Fantasia 2024.06: "Furet", Fly Me to the Saitama: From Biwa Lake with Love, and The Chapel

Pretty short day in part because of previous days not going as planned: Bookworm being sold out on opening night meant I opted for Swimming in a Sand Pool instead, and the science fiction shorts ran just long enough on the 21st that finishing the Nobuhiro Yamashita hat trick with Ghost Cat Anzu wasn't possible, meaning it was easy enough to turn back around and see Not Friends. Pair that with not wanting to risk cascading delays causing Vulcanizadora running late and making me miss Fly Me to the Saitama 2, and I had the whole afternoon free.

First order of business: Another Asian movie!. Well, technically, the first was going into Marshall's and getting some extra socks and underpants so that I could push laundry day to the exact midpoint of the trip, thus only hitting the laundromat once and hopefully not having clean and dirty clothes mingling in the suitcase on the way home. But that mall is right across the street from the old Forum and an easy stop before Customs Frontier.

Second order of business: Poutine!

Honestly, I wish my schedule had lined up so that I could hit Le Grand Poutine Fest for a few days in a row, trying out all the food trucks. This General Tao's Chicken Poutine was good stuff, though.

Then, finally, back to the Concordia campus and a couple of films without guests, which is why I'm throwing pictures of poutine in there. Not that I don't mind a little break after a week.

Not much of a break for the start of the third weekend (or "Week Three", if short weeks are allowed, where I'll be catching the first three episodes of Lantern Blade, Haze, and A Chinese Ghost Story II, seeing what the time/crowd situation is to choose between Jour de chasse and "CineMaposa 2024", and finishing with Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.


"Furet" ("Ferret")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Les Fantastiques Week-ends du Cinéma Québécois, laser DCP)

Fantastiques Week-ends is a celebration of local Québécois filmmaking, from features that recently played major festivals like SXSW ot things that are clearly a few friends screwing around with a camera and editing suite, mostly entertaining themselves as opposed to harboring much thought of doing this for a living. "Furet" is one of those, in a number of senses; if it gets broader notice, it will likely be as a novelty: Most of the supporting cast has Down syndrome, which can lead to the feeling of it taking place in some unusual parallel world. I don't think that's what the filmmakers are going for; they're just a bunch of people who have a thing in common getting together to make the sort of movie they enjoy and having a good time.

And it is a pretty good time - the title character (Rémi-Pierre Paquin), nicknamed "Furet" ("Ferret" in English) for his ability to weasel his way out of situations, gets pulled into a plot to rob a bar from the inside, only for a number of things to go wrong. It's goofier than a lot of comedies using that skeleton are, but also feels like a lot of fun: Why make a movie about gangsters if you're not going to put on costumes and make them 1940s gangsters? Use the ridiculous joke. If you can get a celebrity cameo, let him be silly in a way he probably doesn't get to be at work.

Make movies and have fun with it. You might turn out something better than expected.


Tonde Saitama: Biwako Yori Ai o Komete (Fly Me to the Saitama: From Lake Biwa with Love)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I'll bet, watched back to back, there's precious little difference between the two Fly Me to the Saitama movies and either my tastes have changed or something in the experience was different (it's a movie just made to bring out the weebs going "haw haw, I know that bit!", and that can get me gritting my teeth more than laughing), but this one seemed to be trying a little too hard and leaning on that recognition in the way the first wasn't quite so much. Or maybe it just hit differently tonight. That happens.

The first - well, the first was something, a framing story about a family in a car whose daughter is ashamed to be from the Saitama prefecture listening to a radio drama about the Saitamese throwing off the yoke of their oppressors. The same family is in the car again five years later, daughter Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) now grown and pregnant, worrying over the name of the child, when another drama comes on. It starts with princess Momomi Dannoura (Fumi Nikaido) looking to help unite the Saitama by building a railway line that connects its various districts as opposed to just going to Tokyo and back, but facing resistance; husband and Saitaman hero Rei Asami (Gackt) proposes building a beach. To do that, he and his comrades will travel to Shiga to import sand, but the hips are attacked, and they find themselves amid a similar revolution: Shiga is the equivalent of the Saitama in this part of Japan, with Osaka and its governor Akira Kashoji (Ainosuke Kataoka) ruling with an iron fist and revolutionary Kai Kikyo (Anne Watanabe), very much a female version of Rei, opposing him. He's got plans beyond just having Shiga under his thumb, though - a special chemical extracted from Koshinen Stadium can actually turn outsiders Osakan, effectively making all of Japan Osaka… or even the world!

The good news is that a movie so eager to throw jokes against the wall to see what sticks like this will do pretty well even if only ten percent are working for you, and the hit rate here is better than that. There's not a moment that isn't trying to make the audience laugh in two or three ways even if it's also looking to push some sort of story forward. Many of the jokes are very dumb, and many are completely inscrutable if you're not Japanese and haven't been diving into Japanese pop culture even more than the typical manga fan (I certainly wouldn't know someone had started talking with an Osakan accent or using Osakan slang without other characters commenting on it), but the thing is, they at least all look like jokes and are presented with gusto. Nobody is going to miss the gag because it's too dry, ever, and even if something is hard to parse, the comic timing is pretty impeccable, at least with a crowd. By the end, certainly, the filmmakers have locked into a delightfully absurd mode with big laughs.

Both new and returning cast are strong, and not just because the sight of Anne Watanabe and Gackt in near-matching costumes is fun - the same basic outfit that marks Rei as a someone feminine bishonen makes Kikyo a masculine "Lady Oscar" type - and they're both kind of excitable but complement each other in where they're clever and where they're dumb. Watanabe, especially, dives into how a lot of fans are going to be immediately eager to pair them off and has a ball. Ainosuke Kataoka similarly gets to chew a bunch of scenery as a megalomaniac villain who is quite obviously being cuckolded. And it's kind of a shame that Fumi Nikaido's Momomi is not so much relegated to the sidelines as doing her own thing back in the Saitama - she's a riot, and can sell a lot of gags on her own, but it's mostly against minor characters, as opposed to the other stars.

As with the first, the movie is a bunch of fun to just look at, with elaborate costumes that are as big a part of the characters as the performances but an overall aesthetic that can be kind of rickety, like a lot of secondary locations and visuals were built quick and on short notice so that the whole doesn't feel too fancy. When the action gets big and brash, though, the effects work is up to the task, because the filmmakers want the audience laughing at how wacky this is, not at how low the budget must be.

There's a lot that's fun here, but it doesn't always connect. Maybe the very end locks what wasn't quite working for me in - the first film is more self-deprecating while this sequel points more mockery outward, to the point of saying sorry, we don't really think this at the end. There was something kind of weirdly universal even when the first was at its most specific - every city that's not Tokyo or London or New York has that kind of chip on its shoulder (and even then, Queens has it for Manhattan, for example) - so you felt it even if the references weren't your own, but this is often more about the specific stereotypes than the feeling behind them. It may just be a small difference in attitude, but when you're blowing everything up to the scale that this movie is, it can make a notable difference.


La ermita (The Chapel)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Because these daily reviews have a kind of format, I often wind up copying the previous one, keeping the skeleton, and filling in. Today, this kind of reminds me that The Chapel played in the same slot that had The Beast Within the night before, and some important elements are similar, in that both center on a pre-teen girl whose perspective is an important part of the story. I quite like this one where the other left me cold, and I think a big part of the reason why is that where Beast tried to be a timeless fairy tale, Chapel is contemporary and specific, and its details are interesting and make it easier to identify parallels than something trying to be universal.

The lore here dates back to 1631; with the Black Death raging, the plague doctors rounded up the sick and sealed them in one of the church's rooms, including Uxoa, a little girl who dropped her doll on the way inside and is said to haunt it. Nearly 400 years later, the site has been excavated and recreating the event has been a tourist attraction for decades, in part because medium Ivana Peralta claimed to make contact with Uxoa. This year, one of the locals most fascinated by the whole thing is 8-year-old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), a neighbor of Peralta's who hopes to become a medium herself and is encouraged by the old woman, but for a very specific reason: Her mother Maider (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer. She finds the old woman dead one night during the five-day period when the chapel is ceremonially opened before being resealed, which brings Ivana's estranged, burnt daughter Carol (Belén Rueda) back to town to settle the estate. She's also a medium, but of the cold-reading variety, and resists Emma's entreaties to teach her. But Emma's a very determined girl who doesn't realize how dangerous the forces she'd have to access to talk to the dead are.

I love smart, practical little girls who nevertheless wear cat ears and light-up sneakers like Emma, and Maia Zaitegi is a real delight in the role, making Emma serious and perspective enough to realize what she's dealing with but also light and innocent enough that she doesn't plod through scenes morose. There's determination and curiosity to her that are genuine - a girl like this doesn't really put up a front - that make the moments when sadness overwhelms her or danger creates genuine fear more powerful. The kid is easy to love but is also making things happen in a way that makes sense.

Even with that, it can be hard to make them the actual center of the story and still keep them believable, but it also creates an interesting prism through which to view the adult characters as well. In this case, that's mostly Carol, who is Emma's complement in many ways that make her uncomfortable, and Belén Rueda gets across that Carol knows herself and how other people see her all too well. On her own, she's sarcastic but in a way that suggests she knows she's trying to push people away but doesn't actually want to hurt them. They're interesting to watch together in large part because they're intriguing separately and the pairing is not natural; Carol is well-aware of where the direction Emma is heading leads but also can't help but want to recapture that feeling that there's magic in the world and one's faith matters. Add in Josean Bengoetxea as a policeman that when to school with Carol and is one of the many neighbors looking out for Emma, and there's a trio that look like they should become a found family, but they don't quite fit.

Aside from all that, I like how it plays with faith and belief as well, with Emma motivated by need and possibly harming herself because she's literally playing with fire. The ghost story around the Chapel is terrific, leading to a neat horror-movie finale, but also a commodity, and the way the filmmakers will trick the audience into thinking they're seeing something from 400 years ago but reveal it to be modern recreations is clever: This is all malleable and convincing, and the balance between comforting and exploiting those who need the assurance these stories provide is never fair, whether coming from the official church or a fake psychic.

It's an idea that burrows in and takes hold in part because director Carlota Pereda and her co-writers don't try to abstract what Emma and Carol are dealing with but explore it, while still giving the audience creepy plague-doctor monsters and a phantom who lures an innocent into danger. It's smart and scary and makes all its pieces work together.

Fantasia/New York Asian Film Festivals 2021.04: Bull and Tokyo Revengers

Fun accidental double feature here, with the Sunday virtual second screening of Bull and in-person-in-Montreal screening of Tokyo Revengers both featuring movies that involve trying to right wrongs after a ten year break, just with that break running in different directions, time-wise. This amuses me.

Bull

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, IndeeTV)

Bull is a revenge story, distilled almost completely down to the genre's essence, so much so that its twist arguably just makes it even more elemental. It is lean, nasty, and tremendously satisfying in its nasty way.

It's been ten years since anybody last saw Bull (Neil Maskell), and that is by and large probably for the best; the audience first encounters him buying a gun, plugging someone off-screen, and then casually tossing the weapon back to the person who sold it to him, apparently not terribly worried about being recognized. Soon he's back in his hometown, but only former sister-in-law Cheryl (Kellie Shirley) is to be found. She's not much help in finding the rest of her father Norm (David Hayman) and sister Gemma (Lois Brabin-Platt), who have moved on in the past decade. Bull used to be part of the muscle for Norm's protection racket, and their falling out was such that Norm and his other lieutenants at the time, Gary (Kevin Harvey), Marco (Jason Milligan), and Clive (David Nellist), are shocked to see him alive, to the extent that they track down his mother Margie (Elizabeth Counsell) to find out if he has some sort of look-alike brother or cousin.

The scene where Norm confronts Margie is not necessarily an important one as far as the plot goes, but it's got a couple of moments which exemplify the almost self-contradictory melodrama of it better than almost everything else. Watch Norm just seethe in anger talking to this 80-year-old woman who spends her days making small bets on the ponies, his declaration that her family was put on Earth to destroy his seeming absurdly hyperbolic, but that's the scale of this sort of feud - everything to those involved, but verging on petty from the outside. Nearly as much fun is the moment when director Paul Andrew Williams and his cinematographer zoom in on a corner of the screen, an doubly-unsettling change in a film whose go-to-way to put the audience off-balance is in how it cuts between scenes.

That bit is a great little showcase for David Hayman, who is all over this working-class gangster who never got around to putting on airs or trying to climb to a higher station. There's nothing admirable about that in Hayman's performance - Norm has no imagination to go with his greed - but there's the veneer of something like that in certain scenes, like when he commits to destroying his son in law rather than deal with the disaster that is his daughter, a father's loyalty coming across as an act of cowardice. His lined, weathered face is the complete opposite of Neil Maskell's round, friendly one; Maskell convinces the audience that maybe Bull can compartmentalize and be a good dad to son Aiden (Henri Charles), but it always twists into something disturbing a little too readily. There's a monster in him that can come out on short notice.

Which is why, based upon the conspicuous absence of Aiden outside of flashbacks, one wonders where he's been for the past ten years, what with Williams never exactly letting the grass grow under his feet. Present-day Bull follows a straight line with little room for anything but revenge, and Williams makes sure that it's never the sort of pretty violence where one admires the staging or sees irony and poetry in it. It's mean and angry violence that reflects the rage that the audience can't help but sympathize with even as they feel some horror at how it has found a willing partner in Bull's existing psychopathy.

By the time the film reaches its end, Williams has done his best to push things beyond "man, did they deserve what they got for screwing over the wrong person" even as he couldn't be more clear about this being how you make a monster. Even at under 90 minutes, it's a rough enough ride that some viewers may be ready to tap out early, and those that make it to the end may want to rewind to a family cookout scene to see if they've miscounted the numbe blonde sisters with similar haircuts, just to see to what extent Norm was on to something or if Bull's rampage was more focused than that.

I'm not sure whether that detail which maybe doesn't matter should have been clearer or if it's an interesting ambiguity, but it's an interesting one, and maybe hints at the film having a bit more rewatchability than one might expect for something this nasty and elemental.

Full review at eFilmCritic (dead link)

Tokyo Revengers (Tôkyô ribenjâzu)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2021 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2021, Cinando)

As near as I can tell, the anime series and live-action movies of Tokyo Revengers are coming out almost simultaneously, and while the movie is not bad at all - especially for fans of the teenage-delinquents-fighting genre - this is a story clearly made for another medium, whether it be comics or television. There's too much to fit in and spots which beg for both cliffhangers and room for subplots to get fleshed out. The filmmakers do impressive work getting the story down to two hours, but it's really not a movie at heart.

It kicks off with Hanagaki Takemichi (Takumi Kitamura) working the sort of part-time convenience store job usually reserved for teenagers, and his younger boss suggests he peaked in high school. If so, it wasn't much of a peak - he was the kind of kid who thought fighting made him look tough and cool but always got his ass kicked - with the best part of it the girlfriend he had at the time, and now the news says that Hinata Tachibana (Mio Imada) and her brother Naoto have died in their mid-twenties, the victim of violence involving the Tokyo Maji gang. Soon after, he's apparently pushed in front of a subway train, only to emerge ten years earlier, but at least able to convince Naoto (Yosuke Sugino) to keep alert on 1 July 2020 before returning to a reality where Naoto survived and is now a detective who notes that "Toman" changed drastically ten years ago, when leaders Manjiro Sano (Ryo Yoshizawa) and Tetta Kisaki (Shotaro Mamiya) met. They figure out how to send Takemichi back and forth, and he's able to change things so that he's befriended by "Mikey" Sano, who seems pretty nice for a delinquent. Takemichi figures things changed when his best friend and conscience Ken "Draken" Ryuguji (Yuki Yamada) was killed in a fight with Moebius (Keita Arai) and his gang, but he's still more or less the same loser he was the first time through high school - how can he change destiny?

You'd think that a biker gang led by a gang named "Moebius" whose logo is an ouroboros might have something to do with the time-travel shenanigans, and there are vague hints that there's more going on than what happens when Takemichi and Naoto shake hands, but that's not an element this film does much with. Maybe that's for the best - if screenwriter Takahashi Izumi were to commit to a cause, he might have to spend time explaining it, then maybe talk about how, if there's more going on than just these two coincidentally having this power, someone thinks their best use of it is pushing a group of street punks to become a powerful yakuza rival, which isn't really the story these filmmakers are interested in telling. Still, it feels like they could have done a lot more with Hinata, who had apparently been the best thing in Takemichi's life but often gets treated like an impediment to the plot. Heck, there's barely any talk of what happened to her during the missing ten years. This story could be streamlined down to someone older but not at all wiser reliving his youth and determined to do it right (for a weird value of "right") without all the back-and-forth and maybe work better.

That might have made it a more basic delinquents-fighting story, and it's not exactly bad by that measure. That genre is an acquired taste on this side of the Pacific - it's one of those things that gets done so much in Japan that I don't know as an outsider to what extent it reflects something real and to what extent something similar was a big hit and spurred enough copycats to become a genre - and Tokyo Revengers has a good handle on all the character types and the basic outline, as well as the weird violence of it, where folks like Takemuchi and his friend Akkun (Hayato Isomura) get beaten so badly and so realistically that it looks like they'll break from the abuse but where you can also see how Mikey's casual almost-superhuman skill at just clobbering the people in his way makes him an idol of sorts. And then, when two gangs clash, the rumbles are a blast. In this case, the fights aren't quite the balletic mayhem that Sion Sono and Tak Sakaguchi managed in Tokyo Tribe and the like, but director Tsutomu Hanabusa fills the screen with action while still focusing the eye on where Mikey is plowing through a crowd, tweaking things slightly so that this three-on-one looks like a big deal and that one looks dangerous, letting the characters get fatigued even if the audience is still energized. It can look tacky as heck, but the themed costumes and crazy hair just highlight how, if you're more like Takemichi than Mikey, it's all about plowing through even as you take a beating from those who are really good at inflicting violence, while even Mikey can have his heart broken even if his ass can't be kicked.

Of course, one of the things viewers kind of learn to ignore about the genre is that the guys in these gangs don't ever actually look like teenagers, although it's a little easier to ignore that when the same actors aren't playing them ten years older. Takumi Kitamura actually looks younger in the present day - he and Hayato Isomura tend to present their characters as slumped and timid at 27 but are standing up relatively straight with a couple extra inches of spiky hair at 17 - and is performances in both periods don't quite match; one wonders if his worn-down experience isn't supposed to be able to override his impulsive teenage brain. They actually have to joke about Naoto being so big for a middle-schooler, although Yosuke Sugino winds up being the standout in the cast, actually looking and acting like he's grown up and is genuinely driven by his sister's death. It would be nice to see more of Mio Imada as that sister; as much as she plays the sweet schoolgirl, it's not hard to extrapolate a story where Hinata also became a cop and was more headstrong than Naoto from what she's given. There's not much of Ryo Yoshizawa in the present, which is probably for the best; he does fun but breakable well in 2010 but it manifests as a lack of personality rather than a damaged one in 2020.

Apparently, this film's release was delayed by Covid in Japan, which means it likely comes off even more as an over-compression of the manga and anime series there, rather than the anime being able to play as an expansion. It's a tough break - this may be the best possible two-hour version of the story, and does what it's able to include very well, but you can't help but be aware that there's another adaptation out there that doesn't skip over so much.

Full review at eFilmCritic (dead link)

Fantasia 2020.07: Bleed with Me, Kriya, and Kakegurui

Been a while since I had one of those "can't write during the day but let's keep going until 2am" days, but that's where I was with Wednesday's movies, which had me behind anyway because I didn't get the Kakegurui link until late fairly late. Ah, well, there are some short days coming up, and maybe I won't overlap with NYAFF quite so much.

On the other hand, this does kind of get me back on the planned "watch movies during the day, write while watching baseball at night" schedule!

Bleed with Me

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

I reevaluate movies between watch and review all the time, often finding something that makes it at least a little more interesting with a little thought. For Bleed with Me, it got me from frustration with the ending to "yeah, well, I guess", which is good, because for most of the running time, I was pretty fond of this tight little thriller. I still am, actually, and I suspect those less bothered by certain plot devices will like it a whole lot.

It opens with Rowan (Lee Marshall) asleep in the back seat of a station wagon. She's not actually still a teenager, but kind of looks young and vulnerable. She's traveling to a cabin belonging to the family of co-worker Emily (Lauren Beatty) along with Emily's boyfriend Brendan (Aris Tyros). Brendan is initially none too thrilled about having a third wheel along, but Emily insisted, and he's been a pretty good boyfriend, helping out a lot as Emily recovered from an accident six months ago that still has her walking with a limp. It's looking like the under-the-weather Rowan might be spending a lot of the time in bed, and she's starting to suspect that Emily may be to blame, using the leftover painkillers she casually mentioned to keep her sedated.

Why? Well, more and more cuts keep appearing on her arm, and Rowan has spotted Emily with containers of blood when she thought Rowan couldn't see. Though Rowan doesn't have anyone she can confide it without sounding insane, there's a certain strange logic to it - Emily has a sort of strange, detached way about her, and Rowan had the first couple scars before she got there, so even if a body was found, it would be pretty easy to say there was no foul play. Writer/director Amelia Moses does a nice job of giving the audience time to construct this alongside Rowan without the customary need to stop and say things out loud, go back and forth about how it sounds silly, and the like. She just trusts the viewer to get in and go with it, rather than stepping forward and back to make sure one understands just exactly how unlikely it is.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Kriya

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

As I watched Kriya, I was somewhat reassured that the main character spends much of the movie in the same place I was as an audience member - extremely uncertain whether he was in the middle of something weird and creepy or just culturally outside his own experience. It's the sort of movie where that could very easily be misinterpreted, especially for someone for whom it is much further from the usual, but instead it's especially effective (although it does make me wonder how all the movies with various bits of Christian weirdness play to members of other cultures).

It opens in a club, where Neel (Noble Luke) and Sitara (Navjot Randhawa) catch each other's eyes. As they make out in Neel's car after his gig as DJ is done, Sitara feels uncomfortable about going further there, so they drive to her place - an unexpectedly large mansion - only to find that Sitara's father is laid out in the living room, apparently breathing his last, surrounded by her younger sister Sara (Kanak Bhardwaj), their mother Tara Devi (Avantika Akerkar), and a Panditji or wise man (Sudhanva Deshpande), nurse Magdali (Anuradha Majumder) off to the side. Neel isn't sure he should be there, and the mother agrees, but he also doesn't want to leave the distraught Sitara. Something feels badly off to him - shouldn't a family with this grand house have more friends and family here - but maybe that's just the unsettled feelings he has regarding the deaths of his own parents.

As is often the case with films this steeped in the specifics of another's culture, I'd be genuinely interested to hear from Hindus just how fast and loose this film plays with various traditions, although writer/director Sidharth Srinivasan has seemingly taken pains to note where this this "black funeral" diverges from the norm in order to invoke dark magic and attempts to break a curse through unholy means. Whatever the case may be, it does a really terrific job of placing the audience in Neel's place without making him a complete everyman placeholder. He's not in every scene, but it's close, and Noble Luke does an impressive slow-burn freakout as the film goes on. For a large chunk of the movie, there's almost an awareness that his situation could be darkly funny under slightly different circumstances, which Srinivasan and Luke are able to make things creepier - every time Neel tries to use the social awkwardness to escape, he gets pulled in a little deeper and finds himself a little more disturbed.

Full review at eFilmCritic

Eiga: Kakegurui

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)

You do not actually need to have seen the 13 episodes of the Kakegurui television series to follow this film, which stars the same cast and appears to pick up where they leave off - there's a character whose primary purpose seems to be to get a new viewer up to speed - but it's probably useful to know that this is not a completely stand-alone film in order to temper one's expectations. There is some fairly inspired material here, but the audience can't get the entire picture.

As journalism club member Kyu Nitobe (Akira Onodera) informs us latecomers over the first fifteen minutes, Hyakkoah Academy is an elite school for children of the super-rich, but instead of focusing on academics or athletics, it is dedicated to gambling, under the premise that knowing when and how to bet and win big is the most important skill in business. Yumeka Jabami (Minami Hamabe) is a recent transfer student but one who has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of the school's most skilled and compulsive gamblers, quite possibly a rival to Student Council President Kiari Momobami (Elaiza Ikeda) herself. There are other threats to the Council's power - a group of students who have renounced gambling has formed The Village in an abandoned school building, with Jueri Arukibi (Haruka Fukuhara) its most public officer and Amane Murasame (Hio Miyazawa), said to have once bested Momobami herself, the mysterious leader; less high-minded vandals led by Tomo Inuhachi (Mariko Ito) destroying gaming tables - so she decides to hold a special election, in which students must gamble to vote and candidates play in pairs. Super-rich brat Itsuki Sumeragi (Ruka Matsuda) tries to recruit Yumeko to her team, but she decides to work with high-strung boyfriend Ryota Suzui (Mahiro Takasugi), while her friend Meari Saotome (Aoi Morikawa) teams with a Villager who still likes gambling a lot, Jun Kiwatari (Yuma Yamoto), while Jueri and Tomo form another team - and Murasame chooses to sit the election out.

That is a lot of characters, and it's pretty clear that there could have been even more, with the student council having some pretty colorful folks on the bench, a bunch of people Yumeko has defeated name-checked, and Nitobe kind of hanging around on the sidelines once his fifteen minutes or so of intense exposition at the start is done. On the other side, fans of the show can probably look through that description and spot the "guest star" pretty quickly. It makes that first stretch frantic and maybe dizzying for the newbies while likely being something the fans will fast-forward through, one of the busiest "previously on…" packages ever assembled. It's fairly effective for establishing the players, but leaves the whole set-up as something one definitely shouldn't examine too closely - is there any sort of faculty at this school, or classes, or is it all kind of self-directed, like Nitobe doing a sort of school paper thing? Why do the kids in The Village care about being expelled if they've got no interest in participating in the activity that is the school's reason for being? Just what sort of power do the "Life Plan" documents being thrown around have outside the academy's gates? There are some genuinely clever ideas at work here - the idea that captains of industry are being trained to treat the economy like a game rather than learn practical skills is both sociopathic and bitingly on-point satire, and there's a sort of lesson to how the game which takes up most of the film's second half requires a balance of skill and personal charisma - but, wow, does the premise as presented here have some big gaps to be filled in!

Full review at eFilmCritic

Fantasia 2018.17: Bleach, Laughing Under the Clouds, Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings, Punk Samurai Slash Down, and Terrified

The rare long all-Hall day, although that's in part because I could feel myself winding down during Terrified and wasn't going to swipe a seat from somebody who wouldn't fall asleep during The Oily Maniac. Enjoyably crowded all day, although with a few things seeming to run longer than expected, it was a real into the movie, out to the line, into the movie, repeat, day.



Not a lot of guests today, and this was kind of an accident - as Marc "DJ XL5" Lamothe explained, David Burrowes's "Granny" has a 5.1 mix, but the Zappin Party was mixed in 2.0, which meant that when the first was edited into the second, the music came over fine but the dialogue didn't. He said that a lot of people thought that this was meant to play into the granny being hearing-impaired or the like, but, not, this wasn't that sort of experimental thing, they just fucked it up, and he was really glad that they had a chance to reschedule it to play before Terrified. They even gave away 25 tickets to the film to folks who had been to the Zappin Party.

Burrowes (right) was still there to thank the audience, because the Australian filmmaker is attending the entire festival. I half-wonder if "Granny" is playing at other North American and European festivals and a long tour is easier than going home, or if he figured that if he was going to travel to one festival, it would be the one where his filmmaker badge could get him into 80 movies.

Or more, depending how you count shorts. Today's shorts day for me, with Penguin Highway followed by both the International Science Fiction Shorts and Circo Animato programs, then back to features for One Cut of the Dead and Five Fingers for Marseilles. Five Fingers of Death is a nice 35mm print and a bunch of fun.

Bleach

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

This high-energy manga adaptation plays best early on, when "buddy comedy" is showing more than some of the other genres that have been put in its blender - the chemistry between its two superpowered teens is sharp but thankfully non-romantic, making the movie sing. It's got a delightfully casual way of adding all the fantasy elements here, too.

Eventually it succumbs a bit to manga and film being paced differently, drawing things out while being cryptic and not having a lot of time for supporting characters. We've got an idea of where this is going to go, so either get on with it or distract us with some more of the comedic stuff.

The action is a lot of fun, at least, even if it involves a lot of swinging plastic swords at special effects. The movie benefits a lot from nifty creature design - the "Hollows" all look great - and certainly has makes it exciting enough that I do hope the studio adapts more arcs (and from what I've seen at the comic shop, there's a lot of them!).

Full review at EFC.

Donten ni warau (Laughing Under the Clouds)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

Though Laughing Under the Clouds tends to get kind of muddled at times, not always entirely sure what it wants to be about or how much weight to give ies supernatural and modern elements, it's got a core involving its three brothers that always works emotionally, even when the rest of the story is a little less aligned. Other bits of the story may not quite work, but Soramaru's sibling rivalry with older brother Tenka always feels right on target.

It's got an emotionally sunny attitude from the colorful, modern-feeling opening to how oldest brother Tenka tries to maintain a happy life for his brothers and town. Maybe the horrific prison is a sign that he's ignoring reality; maybe it's just tonal imbalance. However it shakes out, there's always the feel that something is going on, even as the film darkens (though never too much).

It's kind of a mess, but always an interesting one, and it's got a great Indiana Jones feel when it goes full occult adventure in the end. This might be frustrating if it weren't so polished, but it's not really bad at all as it is.

Full review at EFC.

"No One Will Ever Believe You"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

A fun bit of Halloween that occasionally looks like it might be stretching what its makers can do a bit (a scary face is apparently easier than scary arms), but still works because filmmaker Frédéric Chalté is very good at doling little bits of escalation out over the course of the short that crank the tension up without having to have a whole lot of action until the end. That's when he manages to put three pretty good exclamation points on the short, each a different sort of knife-twist. There's something in the climax for whatever scares somebody the most, which is something few people telling horror stories really manage.

Di Renjie zhi Sidatianwang (Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The Four Heavenly Kings is Tsui Hark's best Detective Dee movie yet. He starts with big, colorful fantasy that it seems like he'll have a hard time topping, but in this case it's better than saving this particular good stuff for later. This is the first time Dee feels like he's in the middle of an outrageous world from the start, and the frantic political machinations play off the madness well.

But it builds, though - the finale is both a greatest hits reprise of every bit of effects that Hark used in the rest of the movie and some even bigger bits of insanity. It's a crying shame that the film is only being released 2D in North America, because the credits indicate Hark shot in stereo and he loves throwing crap at the audience. It may be one of the best big action scenes of the summer, though overshadowed here by Tom Cruise risking life and limb.

It finishes promising more, maybe even the time travel story starring both Mark Chao and Andy Lau that has been teased for a while. I hope so, because this is one of the most thoroughly entertaining Chinese blockbusters in a while.

Full review at EFC.

Panku-zamurai, kirarete sôrô (Punk Samurai Slash Down)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Well, that's something. Several somethings, in fact, starting out as a winking con-game movie set in samurai times and eventually becoming five kinds of absurd before a jaw-droppingly insane finale. Somewhere along the way, even the cheery parts get cynical and the biggest hucksters seem to have things right.

And though it stretches out a ways, it manages to be pretty consistently funny, spreading things out between a bunch of characters, going for arch narration when things start to a get too straightforward, lingering when it's more bizarre than usual. I was admittedly ready for it to be done well before it actually finished (and I suspect that absolutely everybody in the audience saw the final "twist" coming), but wasn't annoyed by this in the way I usually am with too-long movies, which certainly means that the filmmakers are doing something right.

"Granny"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Zappin Party, digital)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

A fun little short that's got just enough of a believable motivation to give it some genuine sting rather even though the bloody sight gags are very silly indeed. It works in large part because it's not just old-person jokes - it's got some well-executed thriller moments in it, even if they often do take a comic turn. The two main actors are also both spot-on: Tel Benjamin has just enough incredulity on his face to go with his character's fear, and Maggie Dence balances the horrifying blankness of a slasher villain with some genuine rage and just a little bit of a senior who isn't quite where she was mentally. The last stretch is a bit wobbly, but gets saved by the very silliness of its final bits.

This was the second time the short played in the festival, after a bit of technical trouble including it in a package. Very glad I got to see it properly, although it's interesting to note just how well it played with the dialogue extremely muffled. That's some good visual storytelling, even if it wasn't the intention!

Aterrados (Terrified)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

Give Terrified a lot of credit for not screwing around on the way to the good stuff. A lot of haunted house movies will do a slow build, hint at things that could have a rational explanation, or otherwise play things coy. Writer/director Demián Rugna says to hell with that, going all in on the paranormal barely ten minutes into the movie, and rather than having nowhere to go from there, he builds a contained but still grand mythology, finding ways to make things bigger while still placing them within the corners of our world.

There are a ton of good jump scares, and an enjoyable amount of time playing with how, though these people may be right about there being monsters, that doesn't mean that they are not themselves crazy. Some of the design and effects can seem a bit familiar or low-budget, but there's something weirdly effective about how the first big scare moment plays out - it looks crude, like something anybody could do, but it's staged in a shockingly vicious way and never gets near the uncanny valley. There's a sort of credibility to how the film goes about its business that a lot of other ones doing the same thing lack, but without the tendency to undercut just how unknowable and rule-less these things can seem.

Fantasia 2018.12: The Dark, I Am a Hero, Luz, The Witch in the Window, and Inuyashiki

Monday, apparently, is the day you want to come to Fantasia if you like seeing directors talk about their movies.



That there is The Dark director Justin P. Lange on the right. He made a pretty nifty movie with enough sharp turns that it made my general plan of "see as many movies as possible at the festival without researching unless you need to resolve conflicts" seem pretty clever, because I didn't know what was coming at any point.

He had a pretty dedicated pair of kids working for him, noting that they initially tried to find ways to keep Toby Nichols from having to wear some appliances over his eyes that left him as blind as the character, but the kid kept pushing to do it. Not that the guy was above messing with his director; he would regularly sound not-great during rehearsal and then nail it when filming started, and toward the end of shooting he and co-star Nadia Alexander were practicing one scene with the soapiest possible manner, getting him into a mild panic because they were on a soundstage with with all this elaborate stuff going on before delivering.



Shinsuke Sato (center) had a long day of audience Q&As, with I Am a Hero, Bleach, and Inuyashiki all playing on one screen or another, although it's maybe not hugely taxing - you've got time to have a nice meal while folks watch your movies, probably a nice lounge to read in. Maybe you catch that nifty horror movie that played before yours.

One of the big topics here was something I had kind-of-sort-of noticed but never given a lot of thought to, that a lot of Japanese movies are funded by broadcast television stations, and as a result there are some hard limits on what you can and can't do, so the fact that this was a Toho production without a lot of that sort of thing going on meant he could do a big, violent, gross zombie movie, and he did go kind of all-in.

Much of the climax takes place at a shopping center, so there were inevitable questions about Dawn of the Dead, and he didn't talk about themes so much as pointed out that this took place at an outlet mall, so the action played out differently because much of it was outside, and then pointed out that while you are starting to see more outlet malls in Japan, it was tough to find one in good shape that would let them shoot, so that chunk of the movie was actually shot in South Korea. You probably wouldn't notice in part because of all the English signage, which feels like it could be a metaphor for something (loss of place amid consumer culture?), but it's tough to put one's finger on it.



For Luz, Ariel was joined by director Tilman Singer (center) and production designer Dario Mendez Acosta (right), which isn't just bringing random people up because, as Ariel mentioned at the start, this movie is "very production designed." It's period layered on period, and the whole thing had an incredibly meticulous script, with practically every motion and bit of unsynchronized sound pre-planned. It was Singer's thesis film, so they didn't have a whole lot of money on top of shooting on 16mm, which meant he basically had three takes per shot and that was it. It works out very well; I saw a few folks on Twitter amazed that it was a student film.

Funniest bit: When someone asked if Acosta brought the South American bits to the movie, and he laughed, saying that while he and Singer did a semester abroad in Colombia, he was born and raised in Germany, and this (indicating his face) was lying to you - he's quite German and loses his mind when the train is five minutes late.



Nice crowd for The Witch in the Window, as Mitch Davis welcomed filmmaker Andy MItton, as well as stars Charlie Tacker and Alex Draper and producer Richard King. Shot in Vermont, which explains why a fair number of people came up; Draper is actually a professor at Middlebury College, and they got a lot of people from there working on it. It feels authentically New England in a way that a lot of other haunted house movies don't.

It's interesting to hear how a lot of the movie evolved while making it, with something that's maybe not crucial to the supernatural mythology (whether or not Simon's marriage could be salvaged) but certainly what the movie was about on a thematic level changing midway through, and the important last beat added during sound mixing literally an hour before the film was locked. Which is crazy, but worked.



New screen, same Sato, as he closed out the long day with Inuyashiki. Most of the Q&A was in French, so I didn't catch a lot, but it was kind of interesting to come full-circle and see the Fuji Television logo at the front and notice that, while this film is just about as violent as I Am a Hero was, it was kind of bloodless and held back. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't mentioned this before, but it's hard not to given the context.

Today's plan is kind of up in the air - Chained for Life for sure, and then I'd kind of like to see Da Hu Fa in 3D, but I've heard the subtitles are kind of incomprehensible. The alternative is V.I.P., and then back to Hall to see if I can get into Bodied afterward.

"A/S/L"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

As this sort of short horror movie goes - person demonstrates he's not really a great human being, walks himself into supernatural situation well-suited to punishing it, with violence ensuing - "A/S/L" is pretty good. I don't know that this kind of short is actually scary; it's got too certain a sense of its own righteousness for that, and I suspect that most people watching it know the game well enough that the sudden reversal doesn't provide the relief it's supposed to because the audience is never really that worried.

This one does its job well, though - there's an uncertainty and caution to both Brendan Boogie (as the older man) and Lindsey Taft (as the 13-year-old on the other end of his internet chat) that not only makes them feel less like strawmen but gives the short the feeling that it could go in any direction. It's still always going to end up at the same place, but not knowing the how or the exact feel puts it a notch above many others doing the same sort of thing.

The Dark

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The Dark is good horror-movie stuff that starts with a couple of great bits of misdirection before the story proper begins, good enough that I almost don't want to talk about where it really goes, because discovering it is a lot of nerve-wracking fun and makes the result kind of beautiful. But since a good review tells you why I like it, here goes.

It starts with a tense little bit - twitchy-looking Josef (Karl Markovics) stopping at a gas station, getting an odd assortment of snacks from the convenience store, and ripping open a map before he pays for it. The proprietor doesn't much like him, or any of the tourists who come looking to scare themselves in "Devil's Den". It turns out someone is not what he seems here, and further, when things do get to Devil's Den, there is yet more to be afraid of - although what's there is not, it turns out, as completely inhuman as one might have assumed.

That opening gambit is something that genre audiences have seen rather a lot, but it's still pretty effective; filmmaker Justin P. Lange keeps potential distractions like music to a tense minimum, introduces incongruous bits that pique interest at the time and make a lot more sense later without being clear foreshadowing, and teases the audience with some clear genre knowledge that nevertheless doesn't become a wink and deconstruction. It's well-executed horror material that does a couple of things before the audience is completely ready, giving them both a tingle of excitement and leaving the rest of the film wide open.

Full review at EFC.

I Am a Hero

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I kind of expected the title if this to be a bit more ironic, both from what I've heard of the manga and the way the opening act played (as well as my increasing unease with zombies and the rules that go with them becoming mainstream). It's not, really, but rather pretty much standard but well-done zombie action.

It's good, at least, with a couple terrific action scenes, with an initial attack on the hero that plays genuinely creepy and a fantastic cab sequence highlights of the first half before things calm down for a little while so they can build up to the finale. There's a lot of kind of action that you've maybe seen a lot, but it's done in slick, bloody fashion.

It's definitely one where I prefer the movie in my head more and don't like how it plays into a lot of the toxic fantasies that often go with zombie movies (the world ends and not only is the hero's gun hobby suddenly useful and necessary, but he winds up with a younger, nicer girlfriend and a teenage cutie admiring him unconditionally), and those can use some shredding. But, just looking at the movie Sato made, it's thrilling, capable fast-zombie material, certainly doing well by its genre.

Full review at EFC.

Luz

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Luz is a nifty, disorienting sort of horror movie which has the neat idea of combining hypnosis and possession, creating a sense of lack of control and disconnection that many other films like this lack. It's a fascinating way to make what seems very small into something tremendously tense.

It's an unnerving look, too, shot on 16mm in brutalist, run-down locations, with tons of smoke that makes a room both claustrophobic and infinite. The sound is peculiar and synth-y, too loud and out of sync, but it fits, even if it is also often very jarring. Writer/director Tilman Singer seldom lets the audience forget that they're watching a movie - some of the dropouts on the film seem a little too regular to not be a reminder of the film's own artificiality - but that may in part be a way to condition the audience to want order even as it receives something very much out of joint.

Full review at EFC.

The Witch in the Window

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Thumbs up to the 75-minute horror movie, which is the best length for the genre. May filmmakers' increasing recognition of streaming services as their ultimate landing spot keep them from adding fifteen to twenty unneeded minutes going forward.

Despite that brief length, writer/director Andy Mitton doesn't push the scares too hard; his film is mostly quiet and kind of upbeat as it shows the father and son connecting as they repair a haunted house. It gets sweeter and more responsible as it goes on rather than seeming foolish and panicked, and as a result it's scary but not destructive at its heart, which is relatively unique where ghost stories are concerned.

Nice chemistry between the two stars, as well; Charlie Tacker and Alex Draper make for a nice, believable pairing even when Mitton is being a little too writerly with their talk and having them communicate with the audience as much as each other. It's a genuinely impressive father/son story with or without ghosts.

Full review at EFC.

Inuyashiki

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

I was hoping that the feature film version of Inuyashiki would fix up a few problems the manga had, most importantly that the author quickly found himself more interested in the villain than the title character, which leads to a level of violence that is too much by far, but it turns out to be a pretty faithful adaptation, warts and all.

Of course, getting it "right" does mean it winds up with a good take on the title character, maybe not so extremely old and feeble as the manga, but believably beleaguered and with a very nice performance from star Noritake Kinashi, who projects a simple, genuine decency compared to the villain's detached sociopathy. It's a good but not preachy version of the much-retweeted quotation about not knowing how to explain you should care about other people, and also superhero 101, but kind of effective..

The action and effects do a fair job of capturing the manga's imagery, and look pretty good for something likely a bit below blockbuster level. It's kind of antiseptic at times - the combination of excess and worry about appearances that results in a lot of bloodless headshots - but has a nice handle on aerial action, which seems like it would be neat in 3D if movies get released that way in Japan.

Full review at EFC.

Oldboy, Oldboy, Oldboy (and Zinda)

I do believe that the fairest way to review a movie is probably to let it stand on its own - if it's a remake or an adaptation, try to put those prior (or subsequent) versions out of your mind when watching the new one. Just judge how well it works as a film, with maybe a few comments giving context if you're a fan of the prior versions.

Or, alternately, given a new movie in theaters that is both an adaptation and a remake, I could binge on all three in short succession and talk about how four different teams told (roughly) the same story. In the case of Oldboy, that would be the original manga by Garon Tsuchiya & Nobuaki Minegishi, the South Korean film directed by Park Chan-wook, an unauthorized Hindi-language version directed by Sanjay Gupta (Zinda), and a new film directed by Spike Lee.



And, just for fun, I'll review them in the order of release, writing each up before watching the next, seeing how the story evolves. Admittedly, I've already seen the Park Chan-wook version, but it's been since the original American release.

Be aware: There will be discussion of the ends, clearly marked.

Oldboy (original manga)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Read 28-29 November 2013 in various places

Pretty much every week, I buy more comics than I can read; the individual issues with their ongoing storylines that cross over from title to title generally get finished, but manga, original graphic novels, and other works with a spine can accumulate. That's what happened with Oldboy; I purchased the eight volumes as Dark Horse put them out in 2006-2007 and they just piled up, ready for an excuse to binge-read.

That's not precisely a bad thing; it goes quickly enough and is enough of a good story, well-told that when I got to the end of one volume, I'd want the next right away, and I was glad I didn't have to wait two months for it. It reminded me of Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys in that regard. Of course, part of the quickness of the read was that each 20-page chapter had a double-page spread and some material meant to catch the guy reading it in the original serialized form (it ran as a feature in Weekly Manga Action for 78 weeks).

The story itself is about a man, Shinichi Goto, who was locked up in a private prison for ten years. As expected, he wants to find out why anybody would do this to him - he had no enemies that he knew about- and with nothing to do but exercise and watch television, he's worked himself into a specimin who can take anything thrown at him. Which is fine with his mysterious nemesis, "Dojima", as long as it happens under his terms.

As one starts reading Oldboy, it does not seem particularly surprising that it would become a film; writer Garon Tsuchiya and artist Nobuaki Minegishi occasionally throw in sound effects that seem more at home in the movies than sequential art, and the flashback structure similarly seems cinematic, introduced with what feels like camera movement and a slight change in the shading rather than, say, caption boxes or a different style of panel border. Minegishi's art in general is fairly strong; he draws expressive faces that take advantage of being drawn rather than photographed just enough that things never feel stiff, and places the characters into a detailed world without things ever getting too busy. Sometimes things can get a little off-model - Goto's distinctive chin sometimes shrinks just a little too much from certain angles - but never to the point where it's confusing for more than a second. His art style is somewhat generic beyond a fondness for big noses, but he tells a story without being showy about it as well as anybody.

Tsuchiya knows the tricks of writing this sort of serialized story, mixing red herrings and cliffhangers that will be undone in the next chapter up with new elements that will genuinely change the direction of the story. And it is a good story, albeit one that suffers from some of the usual seinen manga excesses. Goto's tragedies have, as often seems to be the case, forged him into a hyper-competent paragon of masculinity; he is not only able to defeat the top Japanese pugilist based on having shadow-boxed while watching matches on television during his incarceration despite never fighting before (as he tells the reader during some enjoyably hard-boiled narration, the sport has grown disappointing during the past ten years), but he is able to to screw the information he needs out of a woman. Even before some of the loopier plot twists kick in, it's no surprise that within hours of his release, pretty young waitress Eri is practically dragging him back to his place to rid her of that annoying virginity.

And that's before the somewhat loopy machinations of the second half kick in!

SPOILERS!

To be fair, Tsuchiya introduces hypnosis to the story early, and I suppose that if one is going to use it as a plot device, there's no point in going halfway. In some ways, it seems like a bit of a cheat;making the whole duel between Goto and "Dojima" - by now revealed as elementary school classmate Takaaki Kakinuma - little more than a game solitaire for Kakinuma. It robs Goto, Eri, and former teacher Yukio Kusama of much of their agency, and what's the point of a story like this if the whole thing winds up being just a puppet show?

The idea that emerges, though, is that we are all puppets to a certain degree, pulled away from our truest, best selves by emotions and compulsions that we cannot control. Goto, we learn, feared losing control to darker impulses from an early age, while Kakinuma feared that acknowledging any potential for friendship would make him weak, and so set out to destroy the boy who had once been nice to him. His masterstroke, as he sees it, is to make Goto and Eri prisoners of their own minds, awaiting whatever post-hypnotic suggestion might be lurking underneath. They may think that they have beat him, but as the epilogue shows, they can never be sure if their happiness is real or just the set-up for a greater fall. It's a sort of fatalism that many will feel without the need for it to be deliberately implanted.

!SRELIOPS

Put it together, and what do you have? A thriller with a neat hook, fine execution, and a finale that embraces the concept's absurdity to leave the reader with an interesting philosophical question to ponder. It's not surprising that someone saw a movie in it.

Oldboy (2003)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2013 in Jay's Living Room (binging, Blu-ray)

I reviewed this one for eFilmCritic back when it first hit the US, and even though I have (hopefully) become a better writer and more perceptive critic since then, I do agree with the basics of what I wrote there, so I'll just let the link stand and add some more.

One interesting thing I found watching it anew was that, apparently, some of the translation had changed between the theatrical release and the Blu-ray included in Tartan Palisades's "Vengence Trilogy" box set. Most curiously, protagonist Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) now says that his name means "taking things a day at a time" rather than "easy to to get along with". I can certainly see how one thing can be an idiom for both, but it's a very pointed change; instead of being an ironic comment on what a jerk Dae-su is at the start, it foreshadows what it will take to survive in his cell, and, maybe, on the outside (although, interestingly, both of those meanings might better refer to Shinichi Goto more than Oh Dae-su).

Another thing I was struck by while watching it was that while I tend to file Park Chan-wook away as a guy who makes stylish thrillers, springing clever twists on the audience amid excellent craft, he actually makes crazy movies. Oldboy is frantic from scene one, and some of the imagery that pops up on screen (like the ants - how could I forget the ants?) is actually over-the-top bizarre. Park certainly pays major attention to detail - I suspect every detail down to things like the choice of wallpaper in a given room is as meticulously chosen here as in his latest film (obsessively-polished English-language debut Stoker), there's the constant feeling that this thing could go off the rails into bug-nuts territory at any moment.

That's a big change from Oldboy the manga; while artist Nobuaki Minegishi mostly distinguished himself as a detailed draftsman and clear storyteller, the ordinary detail he presented is in stark contrast to the luridstyle and unusual angles Park and his collaborators go in for. Similarly, where writer Garon Tsuchiya emphasized the male-fantasy nature of Goto's methodical search for his enemy - and said enemy's rather formal opposition - Park and his co-writers plunge Oh Dae-su into madness and chaos straight away.

They also streamline the story quite a bit; without the demands of serial publication, the movie can tell the story without having little cliffhangers and false starts, and an important character introduced midway through the manga is entirely absent here. Park also makes the reason Dae-su was imprisoned much more grounded compared to the relative abstraction Tsuchiya went with, and the full scope of the revenge visited on him much more horrible. As the movie reaches the end, the audience is much more likely to react to the last-act revelations in a visceral way.

SPOILERS!

The character of Lee Soo-ah (Yoon Jin-seo) is entirely new, as is the whole plot of her sleeping with Oh Dae-su as a teenager, having a hysterical pregnancy as a result, and then being the subject of rumors that she and brother Woo-jin were having an incestuous affair before committing suicide, eventually leading to Woo-jin having Dae-su imprisoned while he carried out his plan of fixing Dae-su and his own daughter up. It's a brilliant story, shockingly emotional and horrifying on a gut level compared to the intellectual and philosophical motive in the manga. One can almost imaging Park coming up with this part of the plan and stumbling upon the Oldboy manga when trying to figure out how to make it work, and then grafting the two ideas together.

It does lead to Park pouring a lot into the last few scenes. Just as the audience has time to admire the scope and cruelty of Woo-jin's plan, Park is moving on to the next thing, having Choi Min-sik chew a great deal of scenery as Oh Dae-su promised to be Woo-jin's dog and does everything he can to convince him not to tell his daughter/lover Mido what has happened, climaxing in his cutting off his own tongue, the means by which this foul gossip was spread. It's arguably all a bit much, and depending on the mood I'm in when I consider it, those scenes are either two plots trying to upstage each other or Park realizing that they must be equally over-the-top for the incest to not overpower the rumor-mongering that caused it. Once he's committed to this story, there's no way to go but excess.

It's the last scene, though, that really seals what an incredible inversion of the original manga this story is. For all the darkness in Tsuchiya's story, it is a fundamentally heroic tale: Goto works to be a good an honorable person in the face of the darkness he finds within himself. He ultimately triumphs, and while there is still the threat of evil rising up to harm him even after he has defeated his enemy, he and Eri attempt to live a good life in spite of that fear.

At the end of the film, though, is as cynical as it can get. What initially appears to be Dae-su's attempt to erase his sin - having the hypnotist remove the memory of having slept with his daughter - merely frees him to be able to repeat it without guilt. It's interesting that the hypnotist purges the memory by having Dae-su imagine "the monster" walking away, as it is arguably the person left behind who is the actual monster, for he is the one that will continue the forbidden relationship, and has made the arrangements to make it possible. Dae-su was never the good man Shinichi Goto was, but you can argue that this is the lowest, co-opting the very idea of innocence so that he can have that which he is ashamed to want. Where Shinichi Goto lives honorably and has nightmares, Oh Dae-su does wrong and sleeps well.

!SRELIOPS

Zinda

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2013 in Jay's Living Room (binging, DVD)

Zinda is an unauthorized Hindi-language remake that follows the first Oldboy film pretty darn closely, though inevitably without the surges of inspiration that Park Chan-wook brought to the story, so that even when writer/director Sanjay Gupta does the same thing, it's obviously but a pale copy. Apparently, you can't sue over this in India, which is a shame, because this sort of rip-off appears to be Gupta's bread and butter.

Part of this movie's reason for existing is to water the story down; Indian audiences probably would not have gone for some of the nastier bits of Park's screenplay. Heck, early on, it looks like Gupta is going to transform Zinda into an utterly conventional revenge story, although he does eventually push things into twisted territory. That beginning is rough sledding in a lot of ways, as the interplay among Sanjay Dutt (the "Oh Dae-su/Goto" role of Bala Roy), Celina Jaitly (his wife Nisha), and Mahesh Manjrekar (Bala's weirdly-open-about-his-attraction-to-Nisha friend Joy Fernandes) is stilted and awkward. Things start looking up when Gupta and company decide that they will make use of the story's mean streak, especially once John Abraham pops up and brings unabashed nastiness to the part of the villain. Gupta also has no trouble with violence, adding power drills and katanas to the hammers and fisticuffs already in place.

The most obvious problem, though, is that while Gupta may be okay with throwing as much blood as the Indian censors will allow on screen, he's really got no style. He tries to replicate the "Oh Dae-su, with a hammer, against a veritable army in a corridor" fight, and it's terrible, static camerawork of a fight where each thug fights Bala in sequence for no good reason, with an obvious blooper that shows how fake the props are left in. It's also as blue-filtered as the rest of the movie, and make no mistake - you will not see a bluer movie that this; from at least the moment when Bala is imprisoned to the end, the only time the filter comes off is for a love scene, which makes me wonder if cinematographer Sanjay F. Gupta (apparently a different guy) was too conservative to shoot that. It's downright distracting, making the movie more obviously the work of someone who wants to be seen as edgy and different rather than a legitimate boundary-pusher like Park.

For all that Zinda is hackishly put together, though, its worst sin is probably being forgettable. It's Oldboy without the artistry or the truly shocking moments, and forced to fit a Bollywood format that it is ill-suited for (there might not be actual musical numbers,but there are some annoying prominent full songs on the soundtrack). To be fair, those who haven't seen the original - much less done so that week - can get a charge out of the concept and some of the bloody violence, but it can't help but feel watered down.

SPOILERS!

How watered down? Well, hypnosis and incest are both off the table. Abraham's Rohit Chopra certainly reveals a twisted endgame - a plan to sell Bala's daughter into sexual slavery at the same age at which Bala's lies about Rohit's sister Reema gave her a shameful reputation - but the full horror of the prior versions of Oldboy came not just from what the villain does at the end, but how thoroughly controlling a monster he is. Here, Lara Dutta's Eri/Mido stand-in, cab driver Jenny Singh, is just someone Bala meets on release and a convenient hostage for Rohit, there's no manipulation that not only leads to the gut-punch that ends both previous versions, but underscores the claim Rohit explicitly makes early in this one, that he has not been released, but transferred, and his life is still being controlled by his jailer.

Plus, the movie wimps out at the end. Where the manga had an ultimate victory for the villain always lurking in the shadows in the epilogue, and the Korean film had him relent only after Oh Dae-su had abased himself horrifically, this one just has false defeats followed by "what, you didn't think we were really going to have the kid raped, did you?" Where the previous versions had the villains off themselves because they had done their worst and what they had done would linger this one just has him fall off a building in a standard case of not being willing to allow the hero to save his life, only to be revealed as not having the viciousness to do the truly monstrous thing he'd planned.

I don't say this as a "darker == better" type; I want Bala to rescue his daughter, to prove that his love for this little girl he's never met is even stronger than the hate and anger that had propelled him through the rest of the movie. But this finale isn't an earned rescue or a piece of what's come before. It's backing away from the abyss entirely because the filmmaker is timid, and that's not exciting at all.

!SRELIOPS

As an aside: It's kind of hilarious to hear Rohit boasting that what he's planning will be seen by everyone on internet, mobiles, and DVDs, if only because it so closely paralleled the huge sales pitch Eros Entertainment put on the front of the not-exactly-great DVD I spent $3.30 on at Amazon. Aside from how much I wonder how often Eros gets people coming to their site looking for some other sort of entertainment entirely (or how often Bollywood fans accidentally find something spicier than masala), it's a weird sales pitch for the company and its routes for delivering "content", rather than the actual music/songs/TV itself.

Oldboy (2013, USA)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 December 2013 in Regal Fenway 31 (first-run, DCP)

My full review for this one is at eFilmCritic; and that closing paragraph about Spike Lee having a director's cut fills me with some trepidation - I don't necessarily want to update this thing in a few months because there's a fifth version of this story hanging around. That's doubly true since it seems like there's not much that needs to be added - more of Joe being a dick is unnecessary, and nobody else has a background that really needs fleshing out (or which could be fleshed out without giving too much away). There are a couple of plot bits that seem jumped over too quickly - Joe, Marie, and Chucky seem to be looking at Adrian Pryce before they've realized they should be looking at Adrian Pryce, for one; I spent some time wondering if Joe's ex-wife was the "Donna" mentioned in the high-school flashbacks, as her name is mentioned later there's nothing to connect her to the client's wife Joe makes a stupid pass at in 1993 - but supposedly what's been cut is character-building material.

The credits are a bit odd, too - Mark Protosevich is the sole credited writer in the opening titles, just after "Based Upon the Korean Motion Picture Oldboy". First, is it the usual practice to just credit that by name, as opposed to including the original writers/director? Second, there's no mention of the original manga written by Garon Tsuchiya and drawn by Nobuaki Minegishi. Both groups may be mentioned somewhere in the end credits, but that seems rather unfair beyond just giving human beings credit: While Lee & Protosevich have clearly used the 2003 film as their primary source, they do reach back to the original manga for certain elements: Joe sleeps in the back of Chucky's bar much like Goto did, there's an important part for a former teacher, and while previous adaptations only preserved the villain's former security-forces bodyguard as opposed to the pretty secretary, this one combines the two characters.

In some ways, I kind of wish the filmmakers had drawn more deeply on the source material; for instance, there's no particular reason for the four-day deadline, especially since it requires some unworldly puppet-mastery without the hypnosis used to speed things along in the Japanese and Korean versions. The counter-argument is that the longer Joe has, the less predictable what the players do is, but ...

SPOILERS!

... Joe and Marie having sex really never seems inevitable here, especially in the time frame given. This may be a result of having seen the Korean version within the week, knowing what's going to happen, and as a result paying more attention to the way Lee, Protosevich, and company set it up than the events as they unfold.

I'm also not hugely fond of Adrian literally going out of his way to kill Chucky in this one. In the Korean and Indian versions, the equivalent character is there to be enraged, and it's still a decision I don't love - the equivalent sequence in the manga has Goto's friend survive because for as much as Dojima is a monster, he's a planner who gets his revenge over time; that he used someone as stage dressing shows how diabolical he is. Granted, the movies feature a villain with powerful, lingering anger, and given the set-up it would make sense if killing Chucky were always a part of his plan. There's no indication that it was, although this is a more impulsive character. Donna is noted as dead as well, although with no evidence to suggest Adrian is responsible.

I do admit that I rather like the ending Protosevich gave this movie. As mentioned above, Oh Dae-su turns himself into an innocent monster in order to stay with Mido, and it's a twist that seems to exist for the purpose of their being a twist, ensuring that he's the same sort of oblivious, selfish man he was when the whole thing started. By choosing to return to his prison, Joe Doucett has developed the ability to feel guilt, choosing willingly to be punished for an offense he committed without knowing it, though I'm guessing this presumed life sentence has little to do with all the aggravated assaults and murders. It retroactively makes the opening scenes of him as a kind of boring creep better: He's gone from a man with no moral compass to having one that, while unconventional, certainly exerts power over him.

!SRELIOPS


Ranking the various versions, the Korean film goes on top and Zinda at the bottom, with the manga much closer to Park's film than the American remake is to the Indian. It's interesting to note just how transformative the Korean version is; both later versions have mostly followed its lead, although there is good material in the manga that is necessarily disposed of. For example, the later versions have no way to use the sweet sequence where Goto meets his former fiancée, and while all versions are about obsession, the theme of being a prisoner of one's own mind fades as one gets further from the source.

What really stood out to me is how, when seen in such quick succession, the various Oldboys point out the trade-offs in adaptation. When adapting the manga in 2003, Park Chan-wook had to make structural changes - things that worked as a graphic serial wouldn't have worked in a film - but he also injected a new idea that made the story more than its gimmick and the finale more visceral versus philosophical. Gupta's and Lee's adaptations, in contrast, were both about making things safer. Sure, Lee put some wacky stuff of his own in there, but the aggregate was about making thins easier for the audience to handle, even if not to the extent that this was the case for Gupta. This progression is a fine example of how the great adaptations, whether from one medium to another or between languages or eras, build on the best parts of what was there before, while the disappointing ones file things down.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.17 (30 July): Gantz 1 & 2, Article 12, Surviving Life, The FP, and Cold Sweat

I think I did a better job of avoiding the festival nap this year than most - of the 70-ish movies I saw, Surviving Life: Theory and Practice is probably the only one that I conked out in and thus won't be able to review. It's an example of how the nap can strike at any time, though - I'm not usually tired at seven o'clock, and I'd managed to sleep in after a late night at the Horny House of Horror on Friday, but the wall hits when the wall hits.

So, before the next movie, I hit the concession stand for a Pepsi Max and one of those strange Canadian candy bars we don't see much in the States, which meant that I was well and truly alert for this at the front of the theater:



That's Tim League of the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, along with The FP directors Jay and Brandon Trost. I think that this was actually a couple days before Drafthouse Pictures officially announced that they would be distributing the movie in early 2012, so League's presence seemed a bit random at the time, although not totally so; the movie had apparently made some noise at the Alamo's Fantastic Fest screenings during SXSW, although part of that noise was the cast and crew being rowdy during the screening.

And if "I've only got so much vacation time a year" doesn't do it the next time someone asks me why I don't include Fantastic Fest on my annual moviegoing itinerary, I'll just pull that picture up on my phone. As much as I enjoy having a little fun with not-so-serious movies, this sort of "hey, we're drinking to excess and acting ca-ray-zee" thing wears out its welcome pretty quickly for me. It drove me bonkers when I went to SXSW a couple years ago - I seriously did not need midnight shows delayed a half hour for drinking games when I'd been seeing movies since 11am and would get up and do it again the next day - and I suspect a whole festival like that would not mesh well with my temperament at all. You may insert your uptight New Englander jokes here.

(Also, did anyone else find it tacky that Fantastic Fest announced their first wave of titles on Fantasia's opening night? Seems like odd timing. Seriously, guys, it's okay if cities other than Austin are talked about as cool film spots for a day or two!)

And now, what I saw on my last Saturday at Fantasia this year:

Gantz

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Here's my original review at EFC from back in January, when I saw this film in a Fathom Events presentation (full entry here. I liked it quite a bit more the second time around, and not just because of how having the original Japanese soundtrack is an immense improvement over the terrible dub track I saw back then. It's amazing; not making the audience laugh at the line delivery turns out to be a massive improvement for a movie meant to be suspenseful. Who knew?

To a certain extent, I think that recalibration of expectations helped as well. I dig the Gantz manga, but without a ridiculous budget, the movies were never going to match the amazing action scenes in the books, so the movie was something of a disappointment the first time through. However, it's a bad practice in general to judge something on what it isn't rather than what it is, and this film is a fine sci-fi thriller.

Gantz: Perfect Answer

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

The Gantz manga is too large and sprawling to make into one movie; and even two may have been a stretch - the first half of this two-part movie covered roughly the first fifteen or so 200-page volumes that have been released in the US, and left plenty out. Gantz: Perfect Answer has the task of explaining what the heck was going on in Gantz and then wrapping the story up, which is one tall order. It gets the job done, and usually with enough style that the audience can overlook the bits that really don't make a lot of sense.

(Note: Spoilers for the first Gantz movie will abound; if you haven't seen it, you might wish to do so and then come back later.)

After watching his friend Masaru Kato (Kenichi Matsuyama) die in the last movie's climax, Kei Kurono (Kazunari Ninomiya) has sworn to make things right. In the regular world, it means he and girlfriend Tae Kojima (Yuriko Yoshitaka) are looking after Kato's little brother Ayumu; when he's called by to a strange apartment by the mysterious "Gantz" entity to hunt down aliens for "points", he and fellow veteran Yoshikazu Suzuki (Tomorowo Taguchi) execute them with ruthless efficiency, protecting the newbies so that they can earn enough points to revive fallen comrades. As bizarre as this is, things are about to get even stranger - model Eriko Ayukawa has a black orb that is sending her on missions of her own, cop Masamitsu Shigeta (Takayuki Yamada) is digging into the strange pattern of deaths and reappearances around Tokyo, and Kato has apparently returned from the dead without anybody accessing the 100-point-menu.

There comes a time in many (if not most) continuing series where the focus inevitably turns inward. What starts out as a scenario that allows the storyteller to explore many ideas within a familiar framework becomes a focus on the details of the framework itself. Perfect Answer winds up in a sort of in-between place - although it never devolves into focusing on minutia, the new characters introduced have less room to breathe than Kato, Kei, and Kishimoto did in the first. Making Gantz and the aliens the focus of the story rather than just plot devices does tend to highlight that the series's video-game logic really makes no practical sense.

Full review at EFC.

Article 12

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Documentaries from the Edge)

It's always unfortunate when a worthy topic becomes the subject of a bad documentary, because it can be very difficult to separate the quality of the picture for from the merit of its arguments. Usually, it's not that difficult to be objective judge each separately, but Article 12 is the sort of self-satisfied preaching to the choir that can push even a sympathetic audience member to investigating the other point of view just so that he or she is not blindly agreeing with these guys.

The title of "Article 12" comes from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; that portion of the document states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." However, the film points out, this is not always the case; even in democratic republics like the United States and the United Kingdom, privacy protections are becoming weaker, both because of government surveillance and by the voluntary actions of the populace.

There are plenty of good arguments for why privacy is important and why the present day's steady erosion of it is dangerous, and it would be very nice if filmmaker Juan Manuel Biaiñ laid them out in a more rigorous, structured way. Instead, he starts by assuming that the audience prioritizes privacy as highly as he does and then repeating a series of dire proclamations about how the weakening of these rights is bad, although there is a curious lack of concrete examples as to why. Sometimes, interview subjects like Noam Chomsky are allowed to make huge, unsubstantiated leaps between premise and conclusion.

Full review at EFC.

Prezít svuj zivot (teorie a praxe) (Surviving Life (Theory and Practice))

N/A (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

I want to like Jan Svankmajer. I really do. He's a guy who has moved between live-action and animation for a long time, gotten praise internationally, and influenced people all aorund the world. And, truth be told, I have enjoyed a good chunk of what I've seen from him, odd thought it may be. Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) generally falls into that category.

But, man, he knocks me out. I don't know why. Often, I've been able to point to weird showtimes or other factors like that, but this was right at 7pm. Fourth movie of the day, but I can handle that. And what I saw of this one, I rather liked. Some weirder-than-usual bits - I really didn't get what he was going for by using the cutout animation for long shots and than live action for extreme close-up. I suppose mostly just fun, but it was a weird bit of stylization in a movie that spends a lot of time on dream imagery..

Ah, well. It'll probably show up at the Brattle sometime in the next year, and I'll make sure to stop off at the 7-11 for a Pepsi Max before hand, just like I did afterward to make sure I'd be up for...

The FP

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

The FP is the sort of flick that is precisely built to appeal to a certain category of movie fans, who are often surprised when it doesn't do much for others. I have no doubt that it will find its cult quickly, and it should: It's crafted, not manufactured, and offers genuine goofy enthusiasm rather than precision pandering.

Things are going down in Frazier Park (the FP, yo!) - a year ago, local Beat Beat Revelation champion BTRO (Brandon Barrera) collapsed and died in a battle with rival L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy), and now L Dub's gang controls all the liquor in the county. The only hope for The FP is BTRO's brother JTRO (Jason Trost), if the brothers' buddy KCDC (Art Hsu) can get him to return and train under BBR master BLT (Nick Principe). But can he do that, especially since Stacy (Caitlyn "Caker" Folley), the cute girl he met that fateful night, seems to have taken up with L Dub?

Well, of course he can, otherwise it's a very short and unsatisfying movie for all involved. The Trost brothers (star Jason and cinematographer Brandon co-write and direct) know what sort of template this movie will eventually follow, and they don't deviate very far from the pattern. They just amp it up, figuring out to three decimal places how far you can push the ratios between characters' devotion to a sport, the stakes involved, and the game's inherent silliness before it stops being fun-stupid and starts being stupid-stupid. They stay pretty solidly on the fun-stupid side, attaching some frequently-hilarious bombast to patently ridiculous competition.

Full review at EFC.

Sudor frío (Cold Sweat)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

Cold Sweat is silly and ridiculous in just about every way it can be, but it's the sort of ridiculous that works. Director Adrián García Bogliano and company do a nice job of adding just a little bit more crazy with each reel, making for a fun midnight movie.

Back in 1975, the film informs us, a group of Argentine rebels stole twenty-five boxes of dynamite, but nothing came of it at the time. Today, Roman (Facundo Espinosa) is looking for his ex-girlfriend Jacquie (Camila Velasco), who appears to have left him for some blond guy she met online. Fortunately, he's got help; his friend Ali (Marina Glezer) is able to track down where this guy lives from his IP address. When they get there, the run-down house is home not to the lothario they were looking for, but a couple of old guys - Gordon (Omar Musa), who uses a walker, and Baxter (Omar Gioiosa), who is somewhat more mobile.

One should not underestimate old guys, either in movies or in real life. They are the people that natural selection hasn't figured out how to stop yet, and the older they are, the more likely they are to have learned how to mess you up over the course of their lives. It's not giving too much away to say that Gordon and Baxter are the villains of the piece, and they're an enjoyably unconventional choice for the job; ideology seems to have given way to extreme crotchetiness. Some senility, too, but really, having them just resent young people is enough. In addition, they're clearly sick of each other after thirty-five years cooped up together but neither able to imagine life without the other. Omars Musa and Gioiosa play off each other amusingly, with a natural chemistry as they bicker and both managing to give their characters an actual threatening air even as the movie has a laugh at their age and infirmity.

Full review at EFC.