhood Food Drive

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

Neighborhood Food Drive spends a lot of time taking aim at fairly easy targets, but they’re deserving targets and director Jerzy Rose scores some direct hits. It makes for a comedy that is not quite so delightfully vicious as Roses’s previous film (Crimes Against Humanity), but which is certainly able to score some points with those who enjoy watching clueless people get themselves into trouble.

There are two pairs of such people here. Madeline Bruhnhauer (Lyra Hill) and Naomi Florida (Bruce Bundy) have recently opened a new restaurant, “Ciao”, in Chicago’s Humboldt Park area, and even if business were great, they’d still be getting reviews that point out that their fancified and expensive “comfort food” offerings don’t exactly match the character of the neighborhood. How to give back? A food drive! They bring on college undergraduate Bianca Pentecost (Ruby McCollister) as an unpaid intern to coordinate it, possibly unaware that she’s the girlfriend of their waiter Steven Hughes (Marcos Barnes), and that the pair is doing a weird sort of counseling thing with one of their professors (Ted Tremper).

A funny bit early on has somebody with experience in running food drives laying out exactly why this sort of event is a bad idea in practical terms, a fine deadpan gag in and of itself but one that becomes the setup for something surreal as this has the potential to haunt the characters. Presuming, of course, that they can feel haunted - the characters are almost all fairly self-centered and a little too self-aware, from the way Bianca and Steven are analyzing their relationship minutely when they should be winging it to how Maddie’s attempts to calm the high-strung Naomi are fairly practiced and clinical. Those two will even repeat the film’s title like a mantra at times, something that comes off as half what these guys would do and half Rose and co-writers Halle Butler & Mike Lopez being quite aware of their film’s artificiality.

Full review on EFC.

Most Beautiful Island

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

We are fortunate to have multiple great film festivals in the Boston area - in fact, this very review is part of a (failed) frantic attempt to talk up all the movies from the Underground before the Independent starts. With so many, and films generally making only one festival stop per city, where a given film ends up can sometimes be surprising. That is the case with Most Beautiful Island, which initially seems more art-house than midnight-movie, but that it navigates between those two very different styles is what makes it kind of brilliant.

It’s a day in the life of Luciana (Ana Asensio), who has made her way to New York from Spain after a tragedy that has made staying where she was too painful, but she’s starting to bottom out there: Well behind in rent on the dingy apartment she shares with a roommate who has taken to labeling everything in the refrigerator “not yours”, having to beg for a doctor to see her off the books, and taking odd jobs like handing out flyers in Times Square to even afford that much. After a morning of that, she and her friend Olga (Natasha Romanova) are relaxing when Olga gets a call and asks if Luciana can cover another job she has that night - $2,000 to help pretty up a cocktail party. Sure, it will be a tight squeeze getting the black dress and heels needed around her afternoon job as a babysitter, but that’s good money for a night’s work, even if it probably does involve a little more than what Olga is selling it as being.

It will eventually require a lot more, but before it gets there, writer/director/star Ana Asensio essays an illuminating narrative about being a (likely undocumented) immigrant in New York - the scraping, the conning, the casual and constant disrespect. There are three or four scenarios strung together that could each work as the basis of an individual short or even feature if Asensio stretched them out a little more or fleshed out the other people moving through Luciana’s day a little more, but there’s an interesting flow to the way she sets it up: Though there is a point or two when it seems like a certain amount of trouble could be avoided if Luciana just popped back into her apartment for a moment, Asensio instead silently emphasizes that there’s an unsteadiness to Luciana’s life, that she’s got to keep moving forward or be ready to survive with just what she has with her. It’s not constant immediate danger, but it’s not stability, either.

Full review on EFC.

”An Eldritch Place”

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

Someone with a lot more free time and obsession to detail than me should make a list of every feature or short film over the last five or ten years where the credits are done using John Carpenter’s favorite typeface and see how many of them use similar music or how many truly creative ideas they have. “An Eldritch Place”, for instance, is a pretty basic riff on Lovecraft done in Carpenter style, right down to Sarah Boom’s synth-based soundtrack. Like many Carpenter-inspired movies, it announces what director Julien Jauniaux is a fan of as much as what he’s got to say. That’s not a criticism, so much as an observation.

It is, after all, a pretty good horror short. It offers up Abdel (Habib Ben Tanfous) who, trying to simply get by - in this case by taking a job guarding the workspace of Dr. Francis Wayland (Ludovic Philips) - finds himself thrown into a world of otherworldly danger and malevolence. Director Julien Jauniaux and Ben Tanfous do a fairly impressive job of making Abdel just the right sort of protagonist for this sort of thing, imperfect enough to get himself into trouble, but not really deserve what’s about to happen, without the film needing to stress his likability. There’s a rough, working-class feel to the situation that is upended that both contrasts with and flows into the strange realm of the elder gods that Abdel finds himself in. There’s a genuine feeling that, despite the fleeting glimpses we see and the vague nature of this sort of Lovercraftian threat beyond human comprehension, what Abdel encounters could legitimately end the world.

So, sure, in a lot of ways “An Eldritch Place” is a riff on the work of a couple of genre icons more than a new vision, but Carpenter and Lovecraft are pretty good guys for someone directing their first film to find inspiration; it will be interesting to see what evolves from this.

The Void

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski haven’t made a whole lot of movies as part of the Astron-6 collective, and I haven’t reviewed all of them, but it still feels like I’ve written something about how wasteful it is that they didn’t seem to trust their very real talent, using parody as a crutch. While The Void does not have an A-6 title card on it, it was done by many of the same people, but it’s a straight horror movie, and it’s a terrific one, distilling what made the 1980s horror they clearly love great and presenting it as something that doesn’t feel dated or silly at all.

It’s got a nifty little twist at the start, though, as it opens with a couple of folks fleeing a cabin in the woods and not looking back. Unfortunately, James (Evan Stern) isn’t in good shape when local cop Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) finds him by the side of the road. He brings the unconscious man to the nearby hospital, where his ex-wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) and her mentor Richard Powell (Kenneth Welsh) are the only doctors on duty, but there aren’t many patients, as much of the staff is packing up to close the place and consolidate with another hospital. Of course, people start getting homicidal, with the heavily-armed Vincent (Daniel Fathers) and his mute sidekick Simon (Mik Byskov) arriving just as the parking lot fills with a bunch of robed cultists, setting up a supernatural siege.

Those robes and hoods are a simple costume, but the perfection of their execution is impressive; the triangle where the face should be is the sort of material that should allow the man inside to see out, except that it’s inverted so that the point is between the eyes. It looks wrong, but doesn’t broadcast how impractical it is, and the simple shape can be reused in a lot of ways, tying a number of supernatural elements together without it seeming forced. Not everything in the movie is low-key and geometrical like that, but it’s a good start and a good link to the weirder, gorier stuff, with the blood and the tendrils and the other abominations before nature. That stuff is especially excellent, top-notch practical work, with the obsessive visual detail that this team is best known for (paired with a great sound mix and thoroughly-appropriate score) in full force.

Full review on EFC.

Found Footage Redux: Operation Avalanche and Blair Witch

Funny thing, timing - I decided to bump Operation Avalanche in the Fantasia review queue because it was coming out in some areas on Friday, and my first thought was to talk about The Blair Witch Project and how, even knowing that it was not actually a documentary when I got to see it, it still felt real and thrilling in a way that many of the other films that picked up the found-footage/mock-doc gimmick afterward didn't, with one of the rare exceptions being Matt Johnson's The Dirties... And then, just as soon as that's done, I squeeze the new Blair Witch movie in during a gap in the Somerville Theatre 70mm festival, and have something close to the same feeling.

I still recommend both of these movies, and if you're in one of the places where they're playing Operation Avalanche, I bet they make a fun contrast, with one updating the technology to show the things we can do now and the other doggedly throwing back. Both have a little trouble recreating what made their predecessors really memorable, but that doesn't necessarily take away from what they are in the here and now.

Operation Avalanche

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2016 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia 2016, DCP)

I'm moderately surprised that, in the post-Blair Witch Project world, there wasn't more one-upmanship in attempting to further blur the line between reality and fiction the way that film did, genuinely making the audience question whether they were actually seeing found footage or not. Instead, it became a style but a recognized one, where the details of how well the filmmakers are faking it are likely to be observed and dissected in real time. One of the few films to create the same sort of nagging worry that maybe the viewer is seeing something real and horrible was The Dirties, and though the same crew has reunited for another but of faux-found-footage with Operation Avalanche, they're smart enough to know that you probably can't get what is in large part the same audience to fall for the same tricks from the same people twice.

This time around, filmmaker Matt Johnson co-star Owen Williams cast themselves as two of twenty-five Ivy League "Bright Recruits" hired by the CIA straight out of undergrad in 1965, but who by 1967 are bored investigating Stanley Kubrick for "Deep Red", and scheme to get themselves assigned to Operation Zipper - finding a mole inside NASA. Their brainstorm is that while the real rocket scientists there would spot anybody going undercover as an engineer immediately, they could pose as documentary filmmakers for public television. It gets them in the door but their various wiretaps let them in on a potentially bigger secret: There's no way to meet President Kennedy's challenge to land on the moon by the end of the decade - it will be '71 at the earliest - but Matt has another idea - why not fake the moon landing?

Most films of this sort, even if they don't intend to actually trick the audience into thinking that they're watching something real, at least aim to avoid obvious chances for the first to say "ha! obviously staged!" Johnson and co-writer Josh Boles (who, amusingly, appears in the film as Johnson's handler "Josh Boles") keep that in mind, but they also know that both having already done a movie like this and the subject matter they have chosen are working against them. So they have a bit of fun, demonstrating the technology that they're using in-story when many films would prefer the audience just not think of it, letting Johnson and Williams play their on-screen alter egos as a broadly-drawn goofball and straight man rather than having to blend. There's no winking at the camera - they are not making a spoof even if they are making a comedy - but they recognize that they've got no cover, and that gives them room to let the moments when they encounter familiar conspiracy theories or unlikely bits be fun, rather than just dry.

Full review on EFC.

Blair Witch

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 September 2016 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, DCP)

Blair Witch probably does The Blair Witch Project as well as a any movie since the original, and that's no bad thing - once upon a time, before home video or even television reruns, the purpose of sequels was just to give the audience more of a thing they liked more than a next chapter, and this film does that well. The thing is, even beyond how capturing the out-of-nowhere uncertainty of the first film is all but impossible in that first movie's shadow, one almost wishes that writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard had made a knockoff rather than a sequel - covering the same ground as well as they do might work better if it's not explicitly the second time through.

It is, though - after a very familiar disclaimer about how these memory cards and DV tapes were found, we're introduced to James (James Allen McCune), whose sister Heather was one of the people who disappeared in the woods about 17 years earlier, when he was four. A new bit of video surfacing on the internet has him thinking she may still be alive out there, and his friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), herself a film student, opts to document it. Also along are his oldest friend Peter (Brandon Scott) and his girlfriend Ashley (Corbin Reid), and they wind up joined by Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), the couple that found the new tape. So they go out in the woods, hoping to find the house on the tape(s), although that didn't exactly work out well for James's sister.

It's been a while since I saw the first movie - possible since the original release - but I suspect that the new one actually has a stronger ensemble, both in terms of the characters on the page and the cast bringing them to life. Though maybe not the most ambitious exercise in creating characters likely doomed to get knocked off by some supernatural force, Barrett's script quickly establishes who htey are nad how they're tied together, and the cast adds enough little shadings to that to make them seem real enough to get hooks into the audience: There's a chemistry between James Allen McCune and Callie Hernandez that can hint at unwitting attraction - or maybe Lisa being aware James likes her and using it to get this story - as well as awkwardness at people presuming their a couple; at any rate, these people seem to have history without manufactured drama. Brandon Scott especially does a sneaky-good job; he's got deadpan bits that would get big laughs in a horror movie calibrated slightly differently, and he handles moments when Peter can be kind of abrasive with aplomb. Wes Robinson and Valorie Curry weave in and out of the movie as characters outside the central group, but their moments are some of the best, and Corbin Reid handles the often thankless jobs given to Ashley very well.

Full review on EFC.

Fantasia 2016.05 (18 July 2016): White Coffin and La Rage du Démon

Short movie day at the festival, because basically every movie I'd seen elsewhere - The Eyes of My Mother, Three, Karaoke Crazies, and The Wailing was scheduled for Monday, which was not convenient - you kind of lie them spread out, giving more of a chance to not make tough decisions. So I used the free space in the afternoon to go see the new Ghostbusters. It was pretty decent, if a little too fond of explaining details.

I got back in plenty of time for White Coffin, although there were some weird technical issues, and the funny thing about a movie having its world premiere at a festival known for off-kilter films is that there's no way to tell whether the soundtrack is messed up or there are just some really odd choices being made so long as you can make out the dialogue and follow what's going on - and it could have been, because the director was doing screwy things like changing aspect ratios. That's what wound up happening, resulting in us seeing the rest of the movie by screener. Not ideal, but we got through. I do kind of wonder if the accidental weird soundtrack and the interruption affected my opinion of the movie; that's not how it's meant to be seen.



There's the Q&A for La Rage du Démon, with director Fabien Delage on the right, making the trip from France. I can't tell you a whole lot about what was said, because my French is terrible, but everyone seemed to be into it, and there were two more unusual French-language shorts afterward (that I won't try to review because my brain was fried). There was a lot of uncertainty on whether this would have subtitles or not, but I figured I could hang on for an hour, even if it was mostly a talking-heads faux-doc. There were titles, however, and I'm glad, because I wound up quite enjoying the movie.

"Madre de Dios"

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2016 in the J.A. de Sève Cinema (Fantasia 2016, digital)

My initial reaction to "Madre de Dios" is that, while I may have hated director Gigi Saul Guerrero's previous short film, "El Gigante", at least that one had something resembling a story, compared to this one which is just an ugly scene of violence and mutilation not particularly attached to anything else. That's unfair; while this lacks exposition or much in the way of dialogue, it's not hard to figure out what's going on and maybe extrapolate a little more around it.

I don't care, though. Guerrero and her crew can do some quality make-up, light things so that it comes across as dark but nothing is particularly out of sight, and step through what's going on with enough competence that a fragment of a story emerges and, because I'm not a monster and the cast and crew is capable of presenting the violence in a certain way, I feel a bit repulsed by a woman being stuck by knives. It still never feels like an actual movie, just a demonstration that these folks know how to use the tools. It's not engrossing, it doesn't have an interesting idea at the center, it doesn't even make me think that I'd like to see what she can do; it's just capably made ugliness that I don't get much from.

Ataúd Blanco: El Juego Diabólico (White Coffin)

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2016 in the J.A. de Sève Cinema (Fantasia 2016, digital)

I'm tempted to call the thing that makes White Coffin an incredibly frustrating horror movie "video-game writing", but I haven't played them in a while and I have friends who tell me its alternation of action with just enough dialogue to send the player off on another mission isn't exactly state of the art any more. Director Daniel de la Vega winds up having to make Adrián & Ramiro García Bogliano's script fly with sheer craft, and while he's got a fair amount of that, it can only get him so far.

It opens with young mother Virginia (Julieta Cardanali) driving across Argentina with her daughter Rebeca (Fiorela Duranda), on the way to a new home, although a phone call from Rebeca's father indicates this may not be entirely within the terms of their custody arrangement. That may be moot; while eating at a rest stop, Rebeca disappears, as does one of a number of kids on a school trip. Virginia remembers a truck pulling out and chases after it, only to have an ambulance try to run her off the road.

She hits a pretty dead end, but fortunately a mysterious man (Rafael Ferro) shows up to say that if a mother finds the White Coffin and brings it to a certain place then maybe she stands a chance - but not why. No, he'll just drive her a little way, get out of the car, and say she has to do this unexplained thing on her own for unexplained reasons. It devolves into a tremendously stupid game that involves keeping three women so ignorant as to require prompting phone calls and ready to turn on each other, facing mortal danger despite the fact that the whole thing doesn't make any sense if they don't get to the end relatively intact. It's one of those stupid horror movie plots where, even if you acknowledge that the goals of the villains make some sort of sense, this is a ridiculous way to go about it.

Full review on EFC.

La Rage du Démon (Fury of the Demon)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2016 in the J.A. de Sève Cinema (Fantasia 2016: Axis, DCP)

Fabien Delage's La Rage du Démon ("Fury of the Demon" in English) is hardly unique for being a mock-documentary built in such a way that you could probably make a decent nonfiction film out of the material shot to supplant the main story, but that is a large part of its charm: There is genuine passion for all the material here, even the stuff that doesn't necessarily serve Delage's story.

It is, ostensibly, the story about a screening at a Paris museum in 2012 of a Nineteenth-Century film recently unearthed by an American collector, quite possible a lost Méliès. It doesn't receive the rapturous reception that one might expect, though - the theater erupts into violence, the police have to be called, ten people are sent to the hospital. A little research suggests that this has happened both other times the film is known to have played (its 1897 premiere and a 1930s screening in New York). Did Georges Méliès, in many ways the most important filmmaker in history, film something unearthly enough to drive men mad?

The answer, in real life, is no, and even within the film, Delage suggests that this demonic film may be more Méliès-adjacent than anything else. In doing so, he creates characters and a story that has the ring of period truth, tapping into how Méliès, who was a magician before he became a filmmaker, would have moved in the same circles as the spiritualists and others who fed the occult craze around the turn of the twentieth century. The stories of Victor Sicarius would be a worthy period piece on its own, and Delage does a fine job of not just fleshing it and its details out, but imagining the sort of record necessary that what we "learn" would be believably fragmentary, uncertain, and open to interpretation.

Full review on EFC.

Boston Sci-fi Film Festival 2016.07: Alienation, The Phoenix Incident, and Mafia: Survival Game

Went out of order on this one, because The Phoenix Incident had a Fathom Events screening on Thursday, so I figured it would make sense to have the review out by then, as that would almost certainly be its biggest release, even if it has a regular release planned. But, no, I get emails from the PR firm handling the film saying it's embargoed. Embargoes are dumb in most situations, but this one seems even more so considering that it was already released on video in the UK (in some form).

But, anyway, enough about that...



First film on the night was Alienated, with producer Princeton Holt and writer/director Brian Ackley. I get into it a fair amount in the review, but their movie really loses me as it goes on, until I found myself really disliking it.

They seemed like nice folks; a little too fond of improv in their movie for my liking, and similarly sort of dismissing the inability to show the art which all the characters were talking about. There was also a sort of rambling talk about independent filmmaking and diversity in the industry.



Here's Keith Arem, director of The Phoenix Incident. Similarly enthusiastic, though an entertainment industry veteran (albeit from the gaming end), so he seemed more accustomed to what amounts to making a presentation. He wound up talking up unconventional distribution and the plans for an integrated app and viral content.

Then, after that, Mafia: Survival Game, which was terrible and had the second-worst projection of the festival to boot. You'd think something with a fair-sized Russian studio behind it would be able to send a DCP, even after the Friday-night debacle, rather than downloading a cruddy file to project on a substandard projector (which, again, is not the fault of the Somerville Theatre projection staff at all)..

Alienated

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)

Given the focus of the festival in question, it's not surprising that a fair number of the negative assessments of Alienated were along the lines of it barely being science fiction, but that's letting it off too easily. This movie is a chore to sit through regardless of which genre labels it is tagged with, an improvised mess that never discovers a route around its problems or a way to mask is unpleasantness compelling.

It takes place, mostly, in the home of Nate (George Katt) and Paige (Jen Burry), a couple that has been together long enough to no longer be amused by each others' quirks when not taking the other for granted. Paige is the breadwinner right now, with Nate apparently looking for work in a half-heated fashion, between posting 9/11 conspiracy theories online and working on paintings, one of which was recently given to an ex-girlfriend. It's a point of contention between them even when Paige just wants to take a bath and watch The Michael J. Fox Show after work, even if it's a rerun. Not likely, because Nate saw a UFO earlier and thinks that Paige should be a lot more interested in that.

This kind of soured-relationship movie tends to bring out one of three feelings toward its outcome in a viewer: Either you hope that the couple will work things out because there seems to be something with saving; you sadly hope they break up because, even if there's something appealing in one or both beneath the fighting, it's too far gone or some ingredient was wrong from the start; or you hope that they'll stick together because they are two genuinely miserable people and their staying together not only prevents them from spreading that may to other partners but increases the chance of a double homicide which just gets rid of them altogether. That Alienated falls into the third category is actually kind of impressive; it's easy enough to lose patience with Nate, but especially since Paige at least seems to be showing enough interest in his art for Nate's condescension to make her sympathetic, but Paige's particular flavor of passive aggression eventually becomes wearing as well.

Full review on EFC.

The Phoenix Incident

* * 1/4 (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, DCP)

I think that I vaguely recall the "Phoenix Lights" that give this film its name; at least, there was a feeling of familiarity when the footage appeared which demonstrates that filmmaker Keith Arem has either done a nice job of integrating real-world material or creating something that seems real. That's better than a lot of people making a science fiction story that fits into the real world's shadows manage, but like a lot of sci-fi looking to fit into that niche, it runs into some pretty hard limits on what it can actually accomplish.

If you don't remember the Phoenix Lights, they were a set of unusually synchronized UFOs that appeared in the sky over Phoenix, Arizona, on 13 Match 1997. Less widely-reported, the film posits, is that four young men - Glenn Lauder (Yuri Lowenthal), Ryan Stone (Troy Baker), Jacob Reynolds (Liam O'Brien), and Mitch Adams (Travis Willingham) - out four-wheeling in the desert went missing that night. Police investigations initially focused on Walton S. Grayson (Michael Adamthwaite), a local cultist/hermit, but he was never charged - perhaps because of pressure brought to bear by the Air Force.

Arem presents this as a mock documentary which incorporates a fair amount of found footage, and while this occasionally makes a film unusually compelling and gives the filmmakers an in-story reason for things to be kept hidden and excuses a few other rough edges, it's a style that has some overhead. Here, that includes a fair amount of time spent explaining that Glenn was the sort of X-Games enthusiast who built wearable cameras to capture his tricks because GoPro was not yet a thing in 1997, time spent arguing about turning the camera off, and a fair chunk of material where the unseen filmmakers hear that having your only son disappear without any sort of closure is awful from the people left behind a and get stonewalled by a fair number of bland government functionaries. When they do get information, it's because an informant shot in shadows to preserve his anonymity (something that the structure of this sort of film prevents the audience from carrying about, so it's all window-dressing) is narrating but not showing anything. Even when this sort of thing is made to look authentic enough, as is the case here, it's all material that is honestly not that important but takes up a fair amount of time.

Full review on EFC. (At least, come 6 April 2016)

Mafiya (Mafia: Survival Game)

* (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2016 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Boston Sci-fi Film Festival, digital)

Nearly every time I see a movie based upon a video game, I can't but help but comment about how directly translating that medium's structures and mechanisms to film creates something incredibly awkward. That is nothing, however, compared to watching Mafia: Survival Game slavishly stick to the party card game that inspired it and fundamentally miss what makes something a watchable movie.

It reimagines this game as the most popular television show in the year 2072, where 12 people - some of them prisoners who will be freed if they win - compete for a pot of a million dollars that will be split among the survivors. This is meant quite literally - at the end of every round, the participants vote, and whoever is voted off is sent into a virtual reality simulation of his or her worst fears, and if you die in that... Well, you know.

This is the point where I would normally list out those contestants, but it's very close to pointless, especially since I only managed to get eleven down while taking notes. They have, in theory, been chosen like the contestants on an actual reality show, with clashing personality types and folks with connected backstories, and there are some potentially interesting ideas in there - ballerina Maria (Natalya Rudova) competing against her stalker Ari or one of the prisoners (Artyom Suchkov) being on death row because the oligarchs convinced him to take the fall for a friend's drunk driving - but with twelve of them to cram into 96 minutes, and occasional forays into the control room with the show's creator (Viktor Verzhbitskiy) that certainly feel like Ed Harris's scenes in The Truman Show, there's just not enough time for any of them to be anything but shallow.

Full review on EFC.

Child 44 and Unfriended (aka Cybernatural)

So, this was weird - the highly polished movie chock full of recognizable actors is the one being presented as "independent" while the one completely populated by unknowns that I missed seeing at a genre festival last year is the mainstream hit.

Random thought: If I were Universal, I probably would have omitted the "A Comcast Company" from the opening animation of the globe that freezes, pixilates, and otherwise glitches to play up Unfriended's taking place online. Sure, those of us with Comcast as our cable company and/or ISP may already think of them that way, but no need to reinforce it.

Child 44

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2015 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)

The name of Child 44 and the trailer that emphasizes the serial-killer aspects of the movie don't do it any favors, but they don't actually misrepresent it either. That's probably the film's main problem - the intention of using a crime story to get at something else is a good and noble one, but that crime story needs to be more interesting and the other half needs to be more interesting sooner.

The common thread is Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy); orphaned as a child by the Ukrainian famine in 1933, he found a home in the army and raised the Soviet flag over Berlin in 1945. By 1953, he is married to the lovely Raisa (Noomi Rapace) and hunting down traitors for the MGB with old army comrades Alexei (Fares Fares) and Vasili (Joel Kinnaman). Alexei's son being murdered but the official finding being a tragic accident - there are no murders in the workers' paradise - is not what gets Leo demoted and exiled to the backwater of Volsk, but once there, he discovers a similar crime. Hopefully General Mikhail Nesterov (Gary Oldman), the head of the local militia, will be more willing to investigate than the brass back in Moscow was.

Child 44 does not exactly start slow, but it does spend enough time establishing Leo as the relatively humane member of the secret police (along with other things) that the audience can find themselves in the uncomfortable position of becoming impatient for the first kid to die. Unfortunately, that half of the film never really takes off; though early scenes are framed so as to imply that the killer's identity is an important mystery, what's actually going on is only vaguely sketched out, and Paddy Considine is wasted in his too-small role.

Full review on EFC.

Unfriended (aka Cybernatural)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2015 in Regal Fenway #7 (first-run, DCP)

I missed Unfriended when it played the Fantasia Festival under the name of "Cybernatural" last year, and was kind of taken aback by the amount of buzz it received and the fact that Universal, as opposed to one of the smaller specialty labels, picked it up for distribution. It is, after all, a horror movie taking place entirely on a computer screen. Surprise, surprise, the praise was merited, as the movie does everything better than one might expect, up to and including benefiting from the studio changing its name.

The computer in question belongs to Blaire Lily (Shelley Henning), a high-school girl planning some seedy video chat with her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm) on a Wednesday night, although she first re-watches bits of a couple videos from a year earlier when her friend Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman) committed suicide. They wind up joining a call with three other friends - Ken (Jacob Wysocki), Adam (Will Peitz), and Jess (Renee Olstead) - but there seems to be someone else lurking on the call. They think it's Val (Courtney Halverson), but she jobs the call and says it's not - although having all six on the line seems to be what this mystery guest connected to Laura's accounts and seemingly immune to all attempts to kick her out has been waiting for.

Unfriended is not the first film to present itself as this sort of real-time video chat - I saw one about ten years ago, and there are probably examples from as far back as broadcasting video was happening. The difference is that it comes at a time when this is a regular part of the culture, and the filmmakers seem comfortable with that in a way few of their forebears have. There are few gimmicky attempts to escape from the limitations on perspective that a laptop's webcam has, and both director Leo Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves are in a unique position to actually portray how people actually use the Internet rather than try to find ways to make this something that appears dynamic from a third-person view.

Full review on EFC.

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #02: Max Mercury, "Painting the Way to the Moon", The History of Time Travel, Uncanny & Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two

Why is it taking me so long to post this? Well, it's a lot of movies, I've been spending a lot of time seeing movies which obviously cuts down into time to write about them, snow has been keeping me working at home and I do a lot of my writing on the bus, but here's the real reason:

The photos below were taken on my tablet. I was the guy holding up his 8.4-inch tablet to take a picture. I'm so sorry.

Before we get to that, a mini-index of shorts and features seen on the seventh:

"Tugger the Ship"
Matt Mercury
"Omega"
"Moon-Lite"
"Painting the Way to the Moon"
The History of Time Travel
Uncanny
Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two

At least not posting until tonight means that I can mention that the director of Matt Mercury sent me an email today and seems to be a genuinely nice guy who was just thrilled to have his movie play somewhere.



From left to right, festival director Garen Daly and "Painting the Way to the Moon" producers Adam Morrow, Jacob Akira Okada, and Carlyanna Taylor; Okada also directed. It was an interesting conversation, in that there wasn't a lot of extra information to be had, but they talked a lot about balancing the movie: That Ed Belbruno was great, but he is the sort of hyper-confident person who will assert his version of events strongly enough that you need to see it through another's eyes as well.



Christian Carroll, writer/director/star of Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two, was last up. Not quite the as much fun a conversation as earlier - this audience is not, as a whole, really into the artsy sort of movie he made - but there were enough folks who liked what he did to have a conversation before going home.

Okay... Now that the shameful use of tablets as cameras has been admitted, hopefully the rest will get done more quickly (although I want to write up the Oscar shorts first).

"Tugger the Ship"

* * 1/2 (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

It's no surprise that "Tugger" writer/director Kevin Bertazzon has a background in visual effects and animation; his short has a lot of that, and while it's not necessarily the most eye-popping you'll see, it's bright and colorful in a way that matches its one joke after another pace. Even when the gags are strained or some other shortcoming rears its head, "Tugger" tends to be fun to watch.

That's no small thing. Bertazzon and his cohorts are cramming absolutely everything they have into something the length of a TV sitcom, and the dashing from one thing to another can get to be too much. Of the cast, only one or two are really what you'd call good actors - Reid Koster plays things fairly straight while the rest tend to ham it up, and gets some of the bigger laughs that way - and it sometimes feels like the filmmakers have to frantically introduce new things because the plot and running bags aren't sustainable. But they keep ahead of collapse, and that's more than can be said for a lot of comedies like this.

Matt Mercury

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Attending any genre film festival means you will probably get hit with parodies claiming great affection for science fiction films and television from the 1950s and 1960s but which wind up accentuating their weaknesses or playing as shallow imitation rather than recognizing what made them exciting. Matt Mercury may not be the worst of the bunch, but it's among the more leaden I've seem lately, dragging more in its sixty-five minutes than many serious movies do in twice the time.

The titular Rocket Ranger (Matt Lavine) commands a ship with a fairly small crew - blue-haired navigator Sparx McCoy (Lauren Galley), robot chief engineer Jinky (voice of Heidi Hughes), and an uplifted gorilla science officer. Their latest mission is to stop Professor Brainwave (Bill Hughes), who has been given a massive cranium and a desire to pull the Earth out of its orbit after encountering a group of extra-dimensional aliens. He'll need the help of not just Brainwave's former colleague Dr. Syfer (Rick Corrigan), but his former first officer and lover Mulkress Dunner (Chantal Nicole).

There's enough blame to go around for why Matt Mercury is not much good, and the usual impulse is to not come down too hard on the people onscreen who are likely doing the movie more for love and fun than anything else, but there's little avoiding that star Matt Lavine is a weak link as the title character. He gamely wears a goofy uniform and hairstyle and cheerily plays the fool, but just doesn't display the comic timing or inflection necessary to make his playing dumb funny, and doesn't fare much better when the script tries to paint him as having some emotional complexity. He's not necessarily the worst of a weak cast - most of the actors could use some seasoning - but he's in the most scenes with the least personality on display.

Full review at EFC.

"Omega"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

There's a temptation with short films like "Omega" to discuss them less in terms of the short itself than the feature version that the filmmakers would clearly like to make. This one sets up characters (a combat vet and his worried doctor girlfriend), a situation (a two-talked comet that may actually be a spaceship heading toward Earth), and a cliffhanger, and then cuts off. Wouldn't it be great to know more? Sure! And, heck, maybe an agent or exec or future festival programmer in the audience will feel the same way, leading to money and visibility for such a feature. There are worse strategies in the dog-eat-dog world of independent film financing.

This one is probably a little more deserving than most; director Peter Ninos has a pretty good eye and puts a nice-looking film together. The action isn't big or unusually polished for the film's likely budget level, but it's clear enough for Ninos to be showing what he can do than trying to hide what he can't. Adam Schmerl and Kate Englefield give decent performances, and that helps "Omega" feel a lot more like a real movie than a calling-card demo.

And then you get to the script, which has some problems. It's frequently clunky, giving the cast very basic scenarios to play out and then really stretching to tie them together. Maybe a feature version would be more developed needing to worry less about every second and having an actual ending to build toward. As it is, the gaps are pretty clear. Too bad if the feature never happens, although it's not a bad place to start.

"Moon-Lite"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Writing a children's book is harder than it looks (or at least it must be; I can't say that I've ever put serious effort into doing so). Making a live-action movie, even a short one, that feels like a children's book is even harder. David Dibble does a fair job of it with "Moon-Lite"; what's going on is obvious from the start but there's enough good cheer to make it kind of fun.

As with a lot of movies that try for this sort of flavor, I would kind of like to see it with actual kids to see how they react. I found something a bit of in its sorry of a harmless eccentric ignored by the locals except for one curious youngster; it's so focused on using its characters to impart an idea that it make them I individuals with personalities rather than quirks. Maybe it doesn't need to - it succeeds in what it sets out to do - but I think that could make it more entertaining to adults and perhaps even get kids to empathize more, too.

"Painting the Way to the Moon"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

In a lot of ways, Ed Belbruno's story isn't that different from that of other scientists whose creations are worth discussing: He has a notion, it turns out to be true and useful, but both it and the means to come up with it are unconventional enough to be sidelined - at least until he's recharged his batteries in another endeavor and the ballistic transfer math he specialized in process necessary. It's the details that make it fun.

For instance, Belbruno attributes his mathematical genius to a batch of magic mushrooms that he ingested as a young man. He also claims to have seen a UFO while driving across the country in 1991, and is a creator of a ballet meant to explain how the Earth's unusually large and iron-deficient moon formed. Next to that, the fact that he is also a painter worthy of note beyond his astronomical influences can seem very conventional.

That director Jacob Akira Okada manages to cover that entire spectrum in just under an hour is an impressive feat; longer and less complete documentaries have certainly been made about similarly multifaceted people. There are two keys to this, I think. First, Belbruno himself is not just gregarious and anxious to talk, but good at it. Not all scientists or artists can communicate w what they do without it becoming a lecture, but he describes the periods and cons of the standard Hohman transfer usually used to get shops into lunar orbit along with his fuel-efficient but time-consuming ballistic transfer clearly. It's fun science that doesn't take the focus away from the scientist who is the film's actual subject.

Okada also does a fine job of keeping the movie fun while also acknowledging that Belbruno can often be a stop or two past lovably eccentric. Belbruno will often get just enough time in a segment to come off as a little bit of a loon, and the filmmakers will often cut to other interviews to not necessarily rebut his version of events but give other perspectives. There are plenty of chances to look at his work, which really is rather nice, especially if one has interest in the science influencing it, and scenes of that ballet being performed by a class of kids that really is worth seeing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson appears toward the end to contrast the way Belbruno's two careers manifest, summarizing the previous hour nicely. That doesn't diminish the rest of the material; after all, knowing information is a different thing than seeing the expressions that come from it.

The History of Time Travel

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Mock documentaries are inherently gimmick movies; it is a rare one that does not crash hard up against the form's limitations, and when that happens, it doesn't matter whether the disappointment comes from the filmmaker having to cheat or the presentation just fizzling out. The History of Time Travel inevitably paints itself into a corner, but unlike most cases, that's where it wants to be.

Writer/director Ricky Kennedy presents it as a production of "History Television", and like many productions of the channel's real-world analog, it starts out in World War II, postulating a second letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning of the Nazis' plans to invent time travel along with the atomic bomb. Unlike their colleagues in New Mexico, the "Illinois Project" doesn't find success during the war, but it's cheap enough that it, and particularly scientist Richard Page, continues to receive functioning from the Pentagon, although it may fall to Page's soon Edward to complete his work. Which he does, obviously, as they are making a documentary about the history and ethics of this invention.

If it were just that simple, of course, we would just have to be impressed with how well Kennedy and his cast & crew recreate this sort of program while slipping bits of sly humor into the mix. It's a straight-faced pastiche with plenty of clever detail in its archival photos, interview footage, and other elements that help create a believable world, with very few cracks, although one's mileage may vary on that (for instance, I am okay with using an Atari 2600 in the design, but can't begin to guess why you'd have a Pitfall! cartridge in the slot). It may not be a perfectly slick imitation, but the details are generally well-done, especially the various experts who hit types pretty squarely in the center but still don't come across as bland or generic.

Full review at EFC.

Uncanny

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Uncanny jokes about the Turing Test casually enough to make even longtime science fiction fans marvel a bit at how the phrase has started to enter the general lexicon in the last few years. The go-to reference for this short of thing used to be the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, and its goal of trying to identify a genuine emotional response is the one that takes center stage here. Am interesting setup, to be sure, but also kind of a problem.

The film is built around tech reporter Joy Andrews (Lucy Griffiths) being given an seven days of access to the lab space of David Kressen (Mark Weber), a prodigy who had been designing the future since graduating college at the age of eighteen seven years ago. He shows Joy a bunch of cool stuff - lightweight bone replacements, synthetic skin, prosthetic eyes - and then introduces her to Adam (David Clayton Rogers), who is what you get when you connect all of those innovations to a cutting-edge artificial intelligence. He's evidently sophisticated enough to become envious when Joy starts showing more ingest in the scientist than the science project.

It's hard to figure out exactly why, though, even without playing the stereotypical "she's an attractive, accomplished woman and he's a real nerd" game. David just isn't very charismatic at all, and even without the readily-apparent irony of Adam seeming like the warmer one of the pair, his clumsy social-stuntedness never comes off as endearing enough to really buy Joy being attracted to him enough for it to become a major cog in the plot. It takes all kinds, sure, but there's a spark missing, and neither director Matthew Leutwyler nor writer Shahin Chandrasoma quite seems to have a handle on what Joy seers in him.

Full review at EFC.

Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

Christian Carroll hits a couple of things I really like in Suicide or Lulu and Me in a World Made for Two, enough that I can overlook its faults, probably better than many would. It's a nifty little movie, although there are one or two things that make it a little hard to entirely love.

It starts with Louise McPhee (Adeline Thery), a mute amnesiac staying at the home of her boyfriend Jorge (Carroll) somewhere near Oklahoma City. They met in Paris, where Louise was a street performer whose married boyfriend had just dumped her and Jorge was working on special photographic projects. They fell in love, and together created amazing art. Or at least, that's what's in the vials of liquid material that Jorge users to restore her memory.

That McPhee resembles silent film star Louise Brooks, especially the iconic haircut, is no accident, and is kind of morbidly funny, then, for her to spend large chunks of the movie mute, in addition to the film being shot in black and white. Or, more likely, a filter is applied; that's what is more likely these days, even in a movie that very specifically fetishizes silent films in general and Pandora's Box in particular. That one features Brooks as a woman in a highly mutable relationship, which means Carroll is kind of meta on top of meta here, with the style and the brainwashing and both obscure camera tech and steampunk-inspired virtual reality as the means of control. It can be a little over-clever and extends the metaphor and tendency toward cooler-than-you references toward the end, but if you like this sort of material, you'll probably find Carroll does it fairly well. It's not empty reference substituting for a story.

Full review at EFC.