Fantasia 2025.08: "Methuselah", A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House with Laughing Windows, "Things That Go Bump in the East", and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

This day started early:

3:30am, to be precise, with the alarm right in the room, rather than just the hallway. I don't know what it was about - I just headed out and tried not to bother the firefighters who showed up impressively quickly - but I'm glad it wasn't serious. This is a twelve-story building with 10 rooms on my floor, and there were not 100 people milling about afterward. Maybe it's just usually filled with college students and mostly-empty for the summer (there are about a dozen keyboxes for AirBNB rentals and brokers showing it to prospective tenants locked to the front steps, and that doesn't even include me), but I have a hard time imagining the folks who sleep through that din or say, man, that's a lot of stairs, maybe I'll evacuate when I smell smoke or firefighters pull me out.

So, it was almost 4am by the time I got to bed, which is just shy of the line where I usually say it's not worth going back to sleep. My body was going to wake me up at 8am or so anyway, though, and I wound up dragging something fierce for most of the day. It didn't help that most of the afternoon programming was from the Underground section and I'm not really a giallo guy, so I wound up dozing off or zoning out until the shorts package in the evening.

I mean, after "Methuselah" by Nathan Sellers; his short was 4 minutes long and pretty darn strong. Obviously, Justine was not really looking at my giant lens-covering finger in disdain (why Samsung designed this phone so that ones finger naturally rests there whne using the buttons to snap a picture is beyond me).

On the other hand, Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon made a movie that was often dark and grainy and very easy to zone out to, so I missed some the film, their Q&A gave the impression that Brisbane is not exactly an Australian hive of creative expression, but it was a scene where everybody sort of knows each other, and they wound up working together, if in unfamiliar roles at times.

Mickey Reese and Josh Fadem were really "on" in their intro and Q&A for Every Heavy Thing. I dig the energy which I didn't have, and that Reese wrote it for Fadem, who had played over a hundred supporting roles but never had a lead, so this was made with him in mind, and pretty much the entire cast. I suppose, as with Brisbane, when you're making movies in Oklahoma City, you know who you're working with.

After that, it was The House with Laughing Windows, and, as I say below, I am just not a giallo guy.

At some point after that, though, the caffeine kicked in or something, or maybe the "Things That Go Bump in the East" selections were just more my speed. Here we've got our moderator (Xige Li?), "Mom, Stay Dead" director Lee Na-hee, programmer/translator Steven Lee, "Dhet!" composer Dameer Khan, and "Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension" co-star/producer Eriko Nakamura & director Koji Shiraishi. As you can see, it was a pretty fun session, with Lee talking about how her short was inspired by how her mother actually blossomed once she finally moved out of the house, gaining a bunch of new hobbies and creating art, which got her thinking about how there are a lot of movies about how children grow at times like this but not necessarily parents.

Khan, meanwhile, is local to Montreal, representing "Dhet!" since director Ummid Ashraf had visa issues. There seemed to be more trouble with visas this year then I remember being a case before, although that could just be random variation. It does demonstrate how even relatively small-scale shorts like this have international collaborators, and Khan talked about how the giant highways the protagonist is traveling make Dhaka a very loud city, so the music had to be layered and a bit discordant, enough so that when it is suddenly quiet, the eeriness of it really hits.

If you look at IMDB, "Red Spider Lilies" is listed as "Pilot Version", and Eriko Nakamura said that, yes, they were very much looking do something more with it. I hope they do; it's a fun premise! She also mentioned that she was in another film at Fantasia this year, Dollhouse, but also not to go see it on her account because it wasn't really one of her great acting roles.

Finally, I made it across the street to Hall, where this is sort of the best picture I got of the surprisingly big contingent for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: Writer/director Kenichi Ugana plus actors Lissa Cranadang-Sweeney, Rocko Zevenbergen, Madeline Barbush, Estevan Muñoz, Ui Mihara, and Katsunari Nakagawa. One thing Mihara mentioned is that she felt a lot like her character going into the movie: If you look at her IMDB page, she seems to be have done an episode of TV every week or so for the past couple years, and felt pretty darn burnt out before doing this one. Though she maybe could have done without the amount of gross things she had to put in her mouth to spit out.


That's the start of Week Two on Wednesday the 23rd; Thursday would be Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and my first go at Transcending Dimensions. Today (Saturday the 2nd), my plans are Foreigner, Circo Animato, Mononoke II, and Queens of the Dead. The School Duel and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake are pretty good.


"Methuselah"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP):
:
A poem of a short film, using striking words and imagery to how trees are both dynamic and static features of nature - always growing but persisting for centuries in some cases - and how too many have been used by humans as sites for hangings and lynchings, tainting them forever. The narration by Jordan Mullins walks a line between reverence and rage, and the images from filmmaker Nathan Sellers manage to emphasize the evil men do with these marvelous things.


A Grand Mockery

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A Grand Mockery is engrossing for as long as it feels like an 8mm pseudo-documentary, but as soon as it tries to consciously be transgressive or experimental, it starts to get a bit tiresome. The filmmakers have vision, but it's not necessarily clear.

It follows "Josie" (Sam Dixon), initially seen walking through a Brisbane cemetery, seemingly one of the few green spots in the city and a sort of postal network where folks leave messages and meet up. There's not much going in the city - things are cool with his girlfriend, the father he tends to is mostly non-responsive, and his job at a cinema involves either cleaning up the disgusting messes customers leave behind or trying to handle their obstinacy. It wears on him, both physically and in the increasingly unhinged notes from possibly-imaginary correspondents.

The wear doesn't really kick in for audiences until the film's final scenes; up until then, even the moments when it approaches the grotesque and despairing feel immediate and earnest, the portrait of a man in a place where his artistic instincts seemingly can't take him anywhere, the cemetery seemingly the only source of tranquility. There are drugs and drink accelerating it, but one mostly sees a situation where folks get ground down because there's no seeming mobility. Josie doesn't necessarily seem inclined to make a living out of his drawings and the like, but they go unshared and he seems to have no other avenue to express himself to others.

The finale, though, is just endless. The filmmakers are good at sneaking up on the audience for a while, Josie's increasingly scraggly hair hiding how some health issue is distorting his face until he winds up in a strange bar that may only bear a passing connection with reality. At that point the movie starts banging on past any point it could be making, drawing out its grotesquerie until Josie is a drunken, distorted mess. Fair enough, I guess - that's arguably where lives of quiet desperation wind up - but after a while the filmmakers have eroded a lot of the goodwill the film had earned.

It goes on a bit as he gets outside the city, and the green of the woods and swamp seems like a bookend to the cemetery at the start (8mm green seems like a very specific color), and for a bit I wondered if it was intentional, starting in a city graveyard and ending outside the city in a place dense with life, but, apparently, the decay is too strong at this point, and the film trundles on until it ends in a whimper.


Every Heavy Thing

* * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm mostly giving this a pass, because even though I didn't doze off much, I feel like I missed a lot of pieces that were important to the story.

It starts out conventionally enough, with a Scream-style pre-credits murder before introducing the audience to Joe (Josh Fadem), who sells ads for the local alt-weekly, one of the last in the country, reluctantly accompanying a friend to a show - he and wife Lux (Tipper Newton) seem to have separate social lives - only to enjoy it more than expected, and see the singer get murdered. Killer William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) says he's going to let Joe live because it amuses him, but it will amuse him much less if Joe does anything stupid. Like helping the paper's new writer (Kaylene Snarsky) when she has leads on the disappearance William is responsible for.

The problem in a nutshell is that the story really doesn't have any place to go after William reveals himself, about ten ten minutes into the movie; Joe winds up in this holding pattern but it plays more like awkward social situations rather than walls closing in or real danger. Writer/director Mickey Reese puts in other threads - Shaffer as the vanguard of various tech companies moving their operations to the city, an old friend (Vera Drew) returning to town after her transition, various family concerns - but none of them seem ironically more urgent than the man who is murdering women and apparently disposing of the bodies very well, which isn't presented as a big deal itself versus how it puts a man in an uncomfortable situation.

Plus, the jokes are only about half as funny as the writers seem to think. It gets by on volume for a while, and Tipper Newton is maybe the film's most valuable asset as Lux, seeming to put a weird and amusing spin on just about everything. After a while, though, things just aren't that funny, and the film made in part to give Josh Fadem a lead role after a lot of character work winds up showing why he hasn't been cast in one before: He's affable and has pleasant chemistry with almost everyone else, but it highlights him as a glue guy in a cast the way Joe is in his community, but maybe not with the sort of charisma that puts him at the center of a story.

One admires the attempt that this sort of outside-of-Hollywood indie is making. Unfortunately, it seems too committed to a twist that seems inspired at first but goes nowhere.


La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Order the old DVD at Amazon

I've probably posted some variation of this before, but I think I'm just not a giallo person. No matter the extent to which the director is regarded as a master, or how sexy the cast is, or how shocking or lurid the twists are, I just don't get drawn in, and The House with the Laughing Walls was not an exception to this rule. Like so many things in the genre, it falls in that gap between intriguing mysteries and unnerving horror for me.

(In fairness, all the films this afternoon suffered from my sleep being interrupted the night before, so I wasn't absorbing as much as I'd like.)

It feels like it should be a little more intriguing than it is, with an art expert (Lino Capolicchio) arriving to restore a church's peculiar painting, mysterious disappearances, and secretive villagers, but the film is too arch for much of its running time. Stefano doesn't really feel like anything, drifting through the story as strange things happen around him, not particularly defining himself as an academic or artist, and there seems to be an opportunity missed in using the restoration as a thing to hand the story and investigation on, where immersing himself in this artist's life and techniques draws him closer to the man's demons. Even with a new restoration, everything feels pre-faded, like there's never been any life to the story to start with. The mystery feels too distant.

It gets crazy toward the end, even audaciously so, but maybe it's a problem of genre-awareness, where knowing something is a giallo means that one is awaiting rather than dreading the inevitable, and the finale is surprising just because it's random rather than lying in wait to blindside a viewer. Sure, okay, the sisters are messed up, but not in a way that has anything to do with what Stefano has experienced, so it's not resonating.


"Magai-Gami"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Magai-Gami" has a pretty darn basic premise - folks in a scary place investigating an urban legend come face to face with monsters that will kill them if they look away - but it executes exceptionally well: Leads Ion Obata and Nagisa Toriumi are a fun pairing even as most of their banter is done over the phone, and the audience picks upon their dynamic very quickly even as the movie starts with them already on the ground. Mostly, the monsters are kind of great, feeling like a mix of visual effects and practical work that capture the freaky images of old illustrations while not looking more out of place next to a girl in a puffer jacket talking on a cell phone than a more modern design would.

Filmmaker Norihiro Niwatsukino doesn't have a particularly long résumé, but he seems very assured here, keeping the film moving even when it involves standing still, displaying a good handle on using what his effects team gives him, and setting up a supernatural-containment mythology in the closing minute or two that doesn't feel too much like it's trying to impress with how clever it is. The program guide describe the short as a proof-of-concept, and, yes, I'd like to see more.


"Ba Dong Yao" ("Hungry")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Taiwanese puppet fantasy adventure is one of the best bits of any Fantasia Festival that contains it - I've rearranged schedules to make it work - and it was a really delightful surprise to see it show up in the middle of what initially looked like an animated short. It's a good animated short - it's got a strong style and a story about an ailing kid and his busy father in the middle of a festival that spans the traditional and the modern - but the live-action puppets means this film zigs where one expects it to zag, making his fever dreams feel a bit more real in the moment than his actual world even as they're clearly mythic.

Oh, and bonkers, as these goddesses fight to become his mother and the puppet combat is a kick to watch, fully embracing the capabilities and limitations of what these things can do, especially with a little FX work to eliminate rods and strings. It's great fun that leads into neat music and a satisfying finale.


"Mati Adat" ("Kill Tradition")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Compared to the others, "Kill Tradition" is a nifty slow-burner of a short, keeping just what the stakes are on the horizon as it builds the relationship between Idah (Nik Waheeda), the sort of precocious kid that gets into trouble, and her recently-widowed mother Iman (Ezzar Nurzhaffira) as they prepare a meal for an upcoming ritual. Waheeda is charming, and Nurzhaffira really nails this vibe of how having this girl is wonderful yet tiring. They're highly watchable, especially Nurzhaffira, once the inevitable reveals itself.

That's when the audience sees where the title is going, in a couple of ways, and while Nurzhaffira plays up how this is more than she can take and the devastation of it, writer/director Juliana Reza and the rest of the team emphasize what sort of inertia tradition and ritual have. It's evil tradition - even with what appear to be actual supernatural entities, there's no strong justification that this is effective or necessary - and Reza highlights the callousness of it as much as the grace of those consumed by it.


"Mom, Stay Dead"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Lee Na-hee kicks off her short with a fun image - grieving daughter Sora (Oh Sohyeon) working her way through a book with "101 Ways to Summon the Dead", with #44 being the Ghost Summoning Dance - before coming up with a neat twist: The ghost she summons (Cho Ahra) seems to be roughly her age, having moved on from Earthly concerns, including the daughter she left behind, into her idealized form. There's maybe a fun sitcom premise in here, something about how family members would really relate if you removed the societal obligations and expectations from them.

It's maybe not far from the likes of Back to the Future or Chinese hit Hi, Mom - though I can't think of any that pull someone into the future rather than having their kids in the past - but aside from what Lee discussed in her Q&A about discovering what her mother could become once she was no longer worried about taking care of her daughter on a day-to-day basis, there's something intriguingly weighty here about spirituality. Sora has been using religion and magic as a way to fulfil her desires rather than really contemplating what all this implies, even as the mother recognizes innately that this girl needs something from her.

A very nifty twist on the idea of moving on that feels all the more honest because of how absurd and thought-provoking it can be simultaneously.


"Dhet!"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

There's a really strong theme across short films and anthologies this year of how gig work like rideshares and delivery is a sort of hell designed to be inescapable until it finally crushes a person, and I kind of worry that it will wind up staying in shorts and their equivalents in other media, because if you've got the money to make a feature, the business model behind this is kind of an abstract thing and you mostly see the convenience. It's a longer distance between classes than it used to be.

"Khet!", from Bangladesh, is a pretty decent example. The story itself is pretty basic - motorcycle-taxi guy (Ahsabul Yamin Riad) ignores a homeless man (Fozie Rabby) telling him not to take a certain turn and winds up unable to leave one of Dhaka's highways - and is perhaps ultimately more about the maddening geography of the city than the rider's circumstances. It's not a bad idea, since cities built around such highways are a topic of conversation in themselves, but it leaves writer/director Ummid Ashraf without a metaphorical offramp on top of the literal lack of one; the story kind of runs in circles without much chance of an ending that truly satisfies.


"Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Red Spider Lilies" isn't quite made just for me, but it does take a genre I tend to really like - the haunted family calling the sort of professional exorcist who carries themselves more like an exterminator than a religious fanatic - and eventually twists it into one I like even more (which would be telling). Here, that's the Aoi sisters, living in an old family house, where one night something possesses Kotoko (Tomomi Kono), leaving Nana (Tomona Hirota) to call the famed Teshigawara (Hirotaro Honda), whom younger sister Ami (Eriko Nakamura) has seen a lot on television. Once there, though, Teshigawara finds this to be much more serious than his usual situation.

It's not a new observation that exorcism stories arguably work better in East Asian environs than elsewhere is that there is a sort of formal place for ghosts and demons in local mythologies with the opposing forces less formalized (in the West, there's the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the likes of snake-handlers but not a lot in between). So there's room for Teshigawara to be a professional and a celebrity and a lot of entertainment as the Aois interact with him like that, but also to be able to go in another direction when a twist comes without a whole lot of effort. Honda sells it well and injects dry humor into the film that doesn't undercut what else is going on, but the three sisters are great fun as well: Eriko Nakamura gets attention as the very funny Ami, but Tomona Hirota and Tomomi Kono solidify their older siblings as the short goes on.

Like "Magai-Gami", this is pretty explicitly a pilot/proof of concept, and I would quite like to see more.


I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festiva, laser DCP)

Watching this film, I chuckled at a low-budget horror-film producer being named "Rusty Festerson", and the actor playing him. Are they going to get that this Larry Fessenden cameo is a joke in Japan, or is this a film made for an extremely specific audience? If it is, that niche definitely includes me, and I'm glad to see it.

It opens by introducing two folks from different worlds. Shina (Ui Mihara) grew up in Japan with things coming relatively easy: Naturally pretty and doing okay in school and sports despite not really having to work very hard at them, show business was the first time she really had to apply herself, and really take pride in succeeding. Jack grew up in Eugene, Oregon, without anything ever coming easy, diving into horror movies and heavy metal, and eventually moving to New York City to work for Festerson's company and getting frustrated when it's just a job. Shina is frustrated too, showing disdain for her work, and taking a trip to New York with boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa) to escape the limelight. Once there, though, English-speaking Ren finds himself frustrated by her nonsense and she feels disrespected, and an argument winds up with Shina, with no money or ID, outside a bar where Jack and his friends are commiserating over the star of their movie dropping out at the last minute. When Shina has nowhere to go at closing time, Jack lets her sleep on his couch, and manages to communicate that he'll pay for a flight back home if she acts in his movie, not knowing she's a big star rather than just a pretty face.

All in all, it's a fun little movie, charming as all get-out with the filmmakers keenly aware that a romantic comedy must be that, with everything else a secondary concern. And it works; even if I don't entirely buy that this pair falls in love with each other, I do believe that they fall in love with making movies with each other, and that's nearly as good for the movie's purposes. If that's something writer/director Kenichi Ugana planned for, that's smart, giving him a fallback position in case the romance doesn't quite get over, as the "making movies with friends" energy is solid enough to believe in Shina's half of the story.

That's sort of the film's biggest issue - Shina is a lot funnier and sympathetic, with a stronger arc than Jack, and I don't think it's necessarily a matter of assuming a foreign-language preform meets a certain standard even when you'll notice the flaws in one's native tongue. Ui Mihara is given a lot of assignments and mostly pulls them off, from the celebrity who is shallow enough that one can laugh at her arrogance to the professional kind of appalled by the mess she's found herself in to smitten to hurt; all kind of tying back to her opening mission statement. Estevan Muñoz isn't quite just given one note as Jack, but he's always playing it at full volume, and I don't know that it's a matter of Ugana being more comfortable in his native language and culture. The English-speaking supporting characters are by and large fun, but Jack is not a complementary half of the movie.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is a good time, full of deadpan humor, missed translation jokes, and the ability to walk the line between getting laughs from what a sketchy production this is for what will almost certainly be a terrible movie and earnest respect for them making it. Ugana seem genuinely fond enough of its scrappers and has the knack for getting the audience to smile at them, which not all movies rooting for underdogs manage. He and the cast make the tricky transition from Jack and company clearly exploiting Shina in an uncomfortable way to her being part of the gang, and if you can feel an ending being jammed into place, it is at least jammed solidly into place.

I do kind of wonder how well this plays at places other than Fantasia, which is in large part about this sort of love affair between Eastern and Western pop culture, as well as mixing the global mainstream and the lowbrow. Still, even it's obviously going to play like gangbusters in that specific room, I suspect it's going to really amuse the folks who would enjoy being in that room if they could.

Detective Kien: The Headless Horror

Hey, check it out, a Vietnamese movie made it out of Dorchester. Just for the week; the wave of films coming out today means that it retreats back to South Bay, but there are worse reasons to see if the Red Line is reliable below South Station on a given day; it's a fun little movie that feels earnest in its pulpiness but isn't particularly campy, and looks great. Makes me wonder a couple of things, though:

First, is there a sort of wave of "brilliant detectives pulled into possibly-supernatural cases in period pieces" going around Asia for the past 15 years or so, or has this always been a big part of these countries' genre fiction and it's just hitting me now? "Detective Kien" has surface similarities to China's "Detective Dee" and Korea's "Detective K" series seem in sort of the same vein, but maybe those have always been there, but we're just getting a wider range of films from these countries now.

Second, "these countries" includes Vietnam, and I've probably gone on here before about how as an American, I've mostly seen Vietnam presented through the prism of the war and how that affected Americans and thus seeing The Rebel at Fantasia nearly 20 years ago was jaw-dropping, and even that was made with a lot of people who had come back home to Vietnam from America, and it would be another different sort of wake-up call when some more contemporary movies showed up and they were in the suburbs; it's worth remembering that, rather than sort of freezing 50 years ago, this is a country that has an immense urban population even if Americans think of it as jungle villages.

Now, admittedly, Detective Kien takes place in a Nineteenth Century village, but it's still kind of interesting in terms of getting a handle on this place, especially a few scenes near the end, where either the language or subtitle choices are kind of noteworthy: Going against the monarchy is described as "blasphemy" as opposed to "treason", which made me think about how monarchy is often justified via links to religion and a vague idea that some king ages ago was chosen by god(s), but that becomes something mostly pay lip service to: This is supposed to be true, but we all kind of know that a king's power is earthly inertia at this point, not heavenly investiture. Maybe that wasn't so much the case there and then, though.

In another spot near to that one, it's mentioned that a family attempting to usurp power 30 years ago was stopped by "informants", not exactly a word with a positive connotation, when you could use "whistleblowers" or the like. It's kind of jarring, because even authoritarian countries don't necessarily use that terminology. You sure don't hear it in Chinese movies.

So, that's kind of interesting to me. The movie's mostly just good for what it is, though.


Thám Tử Kiên: Kỳ Án Không Đầu (Detective Kien: The Headless Horror)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 June 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The thing about Detective Kien: The Headless Horror that I find striking is that there are long stretches where the film spends little if any time on the Drowning Ghost that has been feeding on human heads for the past five years or so, and that's okay. This is a good little period thriller without the horror-movie hook that probably brought it most of the attention it has received, and I found myself thinking that I'd actually be okay if it didn't get back to "the good stuff".

Indeed, while Miss Moon (Dinh Ngọc Diệp) describes the Drowning Ghost to Judge's Detective Kien (Quốc Huy) when she writes asking him to investigate the disappearance of her niece Nga (Đoàn Minh Anh), she is adamant that it is not the work of the Ghost, if only because there is no headless body. The local chief, Liem Quan (Xuan Trang) has been stonewalling her, but that may just because Nga was always an outcast; her mother (Moon's sister) abandoned her family when young, and father Vinh (Quoc Cuong) was not much involved, often leaving Moon to look after her until she, too, departed, only to return recently. Moon and Kien soon turn up more, though - an argument between Nga and Tuyet (Anh Pham), the entitled daughter of Liem and Lady Vuong (Mỹ Uyên), ceramics made by Tuyet's fiancé Thac (Quốc Anh) in Nga's room, and a break-in by a burglar (Sỹ Toàn) who apparently sought to destroy those pieces.

Plus, as mentioned, there's apparently a river monster that has devoured the heads of eight people over the past five years.

Writer/director Victor Vu opts to dive directly into the missing-person case.without spending a whole lot of time looking into the monster series, which is maybe a risk, but Vu plays it out well, building his mystery plot so that Kien, Moon, and the audience find one juicy revelation after another. It's not actually a very good mystery - there are a couple of bits in the home stretch that go beyond not just being fair play into "wait, what?" territory - but for most of the movie, he's good at dangling things just close enough to feel like they're in reach, and then we're over here, so the picture always feels like it's about to come together in some way. He sprinkles enough of the Drowning Ghost in to remind the audience it's there and make us wonder how it connects, although, again, things falter a bit toward the end when it becomes clear that he's not going to stick the "both halves of the story come together in a single climax" landing.

The cast has the right pulp vibe as well, not veering into camp but often hitting that spot where one can see the niche each character fills well enough but maybe just playing it big enough that it could be a mask. Quốc Huy gives Kien authority while also seeming to hold some in reserve and managing to see a bit flustered by Moon's clear interest. Dinh Ngọc Diệp is a delight as Moon, making both her fierce advocacy for Nga and what seems like a playful crush on Kien (who arrested her husband for corruption) work work while often smiling just a bit too much to the point where one starts to wonder if she's the mastermind behind this whole thing. Xuan Trang, Mỹ Uyên, and Anh Pham play the sort of hissable aristocrats where any could be worse or better than expected. Đoàn Minh Anh's Nga radiates sadness but also comes alive.

They're in a nice-looking movie that is obviously not at the scale of an American blockbuster but certainly gets a lot out of what's available for filmmakers in Vietnam, not least that you can apparently point a camera in a great many directions and catch some terrific scenery; the villages and palace look pretty nice too. Vu is smooth in how he has Kien visualize things in a way that's obviously not literal but not showy as one often sees in, say, modern Sherlock Holmes adaptations. When we see the Drowning Ghost, it's got elements of CGI and rubber-suit monsters that look uncanny in the right way. At the climax, the film both embraces and subverts cliché by having a slap-fight that could be silly feel like the stakes are as high as the cool swordfight.

The film is apparently a spin-off from Vu's previous film Người Vợ Cuối Cùng (The Last Wife), although I'm not sure that Quốc Huy was the one playing Kien in that movie; at any rate, one can go into this one more or less cold and not necessarily feel like it's incomplete without the follow-up that the end suggests is coming. The end is a bit dragged out, but otherwise, it's a neat little thriller that anyone who enjoys this sort of mystery can enjoy while also feeling distinctly Vietnamese.

Gazer

Independent Film Festival Boston takes the Somerville Theatre over starting on Wednesday, so not much is opening there since it would just get moved around anyway, but it does mean that they had a little room on screen #2 for this to get a brief five-day run, while the other screen downstairs is playing Secret Mall Apartment. They had filmmakers and subjects for the opening last week, so you'll find these throughout the theater:

If you've seen the movie, you get it.

(There was also a plastic easter egg in my seat's cupholder, because it was Easter, and now I'm wondering if there was a free ticket or something inside)

Anyway, it's serendipitous that Secret Mall Apartment was last year's IFFBoston spotlight film at the Somerville, and its regular run is at that theater just as the next year's festival opens.

So, obviously, late post, but last call for Gazer is tonight at 7pm, but Secret Mall Apartment will be back next Wednesday, at least for a couple of days.


Gazer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2025 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm not saying Gazer would have been better if this was the case, but I went into the film thinking it was going to be a scrappy little 74-minute indie only for it to be half-again that long. It doesn't quite fall into the "you're probably only going to get one movie about X, so put every X thing you can imagine into it" trap (with X being dyschronometria in this case), but it does wind up spreading both its hook and its plot kind of thin.

Frankie Rhodes (Ariella Mastroianni) is the person with dyschronometria here; for her, it tends to present as zoning out, not realizing that a time has passed, but also interacts with a number of other cerebral issues, which together are likely terminal. Her doctor has advised her to look into an assisted living facility, but she bristles, wanting to be reunited with daughter Cynthia, who has been in the custody of her mother-in-law Diane (Marianne Goodell) since Frankie's husband Roger's suicide (Diane thinks Frankie's claims she was zoned out and unable to remember is awful convenient). At a support group, she meets Paige Foster (Renee Gagner), whose brother Henry (Jack Alberts) has become abusive since their mother's suicide. Paige offers to pay $3000 if Frankie will sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and drive it to someplace she can pick it up, but when Paige doesn't show up at the meeting the next day, Frankie doesn't know whether something has happened to her or if, rather than another woman in a tough situation, Paige had seen her as a perfect patsy.

Despite being set in roughly the present day, the vibe of Gazer comes from a generation or two earlier; director Ryan J. Sloan and cinematographer Matheus Bastos shoot on 16mm film and find the sorts of locations in Newark, New Jersey that haven't changed much in the last three or four decades. Everyone has cars that have been on the road for a while, and, crucially, Frankie relies on payphones and a cassette player in her daily life; LED screens and the like tend to trigger her illnesses in a bad way. The score by Steve Matthew Carter isn't exactly a throwback but wouldn't seem out of place in a paranoid 1970s thriller. Little bits of modernity appear around the edges - the PC showing brain scans in the doctor's office, the way Frankie uses earbuds rather than clunky headphones - but the effect is just enough to keep the audience from asking questions and maybe put them in a similar state of detachment.

It's a good sort of mental space for this kind of mystery. The story is not particularly complicated, perhaps, but it's interesting enough to have something to tug on while observing everything else in Frankie's life. Star Ariella Mastroianni (who co-wrote the film with husband Sloan) is careful never to present Frankie as a sleuth, even as she is following a trail or evading pursuit, but someone locked into the current moment who has to work hard to manage anything outside it. There's something off about the way she plays against everyone else in the movie, like Frankie isn't really sure how well she knows anybody aside from her daughter. As much as Frankie is mostly-functional and the more relatable pieces get across, one kind of has to learn to read her, though Masroianni seems to have figured out a nonstandard but consistent set of expressions and tones.

One could argue that the way the pacing and priorities get weird in the last stretch is part of the point; is giving the audience a sense of the disorientation and distraction Frankie feels as he stretches the time out after all the pieces have been put together and has Frankie sort of stumbling forward while often having surreal flashbacks to the night her husband dies. There's not much connection, which frustrates the audience who expects movies to edit in a way that creates links but also perhaps underlines how Frankie is constantly both in the now and the then. A lot of the second half of the movie is like that, though, with Cronenbergian imagery that doesn't exactly resonate with the idea that Frankie's main issue is keeping track of time, and a finale that may be frustratingly discordant in how it emphasizes that Frankie's priority is not necessarily the mystery that has been occupying the audience's more conventional brains.

It's a reasonably intriguing paradox of a movie, in that everything that helps the audience get into Frankie's head and mindset also makes the movie more frustrating as a mystery and story, but it's possible that the filmmakers are well aware of that: What are the cassette tapes that Frankie uses to keep her focused and aware of, say, how long she should be riding on the bus to get home but a way to impose a narrative on her frustratingly nonlinear mind, and how is someone more likely to spiral rather than regroup when those crutches fail? It's a movie that many will leave frustrated, but, well, imagine how Frankie must feel!

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

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

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

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


Tang Ren Jie Tan an 1900 (Detective Chinatown 1900)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Lam Si Kyut Dau (Hit N Fun)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week in Tickets: 21 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 (No real pattern)

This Week in Tickets: 21 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 (No real pattern) It's funny, seeing other folks doing forty horror movies in October and I'm just all over the freaking place. Like, maybe Sunday's kind of Halloweeny, but...

I started the week off right with North By Northwest on 70mm film, which looked great, but like The Searchers a few weeks back kind of looks odd because the restoration process had them scanning the VistaVision film in an unusual fashion - since VV is 35mm run through camera/projector horizontally, with each frame two standard frames, they scanned two "frames" and put them together digitally, then did the restoration work, then output that to 70mm film - like it's definitely been in and out of a computer, even without the weird line right down the center of the screen in one scene.

(To be fair, movies shot in VistaVision often look kind of off to me, like they never did quite figure out how to light right for the process)

The next night was given to Goodrich, which was not another corporate origin story and not exactly the Mr. Mom redux it initially looked like, but a pleasant enough couple hours. Would have been funny if Mr. Mom had been a Meyers-Shyer thing, though.

Wednesday night was a "last evening in theaters" show of The Outrun, which is one I spent the better part of a month not quite being in the mood for but ultimately liking a lot. It had a kind of weird release - spotty times everywhere but Kendall that make me wonder if it's sort of being four-walled for Academy members or something. Pretty good, though.

After a couple days not going out and watching baseball, I hit Chinese movie High Forces Saturday afternoon, which was wobbly but had some quality minor-action-movie trailers in front of it: Werewolves just getting right out there with "One year ago, a supermoon turned millions into werewolves" with no buildup whatsoever, Elevation offering more big ravenous aliens, and Weekend in Taipei's trailer updated because it first started showing up in October with a "Coming in September" caption on it. Then, somehow, not really doing anything besides groceries and a trip to the comic shop in the afternoon, I was oddly worn down by the time Max and the Junkmen in the evening and was in and out too much to really say i watched it. Amusingly, I passed on getting it in the Kino Lorber Fall sale because I knew I'd be watching it over the weekend. Hopefully they'll still have some left for the next big sale!

That turned out to be my last "Melville et Cie." film at the Harvard Film Archive, because Saturday offered the choice of two things on my unwatched shelf - The Bat at the Somerville with Jeff Rapsis on the organ and Army of Shadows at the Archive on 35mm film. I went with The Bat and it wound up a lot of fun. Then, in the evening, it was out to the Seaport for Magpie, which is also pretty neat.

More on my Letterboxd account as I see more, if you don't need to wait for me to actually get spelling and such right.


North by Northwest

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 70mmm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD available on Amazon

Much like Psycho didn't exactly invent the modern horror movie but refined it into something sort of respectable rather than the back half of a twin bill, North by Northwest feels like the birth of the modern blockbuster: A-list talent, a sense of play in the script that lubricates a kind of silly plot that's nevertheless always moving forward, and grand action set pieces that spill into familiar locations. Not the first of its kind, for sure, but more like the James Bond films and other bits of star-driven action that followed it than the Cinemascope epics that preceded it.

(Maybe I'm overthinking it, missing something obvious, or going over well-worn territory here)

At any rate, this is one of my go-to answers when someone asks me my favorite movie and I don't want to either spend a lot of time thinking about it or let them down by saying I can't name one, but I'm not being glib; it's an exceptionally fun film with enough great moments that one will probably surprise you even if you've seen it a dozen times. In this case, it's the awkward little "excuse me" flashbulb as someone captures a picture of Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill apparently stabbing a man, and the little callbacks to it later.

There's a certain oddity to Grant as this sort of reluctant hero 65 years later, as "Cary Grant" lands in the part of the Venn diagram where "foppish" and "suave" intersect, just enough of the latter that the moments where he's suddenly pretty capable don't quite jar. The rest of the cast, though, is terrific, especially Eva Marie Saint, who makes Eve feel exactly that cool, James Mason and Leo G. Carroll as amiably aloof opposites, and a wonderfully dangerous Marin Landau. Hitch and writer Ernest Lehman move them all around quickly but not frantically, slowing down a bit for the scene when we get to see the leads actually like each other without qualification in a way that's sweet, charming, and clarifying, just before the big Mount Rushmore finale, a rougher and scrappier thing than a modern take on it would be but which maybe works better because it's trying to communicate rather than fool.the audience.

Still a ton of fun, and I'm glad that Warner is pushing 70mm prints to theaters to promote the upcoming 4K disc.


Goodrich

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

Goodrich is the sort of film writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer's parents (Nancy Meyers & Charles Shyer) used to make, which in their own ways were kind of throwbacks to earlier days of cinema: Mostly-amiable comedies set against affluent backgrounds with well-cast stars. They were meant to entertain and do so in a relatively frictionless way, and if Meyers-Shyer can't quite make that work, it can be tough to see where it's what she's doing and where it's the times.

It opens in spikier fashion that could almost be a commentary on that as Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) is woken up by a call from his wife saying she has checked herself into rehab, so he's in charge of their nine-year old twins Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera). He's not completely inept, but the nanny having a conflict means he has to call on Grace (Mila Kunis), the daughter from his first marriage (pregnant herself) while he works to save the gallery he's run for decades which has been losing money for a while now.

Whether or not Meyers-Shyer had Michael Keaton in mind for the title role, the part fits him like a glove, letting him go into cruise control a bit. That's not exactly a problem; I like Michael Keaton, and this film is basically him being the same guy he was in his 80s/90s heyday, but maybe a little more mellow if not quite as much wiser as he should be. That's kind of a "for better or worse" thing, at times; it makes for a fairly pleasant couple of hours but you can't help but wonder if maybe his title character shouldn't have been a little more prickly or selfish at points, and the film dances around the moments when his blithe, privileged optimism is burst; things are expected to just work out, eventually, because he's generally a good dude and things work out for guys like that.

This isn't that movie, though, it's resolutely nice and well-meaning and after the first ten minutes or so works very hard to avoid situations where someone gets as upset as they maybe should. It plays fair while it does that, at least, and even theVivien Lyra Blair (as the daughter who is too witty for being nine) never grates. There's a part of me that wonders if this started life as a movie about Mila Kunis's Grace, which would seem the more autobiographical route, only to have the more interesting bits of the script coalesce around Andy. Kunis has a great moment or three where Grace is allowed to confront that she loves her dad but that she sometimes feels like practice for raising her siblings There's a story in there that is not necessarily just an L.A. story as is implied in the dialogue, which would seem to be where she would start from.

Goodrich is almost certainly not all it could be, but it's easy enough to enjoy throughout and gives its star a couple hours to do the sort of thing he does well. There's worse ways to spend a couple hours.


The Outrun

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

Drinking and alcoholism are boring. Yes, they're incredibly impactful and cause drama, but I suspect that even those with a lot of personal experience will look at scenes of Rona drinking, fucking up her life because of it, and going through AA meetings, and have a little "ugh, this shit again" reaction as it happens. It kind of puts the like to the old trope that happy families are all the same but unhappy ones are unique and interesting.

This sounds like a complaint, but it's actually what makes The Outrun kind of engrossing: Main character Rona's narration, which wanders from her own history to topics from geology to mythology to biology, reveals her as smart, curious, and self-aware of how her childhood has left her kind of a mess, and the version of her we see when she drinks is more loud than fun and uninhibited. We kind of get it; her father's bipolar syndrome and mother's religiosity on top of growing up on a farm where the work often involves grimly delivering stillborn lambs and disposing of their carcasses is the sort of thing we can see drinking to escape. And "escape" seems to be her reaction to her alcoholism when things come to a head, insisting on the sort of rehab that locks her up and running north, not just to her home, but to progressively smaller islands. She perhaps needs the quiet to progressively get rid of the noise that leads her to drink - and to make getting a bottle more work when the compulsion comes over her anyway - but it's stark.

Rona fleeing crowds winds up leaving us with Saoirse Ronan and the desolate rocky beauty of the Orkney Islands, and it's a solid foundation to build a movie on; Ronan's taciturn but engaging performance matches the stern environment and offers hints of the occasional joy she'll be able to show later. You can see her trying at times and going through the motions at others, and how her best self is smothered under the noise of drunkenness. The film's got some big clear metaphors working - the rare bird that's hard to find, the polar-bear dips to give one a jolt - but they work pretty well, in part because Rona is smart enough to see them as something she can sort of adapt and learn from in the world rather than the filmmakers building the world to reflect their points. I especially like a moment toward the end when she's explaining how she's changing her area of study to seaweed to her religious mother in a tiny apartment; it's earnest nerdiness that the drink has covered, but it's her also engaging in the world and something important about it that makes life happen. Her mother (Sasika Reeves) doesn't necessarily get it, but this is the way her daughter understands a higher power even as she lashes out at Christianity and is pointedly silent during certain phrases at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

It's a tough sit at times - dull for some, maybe triggering for others - but the people involved recognize and work with it, winding up with something often quite lovely.


Wei Ji Hang Xian (High Forces)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA; check here for when it is

Oxide Pang is just about exactly slick enough to pull this very silly movie off. He doesn't really make it good, per se, but he keeps it moving even as the audience's eyes roll, and when the finale gets big and silly, folks are going sure, why not, rather than really laughing at it, comparing it to Hollywood productions (I'm tempted to revisit Passenger 57 to see just how much they have in common), or asking just which Chinese city, exactly, is big enough for a ring road that the largest passenger liner in the world can land on but not an airport.

Before that, we're introduced to Gao Haojun (Andy Lau Tak-wah), whose demonstration is canceled and is thus able to fly home on the new superliner; the company president, Li Hangyu (Guo Xiaodong), will also be aboard, though in a private office suite, as will ex-wife Fu Yuan (Tamia Liu Tao) and daughter Xiaojun (Wendy Zhang Zifeng). The former has reconciled with Haojun since he has shown real progress in treating the bipolar disorder that used to lead him to fits of rage; given that one caused the accident that left Xiaojun blind, she has not. Also on board, roughly a dozen terrorists whose leader Mike (Qu Xhuxiao) has a similar diagnosis and aims to ransom the plane half a billion dollars - but should the passengers be worried that they brought parachutes?

The script is dumb, and if the bad guys are ever given names rather than numbers in Chinese, they don't make the subtitles. I think this is Andy Lau's second movie in as many years which feels like it may do a real disservice to people with bipolar disorder, though I can't say myself. The "Die Hard on a plane" stuff is often weirdly choppy and frustratingly edited - you can see just enough cool action to wish you had a clearer view - even before getting into how it doesn't really take the tight quarters and sudden motions of an airplane into consideration very much. It almost makes me wonder if there had been a long negotiation worth the censor board, between the brutality of the kills and the way this new release shows 2018 every time the year shows up.

The finale, on the other hand, is big and likably dopey. I don't really believe a minute of it, but Pang and his crew mostly manage to hit the sweet spot where you know the physics is laughable but the effects are pretty well rendered (or, as the credits show us, built), it's well-paced, and the filmmakers seem to know just how much to err on the side of larger than life as opposed to realistic. It's entertaining enough to send one out of the theater enjoying its absurdity, and somehowthat's value for the price of a ticket.


Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2024 in the Harvard Film Archive (Melville et Cie., 35mm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally ; Blu-ray and DVD available on Amazon

I dozed off a bit here, and I'm upset about it, because it looks like two or three really fun movies in one: A cop so desperate for a win (and maybe a deterrent) that he resorts to entrapment, a group of slackers unable to really commit to a crime, and the cop falling for an old friend's sex-worker girlfriend. It's almost built for their not to be a heist, and the filmmakers are clever in how they show the general path to the foregone conclusion and don't give it twists so much as odd terrain - to torture the metaphor further, nothing ever actually disappears behind a hill, but you can't follow a straight line.

Plus, Romy Schneider, wow.

Anyway, sticking a pin here to this movie the next time Kino Lorber has a big sale.


The Fall

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA; check here for when it is; Blu-ray and DVD available on Amazon

Beyond having a few things that clearly inspired some comic book creators a decade later, The Bat is a genuinely fun Old Dark House movie, and that's a genre where I usually like the idea a lot more than the actual execution. It moves quickly enough that one can miss that it's playing fair, near as I can tell on a single viewing, has a fairly enjoyable set of characters that mostly stay on the right side of "too broad", and doesn't wear out its welcome.

The plot is kind of all over the place- it involves a cat burglar who announces his crimes, a young lady trying to hide her boyfriend who many believe to be said "Bat" from the police, passing him off to her spinster aunt as a new gardener, and a hidden room with a safe. It's convoluted and full of a few holes - if The Bat has been at this for a while, why are the cops investigating the latest robbery like it's a one-off - but the bones are simple enough to support more.

It's also kind of noteworthy that this was a movie from 1926 based on a play from 1920 or so, which means that it antedates a lot of things that it could be seen as riffing on, whether they be Batman or Agatha Christie or Miss Marple specifically, and, heck, The Old Dark House was a few years in the future. The building blocks were sort of sloshing around, but this puts a lot of things together in ways that anticipate what will work, and looks great - it's got a fair number of folks who would have notable careers well into the talkie era behind the scenes doing the excellent work where, nearly 100 years later, one can see the seams or the lack of refinement, but the ideas and execution are nevertheless impressive. There's a nice knack for having some funny bits and larger-than-life portions while still taking things fairly seriously.

It's not perfect even before you get to the racist tropes piled so high on the Japanese butler that one might be surprised actor Sojin Kamiyama was not a white guy in yellowface; it tries to juggle enough balls long enough that it can't help but drop a few on occasion. Still, the filmmakers tend to bounce back quickly and cram a lot of movie into its 90 minutes.


Magpie

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2024 in Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

The fun thing about Magpie is that not a lot seems to happen, but it's still got three phases that potentially twist things up: Before one realizes this looks like an unreliable narrator movie, discovering that one doesn't necessarily know who the unreliable narrator is, and when it sorts itself out. It's not that tricky a mystery to solve, but it's satisfying because the red herrings work differently than usual.

As it opens, it's been about five or six years since Anette (Daisy Ridley) and Ben (Shazad Latif) moved to the countryside so that Ben could concentrate on his writing and they could raise their daughter Matilda (Hiba Ahmed), with Anette leaving her job in the publishing industry. Matilda is now a child actress, and has been cast in a period piece as the daughter of a character played by Alicia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), who has just had a sex tape posted online before filming. As Ben visits the set to supervise Matilda, he finds himself feeling a connection with Alicia, while being left home alone isn't doing wonders for Anette's mental health, and it is implied she had some sort of breakdown before Matilda was conceived.

In addition to playing a lead role, Daisy Ridley has a story credit here, and it sort of confirms that she's been seeking out a certain type of role since Star Wars, these wired-differently young women who can make a viewer feel like they're hard to crack. She's interesting to watch as Anette, portraying the way parenthood can overwhelm somebody while also making them feel left behind without necessarily yelling it. There's a precision to how it's directed, emphasizing strain without having to have Ridley exaggerate anything about Anette. There's also a sort of fun in watching her, Shazad Latif, and Matilda Lutz find ways to play scenes so that one isn't quite sure whether they're just a bit awkward, showing guilty conscience, or if the actors are portraying not what the characters are actually doing and how, but what someone else thinks they're doing.

It eventually heads toward a Big Reveal that includes flashbacks, but I like how director Sam Yates and Tom Bateman haven't really worked on hiding things that much, doing only the slightest bit of misdirection in hiding something so that the audience is actively engaged with what's happening later; they seem to want viewers weighing possibilities instead of passively watching and waiting to be blindsided and explained to.

It's a nicely compact film - 90 minutes, not really an ounce of fat on it, but also pretty sparse in its action. Everyone seems to know how to get a lot of its minor events, but it's seldom the sort of consciously still movie that requires the audience to elevate tiny movements to something bigger. Just efficient and tight without feeling like it's been passed down in the name of efficiency.

Fantasia 2024.09: "The Door", The Silent Planet, Don't Call It Mystery, and Penalty Loop

Kind of a short day because, as I told someone else, I respect horror but it's not really close to my favorite genre and I can be fairly easily persuaded to do Something Else, whether that's cozy mystery, ribs, or sleep.

Is this really the only photo I got of "The Door" producer Mark Delottinville and director Alexander Seltzer? I guess it is. I guess they were barely up there long enough to introduce their short before The Silent Planet and, hey, lucky they stayed for a third day, right?

After the film, The Silent Planet co-star Briana Middleton and director Jeffrey St Jules had a little more time to talk. She was very excited to work with Elias Koteas and said the experience lived up to expectations and Koteas was a terrific person to collaborate with. Less exciting, perhaps, was that she is from the southern half of the United States and they shot in Newfoundland, which can get pretty cold. Not a bad place for shooting a desolate alien world, though, since not everybody can afford to go to Iceland.

They also talked a bit about repurposing the same pod set as the home of three three different people and having to be fairly careful about shooting in a disused mine, which was not that dangerous but hard to set up in. Between all those things, the behind-the-scenes crew really did some nice work. The movie doesn't make a tiny budget look huge, but they made a fair-sized world out of not that much.

A lot of folks I know up there went to Chainsaws Are Singing at this point, and while I regret not being able to punch Estonia on my Fantasia passport this year, "slasher musical comedy" didn't really feel like my thing, and it would have overlapped with Don't Call It Mystery, which really did seem like my thing. Instead, I took advantage of it being a sort of lull between lunch and dinner at Deville Dinerbar, had some delicious root beer ribs with excellent fries (though I didn't need jalapenos in the corn bread), and more pain perdu than I was expecting for dessert. You can eat in Montreal.

Don't Call Me Mystery was fun, although it's kind of amusing to see the host, a big fan, explaining Viki Rakuten as how you can see the rest of the series. Some of the smaller streamers you need to watch Asian shows are, well, idiosyncratic even when they don't assume they're playing to expats rather than North American fans.

After that came Penalty Loop, with writer/director Shinji Araki (center). It was, as you might guess, a project that had its roots in the pandemic and the feeling of being more trapped than usual in the daily loop.

After that, I figured on seeing the remake of Witchboard with director Chuck Russell in attendance, but between staying for the Penalty Loop Q&A and the fact that Russell is a guy who kind of counts as a big name at this festival (that it's not a "party with Hollywood types" fest is part of what I like about it, but it does mean that when folks who have had mainstream success show, the folks who want to be near that swarm) and it being shot locally, there were a lot of people in the passholder line ahead of me. We got to the point where they were letting twos and threes in and then a sort of lull before they officially sent us away, and that's when I basically decided that anybody in line behind me probably wanted to see this movie more than I did, so I went back to the hotel, made a post, and got a bit of sleep.


"The Door"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

"The Door" lays its basic idea out there in straightforward fashion, and while there are some rickety or underdone bits, the cast nails what they've been called upon to do and the way that filmmaker Alexander Seltzer doesn't entirely fill every detail out makes it a nice springboard, if not entirely a thriller.

As it start, Felix (Raymond Ablack) is moving out of the house he and Kara (Tanaya Beatty) had shared until the loss of their daughter; as is often the case, one is trying to keep the place frozen in time and the other finds that a form of torture. He is just saying his last goodbye in the kitchen when she notices something that doesn't make any sense - a locked door that they have never used. She is freaked out but he says it must have always been there and they must have just ignored it when they saw it didn't go anywhere. He agrees to keep watch until they can figure out how to open it.

We all know what's going to be on the other side of the door, of course, and a feature version of the movie would probably be concerned with what comes after, maybe years after, but Seltzer is more concerned with what comes before, watching the strain between Felix and Rita play out. Beatty and Ablack are great here, their performances resolutely rooted in the characters' present but convincing us that they have a different past that overshadows it. The basic premise may at times feel like a bit of a stretch - how is Felix not thrown for a loop by this strange door appearing in a room he must know well? - but works because there is sort of something about it that resonates with how he was already putting this place behind him and she was not in a position to handle it changing at all.


The Silent Planet

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Movies like this are a huge part of the reason I attend festivals like this. It's nifty science fiction that isn't just an obvious metaphor for something familiar but isn't completely out there, strong cast, neat world-building. It doesn't have a natural place to play in most theaters (although I am slowly coming around to the Seaport Alamo's "four seemingly random screenings over one week" thing), but fits here nicely. There should be more places where it fits nicely.

It introduces the audience quickly enough to its two main characters: Theodore (Elias Koteas) has been the sole inhabitant of Planet 384 for years or decades for a crime he claims not to have committed, writing journal entries his wife Mona will never read and working a mine because his pod will shut down if he doesn't meet a quota. He does this even after ripping the telemetry implants out of his body, which makes the system think the mine is no longer being worked, sending a new prisoner. Niyya (Briana Middleton) was raised by Oiaan refugees before they were wiped out, and her act of terrorism is half a way to stand up for her pacifistic alien benefactors and half a way to be sent away from humanity. She didn't count on the planet's previous inhabitant still being alive, but also starts to suspect that Theodore isn't who he says he is, and their sharing this planet is a cruel trick.

I kind of love both Elias Koteas and Brianna Middleton here. The script is, by and large, a two-person story that would have been tempting to play as very theatrical, but Koteas gives Theodore this nervous timidity and convinces the audience of his tendency to talk to himself, which could look like an affectation. Theodore hasn't bottled things up, but sanded himself down to something dull, for better or worse. Middleton plays Niiyya as someone who knows herself and humanity a bit too well and is young enough to be a bit harsh but not prone to panic. Middleton is good at making Niyya wary without her looking scared, not entirely sure if her Oiaan upbringing and human nature can be reconciled.

They probably can, as one of the main themes of the movie is how malleable a human psyche can be. There is, of course, a strange native entity on Planet 384 that can expedite or exaggerate the process a bit, but while it is considered dangerous and scary, neither characters nor filmmakers discount what it surfaces as the creature as opposed to the humans; it's an accelerant rather than a distraction. More important is that the human mind is reaching out in all directions, looking for patterns and ingesting new information, and already fallible. Someone subjected to isolation is going to reintegrate themselves in any way they can. It is, given when it was likely filmed, perhaps ahead of the game when it comes to how generative "artificial intelligence" fits into that; the custom-generated sitcoms that Theodore watches are terrible but likely reinforcing what the prison system wants them to reinforce anyway.

This all takes place in a world that feels like it's got more to reveal, always adding a couple more details than a scene absolutely needs but not getting sidetracked. I like how Niyya's pod is basically the same design as Theodore's but with a more modern user interface, the tents connected to them are easily inferred to be greenhouses, and Theodore has a collection of neat rocks that are visible but never mentioned; a man spending decades on a mining planet is going to collect neat rocks. It holds together but doesn't overwhelm, just enough visual effects to feel futuristic but not become the point.

It's a nifty little movie that will likely be buried by others with more and bigger stars or more striking visuals once it's off the festival circuit, but those who find it will be fairly lucky.


Misuteri to Iu Nakare (Don't Call it Mystery: The Movie)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground/Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Fine, I will figure out how that weird streaming service works so I can watch the series. That's high praise, because me deciding to catch up with a TV series is pretty rare. Don't Call It Mystery hits a lot of my buttons, though, and for how impenetrable movie spin-offs of television series based on long-running manga can be, this stands alone well, an entertaining one-off that hints that the bigger series has more to offer.

After an ominous start - a speeding car flying off a cliff and exploding - we're introduced to Totono Kuno (Masaki Suda), a curly-haired, highly-observant college student who is socially awkward in a way that is as likely to lead to saying too much as too little, visiting Hiroshima for a museum exhibition, a little freaked out by the high-school girl (Nanoka Hara) following him. She's Shioji Kariatsumari, whose grandfather has recently died; family tradition holds that one heir inherits the entire business, but remember the car crash? That was the entire previous generation. So Shioji and her cousins - Rikinosuke (Keita Machida), Seiko (Sairi Ito), and Neo (Riku Hagiwara) - are each being given the key to a storehouse with a problem to solve, to be judged by longtime family lawyer Yoshiie Kurumazaka (Yasunori Danta) and accountant Gunji Makabe (Takuzo Kadono), with Kurumazaka's grandson (and Shioji's crush) Asaharu Rumazaka (Kohei Matsushita) hanging around. A mutual friend has recommended Totono to Shioji, both for help solving the problem and because these contests have, over the past century, turned cutthroat and violent.

This is, however, pretty custom-designed to appeal to me, a mystery with an affable sleuth (and if original manga-ka Yumi Tamura isn't also a fan of old-school Doctor Who with a particular fondness for the Tom Baker years, I'll eat some sort of hat). It's got a structure that allows the story to get bigger and switch directions in ways other than dropping more bodies, which is a thing that can trip a lot of light mysteries up. It's cozier than cozy in some ways, but that's not necessarily a fault - screenwriter Tomoko Aizawa, director Hiroaki Matsuyama, and the cast give the audience a bunch of characters with various connections - every heir has a relative not in the line of succession or two, at least, and the puzzles are right up front, and the fun is in watching Totono work rather than doing it oneself.

The trick is that in a lot of ways, this isn't primarily a mystery, so much as that's the way to get the audience to another story which is, in itself, not that much, but which can serve as a good thing to be dug up while letting the audience enjoy the digging. It's maybe not necessarily a great puzzle, it's got levels - the storytellers commit to this being a multigenerational story with deep roots, and while there's a risk of losing track of the present in that, they mostly dodge it. It doesn't hurt that this sleuth's thing is observation, and the story rewards that as much as it does twisted thought processes.

It's also got a nice cast, some of whom carry over from the series and some of whom don't. Masaki Suda's portrayal of Kuno may or may not be close to the source material which I haven't read, but he nails the often-contradictory nature of the fussy amateur sleuth who really doesn't want to be in the middle of crime even though he keeps winding up there without testing the audience's patience. There's enough sparks between the main pair to make me wonder if Shioji is meant to recur, with Nanoka Hara doing well to reconcile how she's kind of frighteningly capable and determined for a teenager but also able to trip herself up because she's still very much a kid in some ways. There's enough personality all around to keep things interesting without making the red herrings more compelling than the actual solution; I don't know that the rest of the cast is filled with character actors who know the job, but it feels like it is.

The filmmakers do well to keep this story self-contained, although I suspect fans will certainly be able to place it and enjoy the mid-credit scenes. If nothing else, it feels like a good introduction to a franchise which maybe hasn't gotten as much of a push on this side of the Pacific because shojo manga doesn't get as much attention as the shonen material aimed at boys, but probably should.


Penalty Loop

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There's a lot about Penalty Loop that maybe doesn't feel right initially, like writer/director Shinji Araki had an idea for a nifty variation on a familiar theme but had to bend a lot of pieces out of shape to fit them together. Indeed, I'm not sure that I buy a lot of the story, but I see what he's getting at. There's some food for thought here, and Araki presents it in a way that's entertaining enough to eat up.

Something feels kind of off with Jun Iwamori's girlfriend Yui as the film starts, but it seems as though he'll never find out what it is, because she is murdered while he is at work. Eventually, Jun (Ryuya Wakaba) discovers who the killer is - maintenance worker Mizoguchi (Yusuke Iseya) - and constructs a meticulous plan to get his revenge. The next day, though, it seems like the previous is a dream, and his plan doesn't go quite so smoothly when Mizoguchi shows up to work. On the third iteration, it becomes clear that time is repeating - and Mizoguchi is as aware of what is happening as Jun is.

Araki mentioned during the Q&A that the film was written during Covid restrictions and, yeah, that tracks. It could be written at any point, but that set of circumstances certainly seems like it makes creating this movie, in this configuration, more likely, as the repetitive nature of one's days are brought into sharper relief and the daily goals But there's something else going on here, too, which coincidentally hearkens back to The Silent Planet at the top of the day, as it becomes painfully clear to Iwamori that what seemed apt at the start of this process doesn't at the end, because not only can people change, but they will adapt their brains to the system they are in, to the point where he may, for better or worse, wind up with a stronger connection to Mizoguchi than Yui.

It's not always smooth, to the point where I am curious how climbing the walls during Covid lockdowns influenced what seems like a sudden tonal shift, where a change of heart that traditionally takes forever or requires a major revelation seems to happen quickly, because folks just get sick of unpleasant things fast and we all know that now. It's a pretty weird shift, and I don't know that I really buy it, although I found the comedic material enjoyable enough to roll with it. It's not necessarily the only sharp turn, especially as Araki opts for a backstory to the loop which hand-waves much less than the typical time loop does, and makes the intrusions of so-called "normality" exceptionally unnerving.

Oddly - relatedly? - I do like the way that the end stretches in contrast. It's maybe an admission that recovering from such trauma isn't going to happen easily or by following some packaged program, and there are plenty of ways to parse someone saying he's fine when he's clearly not. It gives Ryuya Wakaba some really good, tumultuous material to work through after Yusuke Iseya's killer who shows depths and fear if not repentance. Iseya spends a fair amount of the movie threatening to steal the film from its apparent protagonist, and the chance for Wakaba to respond, highlighting the emptiness that inspired all of this, is welcome. Penalty Loop is creaky at times, like a Twilight Zone episode where you can help but think that Serling is really stretching to build a premise for his ironic ending and a big bump to get the story where it has to go on top of that. On the other hand, it's frequently funny, twists nicely when that's called for, and leaves the audience with a bit more than expected.