Short Stuff: The 2017 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

It's a perennial observation, but there's probably no other category in the Academy Awards whose definition dictates the form of the film that gets made, as three of the five nominees are within a minute or two of the maximum length of a short film, leading one to wonder how many of them were cut down from something not quite feature-length and how many arrived at that length and pace naturally.

That all of these shorts have likely been edited to qualify as well as work as films is interesting in that about half of them are leap-of-faith documentaries, so to speak - records of events where the filmmakers came into a situation that, though interesting, had to play out. Documentaries of any length can be like that - how many times have filmmakers not known whether they would have a short, a feature, or something that just doesn't come together when starting?

"Traffic Stop"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2017 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

To a certain extent, director Kate Davis probably knew she had something with "Traffic Stop"; there was likely an active investigation going on even when she started filming. The fact that the wheels of justice can turn slowly at times likely put bounds on how much of the story of Brealion King she could tell; though the audience gets to see the shocking beginning as Ms. King is pulled aside by a traffic cop in Austin, TX and dealt with quite harshly for what is basically a speeding ticket, her civil suit could take years to play out, even if Davis came to the story with things already well underway.

She is able to make that a strength. While the opening scene of this film, taken from the dashcam footage of the office who arrested her, is shocking and visceral, Davis is able to shift the audience's perspective on the film by dedicating a solid chunk of time after that to getting to know King, letting the audience see her as an elementary school teacher, a dancer, and someone who has survived a tough start in life to excel in other ways The incident that gives the film its title may be a major event in her life, but the audience can quickly see that it is not the defining one. It's an impressive balancing act that King manages as director and editor here, as she makes the film about King as a person even as she eventually returns to the incident, giving it more time and some more prominence. It's eventually integrated fully into the film, not so much as its skeleton, but something that must inevitably be part of King's life, a visceral reminder of what she, as an African-American woman, cannot take for granted as she may have done before.

It is, as such, inevitably not neat, and some will likely raise eyebrows at how, if Davis ever tried to follow the story from any perspective other than King's, it doesn't 'make the final cut. But perhaps that's for the best, if the point is uncertainty, and how it can eventually make its way into an otherwise confident person's make-up.

"Edith+Eddie"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2017 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

By contrast, it seems likely that filmmaker Laura Checkoway probably started "Edith+Eddie" knowing that there was a certain amount of risk involved, what with the two subjects of the film being in their mid-nineties even if they are also newlyweds, but maybe not quite seeing that a narrative would develop, as two daughters of 96-year-old Edith clash over her desire to stay in the family home with Eddie, despite her age, relative frailty, and slight dementia. It's a story that feels like it developed before Checkoway's eyes despite what might simply have been a desire to tell the sweet story of two elders who found love despite their age and different ethnicities.

It makes for some interesting situations where access is concerned, as she is able to be on the scene when certain confrontations happen and is able to talk extensively with some members of Edith's family while others - as well as the legal guardian assigned to her - stay away, seemingly unwilling to talk with someone they see as an adversary. There are other notable absences as well - that 95-year-old Eddie seems alone in the world is something the filmmakers never explore on-screen, even if it is interesting that his daughter-in-law seems to be the only person to visit him in the hospital when he is ill. It's a subtext that potentially colors every aspect of Eddie's relationship with Edith and her family, and maybe it's better that the audience is left to ponder that rather than having it all explained.

Whether the conflict over Edith's future was discovered or part of the original brief, the way Checkoway tells the tale evokes the right feelings, a heady mix of the joy that the pair's love brings them and the loneliness and difficulty of age and how it requires pressing on even as body and mind slow down. It never looks easy to be these two, but it at least looks happier as long as they have each other.

"Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2017 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre GoldScreen (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

Sometimes, a documentarian finds a great subject or topic and the film makes itself, with the filmmaker having to choose the best bits; other times, as I suspect is the case with Frank Stiefel's "Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405", it takes a great deal of effort to make it seem that way. Artist Mindy Alper is fascinating, but it must have been tremendously difficult to find the right material with which to present her.

Mindy, after all, has a lot misfiring in her head, and her handicap is the audience's first impression of her, with Stiefel saving the fact that she is a tremendously talented artist for a little bit later, introducing it almost off-handedly, as she starts sketching while doing something else and her lines start forming something interesting beyond just being good draftsmanship. From there, Stiefel starts interspersing the story of Mindy's personal history with more looks at her art, and one gets the sense afterward that he and editor Ting Poo have cut things to very deliberate effect, building up her expressiveness as an artist in a way that is parallel to her difficulties communicating but separate from it. This isn't the story of a savant whose talent is compensation for a handicap or Mindy finding an alternate way to connect; it's the seeming paradox of the thing that gives her story its power.

The filmmakers use both sides of that coin to make something hypnotic. Much of the film is spent talking to Mind directly, and that footage is carefully cut so that the audience can get accustomed to the odd rhythms and quirks of her speech without making it seem like a code or overly simplistic, while her art is occasionally animated to keep the film dynamic without letting the animator's work overpower hers. Stiefel seldom pairs Mindy with other people, which both prevents her from seeming less than them as they talk while also emphasizing just how much she has to plug away on her own. It's sometimes a sadder result than the audience might hope for - one would like to see her and her mother reconnect, for instance - but one that will almost certainly leave a viewer fascinated by this woman who seems to find peace amid trauma just as she can express herself artistically even if verbalization can be difficult.

"Heroin(e)"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2017 in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

Elaine McMillion Sheldon's "Heroin(e)" should likely be pluralized somehow - she builds the film around three women working to deal with the opioid crisis in Huntington, West Virginia - but the English language isn't really built for that to work. It's an admirably no-nonsense look at the situation in the present tense, only tangentially concerned with how opioid addiction became so widespread, why Huntington has an overdose ten times the national average, and what can be done in the future, but far from detached or heartless.

If there's one singular heroine to the story, it's Jan Rader, deputy chief of the local fire department who tirelessly shows up at the scene, does what she and her department can to save a life, and often moves on to the next call directly. Two other women get a similar amount of screen time time - County Drug Court judge Patricia Keller and Necia Freeman, whose "Brown Bag Ministry" delivers lunches with biblical tracts to the local prostitutes - and viewers will likely be impressed with them in the same way: They are compassionate, but firm, none seemingly terribly interested in punishment. Sheldon highlights that they are attacking the problem from different angles, but it's hard to ignore that Rader is the most active and the most likely to both talk about her stance and be shown acting. Freeman explains herself quite clearly, but she's not necessarily shown getting results; Keller does the work but seldom addresses the camera; instead spending her time on the bench.

And for all that Rader's segments of the movie are carefully pieced together to illustrate that it's both necessary and possible to be motivated by hope and pragmatism simultaneously (and quietly making an argument that there are no acceptable losses), it's Keller's drug court that perhaps might merit the deeper dive: Those scenes play like a combination of parole hearing, school, and rehab, and I find myself curious how it works beyond the glimpses given. Still, a short needs focus, and spending time on the attitude that these women bring to bear rather than all of the details makes the film's point without getting bogged down in details

"Knife Skills"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2017 in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (Oscar-Nominated Shorts, DCP)

The last film on the compilation program (though with the documentaries often split in two, it's not unusual to see them "out of order", Thomas Lennon's "Knife Skills" makes an enjoyable finale. It offers up a neat situation - the opening of a French restaurant in Cleveland that would be staffed by those recently released from prison who likely had no experience with the business (and as such also served as a culinary school). It's a story that would probably make a good dramatic feature, but works in this format as well.

It does occasionally bump up against the forty-minute wall a bit more than the other films in the package, giving the most time to the restaurant's founder, Brandon, although that may be as much about ease of access as anything. Because the restaurant business and life after incarceration is difficult, some of the other people Lennon follows will drop out, and others reach turning points off-screen, and the result is a story that sometimes feels a bit incomplete, with Brandon's stability and availability the most complete arc to fit into a limited time. That's no knock; it's clear from the start that he's got more going on than simple philanthropy, and Lennon builds a fine film around him, even if it's the employees who have the potentially more transformational story.


It's a solid collection all around. My choice for the award tonight would be "Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405", and it's also the way I'd bet; as much as the whole group is interesting, that one's arresting, grabbing one's attention in the way few films of any length do.

Cook Up a Storm

Thought not really a romance at all - it’s not even really bromantic in terms of the two male leads becoming close friends - Cook Up a Storm opened on Valentine’s Day and, because that was a Tuesday and there were various previews, other openings, and special events the rest of the week, it wound up having four different schedules in its first four days, which worked out okay for me because, as it slid back from nearly 8pm on Tuesday to just after 6pm on Friday, I was able to match it up with my schedule attending the Sci-Fi festival. It’s trickier than it sounds, because that one is scheduled very tight - in part because, during the winter, the Somerville Theatre doesn’t generally have 9pm shows from Sunday to Thursday, so they want the fest’s show going in pretty early (or the festival doesn’t want to pay to keep the theater open later; it works out the same way). So, if I’m going to see something at any place other than that theater, it can be tough matching the way multiplexes stretch things out to the one-after-another scheduling.

Fortunately, this not only ran at 6:45pm on a night when I figured I wouldn’t bother with Westworld, having just seen it on the big screen a couple years ago, but it had an unusually short preview package (just The Great Wall and The Devotion of Suspect X), so I had a fair amount more time to get up the Red Line than I expected. Still, getting to Boston Common by 6:45pm from Burlington meant no chance to actually eat, and while I’m no foodie - to be perfectly honest, I am a complete culinary coward - it seemed vaguely wrong to grab a concession stand pizza and soda to eat during this movie.

Pretty sparse crowd, and I wonder why that is; it’s a fairly fun movie with a nice cast, and I wonder if Hong Kong/Cantonese just doesn’t draw as well in Boston as China/Mandarin movies, or if the weird release date threw people, or if maybe Magnum is a bit behind China Lion in rallying a crowd. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed this, but it still seems like a bummer. I also kind of wonder if it’s a bit delayed - there’s a goofy New Year’s thing at the end, but I’m pretty sure Chinese New Year was a couple of weeks ago.

Kuet zin shek san (Cook Up a Storm)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2017 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)

There are certain themes I see in every Hong Kong movie that makes it to America these days, even though it’s kind of simplistic and patronizing to expect the changes in the city and its relationship to the rest of the world - basically, the reason why Hong Kong makes the papers - is going to be the focus of any film made there. For better or worse, it’s part of Cook Up a Storm, but so is everything else; the filmmakers are cramming about five different food movies into this one. The jumping around makes it kind of hard for any one story to really grab the audience, but there’s something kind of nice about how this allows its small stories to stay small rather than get too caught up in self-importance.

It mostly takes place in two restaurants across from each other on Spring Avenue, which has long been the culinary center of Hong Kong. “Seven”, named for its founder (Ge You), has been there for thirty years, serving Cantonese favorites at their very best. The current head chef is Sky Ko (Nicholas Tse Ting-fung), the nephew Seven took in twenty years ago when his father left to travel the world. “Stellar” just opened across the street; it’s a well-financed gourmet spot where Sino-Korean chef Paul Ahn (Jung Yong-hwa) and his assistant Mayo (Michelle Bai Bing) tend toward European cuisine. It doesn’t take long for Paul & Mayo to rub Sky and his girlfriend Uni (Tiffany Tang Yan), Seven’s manager, the wrong way, which will play out in a number of ways, from impromptu cooking demonstrations to the attempts by Stellar’s owners to redevelop the whole street to a televised competition on “Chef Please”, the winner of which will go to Macau to compete against “God of Cookery” Mountain Ko (Anthony Wong Chau-sang).

My eyebrows raised a bit at what folks were calling Mountain, although it doesn’t seem as though there’s any connection between this and Stephen’s slapstick comedy by that name akin to the way that the recent From Vegas to Macau movies link to the God of Gamblers series; it must just be a common Cantonese phrase. Instead, director Raymond Yip Wai-man and writers Manfred Wong Man-chun, Liu Yi, and Hana Li Jing-ling combine two or three light dramas: There’s the story of a neighborhood institution keeping on in the face of gentrification here, a rival between local traditionalism and international fusion made personal there, a shocking personal betrayal for one chef and a family schism for another. That’s not a bad set of things to have running in parallel, but instead they wind up going in sequence, creating the feeling of jumping around, plots resolved without getting time to simmer, and no feeling of the stories having something similar at their base and being united.

Full review on EFC.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

Regal: Please stop showing that terrible extended preview for When the Game Stands Tall before every movie. Aside from just not looking very good - and it has the appearance of a terrible movie - concentrating so much on the steak seems kind of tone-deaf. Oh, the high school jocks who are probably worshipped more than is healthy even by Texas football standards lost their first game in twelve years and you're talking about adversity? Screw. You.

(And, everyone? Stop showing that Dracula Untold preview for any reason.)

So much negativity. I also feel like I bag on director Lasse Hallström's reputation more than I should here; I'm pretty sure that his career is more than studio films meant to look indie, but I'll be darned if I can remember the rest.

Sorry, again. Mediocre studio films after a month of awesome genre eccentricity shouldn't make me so cranky.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2014 in Regal Fenway #4 (first-run, DCP)

Good food is wasted on me, but I can generally enjoy a good food movie as much as anyone. But for all that it talks a good game about spice and creativity, The Hundred-Foot Journey is rather bland fare. It looks nice enough, but it meanders never finds something that will grab the audience, despite trying a bit of everything.

That meandering starts early on, as the Kadam family arrives in Europe at Rotterdam, having first fled India when their restaurant burned down after a disputed election, then spent a year in London in between. Their car breaks down in a French village, where "Papa" (On Puri) decides to purchase a vacant restaurant and open it with son Hassan (Manish Dayal) cooking. One of the reasons this space is so affordable is that it's directly across the street from a traditional French place with a Michelin star, and while Hassan and sous-chef Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) become fast friends, owner Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren) is none too enamored with the new neighbors. Hassan developing an interest in French cuisine just complicates things.

I'm curious about the Richard C. Morias novel that screenwriter Steven Knight and director Lasse Hallström adapted. Is it thick with subplots for Hassan's four siblings (or is that three siblings and his sister's husband)? Are the three distinct phases of the story more well-balanced, with at least one character seeming like an active participant in each? As it stands, the film feels like the filmmakers had dozens of ideas that needed to either be fleshed out or pruned away to give the rest some room. It hurts the film two ways, on the one hand connecting the movie's parts with thin threads, and on the other blunting the moments that should be sharp. Especially at the center, when a certain bit of history repeating should yield a much more dramatic reaction from the Kadams while Mme. Mallory's dissection of some of the lyrics to "La Marseillaise" seems like the end of the film having anything to say about European xenophobia, rather than the beginning.

Full review at EFC

Independent Film Festival Boston 2014.04: Jon Imber's Left Hand, We are the Best!, The Search for General Tso, Wild Canaries, A Is for Alex

So, the plan was to basically live in theater #5 for most of the day, but the schedule got rearranged for the pretty good reason of a metric ton of people wanting tickets to Jon Imber's Left Hand. Imber, as it happens, was a Somerville resident, who passed away a mere nine days before the screening. It was probably not a bad way to say goodbye.



So, there's Imber's wife Jill Hoy and the director of the film, Richard Kane. Sort of amusing thing: The film identifies Hoy as Imber's "partner" and muse, so when it caught up to their wedding, I kind of wondered what was up with that - is it so unusual for artists to actually be monogamous and married that it doesn't even occur to biographers to use those terms?

At any rate, I was very glad to see this one; I had sort of written it off when it was scheduled for screen #5 and had sold out, but I bought a ticket when it moved to the larger screen. It wound up being one of my favorites of the festival.

Because Jon Imber's Left Hand overlapped with The Case Against 8 which overlapped with We Are the Best!, that one got moved to screen #1 as well. It was one that Chlotrudis was co-presenting, I think, although not in any way that was particularly visible. Fun little movie.

I may, perhaps, have had time to get to the Brattle for Point and Shoot, but the MBTA wasn't running red line trains north of Harvard that weekend (that they did the previous weekend just because it was Easter and not for the festival is, in my opinion, a sign of misplaced priorities). So I waited until the "TBA" slot at 4:45 on screen #5 was filled in and went for that; it turned out to be The Search for General Tso, itself pretty nifty. There were, as you might expect, people there handing flyers out for 9-Man. I hadn't realized it was by the same guy who did The City Dark, one of the docs I really liked from a couple years ago.

I'd like to say I had Chinese after that, but, no, I went to Deli-cious and had a burger. It was a good burger.



Hey, it's Andrew Corkin again! He was at the screening of Big Significant Things the night before and mentioned that he had produced two films at the festival, which led to a little bit of talk about how, during much of this movie's production, he was down south getting the other one ready. He apologized that director Lawrence Michael Levine and members of the cast couldn't be there; Levine and his wife Sofia Takal are apparently in California prepping their next project, which will apparently be somewhat bigger. Truth is, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the scale of this one. After a few days at the festival, you sort of just start looking at the tickets you've purchased and showing up to the theater marked without much remembering why, which sometimes means that as a very cool set of credits runs, you're like "hey, Sophia Takal... Kevin Corrigan... Alia Shawkat... I like all those people!"

So, yes, kind of tired at that point, but the next one was short.



Got to admit, I didn't remember Alex & Katie Orr had done Blood Car until they mentioned it. Looking back at my review, I'm kind of surprised to see that I apparently described it as the same sort of DIY movie as this one. Granted, I barely remember it at all, but it was a bit more semi-pro in my head. They are, as you might expect, a fun pair.

Then it was home and sleeping fast for the next day.

Jon Imber's Left Hand

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

I can't claim to have much of a grasp on Join Imber's place in the world of art even after seeing this movie; there's a lot of background and the film has other things to attack in its fifty-seven minutes. I can say this, though: If I am ever handed a death sentence that is especially cruel in its irony, I hope that I can respond to it with a fraction of a percent of the quiet spirit Imber did, whether I've got a camera crew documenting it or not.

Jon Imber, you see, was an American painter who started on portraiture, moved to landscapes, and then eventually abstract landscapes, and still has a lot of painting in him when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of ALS. To make matters worse, the first thing that the neuromuscular condition attacked was his dominant right hand. His reaction? To start painting with his left hand and cram as much work as he can into the time he has remaining.

That's a noble goal, but it's the way he reacts to it that makes the film a joy to watch: He's fascinated by the way that forty years of learning the craft of painting interacts with an arm that is physically starting from scratch. He's an admirably upbeat person in general, speaking about how the disease will eventually kill him and how he hopes to make it through the summer before severe deterioration starts with the expected paralyzing emotions held in check and describing several painters as the greatest ever when discussing his influences and art in general. He manages to be as jovial as he can while still being serious about his condition and his art, making this an easy film to watch even though the very first scene shows us something near the end.

Full review at EFC

Vi är bäst! (We Are the Best)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2014 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

The opening scene of We Are the Best! briefly reminded me of another recent Scandinavian film, Sons of Norway, which followed a punk-loving teenager whose need to rebel was frustrated by his exceptionally open-minded and accommodating father. This one pretty quickly goes in a different, lighter direction, and even if it may seem kind of lightweight at times, it's the sort of airiness that comes from kids going full speed ahead.

The punk-loving kid in that first scene is Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), a 13-year-old living in a Stockholm apartment with her mother in 1982; she's on the phone to her best friend Klara (Mira Grosin) while her mother has a big birthday party. They're kind of outsiders at school, and impulsively decide to start a band at the rec center one night. The center only has a bass and drums for them to practice their song about how they hate their gym teacher, but they quickly hit upon a solution: Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), who plays classical guitar to other students' jeers; she can join the band even if she is a good Christian girl.

Writer/director Lukas Moodysson's wife Coco has been credited pitching in in various capacities on several of his movies, and this one is based on a comic she created, probably based upon her own life - the character name "Bobo" isn't exactly a perplexing alias! It does not, thankfully, seem to be a way to exorcise some particularly traumatic childhood experience; in fact, every time the threat of overheated drama rears its head, the Moodyssons tend to defuse it with a wink and recognition that giving yourself a potentially-regrettable haircut, arguing over a boy, or getting booed on stage is not the end of the world. There's a story, sure, but it's a bunch of little things that happen that builds to something whose importance Bobo probably won't fully recognize until she's grown.

Full review at EFC

The Search for General Tso

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2014 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

General Tso's Chicken is one of the most popular take-out dishes in America, a staple at nearly every Chinese restaurant in the country - and almost entirely unknown in China itself. I'm not certain that figuring out where this ubiquitous dish came from was Ian Cheney's true motivation for making this documentary, but it serves as an interesting and frequently amusing way to tell the story of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Cheney starts his search in Shanghai, showing people photographs of General Tso's Chicken and getting no response. It does lead them to Hunan Province, where he learns that Tso Tsung-t'ang was a local hero, never lost a battle, and was especially well-known for putting down the Taiping rebellion - and probably did not invent any chicken dishes. That means the origin of the dish is most likely to be found in the United States, where Cheney finds a history that involves much more than the sudden popularity of an item on a restaurant menu.

Though the dish first appeared in the 1970s, the story goes back to the 1880s and crisscrosses the United States from San Francisco to New York and back to Los Angeles, with a particularly noteworthy stop in Springfield, Missouri. Cheney finds interesting people to interview about most subjects all over the place, whether people who were present at the events in question or who had the knowledge of them handed down. The stories add up to a history of institutionalized racism and xenophobia, determined assimilation, and culinary plagiarism. Each time Cheney talks with someone, it seems, the conversation never strays from the matter at hand but always winds up pointing in a new direction, so that he and editor Frederick Shanahan can tell the story that encompasses a broad range of subjects without feeling as though they've gotten sidetracked.

Full review at EFC

Wild Canaries

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2014 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Wild Canaries is not quite The Thin Man, but it's better at that sort of thing than any other recent movie that leaps to mind. The combination of murder mystery and screwball comedy is a tough enough not to crack that not many people seem to be trying, but this one uses an impressive cast to breathe a lot of life into a matter of life and death.

Our amateur sleuth is Barri (Sophia Takal), a young woman who hasn't quite seemed to grow up completely. Money being tight, she and her fiance Noah (Lawrence Michael Levine) have a roommate in Barri's friend Jean (Alia Shawkat), even as landlord - and Noah's poker buddy - Damien (Jason Ritter) is showing it to potential buyers, while the film distribution business Noah works at with ex-girlfriend Eleanor (Annie Parisse) is on shaky ground. When their eighty-year old neighbor does, Barri suspects her son Anthony (Kevin Corrigan) of foul play, and while Noah is quick to poo-poo that idea, Barri has time on her hands to snoop.

Murder can be a grim business, but it's also a great way to give a story some structure: Something kicks the story off, the characters are always doing something to get to the resolution, and there is a definitive end point. While all that's going on, you can throw in a bunch of stuff about how Jean may have a crush on Barri, Eleanor might have an "and Noah" clause to her attraction to girls, and Noah might be having doubts about sticking with Barri, and if you do it right, it's not only more fun because this being a thing people talk about as a secondary thing while handling other business makes them seem much less egocentric than when it seems to be their only concern. Plus, even when if the plot doesn't completely dictate how the romance shakes out by who's left standing, there is still going to be a sense of resolution, even if a lot of the same variables from the start are still in play.

Full review at EFC

A Is For Alex

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2014 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, digital)

Someday, Alex & Katie Orr's first-born child is going to see this movie, and in my head it's running fifty-fifty on whether they'll have some explaining to do our whether they'll just be the sort of weird parents where this sort of thing makes perfect sense. Probably the latter; it's not like the people who would make this sort of peculiar, homemade movie will be able or inclined to hold their eccentricity in.

In the movie, Alex is an inventor in the Atlanta area, with his latest creation a pollinating done meant to take the place of all those bees vanishing due to colony collapse disorder. He also find himself facing frequent anxiety attacks over the baby he and Katie are expecting, and as the due date approaches, things are only going to get more stressful as giant robot bees prove to be just as good an idea as you'd expect and the home movies from his childhood that Alex's mother (Judith Beasly) keeps uploading to the internet actually prove to be far more than embarrassing.

Even though the Orrs are seasoned film & television production professionals, with director and co-writer Alex even having a feature under his belt (albeit one named "Blood Car"), this can often have the look and feel of a great big YouTube video, with everyone playing an off-kilter version of themselves and the production oftentimes quite literally happening their backyard or garage. It was, apparently, often shoot that way, as each new thing that freaked them out or struck them funny about impending parenthood inspired a scene that would get shot that weekend. I suspect much of the movie came about that way too, as subplots will often vanish for what seems like a long time only to have three or four bits on a row as Alex, Katie, and co- writer Adam Pinney figure out what to do with them. It makes for a chaotic, uneven movie, even with its short 74-minute running time.

Full review at EFC

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Last week, the teacher of my Japanese class told me that she had found my blog sort of by chance (I'd mentioned that I reviewed movies here and for eFilmCritic, and it certainly didn't escape her attention that eiga was one of the Japanese words I already knew when class started, but she hadn't been looking for it specifically). I wound up distributing a few cards with the URLs on them, which is nifty and all, but you'd better believe that writing this review made me a little more nervous than usual, and Sunday's screening of Hirokazu Koreeda's Kiseki? Yeah, no pressure at all!

I did, however, do a little better than usual in picking up Japanese vocabulary, in that I was able to pick oishi ("tasty") and tabemashita ("I ate") out on occasion, along with the occasional number.

Nifty little movie, anyway. Maybe I'll have to give sushi another chance sometime, although the irony is that I figure I'd be a lot more interested if it was more like what we mostly see here - seafood, some spices, and rice - rather than the rolls with vegetables and ingredients whose names I do not recognize which seem much more common in American spots. Maybe if I'd been able to tear myself away from work earlier, I could have joined the rest of the Chlotrudis folk for dinner beforehand, though there really wasn't time.

Instead, I wound up going home afterward and heating a frozen pizza while I started writing the review. I felt like a monster, as well I should have.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2012 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run, 35mm)

I can't say I'm a particular fan of sushi; in fact, I'm quite the culinary coward. But you don't have to like a particular food to admire fine craftsmanship and dedication, and those are things that Jiro Ono has plenty of. David Gelb's documentary on the man isn't exactly short on them, either.

Jiro Ono is 85 years old, and has been making sushi for about seventy-five of them. Despite being located in a Ginza subway station, his restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, may be the world's best. It has a mere ten seats and is booked for lunch and dinner at least a month in advance - and that meal will run a visitor roughly three hundred dollars, depending on what is available at the fish market that morning. Many of Jiro's former employees have gone on to open their own well-regarded restaurants, including his younger son Takashi, but elder son Yoshikazu still toils alongside his father after thirty years as the designated successor to a man who appears to have no interest in retiring.

There are several different threads running through Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but the most important is perhaps that a job done well brings pleasure. Though food writer Masuhiro Yamamoto does, eventually, describe innovations Jiro made in how a meal is structured, that is given less attention than how Jiro is shokunin, a true master who feels responsible to do his best. Throughout the movie, director David Gelb gives us further examples of how Jiro makes a bit more effort: He deals with the seafood and rice merchants that have the highest standards, cooks the rice under higher pressure than anyone else, has his staff massage the octopus for twice as long, and he and Yoshikazu sample the wares constantly to maintain quality control. A scene at the end demonstrates how this attention to detail extends all the way to how he places his morsels on each individual customer's plate.

It takes a certain kind of personality to find pleasure and serenity in that sort of repetition to exacting standards (many apprentices quit after one day), though not necessarily the one a viewer might expect from other profiles of chefs as difficult rock star types. Jiro comes across as quite vital for an elderly man, with flashes of self-deprecating humor to offset plenty of self-confidence. Gelb does a nice job of teasing out the gradations of his personality despite much of the audience needing to follow the subjects' words through subtitles: There are hints of Jiro's controlling nature in the restaurant carrying over to his relationship with his sons, for instance, and Yoshikazu is an intriguing fellow: He often seems more laid-back and less ambitious than Jiro and Takashi, the ideal of a respectful son. He so seldom seems guarded that the moments where he seems to chafe certainly elicit audience curiosity.

It's a bit of a stereotype to say that Gelb has his work cut out for him because his subjects are Japanese and in a very traditional business, but a tendency among the Onos toward extreme politeness and respect for tradition does make it harder for him to build a narrative. If Yoshikazu would like to get out of his father's shadow, he keeps it well-hidden; the audience must also infer any thematic connection between Jiro's absent father and his sons' strong ties. There's a lot of things in the movie that would be fodder for a fine dramatic picture in a fictionalized version, but which stays under the surface here. A segment toward the end lamenting the increasing lack of quality seafood, while sincere, seems included to get the movie just a few minutes longer so that it feels feature-length.

The movie does serve as pretty good food porn, though. Even those not too enamored of that particular cuisine will have to admire the simple beauty of his creations, not just in the loving beauty shots, but in the footage of every stage of preparation. Gelb also finds time to talk about food intelligently, adding a bit of extra flavor to those shots.

There may be juicier stories to be told about Jiro, his sons, and their quest for excellence in their field, but this is not a documentary that tells tales out of school. What we do see leaves no doubt about Jiro being a fascinating subject, and even those who don't much like sushi should find this a tasty morsel.

(Formerly at EFC)

NYAFF Day 03: A Boy and His Samurai, Duel to the Death, Karate-Robo Zaborgar, Ninja Kids!!!, and Buddha Mountain

My second day at the New York Asian Film Festival was rainy, although I can't say I really noticed once I got in the theater; the folks at Lincoln Center were willing to allow camping out, and with something like twenty minutes between most shows, it didn't make sense to wander very far from my seat once I'd gotten in place for A Boy and His Samurai. It's a weirdly isolated feeling, after a while, but the periodic thanks braving the weather at entreaties to those who hadn't already bought tickets for the entire day's slate to spend the rest of the day there at least assured me that I wasn't completely wasting the day inside.

One thing worth noting for future reference: The Lincoln Center area is not exactly brimming with quick, cheap food. I spent a fair amount of time looking for some before A Boy and His Samurai started, only burn up time that could have been spent actually eating if I'd just gone back to Lansky's and tried the brunch. Sure, it's a bit of a missed opportunity when you go to a new city and wind up eating in the same place multiple times, but "popcorn for breakfast" is not the best alternative. Especially when the very first movie taunts you with delicious-looking sweets for the second half of its running time.

On a side note, I need to get more Twitter followers (@JaySeaver, folks). By the time Karate-Robo Zaborgar was starting, I was hungry again, and I offered the last admission on my ten-movie ticket for a box of Raisinets. Sadly, it didn't appear any of the 150-odd people and robots that follow me were in a position to take me up on that offer, so I tore into a slice of pizza once I got back to the hotel.

(The less said about the hotel, the better - I suppose you shouldn't expect much when you sort by ascending price on Expedia, but it was a narrow room with a sink but only one bathroom for the floor, and you bring the toilet paper that they supplied in the room. Not ideal. I also wound up toting my laptop around all day, partly so I could write, but more for not really wanting to leave it in that room out of my sight. And aside from that, a lot of people must walk their dogs on this street, because even though most people I saw cleaned up after their pets, the scent lingered.)

Monday morning, I would return home to Boston to watch the Red Sox and pyrotechnics. It wound up being a pretty good weekend of movie gluttony, the perfect warm-up for Fantasia (which starts tonight!).

Chonmage Purin (A Boy and His Samurai)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2011 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (New York Asian Film Festival 2011)

A Boy and His Samurai has a well-worn fantasy premise that could have very easily proceded in a very predictable fashion. However, even if the original novel it was based on did not have its time-lost samurai discovering the joys of baking, audiences still might have expected a clever, even surprising film from the director of Fish Story and Golden Slumber, and that's what Yoshihiro Nakamura delivers: An off-beat and unusually mature fantasy that should still play well for a young audience.

One day, Tomoya Yusa (Fuku Suzuki) and his mother Hiroko (Rie Tomosaka) spot a handsome young samurai outside a supermarket, looking very confused. Hiroko is sure that it's just an actor doing some sort of promotion, but when they encounter him again a few days later, the man - one Kijima Yasube (Ryo Nishikido) is a mess and seems very confused by the modern world. They take him in, and he eventually proves willing to adapt, helping Hiroko around the house and eventually taking an interest in making custards and pastries. Hiroko still suspects he is a confused modern man, but Kijima insists he comes from the Edo period, 180 years earlier.

Though the film's title evokes a certain genre of kid-oriented dramas and places Kijima in the position of a pet (at least according to its English-language title), the focus of A Boy and His Samurai is often less on Tomoya than Hiroko. Indeed, one might argue with a bit of a wink that the movie is as much a single mother's fantasy as it is a young boy's - what woman in Hiroko's position wouldn't want a handsome younger man whose gratitude compels him to help with the housework around? Nakamura doesn't take the movie too far in that direction, in large part because Rie Tomosaka is given that rarest sort of character to play: A single mother who, while harried and busy, is not defined by her lack of a man or guilt over not being at home more often. Even if it weren't in the script, one perhaps wouldn't be able to fault Tomosaka for playing Hiroko that way; instead, she always shows us a woman who takes pride in her achievements and enjoys both her work and home life.

Full review at EFC.

Xian Si Jue (Duel to the Death)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2011 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (New York Asian Film Festival 2011)

Like the title suggests, Duel to the Death is the martial arts film distilled down to its purest form - noble warriors walking a dangerous road so that they can square off to fight for treacherous leaders. Fortunately, director "Tony" Ching Siu-tung opted to pour his ninja-related nightmares into it, so it's a trip in more ways than one.

The plot is simplicity itself: Every ten years, Chinese and Japanese martial arts masters meet to determine whose style of combat is superior. This year, the task falls to Ching Wan (Damian Lau) for China and Hashimoto (Norman Chu) for Japan. As they make their way to the ancient battlegrounds, their paths cross, both with each other and with Sheng Nan (Flora Cheung), the daughter of the nobleman on whose grounds the contest will take place and whose family has traditionally produced China's champion. But there is skullduggery afoot - Hashimoto's handler Kenji (Eddy Ko) is in contact with the ninjas who are attacking not just Ching Wan, but many of the land's senior masters.

It's easy to dismiss the plots of movies like this as nothing but frameworks on which to hang fights, and in many ways, Ching Siu-tung doesn't even hide that here: The story more or less spells out that there will be a duel and that there are nefarious forces looking to interfere, and when ten or fifteen minutes passes without some sort of fight, you can expect some sort of crazy ninja thing to happen. And yet, dismissing it as just connective tissue would be unfair; Ching and his co-writers do manage to build up stories of intrigue and betrayal on the one side that contrasts nicely with how the various counterparts could easily be friends in other circumstances.

Full review at EFC.

Denjin Zaborga (Karate-Robo Zaborgar)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2011 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (New York Asian Film Festival 2011)

Western otaku likely would have to be deeply committed to an obsession to Japanese pop culture to be familiar with the original Denjin Zaborgar, a long-forgotten sentai television series most notable for featuring one of the first robots that also had a vehicle mode, years before the toys that became Transformers when imported to the United States - after all, it's not exactly well-known on the other side of the Pacific, either. This is, perhaps, all to the good - since it's not beloved, Noboru Iguchi can take this bit of J-pop ephemera and make it his own (a simultaneously exciting and frightening prospect, depending on one's tastes).

As in the original, Yutaka Daimon (Yasuhisa Furuhara) is a young police special agent, barely out of his teens, with an unusual partner - Zaborgar, a robot that can transform into a motorcycle. Most of their missions are against the Sigma organization, a group of cyborgs led by Dr. Akunomiya (Akira Emoto) looking to wipe humans off the face of the Earth! In the meantime, though, they need human DNA to construct their mega-cyborg, and have Akunomiya's top agent, Miss Borg (Mami Yamasaki) collecting it. Others in Sigma disdain Miss Borg, so they turn on her, leading to her and Daimon briefly on the same side. Things get weird, then intimate, Zaborgar feels betrayed, and-- Well, cut to twenty-five years later. Daimon (now played by Itsuji Itao) is an unemployed, newly homeless loser who still wears the helmet once used to interface with Zaborgar, and Akunomiya is finally ready to unleash his giant robot on the world. Small problem - new-model schoolgirl cyborg Akiko (Aimi Satsukawa) doesn't particularly want to be the CPU for an engine of destruction, and escapes to find Daimon, with Sigma's new top agent, Gen Akizuki (Yuya Miyashita) hot on her trail.

That is a lot of plot for a goofy exploitation comedy, and it doesn't include all of the really bizarre tangents Iguchi goes off on. Indeed, the need to cram in so much exposition makes the movie feel lopsided: Though the promotion on the festival circuit emphasizes the "25 years later" angle and Itao gets first billing (with Furuhara credited as "The Younger Daimon"), the two periods are actually rather evenly split, to the point that more time seemed to be spent in the past than the present. That's not necessarily a weakness, but it does make the second half feel kind of rushed at points, as it introduces Akiko and Akizuki quickly and pushes the plot forward at high speed, with little time for the sort of free-form oddness that would occasionally turn up toward the start. It's more than a little strange to say this about a Noboru Iguchi/Sushi Typhoon production, but between the exposition-filled opening and revelation-filled second half, Karate-Robo Zaborgar might be too focused on having a coherent story, causing the high-concept insanity to suffer.

Full review at EFC.

Nintama Rantarô (Ninja Kids!!!)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2011 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (New York Asian Film Festival 2011)

For the last few years, I've had this recurring joke about how hiring Takashi Miike to direct family movies is the Japanese equivalent of Warner Brothers getting the rights to Harry Potter and deciding that the right man for the job is David Cronenberg. Now, though, it's just a thing that happens every year or two, not a cause for shock as much as an indication that this particular kiddie flick, even if otherwise average, will at least have a few memorably bizarre moments.

An adaptation of the long-running comic and cartoon Nintama Rantaro, the movie follows title character Rantaro (Seishiro Kato) as he goes off to start first grade at Ninja Academy, where his parents (Shido Nakamura and Rei Dan) hope that he will learn to become a great ninja not have to work as a farmer as he does. He soon makes friends, particularly Shinbei (Fuuta Kimura), a sleepy, roly-poly fellow, and Kirimaru (Roi Hayashi), a poor but hardworking boy who takes babysitting jobs to make tuition. They get into mischief, but pull together when a nice kid in the fourth grade, "gangsta hairstylist" Takamaru Saito, finds his family attacked by members of their old clan.

I've never encountered any of the franchise's previous iterations, but I am not surprised at all the hear that Nintama Rantaro started life as a four-panel gag strip with more of a focus on punchlines than continuing (mis)adventures. That's how the movie often plays, like a stream of skits about just how goofy it would be to have grade-school kids learning ninja skills in the classroom, with even the climactic race broken up into distinct comedy bits that last a few minutes at most. It's not necessarily a bad way to put a movie aimed at young children with short attention spans together, although it feels very stitched-up at times - Takamaru is introduced just when the filmmakers seem to realize that the movie needs a bit of a plot for its finale, and Rantaro being a particularly fast runner wasn't brought up before the race starts.

Full review at EFC.

Guan Yin Shan (Buddha Mountain)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2011 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (New York Asian Film Festival 2011)

It doesn't always work out this way, but ending the trip to New York City for the Asian Film Festival with Buddha Mountain turned out to be a nice way to decompress. After a non-stop barrage of movies where even the relatively sedate family picture featured a time-traveling samurai, this picture from China about a group of struggling Chinese friends would have been a fine palate cleanser even if it wasn't genuinely good on its own.

Three young people in Chengdu need a new place to live. Nan Feng (Fan Bingbing) is an aspiring singer who gets in financial trouble when a man who claims he was injured at one of her shows starts shaking the bar where she plays down; Ding Bo (Berlin Chen) dropped out of college and uses his motorcycle to work as an unlicensed courier; Fei "Fatso" Zao (Wang Helong) does odd jobs and gets teased for being overweight. Tossed out of their current apartment, they wind up renting a room from Master Chang Yun-qin (Sylvia Chang), a one-time Peking Opera singer with her own issues whose fastidiousness inevitably leads to clashes with her boarders.

Buddha Mountain is the sort of movie western audiences don't see from China very often - it's contemporary, small in scale, and tells a tale of ordinary people; it's also written and directed by a woman. That last bit is apparently quite rare in China, and with at least one of writer/director Li Yu's previous films (Lost in Beijing) banned, it wouldn't be surprising if this film was a truly independent production. It certainly feels like one, with its ground-level photography of what feel like found locations and appealing but not glamorous cast of characters. It's also refreshingly free of the nationalism that has been omnipresent in recent Chinese cinema - there are no reminders of the glorious history, propagandic praise for the government, or pointed displays of prosperity.

Full review at EFC.

IFFBoston 2011 Day #6: El Bulli: Cooking In Progress and Sons of Perdition

First, and most important: If you're reading this in Boston on or before 2 June 2011, Sons of Perdition is still playing at the Kendall Square Cinema, and is pretty darn good. It was only booked for a week, so it would probably not have survived the ridiculous way they've booked Tree of Life this weekend anyway (and boy, is that a rant for this week's Next Week...).

No Q&A for it there, of course, which is a shame; Tyler Measom gave a thoroughly charming one to cap off the festival's run in the Somerville Theatre (thanks to his bright shirt, you can almost make him out in the obligatory Horrible Photography™). I found myself impressed by the even, accepting tone he maintained throughout the conversation, considering the subject matter of his and his wife's film, I would have been pretty much 100% pure anger. I'm not a big fan of superstition to begin with, so I can't really say that there's a special place in Hell for the people who manipulate their followers like this, but it ticks me off - both for it's a crappy thing to do and how it never seems to lead to people questioning their own religious beliefs.

That was the second half of the night; the first was what was possibly the surprise hit of the festival; El Bulli: Cooking in Progress got upgraded from one of Somerville's smaller theaters to their main screen, and while it didn't sell out, it got fairly crowded. No filmmakers in attendance, so it was on Brian to mention during the intro that they always hope to book something that strikes a chord with audiences, and this one exceeded all expectations in terms of ticket sales.

Maybe they set their expectations a little low; Adrià was a visiting lecturer at Harvard last fall, giving the project even more local interest even if cooking programs weren't popular. Plus, there's a science angle, which was a big part of what got my attention (for all I grumbled about all the performer-related docs, I grabbed a seat at any science-related one I could find, although there were never two or three of those running at once). It's a lot of reasons for people to be interested in the movie, and it seemed to bring them all out.

Just one horrible picture today:


Tyler Measom, from fairly close up, so I got an unusually decent shot.

(And, man, is it a said thing that dropping Warren Jeffs's name into Amazon brings up multiple books about his cult.)

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2011 in Somerville Theatre #1 (IFFBoston 2011)

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress has a strange start for a documentary about a famous chef and his equally famous restaurant: The kitchen is disassembled and packed away. This is not, however, a precursor to a jump back in time to tell us a story of failure; it's a fittingly unusual beginning to an examination of Ferran Adrià's unusual process.

Yes, Adrià's El Bulli restaurant did close in October of 2008, but that's a regular occurrence, as he and his staff retreat to their Barcelona test kitchen to begin development of the next year's menu. Though the words are never mentioned in the film, Adria is one of the main practitioners of molecular gastronomy (though he prefers the term "deconstructivist"), a form of cooking that embraces technology and scientific procedures. Adrià and his assistants will spend the next months painstakingly researching and quantifying the tastes and textures that come from preparing different foods in different ways, developing a menu theme that coalesces into the "Year of Water" when the restaurant re-opens in June of 2009.

There's an old joke among scientists that the scientific method is best defined as "make the grad students do all the work". The various assistants and sous-chefs we meet are likely a bit higher up the totem pole than that, but the principle holds: For much of the film, we are not watching Ferran Adrià, but his staff - Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch, Eugeni de Diego et al. They're the ones who do the repetitive but crucial work of iterating through various combinations of ingredients, equipment, and parameters in order to discover the best ones to present to Ferran, and are often the ones who find a new dish, whether by happenstance (mistakenly using carbonated water when flat was originally called for) or trial and error. In some ways, though, this is more instructive - with Adrià off-site or just off-screen, we see pecking orders on the one hand and comradeship on the other. Some on the staff are relatively new, so there is talk of "what Ferran will think".

Full review at EFC.

Sons of Perdition

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2011 in Somerville Theatre #4 (IFFBoston 2011)

Most of the time, when the modern westerner encounters or hears of polygamy, it's an individual case, and thus he or she thinks about the individual psychology involved. Make it more commonplace, though, and a numbers issue emerges: A potential surplus of young men. In a polygamist community in the American southwest, this excess is cast out (or at least, men who leave are not pursued nearly as much as women), considered "sons of perdition", and the film of the same name is a fascinating look at these exiles' struggles.

The exiles come from the town of Colorado City, Arizona, a town populated by Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a Mormon splinter group under the leader ship of Warren Jeffs. Jeffs - called "The Prophet" - is a second generation cult leader who controls the town absolutely. When girls reach child-bearing age, they are given to the men Jeffs selects; fall out of favor, and your wives and children may be distributed to someone else (and, since you'll no longer need such a big house, you'll likely be ordered to move, as well). Extra boys who are not among the chosen elite are either dropped outside town or allowed to run. Many end up in St. George, Utah. The filmmakers spend most of their time with three: 17-year-old Sam, his 15-year-old cousin Bruce, and 17-year old Joe.

Generally speaking, documentaries come in two main flavors - fly-on-the-wall and interview/archive-driven. Directors Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merten mostly favor the former, following the boys around as they experience and try to find a place in the outside world. There are basic bits of information to fill the audience in on, though, and it's delivered in a couple of interesting ways. We get an idea of what sort of indoctrination the members of the FLDS receive by listening to clips of Jeffs, and it's remarkably, unnervingly seductive - the delivery is clear and simple with consistent logic that almost makes sense from a certain starting position; it does a good job of short-circuiting any contempt the audience might feel for the majority of the FLDSers. Outside of that, the information seldom seems spoon-fed; only a former FLDS social worker really seems to be a straightforward interview. The rest come from the boys and the people they meet, the information seeming to come out as asides as the subjects go about their business.

Full review at EFC.

Fantasia Daily for 27 July: Dream Home, The Perfect Host

Someday, I'm going to carve out a day in Montreal to see the Exporail museum. I really thought it was going to be the 27th - everything in the afternoon was either already seen or highly skippable, so I didn't have any commitments before 5:25pm, the last movie of the night on the 26th ended at a fairly reasonable time (11:15pm-ish), so I'd be able to get up in time to catch the train/bus combo necessary and still spend a fair amount of time looking around the yard...

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of grabbing a soda with the food I grabbed on the way home (Monday was one of those days where there's just never enough time between movies to get food), and was apparently still alert enough to have a review of Suck posted at 2am. Needless to say, I didn't wake until past noon, scotching those plans.

So, I ran some errands for the rest of the afternoon: Picking up my pile of screeners for movies that need revisiting or which I couldn't make it to (about six, I think), checking local comic shops to fill the gaps in my collection and subscriptions (didn't find the Judge Dredd Megazine I was looking for, but did get a good deal on the first two volumes of Robo-Hunter, and really wish I'd sprung for the same with Sinister Dexter), and checking out a couple food spots (yearly visit to Mr. Steer wasn't the greatest, although the burger itself was still excellent).

One of the places I went was La Pendularie, which mainly sells Swiss timepieces (from watches to grandfather clocks), but has a counter out in the front where they sell Swiss chocolate. Among the offerings: 40 different varieties of chocolate milkshake. Well, 38, plus vanilla and maple. One of my goals next year is to hit all forty, although that will likely mean two a day. The dark-chocolate (about 68% cacao, I think) and mint was quite good, though - more bitter than I'm used to, but with a great aftertaste.

The movie schedule wound up being decided for me. It was the official closing night, so the two big movies were playing in Hall - Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, and because Fantasia is a laudably fan-oriented festival, a media pass alone wasn't good enough to get into those; we would have to request to be put on the list, which wasn't guaranteed. I opted not to for those two; I figure both will have a theatrical release soon enough (admittedly, I'm less certain about Tucker & Dale), and if I was going to see Metropolis, this was my only opportunity for The Perfect Host, while The Last Exorcism blocked my other opportunity to see Boys on the Run.

In hindsight, I wish I'd asked for a ticket to Tucker & Dale; the gap between The Perfect Host and Boys on the Run was unusually long to begin with, and when 10pm came without our being let in, something had to be wrong. Apparently it was technical in nature; what I could pull out of the local franglais was that the projector had broken down and the screening was annullé. If I'd known that Scott Pilgrim had started late because Universal at the last minute decided to pull the same crap with mobile phones and bags that Alliance did on Saturday, I might have crossed the street and tried to get into T&D; instead, I headed back to the apartment, to pack before my last day in Montreal.

Wai dor lei ah yut ho (Dream Home)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)

Dream House tries to be a lot of different things, and winds up a bit of a mess as it jumps from one tone to another, playing like a small drama for a long time before taking a brutal detour into some of the nastiest violence you'll see on screen. Of course, some might argue that the gore that got the film Hong Kong's equivalent to an NC-17 rating (even after being cut for theatrical exhibition) is not nearly as frightening as what opens the film - statistics on the cost of buying a home, especially in Hong Kong.

The numbers are mind-boggling, pointing out that since 1997, Hong Kong income has increased 1%, while the cost of housing went up 15% in 2007 alone. Apartments as small as 600 square feet can go for $300,000, more with a harbor view. And that's what Cheng Lai-sheng (Josie Ho) wants; she's been saving for it her entire adult life, working two jobs in order to do so. She's got a very specific target, 1 Victoria Place. As we see in flashbacks, she's got her reasons for wanting to purchase a unit there, but her determination has become an obsession that even her realtor Nelson (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) finds to be a bit excessive. And that's before she gets close enough to her goal that not making it would really send her over the edge.

The desire to own one's own home is an almost universal motivation, and the scenes in Dream Home where we see the seeds being planted in Lai-sheng's head and how it dominates her thoughts in the present day are well-played. It is, at times, a little confusing. The flashbacks often play out in a very disconnected way; if we're told her father (Norman Chu) was in construction before learning that his health problems are possibly related to long-term exposure to asbestos, it's very quickly and in passing, even though that could be a major part of what motivates her. Certain bits, like the collaboration between the government, developers, and triads, probably also play much better for Hong Kong natives than foreigners - and I'm not sure whether the scheme that Lai-sheng and her co-workers are running is an example of a side-plot that's not well-integrated, something Chinese audiences would grasp better than everyone else, or both. There are two notable unfaithful husbands - Lai-Sheng's boyfriend (Eason Chan) and the owner of an apartment in 1 Victoria (Sin Lap-man).

Full review at eFilmCritic

The Perfect Host

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)

The appeal of The Perfect Host is plain to see: David Hyde Pierce, in a film that plays to his strengths, both in his character's personality and the stage-like setting and rhythm. The downside takes a little bit more thinking to ferret out; it basically amounts to the snaking suspicion that every moment of something other than two guys trying to outwit each other is the film barking up the wrong tree.

But, before we see Pierce, we meet John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), who has just robbed a bank but been injured in the getaway. With the cops breathing down his neck, he attempts to con his way into various houses in order to rest up and lay low. Warwick Wilson (Pierce) is the one who finally lets him in after John claims to be a friend of a friend, but things could go haywire very quickly, as Warwick is preparing for a dinner party, with guests that include a tough-on-crime D.A. And as John soon discovers, a Warwick Wilson dinner party is a unique experience.

Things are going well in the first act. There's a nice contrast between Crawford and Pierce: Crawford gives John a certain amount of blue-collar outlaw charm, clearly happier to charm his adversaries than to use violence, but kind of aware that he does not have boundless resources with which to outwit someone. He's harried, but always reminds the audience that he's potentially dangerous even without being physically imposing. Pierce, meanwhile, makes Warwick clearly privileged without being snotty about it, excellent at cheerily delivering lines that will tighten the noose around John's neck. For a while, the pair of them are cheerily standing on a teeter-totter, each making little moves that could knock them off to gain advantage.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Fantasia Daily for 25 July: Summer Wars, Rinco's Restaurant, Vampires, Deliver Us from Evil, A Little Pond

Another long day at the festival, where the first movie starts at 11:30am and the last finishes at 11pm. Watching movies for eleven hours (with bits of standing in line between) doesn't seem like it's tiring, but as I've said before, it's using one specific part of your brain all day, and can be wearying.

And now some photos, for those who can't get enough "filmmakers with movie screen behind them and mikes in front of them" action!



Left to right, we have festival director Pierre Corebeil (I think; it might be Simon Lapierre; I even after five years, I haven't learned all the names yet and have a hard time pulling them out of a barrage of French), a translator, and Rinco's Restaurant director Mai Tominaga.

I felt vaguely guilty that I munched on a box of Timbits throughout Ms. Tominaga's movie about a woman who makes delicious food. Normally, I'm one to advocate donuts and donut holes as movie snacks (they are quiet and tasty), but that's the sort of movie that asks that you raise your standards, you know? And though I'll probably get a bunch of Canadians coming after me for this, they were only Timbits, which aren't bad but aren't Munchkins.

(I had a slice of fast-food pizza for dinner, too. Multiple food movies this year, and I really didn't do much for myself in terms of dining out!)

By the way, the translator did a fine job. I think this is a new person handling the Japanese-translation duties (a good chunk of the staff probably turns over every few years as college kids graduate) - she didn't give the withering "why would you ask such a stupid question?" look after the questions that waste everybody's time during Q&A. Or maybe she's just learned to hide her disdain better.



Left to right, Vampires director Vincent Lannoo and star Carlo Ferrante. M. Lannoo is not a dual amputee, by the way; my Droid's camera just isn't that great with motion. Sadly, I didn't get a chance to stick around for much of what was likely an entertaining Q&A, as Deliver Us From Evil was scheduled to start very soon and the first question and answer clinched that my terrible French was not going to be up to the task.

Not that I'm complaining; despite my only being able to understand fleeting bits when people talk slowly and use simple tenses (has it really been twenty years since I stopped taking French in high school?), I always find it kind of cool when the intros and stuff are in French, especially when it's something surreal, like a Japanese movie with English subtitles being introduced by a guy speaking French. You don't have to try and make my monolingual self feel at home; I like the reminder that I'm surrounded by a different culture.

But, yeah, I'm not always going to stick around and be confused. Sorry.

Samâ wôzu (Summer Wars)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

Mamoru Hosoda perhaps didn't make a huge name for himself with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but he made a very good animated film that told a fantastical science fiction story that was also very emotionally grounded. For his follow-up, he does something much the same, albeit on a larger scale.

Kenji Koiso (voice of Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a high-school math wihz, although his summer job is much more mundane, doing online troubleshooting for "OZ", a global virtual community (imagine Facebook as the interface to the entire internet). It's boring work, so when college-bound classmate Natsuki (voice of Nanami Sakuraba) offers him a chance to do something else for a couple weeks, he jumps at it: Come with her to a family reunion in Ueda coinciding with the 90th birthday of her great-grandmother Sakae Jinnouchi (voice of Sumiko Fuji), help set up and ride herd on the dozens of relatives, pretend to be the boyfriend she told Sakae about... Oh, did I not mention that last part back in Tokyo or on the train? Sorry. Anyway, Kenji soon has bigger concerns - a math puzzle he received in an email turns out the key to defeating OZ's supposedly-impregnable security, making Kenji a wanted man, although the Japanese authorities are much more concerned with the infrastructure collapses they soon face, as OZ accounts can serve as authentication to a number of official systems.

I wouldn't be surprised if the screenplay for Summer Wars has been kicking around for a while; while the timeframe is sometimes implied to be the 2010s, other things place the year at around 1998, and OZ does often seem like a very twentieth-century vision of the internet's future, in that it's anthropomorphic, complete with cute avatars navigating three-dimensional virtual space that functions as a very direct analog to the physical world, including avatar battles. Though bits of the underlying concept may have relevance (Facebook and Google have become so ubiquitous and integrated as to be a real security weakness), folks will likely find it a somewhat dated version of the future. Of course, to a certain extent, functionality takes a back seat to looking cool, and the great animators at Madhouse are certainly deliver on that account, giving a virtual world that hangs in white space like something astronomical, with avatars and outposts in orbit. It's a clearly CGI element in a generally cel-based movie, but one that looks like it might exist on the screens of that world.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Shokudo Katatsumuri (Rinco's Restaurant)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

So, here's my question: If you lived in this tiny Japanese village, what sort of evidence would you need to declare that Rinco's cooking has magical wish-granting powers? After all, in the sort of small town where everybody knows everybody else's business, coming to that conclusion would almost certainly require positing that she spent her whole life eating take-out.

Of course, it's been a while since they've seen Rinco (Kou Shibasaki); she ran away from home as a teenager, unable to bear the taunting that came from being the fatherless daughter of Ruri (Kimiko Yo), who has extended her party-girl lifestyle well into middle age. She wound up with her grandmother, who taught her to cook, and that's where Rinco found her calling; she mastered every cuisine she could, and had save almost enough to open a restaurant with her boyfriend when he left her and took everything. So devastated that she lost the power of speech, she made her way back home to find her mother more eccentric than ever - she dotes on her pet pig Hermes to an uncomfortable extent. She does open that restaurant, though; she and her childhood friend Yuma (Brother Tom) clean up a tiny shed on Ruri's property. It's off the beaten path, and only has one table, but Yuma swears that the carefully prepared dishes grant the diner his heart's desire.

As with most food movies, the pleasures of Rinco's Restaurant are sensual. Dish after mouth-watering dish is prepared, served, and consumed, and director Mai Tominaga makes certain that the audience is aware of the intimacy of the setting; this food, or at least the image of it, is a treat for them directly, just as much as it has been lovingly and individually prepared for the character. Ruri's house gives the impression of free-spirited chaos but is actually very tidy, with a cute little sty for Hermes. And though the mountains for which Bosom Village are named are mostly a goofy visual joke, they do make for some nice scenery.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Vampires

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)

It's not that you can't make a scary, surprising vampire movie any more - my last two trips to this festival delivered Let the Right One In and Thirst, so it can be done. It's just hard; the bloodsuckers have grown so familiar that it's easy to slip into what movies like Vincent Lannoo's Vampires do, treating monsters like something commonplace and trying to be clever with the details.

Georges (Carlo Ferrante) is the head of a vampire family living in Belgium. He's got a regal air, even if his wife Bertha (Vera van Dooren) doesn't quite charm the television crew doing a documentary on them quite so much. They keep a relatively low profile, mostly feeding on a former prostitute they call "The Meat" and a pen of illegal immigrants in the backyard, with the local police helping with procurement and disposal. It's not a completely tranquil household - "son" Samson (Pierre Lognay) has been sneaking off with the local head vampire's girl, and "daughter" Grace (Fleur Lise Hevet) wishes she were human. And then there are "the neighbors", two vampires that they graciously allow to live in their basement because the vampire code says that vampires must children in order to rate a house of their own (Elizabeth and Bienvenu have their own individual self-control issues with kids).

Vampires straddles the line between parody and satire, spending most of its time on the broad, somewhat silly side of the line. It's still often mean-spirited humor - the opening bits about why a film crew might be unwilling to take on this assignment are as bloody as they are exercises in perfect set-up and delivery. A lot of it is relatively simple jokes, though they work - there's a visit to the funeral home to pick out new coffins; Georges finding himself just unable to understand his daughter, wearing all that pink and dyeing her hair blonde; a move to Montreal find Belgian Samson unable to understand a word that his Québeçoise girlfriend is saying; that sort of thing. A fair amount of fun is had mocking the sometimes torturous rules that vampires live by, both socially and biologically (is the way they are shown to mediate disputes here really that much more illogical than having to be invited into a room?).

Full review at eFilmCritic

Fri os fra det onde (Deliver Us from Evil)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)

Ole Bornedal was never really away from filmmaking, but time spent trying to work Hollywood and then working Danish theater kept his film output very sparse in the ten years leading up to 2007. Since then, though, he's been back with a vengeance, each new movie better than the last, with the latest a thriller that is both narratively intriguing and laser-focused.

We start with brothers. Johannes (Lasse Rimmer) was a big-city lawyer who, with his wife Pernille (Lene Nystrøm), moved back to the small town - and family home - where he grew up a few years ago. Lars (Jens Andersen) is his exact opposite, an unkempt drunk of a truck driver with a foul mouth and a violent temper, although he realizes he needs to change, especially upon learning his girlfriend Scarlett (Pernille Vallentin) is pregnant. But just as he's about to turn over that new leaf, he runs over an old woman just out of town. Now, he's not stupid - he quickly finds a way to throw the blame on Alain (Bojan Navojec), a Bosnian refugee helping Johannes work on the family home. What Lars doesn't figure on is Ingvar (Mogens Pedersen), the dead woman's husband, who is as admired by all about town as he is completely dependent upon his wife for his mental stability.

Bornedal knows where he wants Deliver Us from Evil to go, and he is ruthlessly efficient in getting it there. Narration quickly supplies us with information about the characters and town, plots that were set up separately intertwine quickly but in a manner that doesn't smack of coincidence. Brief moments of comic relief plant a seed in the audience's head that the potential for ugly behavior lies within even the most gentle of souls. There is no time spent on hand-wringing: Characters are decisive, moving us inevitably toward confrontation.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Jageun yeonmot (A Little Pond)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)

A Little Pond's goal is to educate its audience about the Nogunri massacre of 1950, and it succeeds: It presents a reconstruction of that shameful incident in the best detail that the filmmakers could extrapolate. It is almost not necessarily to say any more about it; writer/director Lee Sang-woo aims to depict this thing and does so, well enough that he does not squander the horror inherent in the facts.

The movie spends a little time building to its incident. In July of 1950, the Korean War was just starting, and the North was pushing south. A soldier visits the house of Mr. Moon (Moon Seong-geun), though it is not the middle-aged man with the young new wife that they are interested in, but his son-in-law (Lee Dong-kyu), who was originally from the north. Elsewhere, Moon's second daughter Hyun-i (Kim Ji-hyun) is taking her shift at the village school, supervising the chorus which is practicing for a regional competition. It is a tense atmosphere, but not yet one that is critical. The tension moves up a notch when American and ROK soldiers order the town evacuated, as a battle there is imminent. Many head for a nearby hill, where they had often holed up during the Japanese invasion. However, things change quickly in battle, and the American troops have orders to shoot anyone crossing the front line, which places many of the villagers in the line of fire, taking cover under a bridge, hoping for things to stop.

The facts in the Nogunri case are disputed; the best-known account was published fifty years after the actual incident, but almost as soon as it led President Clinton to issue an official apology, it was found to be based in part on fraudulent accounts. Everybody agrees that civilian refugees were killed; nobody agrees on the number (cited as anything from 5 to 400) or whether the U.S. Army attempted to cover it up. I would be interested to learn how much research Director Lee did in preparing this film; much of it is told from the perspective of the village's children, who sixty years later would be the best primary sources.

Full review at eFilmCritic