I was interested in Tornado just from the trailer, then looked it up and saw it was from the director of Slow West and really got my interest piqued.. Then… Wait, ten years since Slow West? Nothing in between? Well, one music video for his brother's band, but, yikes. I remember people being pretty fond of his movie, even if it was kind of an odd duck of a western, but, yikes, what has he been up to since then? IMDB and other online resources like it aren't definitive - you can be developing stuff and even getting paid for your work and have it never have it logged because for one reason or another it never becomes a credit - but it still seems kind of sparse. You'd expect to see a little TV or something, right? Maybe a movie you never heard of because Netflix picked it up and it was made available without any fanfare?
I've seen it happen before - go back far enough in this blog and you'll see me saying much the same thing about the gap between Jump Tomorrow and Last Chance Harvey - and it makes me wonder anew just to what extent it's harder than it ever was to get a movie made.
Anyway, in an enjoyable theme stretch, the next night Bushido played at the MFA as part of their Japanese Film series, and it too features an unusual samurai and his daughter, which is a really fun bit of serendipity, considering they were made at opposite ends of the world.
Tornado
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2025 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link for pre-order)
Tornado is an impressively mean little bit of pulp that remixes its various influences well but is modest about it. Director John Maclean isn't particularly looking to show off his bona fides or encyclopedic knowledge of various genres, but serving up some creative violence and the grim results of paternal conflict for 90 minutes.
Taking place in the year 1790, it starts in media res, with the title character (Mitsuki "Koki," Kimura) running across the Scottish Highlands, a young boy (Nathan Malone) not far behind, pursued by a gang of highwaymen. Their leader Sugarman (Tim Roth) pursues with patient but ruthless determination while son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) hangs back, watching for details his father misses and planning to act on his own. Before long, we'll see how all this started, with Tornado frustrated by her strict former-samurai father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) and the traveling puppet show where they barely make ends meet, although it's good enough that things go to hell when the highwaymen stop to watch and everyone gets sloppy and greedy.
It's a basic chas/revenge story, but Maclean keeps it from feeling rote, strewing bits of backstory about to casually connect or leave mysterious as best serves the very focused plot. He starts with what is probably the second big chase piece, chronologically, not so much to hide something as to focus on who the core cast is rather than to set the audience up for disappointment because he kills favorites early or introduces potentially critical connections late. You can probably piece together a lot about how Fujin and Tornado wound up traveling alone in Eighteenth Century Scotland and enjoy wondering about the rest, and enjoy how protagonists and antagonists alike feel like natural groups rather than folks forced together by authorial fiat.
That's especially notable during the relatively brief scenes with Tornado and Fujin, who come off a bit dysfunctional, with Mitsuki Kimura playing a modern sort of archetype - the assimilated child of immigrants - without coming off as too Twenty-First Century or being allowed particularly long stretches to show how her brattiness has led to disaster. It's a natural complement to how Takehiro Hira plays Fujin as someone who has left the warrior's life behind but can't quite shake the attitudes it has ingrained in him; you can see their well-intentioned instincts making things worse. The other parent and child probably don't have better instincts and are way too much alike for their own good: Both Sugarman and Little Sugar know they're smart and ruthless, which manifests as seasoned, witty self-assurance from Tim Roth but overeagerness and a smirk about how much more clever he is from Jack Lowden.
It's a set-up for doling violence out in rather casual fashion. The choreography is never really complicated - the point often is that it doesn't really take much to kill a person, especially if you're unsentimental about it, or that being very good with a weapon may not mean much if the other person strikes before you realize it's a fight to the death - but some of the kills have an impressive vicious or absurdity nevertheless, with more than a couple bits quick but ingenious enough to make a viewer search their memories for if they've seen that before. It's a little meta about how much fun this is, with a word about audiences cheering for violence rather than heroes, but doesn't raise itself above its anti-heroine as she maybe trades one piece of her soul for another.
For those who have seen Slow West, there's little doubt it's from the same guy. It's not necessarily relaxed as it pushes through its chase in steady but relentless fashion, but it's got the same sorts of moments where it pauses to show its amoral characters framed in a harsh but beautiful land and preference for just enough dialog to make introspection readable. The music is harsh and discordant at times, as uninterested in messing around as the rest of the film, though it happily adds genre notes where appropriate.
This one isn't for everyone - there's a lot more cruelty than fun to its grindhouse violence - but Maclean does well in shrinking a revenge epic down to size and making it work without a lot of fuss.
Gobangiri
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 May 2025 in Museum of Fine Arts Remis Auditorium (Festival of Films from Japan, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
I scribbled "go" under "mahjongg" on an imaginary list of board games to learn so I can appreciate asian films early on in this one. It's an entertaining period piece that I suspect is especially charming to those who know the game and can perhaps see its philosophy and strategy throughout.
Its central figure is Kakunoshin Yanagidi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), a vagrant samurai behind on his rent because he is making his living as a carver and not that many people in Edo's Yoshiwada district need personal seals. His true passion is the game of go, shared by pawnbroker Genbei Yorozuya (Jun Kunimura), and they become close friends; it doesn't hurt that Genbei's employee Yakichi (Taishi Nakagawa) is quickly smitten with Yanagadi's lovely and intelligent daughter Okinu (Kaya Kiyohara). Two events throw this potentially pleasing arrangement into chaos: The arrival of old friend Kajiki Samon (Eita Okuno), who informs Yanagidi that rival Hyogo Shibata (Takumi Saito) has been identified as the actual person behind the events that led to Yanagidi's exile, and the disappearance of money during a game between Yanagidi and Genbei which Yanagidi and Okinu go to dangerous lengths to repay.
I find myself very impressed at how what could often be a whimsical premise for a movie quickly becomes dead serious here. The honorable ronin whose true passion is go and who needs his sensible daughter's care reveals a dark side when given a righteous cause; the bushido code itself appears to bring out the very worst in him, and in others. Director Kazuya Shiraishi and his crew often shoot the film in cheery, nostalgic fashion - this isn't a grimy, "you know it's serious because it's dark" film - but it's clear early on that living in this land means potentially being at the mercy of violent maniacs who are far too willing to let a situation escalate to formalized murder.
That's the most fascinating part of Tsuyoshi's portrayal of Yanagidi, which initially presents as stiffly earnest and formal, the samurai who has been restricted to inaction by his training and the expectations of his caste to be an outsider among ordinary people that only occasionally reveals the dark side that lurks within, letting you spend the second half of the movie wondering just how far he will sink. It makes the confrontations with Takumi Saito's Shibata entertaining in seeing how one doesn't know what to do with his dark impulses while the other is clearly just covering them as is convenient. It also lets a couple of character actors used in fun ways; I seldom remember Jun Kunimura playing this cheerful, and Masachika Ichimura seems a bit less rigid than he might. Taishi Nakagawa and Kaya Kiyohara are a likable pair, and Kyoko Koizumi plays a neighbor who seems to have a handle on her own dark side, for better or worse.
It softens one up a bit before getting the more dramatic material with an often cheery first act. Its occasional bits of humor seem to be happily free of anachronism and never make things silly, with a nice way of emphasizing what is universal and familiar in a bygone time. You can feel the shift into darker material like a click as the filmmaker turns a dial to a new setting. The action is exciting but one can see how it could be corrosive.
I've got no idea how well it presents the game - folks near me in the theater seemed not-upset - but the filmmakers know how this stuff works, showing the broad strokes of the game, demonstrating a specific rare strategy that will be important later, but watching the players more than the game to the extent they can. They're tuned into the exact amount that selling these scores with a board game is kind of silly, even if we do take these games seriously.
Showing posts with label samurai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label samurai. Show all posts
Monday, June 02, 2025
Thursday, February 29, 2024
This Week in Tickets: 19 February 2024 - 25 February 2024 (Annoyingly Good Programming)
Sure, I said, I'll just get the Alamo Drafthouse membership because it'll pay for itself with two movies or so a month, but probably won't use it for much more, especially since they're all the way down in the Seaport.
Moviegoing kicked off on Tuesday when I finally got around to Pegasus 2, which may be the biggest Lunar New Year movie for the Year of the Dragon. It's not bad, although also not great, weirdly non-melodramatic for a fast-car movie!
Wednesday night I hit Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which turns out to be the only thing I went to as part of the Alamo's Time Capsule '99 shows, in part because a lot show elsewhere semi-regularly and 25th anniversary stuff, well, that'll be at the Brattle during reunion weekend and just kind of shows up regularly. Still, this was one I've not crossed paths with yet - I think it might have felt too weird for me when it came out - and I dug it. Speaking of 25 years ago, the next night was Drive-Away Dolls, which takes place in 1999, and is pretty decent, if not quite up to what the folks involved maybe could have managed.
Friday night, it was back to Lunar New Year stuff with Article 20, the latest from Zhang Yimou (who is making movies at a pace that suggests gambling debts or the like these days), although perhaps the most grounded and contemporary thing he's ever done. Surprisingly fun and quippy for the subject matter. Just kind of odd for Zhang.
Saturday was the first of two days heading down to the Seaport for stuff where the only/best show was at 12:15pm on the weekend, which isn't ideal even if the Red Line is working, which it wasn't this weekend. That got me there for Stopmotion, a decent-enough horror movie for a while that eventually diverges from what I tend to like about the genre. After that, I walked back across the bridge for Perfect Days, which is pretty much as great as people say, even if it's kind of odd for Wim Wenders to be directing Japan's submission for the Oscars.
The next day started the same way, with movie in question being The Invisible Fight, and, wow, I feel like it was just a few weeks ago that I was grumbling about how it was impossible to go to that place spur of the moment because between limited showtimes and seating, everything sold out a week in advance. When I got on the train Sunday morning, it looked like I might be alone in this show. Admittedly, it's a weird one at a weird time, but has the novelty worn off? Or is it just not enough in cases like this?
And, finally, speaking of novelty (sort of), we end the week back near home at the Somerville Theatre, which had one of the 70mm prints of Tenet that Warner was pushing out to promote Dune Part Two on large-format film next week, which is kind of odd - they're not exactly related beyond having a WB logo up front! - but we'll take it.
Those two-movie days get my Letterboxd account, closer to 1 film/day, which is either a bit much or a goal.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (Time Capsule: 1999, laser DCP)
Available to stream/rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on Blu-ray at Amazon
So many movies with this basic story - an assassin's assignment goes sideways and he must ultimately kill the whole organization before it kills him - are visibly working so hard to be off-kilter and cool without achieving half of the genuine eccentricity that Jim Jarmusch seems to manage effortlessly here. I'm not sure why that is - maybe it's that Jarmusch conceived Ghost Dog and his world more holistically than others; maybe he's just got an odd way of looking at things - but it makes the movie memorable in a way that others of its ilk aren't.
The assassin in question (Forest Whitaker) goes by "Ghost Dog", and after having been rescued from a beating by gangster Louie (John Tormey) some years ago, he's modeled himself on samurai retainers and pledged his loyalty. He and Louie communicate by pigeon, and that's where he got the orders to kill Handsome Frank (Richard Portnow), who has been hooking up with his boss's daughter Louise (Tricia Vessey). Trouble is, Louise was supposed to be on a bus as opposed to Frank's apartment, which means the gang can't say they don't know who to look for.
Of course, part of why this characterization works is that Jarmusch knows the price of such eccentricity; underneath Ghost Dog's cool is a man trying his damnedest to create some sense of stability by following a Way, even if his employers clearly have no code. Forest Whitaker never seems about to crack in the role, but always lets you see that this persona, real though it may be, has been carefully constructed. He may not be entirely aware that this whole situation is the result of how both he and the gangsters he serves are trying to live by genre tropes - in this case, the honorable man being used by those that change their minds capriciously, though he certainly is by the end, and is somehow at peace with that. It is, perhaps, a Way itself.
Jarmusch is aware it's a bit ridiculous,, and doesn't entirely play it straight, but his winking at the audience before the final High Noon reference is mostly having gangsters watching cartoons whenever there's a TV nearby, as if that's the highest level of sophistication these tough guys can muster about the violence they use. Instead, he makes the movie very funny in a certain way, deadpan absurdity where sometimes one finds oneself the only person in the theater laughing at a joke and sometimes one is a bit surprised to hear others. Somehow, every bit with Ghost Dog and his francophone best friend Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé) saying the same thing in different languages lands despite it always being the same joke because there's something earnest about understanding each other if not each other's words there.
By the end, Ghost Dog does not feel like it has vanished into its sort of meta-ness, but that is where it has wound up, with most characters accepting their parts in these genre narrative and the ones who haven't rather alarmed by it.
Drive-Away Dolls
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2024 in AMC Causeway #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
I hope all three movies in Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke''s B-movie project honor their origins by coming in comfortably under 90 minutes. Not in a "man, even 1:24 is too much" way but because they seem well aware that there's potential for bloat in trying to get their zany ideas to not look dinky next to other listings and resist, moving things along instead.
The plot, such as it is, works as pure road-trip hijinks fuel, as buttoned up Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) winds up having her recently-broken-up hot mess of a friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley) tag along on her trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, suggesting they can save some money by using a "drive-away" for folks who want to get a car from one place to another. A misunderstanding has them taking one with a MacGuffin in the spare tire well, so a couple of goons (C.J. Wilson & Joey Slotnick) are sent to make sure they don't accidentally find it - which, of course, they do.
It's one of the sturdiest foundations you can build a movie upon, and the filmmakers don't get too cute trying to twist it beyond some unusual details. That said, the movie often feels like it could have used a joke or two more, or maybe some better ones at times. It's never terribly serious, and doesn't seem particularly clueless in the way an older straight white dude and his wife making a movie about young gay women could be, but it's a movie that provides a steady stream of chuckles that leaves the audience maybe a bit impatient for the huge laughs that its goofy premise and impressive pedigree promise. There are a few, especially toward the beginning and end, but it still feels like the film is underachieving just a bit - they kind of know what has to happen for Jamie and Marion on the road, but don't really come up with characters to encounter that are able to steal their scenes, and there's maybe a little "I forget, was this transgressive then?" going on.
That's not true of the dolls themselves, thankfully; Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are introduced in a couple scenes that seem a bit overdone but quickly find a groove, like Coen & Cooke figured the language could be extra-screwball for a moment to establish them before pulling back. They're really great together as an odd couple one immediately believes as friends despite opposing personalities, and if there's romance in store, sure, that'll work too. Qualley gets the obviously funny stuff, but Viswanathan kind of had the hard part playing the more uptight half without getting anywhere close to being an annoying killjoy. Joey Slotnick & C.J. Wilson have a similar sort of vibe - Slotnick plays the chatty movie goon and Wilson the hulking one - but they're better off with Colman Domingo annoyed with the pair of them.
It should have been better, but it at least moves quick enough to never actually live out its welcome. The question, given that the filmmakers talked about doing three, is whether they've got jokes enough for two more movies like this given how thin they occasionally were here.
Stopmotion
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
Horror movie life hack: As soon as the kid who looks an awful lot like a young version of yourself and never seems to have parents around shows up, talk to a licensed mental health care professional and enquire about medication. It's never a good sign.
Of course, Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) was destined to have issues anyway; the daughter of a stop-motion animation legend (Stella Gonet) whose arthritis as left her unable to manipulate her maquettes directly, Ella is serving as Suzanne's hands on what is to be her final project, even though her mother doesn't see her as a true artist. When Suzanne has a stroke, Ella attempts to finish the work in a new space her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) finds for her, but, just as Suzanne claimed, Ella has a difficult time coming up with an idea when placed on the spot - although a kid running around the building (Caolinn Springall) has a few.
That audiences are certainly going to recognize that, not only does Caolinn Springall look an awful lot like Aisling Franciosi, but her character never gives a name, is not necessarily bad for the movie, since it's not like the filmmakers are being particularly cute about it; it certainly lets Ella's mini-me just jump straight to being a very weird little girl without a lot of messing around. We are here for a movie about the animator who has to plunge so deeply into her creations and worries that there's not much of herself anyway, right? And when the film is about that, it's kind of great, retaining the magic of the technique while still satisfying curiosity about how it works. The puppet imagery is terrific, and the moments when it spills over into the real world land very well.
Unfortunately, at least for me, the finale is the sort of horror movie climax where it gets gnarly and meaner, but there's not a whole lot that compels me beyond the blood and guts. I didn't feel a sense of doomed inevitability, or the discomfort of knowing it could have been avoided, or the forlorn hope that things could be turned around. It's just kind of time to escalate, as opposed to truly feeling like the inevitable next step of what's troubling Emma, despite the fact that we're pretty invested in that, for all it's been haphazardly presented.
That's the thing that separates a great horror movie from a decent one, often, that all the little details reinforce each other and prevent any way out. It's a bit disappointing that Ella's film doesn't tell us much about her, especially when there's such good material about her actually being a good technician but thinking she should be a genius like her mother; it could have even made the genericness of her monster and need to transgress sharper. Instead, it plays more like "this is kind of nasty, let's throw it in" than something really horrifying.
Perfect Days
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
So, I was kind of at "this is really good, maybe something special, and there ain't nothing wrong with that" until the last shot of all the complex emotions going across Koji Yakusho's face basically destroyed me.
Which, basically, seemed what he and director Wim Wenders are going for, in a kind of sneaky way, spending the first half of the movie or so sort of playing up this thing outsiders low-key fetishize about Japan, the pride in how even ordinary things can be beautiful and there's dignity in doing necessary work. Then, though, he starts quietly not-quite-upending this, but maybe making one get a little fidgety about it. A camera angle we haven't quite seen before reveals a pile of paperbacks finished and set aside, then something similar with the photographs he's been taking. Then his toilet cleaner Hirayama's Niko (Arisa Nakano) shows up and it's very clear that he's built himself a life with little room for more than it has.
Wenders's movie isn't the sort to scold him for this. The beauty found here is real, but it's got a cost, especially for a man like Yakusho's Hirayama who's not getting any younger, and there's a sort of realization that being able to live like this is something of an illusion. Your life may be a story of perfect stasis, but change will come, probably in the form of some small piece of this structure you take for granted disappearing.
Yakusho plays that well, even beyond that incredible final shot; for all that Perfect Days and Hirayama aren't entirely what they appear to be on the surface, it has to work as that portrait of a humble worker who sees joy all over despite a small apartment and a job cleaning Tokyo's art-installation-quality public toilets, but there's also got to be things about him that are a bit stunted: His lack of conversation gets abrasive, he's abrasive when a co-worker quite, and his response to a friend of a friend having terrible news is on the one hand cheering but on the other, maybe a bit childish. This isn't a big man-child, but he's maybe missed some of the development that usually comes before settling into this sort of serene engagement with life. That hits home with me a bit, to be honest, and it's interesting to watch the film weigh that.
Nähtamatu võitlus (The Invisible Fight)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run/Fantastic Fest Presents, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
The clever thing about The Invisible Fight is that a viewer is quite like to start this movie kind of delighted at the idea of a genre-poisoned mind looking at this Orthodox monastery and seeing the Shaolin Temple, but by the end, it's pretty clear that the cool things that the Soviet Union has banned are not just kung fu or rock & roll, but religion. Underneath all the slapstick and silliness, these filmmakers are genuinely fond of their monks, and see the part that they and their institution have to play.
First, though, we see three rock & roll Chinese bandits (Eddie Tsai Chia-Yuan, Kyro Wavebourne, Johnny X. Wang) practically fly into a fort on the USSR/China border in 1973, seemingly killing everyone but one guard. When Rafael (Ursel Tilk) returns home to Estonia, it's clearly made an impression on him - he wears his hair long, adores Bruce Lee, and listens to Black Sabbath, presumably smuggled in, because "everything cool is banned by the Soviet Union". His mother (Maria Avdjushko) despairs, but Rtia (Ester Kuntu) notices him one night at the bar; alas, she's already engaged, to Rudolf (Ekke Märten Hekles). Soon, though, Rafel finds a hidden monastery where the monks practice martial arts, and while most want nothing to do with him, Father Nafanail (Indrek Sammul) takes him on as a student, a blow to his current protégé Irinei (Kaarel Pogga).
There is a lot of goofy physical comedy as Rafael, dismissed as a clown by most of the monks, plows through certain of his destiny and his desire to learn kung fu with little on his mind beyond that. Writer/director Rainer Sarnet riffs on everything from silent comedy to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, seldom letting the opportunity for a physical gag go by but having a great eye for when a gag is both kind of silly and cartoonish and when it's based on something cool that's got to look cool. That high-energy enthusiasm carries the movie a long way. It's relentless and silly enough to keep the audience hooked even if the story is a bit thin, and the odd couple chemistry between Ursel Tilk and Kaarel Pogga as Rafael & Irinei is kept at a very enjoyable simmer, as these guys never actually grow to like each other but at constantly able to turn that into comedic tension. If you're going to build a movie around someone as brash and dumb as Rafael, it helps to have someone exasperated with his own flaws as a balance.
It does sort of start to stretch once one realizes that this isn't quite the martial-arts spoof it's sold itself as, or at least not entirely so and there's probably not going to be another big wire-fu set piece to bookend the film at the end; neither Rudolf nor the State Security guy they cross paths with is that formidable or even the right sort of character. It feels, a bit, like Sarnet maybe intended to go that direction, but eventually found his way to the spirituality being the thing - the confidence and trust and sense of belonging more than the supernatural or a demand of devotion - and there was some casting about while writing the script without removing the dead ends once the final direction became clear. It finishes satisfyingly, though, and I suppose that's a reasonable result for a movie tackling this sort of subject: One seldom ends a spiritual journey at their initial intended destination, after all.
Tenet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (re-release, 70mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD/Blu-ray/4K disc at Amazon
This random-seeming re-release to promote Dune Part Two playing on large-format film next week highlights just how great this plays with an audience and makes me think that the pandemic screwing up its intended release has allowed it to become a sort of cult film. I know, it's too expensive and filled with movie stars to be a traditional cult film, but it's weird, benefits from multiple viewings, and a lot of folks are going to discover how much they truly enjoy it because they saw it at a special show in the one place in town that can still run 70mm film, as opposed to it just being this week's blockbuster. It's a film where there's a narrative to seeing it.
And, on top of that, it's a better movie than I thought when I first saw it during its delayed initial release, and not just because there were more of us digging Nolan's amazing action sequences at a time than there were then, with everyone scattered throughout theaters that could only hold 10% or so. As with Ghost Dog (how's that for some fortunate/found bookending!), you can sort of see Nolan examining genre and moviemaking, how you may wind up building a movie both forward from the initial concept but also backward from the climactic action finale, an unseen hand putting everything in place but the story still needing to live and breathe on its own. I like the performances a bit more, with John David Washington's Protagonist dutiful but chafing at being put into a box, Robert Pattinson charmingly ostentatious, Elizabeth Debicki gaining a spine after being so thoroughly cowed. There are little bits I really love - Debicki racing back to look casual after her Kat hides a gun from her husband, Washington casually mentioning that one of the large vehicles he wants for the impossible heist he's planning has to be a fire truck, or a bit where he sarcastically asks Kenneth Branagh's Sator whether a line comes from Walt Whitman that I will believe is a Dead Again reference until Nolan personally tells me otherwise.
It is, for a movie so intent on making sure one appreciates the clockwork of it, awfully lively and emotional. It's currently lodged atop my list of most-rewatched films at Letterboxd, and although that only includes a few years, I think it will stay up there. It's enough fun to catch again when a local theater hauls it out, and I think enough folks are starting to realize that to get theaters to book it every couple years or so.
Initial Letterboxd entry from October 2020
Wednesday night I hit Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which turns out to be the only thing I went to as part of the Alamo's Time Capsule '99 shows, in part because a lot show elsewhere semi-regularly and 25th anniversary stuff, well, that'll be at the Brattle during reunion weekend and just kind of shows up regularly. Still, this was one I've not crossed paths with yet - I think it might have felt too weird for me when it came out - and I dug it. Speaking of 25 years ago, the next night was Drive-Away Dolls, which takes place in 1999, and is pretty decent, if not quite up to what the folks involved maybe could have managed.
Friday night, it was back to Lunar New Year stuff with Article 20, the latest from Zhang Yimou (who is making movies at a pace that suggests gambling debts or the like these days), although perhaps the most grounded and contemporary thing he's ever done. Surprisingly fun and quippy for the subject matter. Just kind of odd for Zhang.
Saturday was the first of two days heading down to the Seaport for stuff where the only/best show was at 12:15pm on the weekend, which isn't ideal even if the Red Line is working, which it wasn't this weekend. That got me there for Stopmotion, a decent-enough horror movie for a while that eventually diverges from what I tend to like about the genre. After that, I walked back across the bridge for Perfect Days, which is pretty much as great as people say, even if it's kind of odd for Wim Wenders to be directing Japan's submission for the Oscars.
The next day started the same way, with movie in question being The Invisible Fight, and, wow, I feel like it was just a few weeks ago that I was grumbling about how it was impossible to go to that place spur of the moment because between limited showtimes and seating, everything sold out a week in advance. When I got on the train Sunday morning, it looked like I might be alone in this show. Admittedly, it's a weird one at a weird time, but has the novelty worn off? Or is it just not enough in cases like this?
And, finally, speaking of novelty (sort of), we end the week back near home at the Somerville Theatre, which had one of the 70mm prints of Tenet that Warner was pushing out to promote Dune Part Two on large-format film next week, which is kind of odd - they're not exactly related beyond having a WB logo up front! - but we'll take it.
Those two-movie days get my Letterboxd account, closer to 1 film/day, which is either a bit much or a goal.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (Time Capsule: 1999, laser DCP)
Available to stream/rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on Blu-ray at Amazon
So many movies with this basic story - an assassin's assignment goes sideways and he must ultimately kill the whole organization before it kills him - are visibly working so hard to be off-kilter and cool without achieving half of the genuine eccentricity that Jim Jarmusch seems to manage effortlessly here. I'm not sure why that is - maybe it's that Jarmusch conceived Ghost Dog and his world more holistically than others; maybe he's just got an odd way of looking at things - but it makes the movie memorable in a way that others of its ilk aren't.
The assassin in question (Forest Whitaker) goes by "Ghost Dog", and after having been rescued from a beating by gangster Louie (John Tormey) some years ago, he's modeled himself on samurai retainers and pledged his loyalty. He and Louie communicate by pigeon, and that's where he got the orders to kill Handsome Frank (Richard Portnow), who has been hooking up with his boss's daughter Louise (Tricia Vessey). Trouble is, Louise was supposed to be on a bus as opposed to Frank's apartment, which means the gang can't say they don't know who to look for.
Of course, part of why this characterization works is that Jarmusch knows the price of such eccentricity; underneath Ghost Dog's cool is a man trying his damnedest to create some sense of stability by following a Way, even if his employers clearly have no code. Forest Whitaker never seems about to crack in the role, but always lets you see that this persona, real though it may be, has been carefully constructed. He may not be entirely aware that this whole situation is the result of how both he and the gangsters he serves are trying to live by genre tropes - in this case, the honorable man being used by those that change their minds capriciously, though he certainly is by the end, and is somehow at peace with that. It is, perhaps, a Way itself.
Jarmusch is aware it's a bit ridiculous,, and doesn't entirely play it straight, but his winking at the audience before the final High Noon reference is mostly having gangsters watching cartoons whenever there's a TV nearby, as if that's the highest level of sophistication these tough guys can muster about the violence they use. Instead, he makes the movie very funny in a certain way, deadpan absurdity where sometimes one finds oneself the only person in the theater laughing at a joke and sometimes one is a bit surprised to hear others. Somehow, every bit with Ghost Dog and his francophone best friend Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé) saying the same thing in different languages lands despite it always being the same joke because there's something earnest about understanding each other if not each other's words there.
By the end, Ghost Dog does not feel like it has vanished into its sort of meta-ness, but that is where it has wound up, with most characters accepting their parts in these genre narrative and the ones who haven't rather alarmed by it.
Drive-Away Dolls
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2024 in AMC Causeway #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
I hope all three movies in Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke''s B-movie project honor their origins by coming in comfortably under 90 minutes. Not in a "man, even 1:24 is too much" way but because they seem well aware that there's potential for bloat in trying to get their zany ideas to not look dinky next to other listings and resist, moving things along instead.
The plot, such as it is, works as pure road-trip hijinks fuel, as buttoned up Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) winds up having her recently-broken-up hot mess of a friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley) tag along on her trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, suggesting they can save some money by using a "drive-away" for folks who want to get a car from one place to another. A misunderstanding has them taking one with a MacGuffin in the spare tire well, so a couple of goons (C.J. Wilson & Joey Slotnick) are sent to make sure they don't accidentally find it - which, of course, they do.
It's one of the sturdiest foundations you can build a movie upon, and the filmmakers don't get too cute trying to twist it beyond some unusual details. That said, the movie often feels like it could have used a joke or two more, or maybe some better ones at times. It's never terribly serious, and doesn't seem particularly clueless in the way an older straight white dude and his wife making a movie about young gay women could be, but it's a movie that provides a steady stream of chuckles that leaves the audience maybe a bit impatient for the huge laughs that its goofy premise and impressive pedigree promise. There are a few, especially toward the beginning and end, but it still feels like the film is underachieving just a bit - they kind of know what has to happen for Jamie and Marion on the road, but don't really come up with characters to encounter that are able to steal their scenes, and there's maybe a little "I forget, was this transgressive then?" going on.
That's not true of the dolls themselves, thankfully; Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are introduced in a couple scenes that seem a bit overdone but quickly find a groove, like Coen & Cooke figured the language could be extra-screwball for a moment to establish them before pulling back. They're really great together as an odd couple one immediately believes as friends despite opposing personalities, and if there's romance in store, sure, that'll work too. Qualley gets the obviously funny stuff, but Viswanathan kind of had the hard part playing the more uptight half without getting anywhere close to being an annoying killjoy. Joey Slotnick & C.J. Wilson have a similar sort of vibe - Slotnick plays the chatty movie goon and Wilson the hulking one - but they're better off with Colman Domingo annoyed with the pair of them.
It should have been better, but it at least moves quick enough to never actually live out its welcome. The question, given that the filmmakers talked about doing three, is whether they've got jokes enough for two more movies like this given how thin they occasionally were here.
Stopmotion
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
Horror movie life hack: As soon as the kid who looks an awful lot like a young version of yourself and never seems to have parents around shows up, talk to a licensed mental health care professional and enquire about medication. It's never a good sign.
Of course, Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) was destined to have issues anyway; the daughter of a stop-motion animation legend (Stella Gonet) whose arthritis as left her unable to manipulate her maquettes directly, Ella is serving as Suzanne's hands on what is to be her final project, even though her mother doesn't see her as a true artist. When Suzanne has a stroke, Ella attempts to finish the work in a new space her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) finds for her, but, just as Suzanne claimed, Ella has a difficult time coming up with an idea when placed on the spot - although a kid running around the building (Caolinn Springall) has a few.
That audiences are certainly going to recognize that, not only does Caolinn Springall look an awful lot like Aisling Franciosi, but her character never gives a name, is not necessarily bad for the movie, since it's not like the filmmakers are being particularly cute about it; it certainly lets Ella's mini-me just jump straight to being a very weird little girl without a lot of messing around. We are here for a movie about the animator who has to plunge so deeply into her creations and worries that there's not much of herself anyway, right? And when the film is about that, it's kind of great, retaining the magic of the technique while still satisfying curiosity about how it works. The puppet imagery is terrific, and the moments when it spills over into the real world land very well.
Unfortunately, at least for me, the finale is the sort of horror movie climax where it gets gnarly and meaner, but there's not a whole lot that compels me beyond the blood and guts. I didn't feel a sense of doomed inevitability, or the discomfort of knowing it could have been avoided, or the forlorn hope that things could be turned around. It's just kind of time to escalate, as opposed to truly feeling like the inevitable next step of what's troubling Emma, despite the fact that we're pretty invested in that, for all it's been haphazardly presented.
That's the thing that separates a great horror movie from a decent one, often, that all the little details reinforce each other and prevent any way out. It's a bit disappointing that Ella's film doesn't tell us much about her, especially when there's such good material about her actually being a good technician but thinking she should be a genius like her mother; it could have even made the genericness of her monster and need to transgress sharper. Instead, it plays more like "this is kind of nasty, let's throw it in" than something really horrifying.
Perfect Days
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
So, I was kind of at "this is really good, maybe something special, and there ain't nothing wrong with that" until the last shot of all the complex emotions going across Koji Yakusho's face basically destroyed me.
Which, basically, seemed what he and director Wim Wenders are going for, in a kind of sneaky way, spending the first half of the movie or so sort of playing up this thing outsiders low-key fetishize about Japan, the pride in how even ordinary things can be beautiful and there's dignity in doing necessary work. Then, though, he starts quietly not-quite-upending this, but maybe making one get a little fidgety about it. A camera angle we haven't quite seen before reveals a pile of paperbacks finished and set aside, then something similar with the photographs he's been taking. Then his toilet cleaner Hirayama's Niko (Arisa Nakano) shows up and it's very clear that he's built himself a life with little room for more than it has.
Wenders's movie isn't the sort to scold him for this. The beauty found here is real, but it's got a cost, especially for a man like Yakusho's Hirayama who's not getting any younger, and there's a sort of realization that being able to live like this is something of an illusion. Your life may be a story of perfect stasis, but change will come, probably in the form of some small piece of this structure you take for granted disappearing.
Yakusho plays that well, even beyond that incredible final shot; for all that Perfect Days and Hirayama aren't entirely what they appear to be on the surface, it has to work as that portrait of a humble worker who sees joy all over despite a small apartment and a job cleaning Tokyo's art-installation-quality public toilets, but there's also got to be things about him that are a bit stunted: His lack of conversation gets abrasive, he's abrasive when a co-worker quite, and his response to a friend of a friend having terrible news is on the one hand cheering but on the other, maybe a bit childish. This isn't a big man-child, but he's maybe missed some of the development that usually comes before settling into this sort of serene engagement with life. That hits home with me a bit, to be honest, and it's interesting to watch the film weigh that.
Nähtamatu võitlus (The Invisible Fight)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run/Fantastic Fest Presents, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is
The clever thing about The Invisible Fight is that a viewer is quite like to start this movie kind of delighted at the idea of a genre-poisoned mind looking at this Orthodox monastery and seeing the Shaolin Temple, but by the end, it's pretty clear that the cool things that the Soviet Union has banned are not just kung fu or rock & roll, but religion. Underneath all the slapstick and silliness, these filmmakers are genuinely fond of their monks, and see the part that they and their institution have to play.
First, though, we see three rock & roll Chinese bandits (Eddie Tsai Chia-Yuan, Kyro Wavebourne, Johnny X. Wang) practically fly into a fort on the USSR/China border in 1973, seemingly killing everyone but one guard. When Rafael (Ursel Tilk) returns home to Estonia, it's clearly made an impression on him - he wears his hair long, adores Bruce Lee, and listens to Black Sabbath, presumably smuggled in, because "everything cool is banned by the Soviet Union". His mother (Maria Avdjushko) despairs, but Rtia (Ester Kuntu) notices him one night at the bar; alas, she's already engaged, to Rudolf (Ekke Märten Hekles). Soon, though, Rafel finds a hidden monastery where the monks practice martial arts, and while most want nothing to do with him, Father Nafanail (Indrek Sammul) takes him on as a student, a blow to his current protégé Irinei (Kaarel Pogga).
There is a lot of goofy physical comedy as Rafael, dismissed as a clown by most of the monks, plows through certain of his destiny and his desire to learn kung fu with little on his mind beyond that. Writer/director Rainer Sarnet riffs on everything from silent comedy to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, seldom letting the opportunity for a physical gag go by but having a great eye for when a gag is both kind of silly and cartoonish and when it's based on something cool that's got to look cool. That high-energy enthusiasm carries the movie a long way. It's relentless and silly enough to keep the audience hooked even if the story is a bit thin, and the odd couple chemistry between Ursel Tilk and Kaarel Pogga as Rafael & Irinei is kept at a very enjoyable simmer, as these guys never actually grow to like each other but at constantly able to turn that into comedic tension. If you're going to build a movie around someone as brash and dumb as Rafael, it helps to have someone exasperated with his own flaws as a balance.
It does sort of start to stretch once one realizes that this isn't quite the martial-arts spoof it's sold itself as, or at least not entirely so and there's probably not going to be another big wire-fu set piece to bookend the film at the end; neither Rudolf nor the State Security guy they cross paths with is that formidable or even the right sort of character. It feels, a bit, like Sarnet maybe intended to go that direction, but eventually found his way to the spirituality being the thing - the confidence and trust and sense of belonging more than the supernatural or a demand of devotion - and there was some casting about while writing the script without removing the dead ends once the final direction became clear. It finishes satisfyingly, though, and I suppose that's a reasonable result for a movie tackling this sort of subject: One seldom ends a spiritual journey at their initial intended destination, after all.
Tenet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (re-release, 70mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD/Blu-ray/4K disc at Amazon
This random-seeming re-release to promote Dune Part Two playing on large-format film next week highlights just how great this plays with an audience and makes me think that the pandemic screwing up its intended release has allowed it to become a sort of cult film. I know, it's too expensive and filled with movie stars to be a traditional cult film, but it's weird, benefits from multiple viewings, and a lot of folks are going to discover how much they truly enjoy it because they saw it at a special show in the one place in town that can still run 70mm film, as opposed to it just being this week's blockbuster. It's a film where there's a narrative to seeing it.
And, on top of that, it's a better movie than I thought when I first saw it during its delayed initial release, and not just because there were more of us digging Nolan's amazing action sequences at a time than there were then, with everyone scattered throughout theaters that could only hold 10% or so. As with Ghost Dog (how's that for some fortunate/found bookending!), you can sort of see Nolan examining genre and moviemaking, how you may wind up building a movie both forward from the initial concept but also backward from the climactic action finale, an unseen hand putting everything in place but the story still needing to live and breathe on its own. I like the performances a bit more, with John David Washington's Protagonist dutiful but chafing at being put into a box, Robert Pattinson charmingly ostentatious, Elizabeth Debicki gaining a spine after being so thoroughly cowed. There are little bits I really love - Debicki racing back to look casual after her Kat hides a gun from her husband, Washington casually mentioning that one of the large vehicles he wants for the impossible heist he's planning has to be a fire truck, or a bit where he sarcastically asks Kenneth Branagh's Sator whether a line comes from Walt Whitman that I will believe is a Dead Again reference until Nolan personally tells me otherwise.
It is, for a movie so intent on making sure one appreciates the clockwork of it, awfully lively and emotional. It's currently lodged atop my list of most-rewatched films at Letterboxd, and although that only includes a few years, I think it will stay up there. It's enough fun to catch again when a local theater hauls it out, and I think enough folks are starting to realize that to get theaters to book it every couple years or so.
Initial Letterboxd entry from October 2020
Sunday, August 28, 2022
Fantasia 2022.17: Island of Lost Girls, The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai, Circo Animato, "The Cradle", Sadako DX, and Missing
I'm mildly surprised that the Schmidt family didn't make it to Montreal for Island of Lost Girls on Saturday morning. I imagine that Covid throws a wrench in that sort of thing, but I also suspect that if I'd somehow made a film with my family like this - I don't know that I'd quite call it backyard filmmaking because it's an awful big backyard - that got accepted into a major festival like Fantasia, a week in Montreal would absolutely be that year's summer vacation. I think of the Adams family with The Deeper You Dig three years ago - ike the Adamses, the Schmidts have been making movies as a hobby for a while, occasionally getting one into a festival even though it will almost certainly not get picked up for distribution or get much talked about aside from the dozens who see it in such situations. It isn't tagged with the "Fantasia Underground" label in the program, but it's underground as heck even if it's not the same tone and aesthetic as most stuff in that section. It might be a fun thing to have in the next BUFF, reaching out to family audiences.
Anyway, I would really have enjoyed the explanations of just how insane the making of this must have been, especially if they included a five-year-old shrugging off panicked questions from the audience by saying she is actually a much better swimmer than her character in the movie.
Tough-ish choice later in the day, as Heaven: To the Land of Happiness looks really good and has a heck of a cast and crew, but it might also quietly get a Blu-ray release or show up on Prime in the next few months, and the thing a block away at the Museum is kind of a tradition.
Hello, fifteen-film animation program, the thing that usually grinds these reviews to a halt even when work isn't busy! I love festival animation programs, because they often seem to be the purest expression of what people are imagining in the most concentrated forms. These things average six minutes or so and some are done by the time you've even got yourself prepared for what you're going to see.
Anyway, the guests, mostly directors, left to right: Grace An of "Baek-il", Karla Monterrosa of "Lo 100to", Omorose Osagie of "Glass Doll", Florentina Gonzalez" of "El After del Mudo", Shengwei Zhou of "Perfect City: The Mother", Sam Chou of "VRDLK: Family of Vurdulak", and "Deshabitada" producer Amanda Puga.
Many, but not all, were student films - An and Monterrosa both talked about drawing on something personal, while others wanted to make something that was far more a flight of fantasy. Chou said that he tried to make a very different film with each short, so apparently the rest aren't banter-y horror stories. Zhou mentioned that he actually really disliked doing "3D"/computer generated stuff, so it was apparently something satisfying to make that extra plastic.
After that, it was kind of an evening of avoiding things. I didn't really care about seeing the new Lena Dunham movie, Sharp Stick, so I went back to Hall for Sadako DX, even though I've never seen any Ring movie from any continent, and Dark Glasses was Dario & Asia Argento, whom I've never had any particular interest in (with the daughter kind of in the category of people whose work you don't really need to support if you don't have to), so I went with Missing, even though there was nothing else blocking its second screening.
Next up: Sunday, which may have wound up the longest day, with My Broken Mariko, One for the Road, Confession, Dobaaraa, and Seire.
Island of Lost Girls
Seen 30 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Island of Lost Girls is quite possibly the most insane movie I'll see at Fantasia this year, because, for the life of me, I can't see how the Schmidt family makes this thing safely without much more and better CGI than seems likely for this sort of backyard production. It's like Open Water except with pre-teen girls and elephant seals at various points, and then it somehow gets crazier on land.
The three girls are sisters Avila, Autumn, and Scarlet, orphans in a foster home, with Avila a fairly responsible tween while her sisters are mischievous (autumn) and pure chaos (Scarlet), with the latter two seeming to torpedo an interview with prospective adopters when they show up late. They convince Avila to sneak out to the beach, but while there, Scarlet gets pulled out in a current. Avila swims out on a surfboard to get her, with Autumn along because she's scared to be left alone, but the current takes them, and hours later, they find themselves approaching an island with a sea cave. From what they can see, it seems to be sheer cliffs on all sides, and getting to the lighthouse at the top looks like it would be daunting for fully-grown adventurers.
This family has done this sort of thing before - The Incredible Adventure of Jojo (and His Annoying Little Sister Avila) played the festival in 2015 and there's at least one other short listed on IMDB - so they presumably know what they're doing with their tools and what the kids can handle. There are a couple scenes where one or the other of the girls appears doubled, but for the most part, it's clearly them on the surfboard floating in open water or in caves tight enough that many in the audience may find themselves tense at the very thought of what a sudden surge of water could do. The work of cinematographer Heatha McGrath is not often fancy but it doesn't have to be, although going from one shot to another can get shaky and the filmmakers have a tendency to lose track of whichever girls aren't on screen when they get separated.
But, presuming this family wasn't actually putting their daughters in incredible danger, you really have to respect some of the bigger set pieces. There is one involving a tractor, a cave, a cliff, two of the girls, a starfish, and a crab that is legitimately jaw-dropping in its scale even as it has something straight out of a cartoon gag in the middle of it. There are people making $200M movies who could do with studying the stakes, clarity, and sense of danger of that centerpiece. A number aren't quite to that scale but are still genuinely impressive for how they obviously aren't hugely elaborate set-ups and serve to remind just how dangerous situations that the makers of big action movies frequently feel need to goosed can be.
You don't give a movie like this a star rating, because it is clearly the work of amateurs who are going to look bad when graded on the same scale as professionals: The filmmakers are often unable to manage what seems like basic shot-to-shot continuity, for instance, while the young cast is often in that zone where they're not really performers and don't have good lines to recite, but feel enough like real kids who aren't polished in any way to be authentic. Similarly, I can't imagine putting this movie in a multiplex and selling tickets, but it's a kind of amazing thing to stumble upon by accident with no idea what one is in for.
Tōge saigo no samurai (The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
A samurai film from one of Akira Kurosawa's assistant directors with the great Tatsuya Nakadai in a supporting role is not a thing one passes up, even if it does unintentionally serve as a reflection of the old ways and legends fading into history in a way that is perhaps not ignominious, but quiet. As with their subjects, this film's makers do not fear the new but perhaps are not quite up to cementing their legacy in grand fashion.
The year is 1867, and as it opens, shogun Tokugawa (Masahiro Higashide), recognizing the coming external threats to Japan, opts to cede power to the Emperor to create a stronger nation, although his allies are not so fast to do so, leading to civil war. Between the two powers lies Nagaoka, a small prefecture led by Tadayuki Makino (Tatsuya Nakadai), containing the crucial Enoki Pass. Though both Makino and chief retainer Tsugunosuke Kawai (Koji Yakusho) favor imperial rule personal, their allegiances lead them to attempt neutrality, a stance that likely will not work out nearly as well for Nagaoka as it does for Switzerland, whom "Tsugi" sees as an aspirational model.
Indeed, it is perhaps unusual in that the build-up to the final battle is perhaps its most exciting part, a lengthy middle where one gets to watch star Koji Yakusho inhabit his noble samurai, bathe in the respect and loyalty he earns, and see that his warrior's soul does not crave battle the way some other such figures seem to. He exemplifies the best of the samurai, and without a lot of posturing or stiff rectitude - or a particularly obvious monster for contrast - makes one understand that the system could have survived and thrive if more were like him. It's a performance from Yakusho that can appear effortless, with Kawai often coming across as modern and superlatively reasonable, but it's also one where the audience can see him thinking and striving to present himself as more calm and assured than he perhaps is.
As Kawai prepares for the inevitable battle, writer/director Takashi Koizumi gives Yakusho and his cast-mates small episodes to play out - encouraging a samurai who is a talented draftsman to explore his art, a visit to the geisha that Tsugi perhaps doesn't realize is awkward for wife Suga (Takako Matsu), an attempt to reason with their former allies where patience and reasonability meet their limits. They are, by and large, quiet moments, with Kawai and those around him recognizing that they stand at a crucial point in history and pondering that without a lot of pretension. Tsugi and Suga have no children, which seems a shame, although fitting, if they see themselves as a last remnant of the old Japan. There are lots of nifty little performances her, with Takoko Matsu's Suga perhaps the most interesting - she is clearly still trying to puzzle her husband out in some ways, such that after decades, they do not necessarily understand the details of their own love for one another. This may wind up being Tatsuya Nakadai's last credit - the 89-year-old legend slowed down but never stopped working before Covid-19, but that might understandably have kept him off film sets - and it's a dignified farewell if so, projecting dignity even as Makino yields the making of decisions to his retainers.
The final battle is perhaps, deliberately anticlimactic: For all Tsugi's intelligence and honor, and willingness to invest in Western weapons like a Gatling Gun, he cannot overcome an opponent that outnumbers him by this much, and in 1867, a relatively random wound is going to sideline him badly. Koizumi marshals the familiar elements of the grand battle - the maps that make clear what the combatants will need to do when the camera finally arrives on scene, the tense where each soldier knows that their war can quite easily end with one shot or slash, the stoic commanders swelling with pride and admiration for their soldiers - and plays them out, but also drains much of the tension. There is not much suspense in this last stand; just the feeling that it had to be made.
The age of the samurai almost ends with a whimper here, although Tsugi has at least helped Japan be able to conceive of something else. Similarly, one can see Japan losing its last links to a defining age of cinema as Koizumi and Nakadai wind their careers down, even if what comes next is also inevitable and worth supporting.
"Piece of Solitude"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
An impressive, wordless memory piece with a man left alone in his book-filled home, seemingly only engaging the rest of the world with the newspaper and, specifically, the crossword, which may not be the greatest habit for someone in that position, as some clue winds up sending him back to memories of how he got there.
The main figure in this stop-motion tale is clay, mostly, but the dominant motif around him is paper - if you want to stretch, even the buckling bookshelves around him may be made of cardboard. It suggests a life closed off inside academic pursuits, perhaps ignoring other things around him until he was that isolated, able to form as needed into a flat, abstract world or a twisted Escher print. Books file information away, contained neatly until someone lets them out, but the crosswords, they contain words that intersect and connect one idea to another, knowledge to memory to experience until there's no way to avoid how, perhaps, he may have been a coward.
Yes, I am probably reading too much into the crossword analogy, but I love them and it's an extra way in to what could seem like a standard, familiar story about an old man with regrets.
"Histoire pour 2 Trompettes" ("A Story for Two Trumpets")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
A delightful little film that fits a great deal of transformation and growing up into its five minutes, perhaps in part because, along with bouncy music by Chapelier Fou that pushes forward without seeming rushed, it feels like a lot of things that kids see or process as paths along the way - storybooks with a trail, board games, jigsaw puzzles, all things that a child will look at as things that lead from one thing to another, only the little girl at the center of it, breaking and making things along the way, is changing too.
Director Amandine Meyer apparently creates children's storybooks as well as short films, so it's not surprising that she knows the forms well enough to put them into motion and make them cross over, and knows when a kid watching it might enjoy a detour into some darkness. It's a neat little piece of work where growing up can sometimes be dangerous but still a magical journey.
"The Commute"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Dang right I'm going to be fond of a movie that animates a transit map, especially since this one-minute flick is as much about the delight of transit maps as the travel itself, and how it's there whether they are apps on a phone or posters on a wall. I wouldn't be shocked if Toronto (or whichever city this represents) were to use this as a PSA on an animated billboard or the like; it's got that feel of whimsy without being a hard sell.
"Glass Doll"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Omorose Osagie builds a nifty little tale here, a combination of storybook fantasy and post-apocalyptic tale, as the titular doll looks after her friends but also tries to find the eye that will make her whole - but what if the price is too steep?
It's a nifty-looking take on its world, something that works as both a literal fantasy and a sort of translation of what being discarded and left behind would be like for toys, with the design feeling like it would fit right into a Cartoon Network lineup. Osagie keeps the story for her short impressively tight despite it being an elaborate creation - for all that it's full of nifty detail and has fun things hiding in every corner, there's nothing wasted in the telling of the story, a perfect little tragedy that gets where it's going without any sort of unnecessary detour.
"BREAK bug"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
I hope visual effects artist Mchael Ralla used motion capture to animate his dancing robots and insects in "BREAK bug", because the film is, in its way, about a big ol' robot effectively doing motion capture from that little grasshopper, and it would be fun if this were actually that meta.
At any rate, it's fast-paced, has a beat, and while I'm not going to say whether it choreographs its simultaneous dance and action so that it it inevitably leads to a double-splat, the fact that one can see just how well Ralla has laid everything out and made it work together is impressive work as both direction and doing visual effects.
"VRDLK: Family of Vurdulak"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
This is based on a Tolstoy story from 1839, which is somewhat amusing because it is built to feel very modern and quippy and irreverent, the kind of horror that is so fond of nervous laughter on the one hand and being so dismissive of the supernatural that it's meant to be a bigger shock on the other that it's hard to truly settle into its world. Sam Chou's thriller is fun, don't get me wrong, but somehow shifting into animation exacerbates that unwillingness to simply be horrific just a little more.
It is kind of a ball, though, with a slick Don Bluth quality to the animation that says yes, they have inevitably been influenced by Disney but want to do something a little more intense, with enough of Tod Browning's Dracula in the DNA to feel like it's coming from the same place but not entirety trying to be the same thing. He and screenwriter Ellery Vandooyeweert do the thing where two sorts of genres intersect very well, with this foppish hero suddenly landing in the middle of a horror story while the villagers who know this stuff are annoyed with this noble dilettante, but the point is not necessarily that either is wrong to be who they are and must adjust to survive; they connect and effect each other but neither is ever exactly pulled out of their own milieu.
That's a neat sort of trick, and there's something to it - these sophisticated, devil-may-care aristocrats exist in the same world as the poor, superstitious commoners, but not entirely - although they never let it totally dominate the way that it's going to take a lot of luck and hard work to survive until morning.
"Baek-il"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
It's a genuine shock to go back into the program afterward and see that "Baek-il" is just two minutes long; for all that Grace An's twist on a piece of Korean folklore is snappily paced and doesn't particularly waste seconds as one watches it, there's enough going on that it feels broader and busier than that. She starts out with a passage stating that for these animals/spirits to become human, they must quarantine for 105 days - immediately connecting with something most in the audience will recall all too well - and then pops up "Day XX" enough times as Cat drives Bear up the wall in their isolation cave that it feels like it must go on longer. But, no, between her impressively sketched figures and great instincts for knowing when they should move and when they should stay still, she does a great job of underscoring just what a long freaking time that can be without actually making the audience wait it out to the point of being impatient themselves.
"Deshabitada"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
It initially feels like we're back in the same sort of space as "Piece of Solitude", albeit with a Chilean rather than Irani spin, but it turns out that the audience is in for a darker ride than that. This old woman's hunched figure implies guilt rather than just isolation, and filmmaker Camila Donoso leans on how concrete her sins are rather than making them complete abstractions. There are portions of this film where her deteriorating mind takes her to some seemingly fantastical dystopian settings, but more often than not, her memories are all too clear, playing on the banality of evil that pervaded Chile during the Pinochet years. What she did in her time was stark - and the clay-based animation is suitably gray and grotesque - but now that she's an old woman who cannot entirely function on her own, there's a real tension between what a functional society must do for everyone and what a just one may perhaps demand.
This is, I must admit, the sort of animated short one sees in a lot of programs that exist in part to demonstrate how animation can be used for weighty topics, to the point where it's become a bit of a genre unto itself. It's almost more interesting to look at it next to other similar films in the package and see how it handles the same sort of material as "Piece of Solitude" or others - in this case, impressively straightforward and unblinking, abstracted just enough to make the audience aware of just how deliberately distanced from reality these situations are, but just removed enough that the sort of visceral horror to be somewhat hit-or-miss.
"El After del Mundo" ("The World's After")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Co-writer/director Florentina Gonzalez offers up one of the more compelling intersections of the supernatural and the post-apocalyptic here, presenting its ghosts as hollow sets of clothing who are in some ways continuing what they did in life and in others freed from it. Fluor is still basically still acting like a gig-economy delivery cyclist, but also more or less going where she wants, chasing new music to put on her phone, while Carlix remains at this old marine park, diligently reassembling a whale's skeleton. They meet, seemingly get on, but what comes next?
Gonzalez gives herself and her ghosts time to play with that, poking at the edges of how this world where post-millennials are continuing on in a world that's already gone might work but also teasing out a sort of hope: The world is past gone, and these two women are more or less ghosts adrift without responsibilities or futures to work toward, but they still find things worth continuing to exist for, even without it ever being likely to lead to something being fixed or remembered. There's disaffection and cynicism, but also an understanding that they go on, and do so as well as they can.
The style of the film is nifty, looking like something from the 1980s that maybe started from rotoscoping but didn't have the budget for truly elaborate animation over that; any given frame can sometimes look simple and crude, but Gonzales makes the characters' body language expressive despite the empty space where both faces and other glimpses of skin should be. The way Fluor and Carlix are both wearing tops with long sleeves with prominent cuffs at the end is a really clever bit of design, giving the illusion of hands and fingers so the audience accepts them manipulating things without actually seeing the fine detail. The music is also quite good, and overall, it's just an impressively balanced tale of how, even when nothing can be done, the way one chooses to exist can still mean something.
"Whisper Down the Lane"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
I didn't entirely see Raghad Al Barqi's short film as a game of telephone at first; the red string connecting characters came across as something more abstract even though the title was right up front while many of the objects floating in the background were means of communication. It's obvious in retrospect, although in the moment, the very concept of connection seemed more powerful to me, not so much how ideas get distorted as they go along. Ah, well.
It resolves into an intriguing short anyways, filling the screen with carefully and realistically rendered human figures and cutouts of various photographs but using the fact that this is animation and semi-abstract art to scatter them, both creating significance in how they are arranged and inviting the audience to mentally put them in some sort of order. The line often connects not phones but coffee cups, which feels like both an homage to how "telephone" is often represented by cups or cans at the end of such strings and how gossip often spreads, idly and over refreshments rather than actively, for a specific purpose. There's intriguing color coding, as if a jump from primarily-red imagery to primarily-blue is implying it's crossed a line.
It's the sort of thing that might be nifty to see in a museum installation; at just five minutes, one could easily sit through it twice, maybe picking up a bit more meaning the second time around.
"Lo 100to"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
It was vaguely reassuring when director Karla Monterrosa mentioned during the Q&A that this was in many ways constructed out of the secondhand chaos she heard other people talk about vis-a-vis their group texts, saying she doesn't really have something like this. Like, I don't either, but I hear people talk about theirs on social media like it's just an expected part of the world today. How'd we miss it?
That aside, it's a fun little cartoon, using doodles and art to illustrate the connection her avatar feels with everybody else she's linked to this way, even if they are far away and only sending these compacted bits of language and the occasional picture. On the other hand, the story itself and the way it gets buried - she's trying to communicate a broken engagement here! - is a nifty illustration of how, for as effective as this is in many ways, it doesn't always have the weight one wants. There's just no way to push across the importance of something amid the talking over each other and potential flood of far smaller issues. Like a lot of social media, it's something that feels like it should have the capacity for big ideas but can't help but be consumed by trivia, and dwelling on it for more than a couple of minutes isn't going to do any good.
"Perfect City: The Mother"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
There's some very neat stuff going on in here but the movie having a colon in the title doesn't do it a lot of favors; Shengwei Zhou has an interesting idea or three here and it's no problem that he's not exactly subtle getting them across, but it doesn't exactly feel as though playing in this sandbox more is going to reveal different nuances. It's a bit stretched as is; I don't know that I need more.
I like where his head's at, though, as a stop-motion forest spirit/creature, pregnant, starts taking in a liquid called "Perfect" - bright CGI yellow compared to the rest of the picture - and it eventually reshapes both. There's interesting stuff going on under the surface about parents striving to give their children advantages but as a result making both into something they don't quite recognize, rural people fed a steady diet of the city as aspirational that they get left behind. The visuals and how he uses them are nifty, from how the tree-creatures feel a bit monstrous to start but seem kind of comfortable once Zhou dives deep into the uncanny valley to make the more humanoid forms plastic and unnerving.
There's just a lot of it; this is very much the sort of movie where one can find themselves saying "yeah, I get it" halfway through and sitting around as it gets drawn out.
"The Principle of Sunrise"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Every kid's first pet winds up more responsibility than expected, and that's what happens here, as a little girl takes an injured bluebird in and finds it growing to be more than she can handle, certainly within her home in the city, but returning it to nature is tricky, too.
Ye Song's movie has a nifty deadpan sense of humor and a blue color scheme that shows just how much this little creature means to its caretaker, on top of just being a cool-temperature look and emphasizing how much happens at night.
"New Moon"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Shorts like "New Moon" that take a monologue developed for the stage and visualize it are odd things - if it's worth adapting, the animation has a great chance of being superfluous, quite possibly detracting from the experience because it substitutes one thing for all the personal associations and such that can exist in the viewer's mind. That I can't say that happened for me here, although I do find that I remember Colman Domingo's voice more than the images that go with it.
It's a nice monologue and short, though, the sort that spends some time getting comfortable with the idea that these characters may not have a lot financially but how this doesn't bother young Colman particularly much because there's a lot of warmth between him and his mother to give him a solid foundation. One can sense him eliding the parts that are hard and seeing animators Jeremie Balais & Jeff LeBars giving a little extra vibrancy to his world.
"The Cradle"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, digital)
This is a nifty, atmospheric little piece where I don't know that I necessarily got the program's description from it - yes, that could be what's happening in retrospect, although I maybe saw "weird shut-in spinster" more than "witch" - but it doesn't much matter. Massimo Meo spends a fair amount of the short running time making the audience aware of what's missing, from not showing this old woman's head to the empty cradles to the faceless dolls, and that sense of incompleteness builds up quickly over the film's short running time. Throw some spooky photography that injects a bit of twitchiness into an orderly routine and sounds from outside drawing closer, and you've got a short, solid creeper.
Sadako DX
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
So, this franchise was a big deal back in the day, huh? I get that, like The Grudge, this series has perhaps not gotten bigger with subsequent entries, but rather seen its budget and attached talent slide so that it will continue to make a profit even as ticket sales diminish, but still, this is bad enough that it's hard to see where the original appeal of The Ring was. As someone happening on this for the first time, I can sort of see how there might have been something to it, but it's a shadow of its former self if so.
As it opens, the news is reporting a wave of sudden, inexplicable deaths, and some are just putting together that it resembles the "Ringu" phenomenon of 25 years earlier. A Tokyo news program runs a panel discussion, featuring Ayaka Ichijo (Fuka Koshiba), a grad student who has tested for Japan's highest IQ at 200+, playing the skeptic and Kenshin (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) arguing for musical explanations, and giving Ayaka a copy of the original tape of Sadako, which her kid sister Futaba (Yuki Yagi) digs out a VCR to watch. Elsewhere, a more social-media savvy young man, Oji Maeda (Kazuma Kawamura), is attempting to help someone who has seen the Sadako video survive, only to find it now kills in 24 hours rather than a week, and they all come together to try and figure out how to keep themselves, their loved ones, and maybe all of Japan alive, as a viral video can spread much quicker in the 2020s than the late 1990s.
Something in Ringu touched a chord in people the first time around, and one can see hints of it here, even if it also feel enough like the Ju-on movies (to the point of the haunting being described as a "grudge") that one wonders what was in the water back then. Unfortunately, so much of Sadako DX feels like the laziest take on half-decent ideas. It seems like there should be a solid foundation for picking the story back up at this time, with both bad information and an actual virus spreading as they are in the present day, but screenwriter Yuya Takahashi never gets much further than saying "this is like a virus, so maybe we should inoculate in the same way", which is an interesting idea but one the filmmakers can't commit to without random twists to sap it of its power. There's also some of It Follows in the film's depiction of Sadako which is apparently new, but it doesn't seem to add much, instead diluting a horror icon until she is practically not there.
All the characters are the most bland stereotypes of basic types, with Ayaka in some ways the most frustrating, because Fuka Koshiba seems like she's capable of more than this, but she's written and directed like Takahashi and director Hisashi Kimura have never actually met someone who is good at science or methodical in their problem solving and can't quite conceive of them as fully human rather than Mr. Spock. Kazuma Kawamura is a different set of self-aware ticks rather than a character, and it's hard to tell whether their anti-chemistry is a sort of choice - the filmmakers are playing this for much more comedy than is apparently typical of the series - or just two people who don't click on-screen. Hiroyuki Ikeuchi at least brings the sort of comfort veteran character actors tend to, but none of this group have interesting stories to plug Sadako into, and none are able to make the audience find them interesting without her.
Meanwhile, Sadako doesn't even look threatening, with the filmmakers going to the well of "this hallucination is just someone in an incongruous wig" so often that the monster becomes a joke. Beyond that, this is such a basic, direct-to-video-looking picture that it's all but impossible to imagine Hideo Nakata or Gore Verbinski ever touched this franchise. It's almost all shot in the most generic possible locations with seemingly no thought to how the lighting might give it some atmosphere. As a result, the scariest part of the movie is probably the original VHS footage (or Kimura's recreation thereof). It at least has some style 20 years later, and a hook the folks making this one can use, even if they've only got fragments of ideas for what to do beyond having teenagers ask what VHS is.
Not counting foreign remakes, this is the producers' second revival of the series (a "Sadako 3D" cycle came out in the mid-2010s), and it seems like the filmmakers make every mistake one can make in doing so: It's youth-oriented but connected to backstory from a film that came out 20+ years ago, too eager to make jokes to really commit to being scary, springing from ideas its makers seemingly don't have the vocabulary to express, and cheap-looking and amateurish on top of that. I suppose there could be Ring fans looking for another hit, no questions asked, but I'm not sure who else this is going to impress.
(Amusing credit note: Somewhere in the scroll at the end, either important enough that someone decided to subtitle it or written out in English to start, is someone who served as the "Supervisor on Series World View", and I've got no idea if this is somebody whose job is to wrangle the continuity of a 25-year-old series on its second wave of legacyquels or someone poring over the script to make sure that the dark comedy isn't too far out of line.)
Sagasu (Missing)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Shinzo Katayama's Missing has a couple of distinct directions it could go after it hits its first climax, and they represent an interesting choice in how a writer handles deepening the story at this point - lay out a longer path for the sleuth to follow, which makes the whole thing more prone to collapse, or build out to the sides in a way that makes for deeper complexity but less intriguing mystery. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, although those entirely drawn in by the film's genre hook may wish the filmmakers had kept things relatively simple.
It begins by introducing the audience to Kaede Harada (Aoi Ito), a middle-schooler who has had to become even more self-sufficient since her mother's death as father Santoshi (Jiro Sato) has fallen apart; she's just had to pull him out of the drunk tank (again). Santoshi thinks he's figured out a way to get back on track, though; he believes he has spotted the fugitive "No Name" (Hiroya Shimizu) who has recently fled Tokyo, and is ready to turn him in for the reward. Instead, he disappears, but rather than disappear into the foster care system, Kaede is determined to find him, enlisting a boy who has a crush on her to assist.
If this were the entirety of the film, it would potentially be a pretty compelling one; Katayama and actress Aoi Ito' avoid any girl detective tropes while still making a compelling case that a smart, motivated teenager might be able to hunt down a serial killer, or at least get this far in doing so. Katayama and Ito do such a good job of keeping Kaede's eyes on her goal while avoiding the language of mysteries that she never comes across as someone with a gift who might take on other "cases" someday as opposed to a kid recklessly following a path to her father despite other adults seeing just as useless as he often was. The filmmakers create great tension in part because they don't follow certain beats; rather than dangerous narrow escapes that might show she's onto something, there's ominous implied danger that indicates she may be in over her head.
That's mostly the first half or so of the movie, before the perspective shifts and the story backtracks to change points of view, and it becomes a very different film, with Kaede mostly reduced to a side character who is maybe even less present than would make sense given what events the film is showing. It is, on its own, a kind of intriguing story, one that starts from the premise of "No Name" being the worst sort of human monster that the viewer can imagine and then expanding outward to consider how seemingly decent people can, for various reasons, get caught up in a network of actions and motivations that include a man compelled to kill. Katayama has worked some in the Korean film industry, most notably with Bong Joon-Ho, and the kind of darkness he explores is the sort that seems to pop more in Korean crime films than ones from Japan, these universal undercurrents that are present all over rather than twisted codes of honor or plain-spoken villainy. Perhaps the most memorable moment in this section of the film is when No Name encounters a suicidal potential victim and cannot himself conceive of someone wanting what he has to offer; even to him, this situation makes no sense.
Katayama and his team tell the tale in a fashion that is relentlessly grim but not gleefully so; No noirish signifiers or sleek surfaces for evil to hide behind; everyone seems to be hovering around having just enough to get by but not the time or motivation to keep it nice, either surrounded by a mess or a sparseness that is not exactly neat. There is something either tragic or rotten about how Santoshi's ping-pong center has gone out of business but he and Kaede still seem to access the building freely, like the building's owners can't even be bothered to properly evict them or change the locks until they have to (maybe they're hoping he gets back on his feet, but it doesn't seem like that sort of movie). There's a sort of rot here that manifests itself in all the linked stories - people shouldn't want to die, and a serial killer who can operate effectively enough to elude the police shouldn't be someone a 15-year-old girl can track down.
The question, then, is how well the flashbacks integrate with Kaede's mission, and while the filmmakers do eventually manage to integrate them, tying the various time frames together and eventually fitting Kaede into this world in a way that quietly and impressively raises eyebrows, it maybe takes a bit too long to fit together as it circles back to the start and reveals how all this connects. The opening is so strong and clear in its purpose even as it establishes the atmosphere that the rest of the film will work in that I suspect even those who enjoy its flavor of moral quagmire may wish that either No Name or Santoshi or any of the people they encounter as their paths cross were as interesting and immediately compelling as Kaede.
Complexity and moral ambiguity are interesting and often worth the extra work they may require, but sometimes the clear, simple piece in the middle of all that can't help but stand out.
Anyway, I would really have enjoyed the explanations of just how insane the making of this must have been, especially if they included a five-year-old shrugging off panicked questions from the audience by saying she is actually a much better swimmer than her character in the movie.
Tough-ish choice later in the day, as Heaven: To the Land of Happiness looks really good and has a heck of a cast and crew, but it might also quietly get a Blu-ray release or show up on Prime in the next few months, and the thing a block away at the Museum is kind of a tradition.
Anyway, the guests, mostly directors, left to right: Grace An of "Baek-il", Karla Monterrosa of "Lo 100to", Omorose Osagie of "Glass Doll", Florentina Gonzalez" of "El After del Mudo", Shengwei Zhou of "Perfect City: The Mother", Sam Chou of "VRDLK: Family of Vurdulak", and "Deshabitada" producer Amanda Puga.
Many, but not all, were student films - An and Monterrosa both talked about drawing on something personal, while others wanted to make something that was far more a flight of fantasy. Chou said that he tried to make a very different film with each short, so apparently the rest aren't banter-y horror stories. Zhou mentioned that he actually really disliked doing "3D"/computer generated stuff, so it was apparently something satisfying to make that extra plastic.
After that, it was kind of an evening of avoiding things. I didn't really care about seeing the new Lena Dunham movie, Sharp Stick, so I went back to Hall for Sadako DX, even though I've never seen any Ring movie from any continent, and Dark Glasses was Dario & Asia Argento, whom I've never had any particular interest in (with the daughter kind of in the category of people whose work you don't really need to support if you don't have to), so I went with Missing, even though there was nothing else blocking its second screening.
Next up: Sunday, which may have wound up the longest day, with My Broken Mariko, One for the Road, Confession, Dobaaraa, and Seire.
Island of Lost Girls
Seen 30 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Island of Lost Girls is quite possibly the most insane movie I'll see at Fantasia this year, because, for the life of me, I can't see how the Schmidt family makes this thing safely without much more and better CGI than seems likely for this sort of backyard production. It's like Open Water except with pre-teen girls and elephant seals at various points, and then it somehow gets crazier on land.
The three girls are sisters Avila, Autumn, and Scarlet, orphans in a foster home, with Avila a fairly responsible tween while her sisters are mischievous (autumn) and pure chaos (Scarlet), with the latter two seeming to torpedo an interview with prospective adopters when they show up late. They convince Avila to sneak out to the beach, but while there, Scarlet gets pulled out in a current. Avila swims out on a surfboard to get her, with Autumn along because she's scared to be left alone, but the current takes them, and hours later, they find themselves approaching an island with a sea cave. From what they can see, it seems to be sheer cliffs on all sides, and getting to the lighthouse at the top looks like it would be daunting for fully-grown adventurers.
This family has done this sort of thing before - The Incredible Adventure of Jojo (and His Annoying Little Sister Avila) played the festival in 2015 and there's at least one other short listed on IMDB - so they presumably know what they're doing with their tools and what the kids can handle. There are a couple scenes where one or the other of the girls appears doubled, but for the most part, it's clearly them on the surfboard floating in open water or in caves tight enough that many in the audience may find themselves tense at the very thought of what a sudden surge of water could do. The work of cinematographer Heatha McGrath is not often fancy but it doesn't have to be, although going from one shot to another can get shaky and the filmmakers have a tendency to lose track of whichever girls aren't on screen when they get separated.
But, presuming this family wasn't actually putting their daughters in incredible danger, you really have to respect some of the bigger set pieces. There is one involving a tractor, a cave, a cliff, two of the girls, a starfish, and a crab that is legitimately jaw-dropping in its scale even as it has something straight out of a cartoon gag in the middle of it. There are people making $200M movies who could do with studying the stakes, clarity, and sense of danger of that centerpiece. A number aren't quite to that scale but are still genuinely impressive for how they obviously aren't hugely elaborate set-ups and serve to remind just how dangerous situations that the makers of big action movies frequently feel need to goosed can be.
You don't give a movie like this a star rating, because it is clearly the work of amateurs who are going to look bad when graded on the same scale as professionals: The filmmakers are often unable to manage what seems like basic shot-to-shot continuity, for instance, while the young cast is often in that zone where they're not really performers and don't have good lines to recite, but feel enough like real kids who aren't polished in any way to be authentic. Similarly, I can't imagine putting this movie in a multiplex and selling tickets, but it's a kind of amazing thing to stumble upon by accident with no idea what one is in for.
Tōge saigo no samurai (The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
A samurai film from one of Akira Kurosawa's assistant directors with the great Tatsuya Nakadai in a supporting role is not a thing one passes up, even if it does unintentionally serve as a reflection of the old ways and legends fading into history in a way that is perhaps not ignominious, but quiet. As with their subjects, this film's makers do not fear the new but perhaps are not quite up to cementing their legacy in grand fashion.
The year is 1867, and as it opens, shogun Tokugawa (Masahiro Higashide), recognizing the coming external threats to Japan, opts to cede power to the Emperor to create a stronger nation, although his allies are not so fast to do so, leading to civil war. Between the two powers lies Nagaoka, a small prefecture led by Tadayuki Makino (Tatsuya Nakadai), containing the crucial Enoki Pass. Though both Makino and chief retainer Tsugunosuke Kawai (Koji Yakusho) favor imperial rule personal, their allegiances lead them to attempt neutrality, a stance that likely will not work out nearly as well for Nagaoka as it does for Switzerland, whom "Tsugi" sees as an aspirational model.
Indeed, it is perhaps unusual in that the build-up to the final battle is perhaps its most exciting part, a lengthy middle where one gets to watch star Koji Yakusho inhabit his noble samurai, bathe in the respect and loyalty he earns, and see that his warrior's soul does not crave battle the way some other such figures seem to. He exemplifies the best of the samurai, and without a lot of posturing or stiff rectitude - or a particularly obvious monster for contrast - makes one understand that the system could have survived and thrive if more were like him. It's a performance from Yakusho that can appear effortless, with Kawai often coming across as modern and superlatively reasonable, but it's also one where the audience can see him thinking and striving to present himself as more calm and assured than he perhaps is.
As Kawai prepares for the inevitable battle, writer/director Takashi Koizumi gives Yakusho and his cast-mates small episodes to play out - encouraging a samurai who is a talented draftsman to explore his art, a visit to the geisha that Tsugi perhaps doesn't realize is awkward for wife Suga (Takako Matsu), an attempt to reason with their former allies where patience and reasonability meet their limits. They are, by and large, quiet moments, with Kawai and those around him recognizing that they stand at a crucial point in history and pondering that without a lot of pretension. Tsugi and Suga have no children, which seems a shame, although fitting, if they see themselves as a last remnant of the old Japan. There are lots of nifty little performances her, with Takoko Matsu's Suga perhaps the most interesting - she is clearly still trying to puzzle her husband out in some ways, such that after decades, they do not necessarily understand the details of their own love for one another. This may wind up being Tatsuya Nakadai's last credit - the 89-year-old legend slowed down but never stopped working before Covid-19, but that might understandably have kept him off film sets - and it's a dignified farewell if so, projecting dignity even as Makino yields the making of decisions to his retainers.
The final battle is perhaps, deliberately anticlimactic: For all Tsugi's intelligence and honor, and willingness to invest in Western weapons like a Gatling Gun, he cannot overcome an opponent that outnumbers him by this much, and in 1867, a relatively random wound is going to sideline him badly. Koizumi marshals the familiar elements of the grand battle - the maps that make clear what the combatants will need to do when the camera finally arrives on scene, the tense where each soldier knows that their war can quite easily end with one shot or slash, the stoic commanders swelling with pride and admiration for their soldiers - and plays them out, but also drains much of the tension. There is not much suspense in this last stand; just the feeling that it had to be made.
The age of the samurai almost ends with a whimper here, although Tsugi has at least helped Japan be able to conceive of something else. Similarly, one can see Japan losing its last links to a defining age of cinema as Koizumi and Nakadai wind their careers down, even if what comes next is also inevitable and worth supporting.
"Piece of Solitude"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
An impressive, wordless memory piece with a man left alone in his book-filled home, seemingly only engaging the rest of the world with the newspaper and, specifically, the crossword, which may not be the greatest habit for someone in that position, as some clue winds up sending him back to memories of how he got there.
The main figure in this stop-motion tale is clay, mostly, but the dominant motif around him is paper - if you want to stretch, even the buckling bookshelves around him may be made of cardboard. It suggests a life closed off inside academic pursuits, perhaps ignoring other things around him until he was that isolated, able to form as needed into a flat, abstract world or a twisted Escher print. Books file information away, contained neatly until someone lets them out, but the crosswords, they contain words that intersect and connect one idea to another, knowledge to memory to experience until there's no way to avoid how, perhaps, he may have been a coward.
Yes, I am probably reading too much into the crossword analogy, but I love them and it's an extra way in to what could seem like a standard, familiar story about an old man with regrets.
"Histoire pour 2 Trompettes" ("A Story for Two Trumpets")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
A delightful little film that fits a great deal of transformation and growing up into its five minutes, perhaps in part because, along with bouncy music by Chapelier Fou that pushes forward without seeming rushed, it feels like a lot of things that kids see or process as paths along the way - storybooks with a trail, board games, jigsaw puzzles, all things that a child will look at as things that lead from one thing to another, only the little girl at the center of it, breaking and making things along the way, is changing too.
Director Amandine Meyer apparently creates children's storybooks as well as short films, so it's not surprising that she knows the forms well enough to put them into motion and make them cross over, and knows when a kid watching it might enjoy a detour into some darkness. It's a neat little piece of work where growing up can sometimes be dangerous but still a magical journey.
"The Commute"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Dang right I'm going to be fond of a movie that animates a transit map, especially since this one-minute flick is as much about the delight of transit maps as the travel itself, and how it's there whether they are apps on a phone or posters on a wall. I wouldn't be shocked if Toronto (or whichever city this represents) were to use this as a PSA on an animated billboard or the like; it's got that feel of whimsy without being a hard sell.
"Glass Doll"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Omorose Osagie builds a nifty little tale here, a combination of storybook fantasy and post-apocalyptic tale, as the titular doll looks after her friends but also tries to find the eye that will make her whole - but what if the price is too steep?
It's a nifty-looking take on its world, something that works as both a literal fantasy and a sort of translation of what being discarded and left behind would be like for toys, with the design feeling like it would fit right into a Cartoon Network lineup. Osagie keeps the story for her short impressively tight despite it being an elaborate creation - for all that it's full of nifty detail and has fun things hiding in every corner, there's nothing wasted in the telling of the story, a perfect little tragedy that gets where it's going without any sort of unnecessary detour.
"BREAK bug"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
I hope visual effects artist Mchael Ralla used motion capture to animate his dancing robots and insects in "BREAK bug", because the film is, in its way, about a big ol' robot effectively doing motion capture from that little grasshopper, and it would be fun if this were actually that meta.
At any rate, it's fast-paced, has a beat, and while I'm not going to say whether it choreographs its simultaneous dance and action so that it it inevitably leads to a double-splat, the fact that one can see just how well Ralla has laid everything out and made it work together is impressive work as both direction and doing visual effects.
"VRDLK: Family of Vurdulak"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
This is based on a Tolstoy story from 1839, which is somewhat amusing because it is built to feel very modern and quippy and irreverent, the kind of horror that is so fond of nervous laughter on the one hand and being so dismissive of the supernatural that it's meant to be a bigger shock on the other that it's hard to truly settle into its world. Sam Chou's thriller is fun, don't get me wrong, but somehow shifting into animation exacerbates that unwillingness to simply be horrific just a little more.
It is kind of a ball, though, with a slick Don Bluth quality to the animation that says yes, they have inevitably been influenced by Disney but want to do something a little more intense, with enough of Tod Browning's Dracula in the DNA to feel like it's coming from the same place but not entirety trying to be the same thing. He and screenwriter Ellery Vandooyeweert do the thing where two sorts of genres intersect very well, with this foppish hero suddenly landing in the middle of a horror story while the villagers who know this stuff are annoyed with this noble dilettante, but the point is not necessarily that either is wrong to be who they are and must adjust to survive; they connect and effect each other but neither is ever exactly pulled out of their own milieu.
That's a neat sort of trick, and there's something to it - these sophisticated, devil-may-care aristocrats exist in the same world as the poor, superstitious commoners, but not entirely - although they never let it totally dominate the way that it's going to take a lot of luck and hard work to survive until morning.
"Baek-il"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
It's a genuine shock to go back into the program afterward and see that "Baek-il" is just two minutes long; for all that Grace An's twist on a piece of Korean folklore is snappily paced and doesn't particularly waste seconds as one watches it, there's enough going on that it feels broader and busier than that. She starts out with a passage stating that for these animals/spirits to become human, they must quarantine for 105 days - immediately connecting with something most in the audience will recall all too well - and then pops up "Day XX" enough times as Cat drives Bear up the wall in their isolation cave that it feels like it must go on longer. But, no, between her impressively sketched figures and great instincts for knowing when they should move and when they should stay still, she does a great job of underscoring just what a long freaking time that can be without actually making the audience wait it out to the point of being impatient themselves.
"Deshabitada"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
It initially feels like we're back in the same sort of space as "Piece of Solitude", albeit with a Chilean rather than Irani spin, but it turns out that the audience is in for a darker ride than that. This old woman's hunched figure implies guilt rather than just isolation, and filmmaker Camila Donoso leans on how concrete her sins are rather than making them complete abstractions. There are portions of this film where her deteriorating mind takes her to some seemingly fantastical dystopian settings, but more often than not, her memories are all too clear, playing on the banality of evil that pervaded Chile during the Pinochet years. What she did in her time was stark - and the clay-based animation is suitably gray and grotesque - but now that she's an old woman who cannot entirely function on her own, there's a real tension between what a functional society must do for everyone and what a just one may perhaps demand.
This is, I must admit, the sort of animated short one sees in a lot of programs that exist in part to demonstrate how animation can be used for weighty topics, to the point where it's become a bit of a genre unto itself. It's almost more interesting to look at it next to other similar films in the package and see how it handles the same sort of material as "Piece of Solitude" or others - in this case, impressively straightforward and unblinking, abstracted just enough to make the audience aware of just how deliberately distanced from reality these situations are, but just removed enough that the sort of visceral horror to be somewhat hit-or-miss.
"El After del Mundo" ("The World's After")
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Co-writer/director Florentina Gonzalez offers up one of the more compelling intersections of the supernatural and the post-apocalyptic here, presenting its ghosts as hollow sets of clothing who are in some ways continuing what they did in life and in others freed from it. Fluor is still basically still acting like a gig-economy delivery cyclist, but also more or less going where she wants, chasing new music to put on her phone, while Carlix remains at this old marine park, diligently reassembling a whale's skeleton. They meet, seemingly get on, but what comes next?
Gonzalez gives herself and her ghosts time to play with that, poking at the edges of how this world where post-millennials are continuing on in a world that's already gone might work but also teasing out a sort of hope: The world is past gone, and these two women are more or less ghosts adrift without responsibilities or futures to work toward, but they still find things worth continuing to exist for, even without it ever being likely to lead to something being fixed or remembered. There's disaffection and cynicism, but also an understanding that they go on, and do so as well as they can.
The style of the film is nifty, looking like something from the 1980s that maybe started from rotoscoping but didn't have the budget for truly elaborate animation over that; any given frame can sometimes look simple and crude, but Gonzales makes the characters' body language expressive despite the empty space where both faces and other glimpses of skin should be. The way Fluor and Carlix are both wearing tops with long sleeves with prominent cuffs at the end is a really clever bit of design, giving the illusion of hands and fingers so the audience accepts them manipulating things without actually seeing the fine detail. The music is also quite good, and overall, it's just an impressively balanced tale of how, even when nothing can be done, the way one chooses to exist can still mean something.
"Whisper Down the Lane"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma du Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
I didn't entirely see Raghad Al Barqi's short film as a game of telephone at first; the red string connecting characters came across as something more abstract even though the title was right up front while many of the objects floating in the background were means of communication. It's obvious in retrospect, although in the moment, the very concept of connection seemed more powerful to me, not so much how ideas get distorted as they go along. Ah, well.
It resolves into an intriguing short anyways, filling the screen with carefully and realistically rendered human figures and cutouts of various photographs but using the fact that this is animation and semi-abstract art to scatter them, both creating significance in how they are arranged and inviting the audience to mentally put them in some sort of order. The line often connects not phones but coffee cups, which feels like both an homage to how "telephone" is often represented by cups or cans at the end of such strings and how gossip often spreads, idly and over refreshments rather than actively, for a specific purpose. There's intriguing color coding, as if a jump from primarily-red imagery to primarily-blue is implying it's crossed a line.
It's the sort of thing that might be nifty to see in a museum installation; at just five minutes, one could easily sit through it twice, maybe picking up a bit more meaning the second time around.
"Lo 100to"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
It was vaguely reassuring when director Karla Monterrosa mentioned during the Q&A that this was in many ways constructed out of the secondhand chaos she heard other people talk about vis-a-vis their group texts, saying she doesn't really have something like this. Like, I don't either, but I hear people talk about theirs on social media like it's just an expected part of the world today. How'd we miss it?
That aside, it's a fun little cartoon, using doodles and art to illustrate the connection her avatar feels with everybody else she's linked to this way, even if they are far away and only sending these compacted bits of language and the occasional picture. On the other hand, the story itself and the way it gets buried - she's trying to communicate a broken engagement here! - is a nifty illustration of how, for as effective as this is in many ways, it doesn't always have the weight one wants. There's just no way to push across the importance of something amid the talking over each other and potential flood of far smaller issues. Like a lot of social media, it's something that feels like it should have the capacity for big ideas but can't help but be consumed by trivia, and dwelling on it for more than a couple of minutes isn't going to do any good.
"Perfect City: The Mother"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
There's some very neat stuff going on in here but the movie having a colon in the title doesn't do it a lot of favors; Shengwei Zhou has an interesting idea or three here and it's no problem that he's not exactly subtle getting them across, but it doesn't exactly feel as though playing in this sandbox more is going to reveal different nuances. It's a bit stretched as is; I don't know that I need more.
I like where his head's at, though, as a stop-motion forest spirit/creature, pregnant, starts taking in a liquid called "Perfect" - bright CGI yellow compared to the rest of the picture - and it eventually reshapes both. There's interesting stuff going on under the surface about parents striving to give their children advantages but as a result making both into something they don't quite recognize, rural people fed a steady diet of the city as aspirational that they get left behind. The visuals and how he uses them are nifty, from how the tree-creatures feel a bit monstrous to start but seem kind of comfortable once Zhou dives deep into the uncanny valley to make the more humanoid forms plastic and unnerving.
There's just a lot of it; this is very much the sort of movie where one can find themselves saying "yeah, I get it" halfway through and sitting around as it gets drawn out.
"The Principle of Sunrise"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Every kid's first pet winds up more responsibility than expected, and that's what happens here, as a little girl takes an injured bluebird in and finds it growing to be more than she can handle, certainly within her home in the city, but returning it to nature is tricky, too.
Ye Song's movie has a nifty deadpan sense of humor and a blue color scheme that shows just how much this little creature means to its caretaker, on top of just being a cool-temperature look and emphasizing how much happens at night.
"New Moon"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Cinéma de Musée (Fantasia Festival: Axis: Circo Animato, digital)
Shorts like "New Moon" that take a monologue developed for the stage and visualize it are odd things - if it's worth adapting, the animation has a great chance of being superfluous, quite possibly detracting from the experience because it substitutes one thing for all the personal associations and such that can exist in the viewer's mind. That I can't say that happened for me here, although I do find that I remember Colman Domingo's voice more than the images that go with it.
It's a nice monologue and short, though, the sort that spends some time getting comfortable with the idea that these characters may not have a lot financially but how this doesn't bother young Colman particularly much because there's a lot of warmth between him and his mother to give him a solid foundation. One can sense him eliding the parts that are hard and seeing animators Jeremie Balais & Jeff LeBars giving a little extra vibrancy to his world.
"The Cradle"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, digital)
This is a nifty, atmospheric little piece where I don't know that I necessarily got the program's description from it - yes, that could be what's happening in retrospect, although I maybe saw "weird shut-in spinster" more than "witch" - but it doesn't much matter. Massimo Meo spends a fair amount of the short running time making the audience aware of what's missing, from not showing this old woman's head to the empty cradles to the faceless dolls, and that sense of incompleteness builds up quickly over the film's short running time. Throw some spooky photography that injects a bit of twitchiness into an orderly routine and sounds from outside drawing closer, and you've got a short, solid creeper.
Sadako DX
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
So, this franchise was a big deal back in the day, huh? I get that, like The Grudge, this series has perhaps not gotten bigger with subsequent entries, but rather seen its budget and attached talent slide so that it will continue to make a profit even as ticket sales diminish, but still, this is bad enough that it's hard to see where the original appeal of The Ring was. As someone happening on this for the first time, I can sort of see how there might have been something to it, but it's a shadow of its former self if so.
As it opens, the news is reporting a wave of sudden, inexplicable deaths, and some are just putting together that it resembles the "Ringu" phenomenon of 25 years earlier. A Tokyo news program runs a panel discussion, featuring Ayaka Ichijo (Fuka Koshiba), a grad student who has tested for Japan's highest IQ at 200+, playing the skeptic and Kenshin (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) arguing for musical explanations, and giving Ayaka a copy of the original tape of Sadako, which her kid sister Futaba (Yuki Yagi) digs out a VCR to watch. Elsewhere, a more social-media savvy young man, Oji Maeda (Kazuma Kawamura), is attempting to help someone who has seen the Sadako video survive, only to find it now kills in 24 hours rather than a week, and they all come together to try and figure out how to keep themselves, their loved ones, and maybe all of Japan alive, as a viral video can spread much quicker in the 2020s than the late 1990s.
Something in Ringu touched a chord in people the first time around, and one can see hints of it here, even if it also feel enough like the Ju-on movies (to the point of the haunting being described as a "grudge") that one wonders what was in the water back then. Unfortunately, so much of Sadako DX feels like the laziest take on half-decent ideas. It seems like there should be a solid foundation for picking the story back up at this time, with both bad information and an actual virus spreading as they are in the present day, but screenwriter Yuya Takahashi never gets much further than saying "this is like a virus, so maybe we should inoculate in the same way", which is an interesting idea but one the filmmakers can't commit to without random twists to sap it of its power. There's also some of It Follows in the film's depiction of Sadako which is apparently new, but it doesn't seem to add much, instead diluting a horror icon until she is practically not there.
All the characters are the most bland stereotypes of basic types, with Ayaka in some ways the most frustrating, because Fuka Koshiba seems like she's capable of more than this, but she's written and directed like Takahashi and director Hisashi Kimura have never actually met someone who is good at science or methodical in their problem solving and can't quite conceive of them as fully human rather than Mr. Spock. Kazuma Kawamura is a different set of self-aware ticks rather than a character, and it's hard to tell whether their anti-chemistry is a sort of choice - the filmmakers are playing this for much more comedy than is apparently typical of the series - or just two people who don't click on-screen. Hiroyuki Ikeuchi at least brings the sort of comfort veteran character actors tend to, but none of this group have interesting stories to plug Sadako into, and none are able to make the audience find them interesting without her.
Meanwhile, Sadako doesn't even look threatening, with the filmmakers going to the well of "this hallucination is just someone in an incongruous wig" so often that the monster becomes a joke. Beyond that, this is such a basic, direct-to-video-looking picture that it's all but impossible to imagine Hideo Nakata or Gore Verbinski ever touched this franchise. It's almost all shot in the most generic possible locations with seemingly no thought to how the lighting might give it some atmosphere. As a result, the scariest part of the movie is probably the original VHS footage (or Kimura's recreation thereof). It at least has some style 20 years later, and a hook the folks making this one can use, even if they've only got fragments of ideas for what to do beyond having teenagers ask what VHS is.
Not counting foreign remakes, this is the producers' second revival of the series (a "Sadako 3D" cycle came out in the mid-2010s), and it seems like the filmmakers make every mistake one can make in doing so: It's youth-oriented but connected to backstory from a film that came out 20+ years ago, too eager to make jokes to really commit to being scary, springing from ideas its makers seemingly don't have the vocabulary to express, and cheap-looking and amateurish on top of that. I suppose there could be Ring fans looking for another hit, no questions asked, but I'm not sure who else this is going to impress.
(Amusing credit note: Somewhere in the scroll at the end, either important enough that someone decided to subtitle it or written out in English to start, is someone who served as the "Supervisor on Series World View", and I've got no idea if this is somebody whose job is to wrangle the continuity of a 25-year-old series on its second wave of legacyquels or someone poring over the script to make sure that the dark comedy isn't too far out of line.)
Sagasu (Missing)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Shinzo Katayama's Missing has a couple of distinct directions it could go after it hits its first climax, and they represent an interesting choice in how a writer handles deepening the story at this point - lay out a longer path for the sleuth to follow, which makes the whole thing more prone to collapse, or build out to the sides in a way that makes for deeper complexity but less intriguing mystery. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, although those entirely drawn in by the film's genre hook may wish the filmmakers had kept things relatively simple.
It begins by introducing the audience to Kaede Harada (Aoi Ito), a middle-schooler who has had to become even more self-sufficient since her mother's death as father Santoshi (Jiro Sato) has fallen apart; she's just had to pull him out of the drunk tank (again). Santoshi thinks he's figured out a way to get back on track, though; he believes he has spotted the fugitive "No Name" (Hiroya Shimizu) who has recently fled Tokyo, and is ready to turn him in for the reward. Instead, he disappears, but rather than disappear into the foster care system, Kaede is determined to find him, enlisting a boy who has a crush on her to assist.
If this were the entirety of the film, it would potentially be a pretty compelling one; Katayama and actress Aoi Ito' avoid any girl detective tropes while still making a compelling case that a smart, motivated teenager might be able to hunt down a serial killer, or at least get this far in doing so. Katayama and Ito do such a good job of keeping Kaede's eyes on her goal while avoiding the language of mysteries that she never comes across as someone with a gift who might take on other "cases" someday as opposed to a kid recklessly following a path to her father despite other adults seeing just as useless as he often was. The filmmakers create great tension in part because they don't follow certain beats; rather than dangerous narrow escapes that might show she's onto something, there's ominous implied danger that indicates she may be in over her head.
That's mostly the first half or so of the movie, before the perspective shifts and the story backtracks to change points of view, and it becomes a very different film, with Kaede mostly reduced to a side character who is maybe even less present than would make sense given what events the film is showing. It is, on its own, a kind of intriguing story, one that starts from the premise of "No Name" being the worst sort of human monster that the viewer can imagine and then expanding outward to consider how seemingly decent people can, for various reasons, get caught up in a network of actions and motivations that include a man compelled to kill. Katayama has worked some in the Korean film industry, most notably with Bong Joon-Ho, and the kind of darkness he explores is the sort that seems to pop more in Korean crime films than ones from Japan, these universal undercurrents that are present all over rather than twisted codes of honor or plain-spoken villainy. Perhaps the most memorable moment in this section of the film is when No Name encounters a suicidal potential victim and cannot himself conceive of someone wanting what he has to offer; even to him, this situation makes no sense.
Katayama and his team tell the tale in a fashion that is relentlessly grim but not gleefully so; No noirish signifiers or sleek surfaces for evil to hide behind; everyone seems to be hovering around having just enough to get by but not the time or motivation to keep it nice, either surrounded by a mess or a sparseness that is not exactly neat. There is something either tragic or rotten about how Santoshi's ping-pong center has gone out of business but he and Kaede still seem to access the building freely, like the building's owners can't even be bothered to properly evict them or change the locks until they have to (maybe they're hoping he gets back on his feet, but it doesn't seem like that sort of movie). There's a sort of rot here that manifests itself in all the linked stories - people shouldn't want to die, and a serial killer who can operate effectively enough to elude the police shouldn't be someone a 15-year-old girl can track down.
The question, then, is how well the flashbacks integrate with Kaede's mission, and while the filmmakers do eventually manage to integrate them, tying the various time frames together and eventually fitting Kaede into this world in a way that quietly and impressively raises eyebrows, it maybe takes a bit too long to fit together as it circles back to the start and reveals how all this connects. The opening is so strong and clear in its purpose even as it establishes the atmosphere that the rest of the film will work in that I suspect even those who enjoy its flavor of moral quagmire may wish that either No Name or Santoshi or any of the people they encounter as their paths cross were as interesting and immediately compelling as Kaede.
Complexity and moral ambiguity are interesting and often worth the extra work they may require, but sometimes the clear, simple piece in the middle of all that can't help but stand out.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Fantasia On-Demand Preview 2020.04: Crazy Samurai Musashi (plus Sheep Without a Shepherd and Fantasia Classics)
I thought I'd be doing more of these, but I got caught up watching a couple baseball games (which is stupid, because the Red Sox are awful this year and take a long time to lose), but there's going to be plenty of time over the next couple of weeks to catch up on some even as I try and keep up with the "real time" screenings. I'd still hoped to get a couple more in, but some time has to be saved for work
Crazy Samurai Musashi is a lot of fun, at least - not a great movie, perhaps, but one whose central gimmick is nifty enough that it's worth checking out even if star Tak Sakaguchi and his cohorts didn't have a major place in world genre cinema back when I first started going to Fantasia: Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus was a huge deal, arriving right around the same time Audition did and signally that there was this sort of energetic, entertaining live-action stuff being made in Japan when most of what came over was either animated or very formal, and they were followed by a group of B-movie filmmakers who often seemed to be making Crazy Japanese-Brand stuff for export as much as for consumption at home, especially when you consider what strong in-person presence these guys would have during the festival in Montreal (and, presumably, Austin a month or two later). As I mention in the review, the bubble kind of burst without anyone really taking that next big leap into the mainstream in Japan and Kitamura sort of becoming a journeyman here, their cheap-but-crazy entries more or less replaced with slick manga adaptations. I kind of miss them, from Tak Sakaguchi showing up and doing martial arts demonstrations to having my jaw drop at the utter madness of what Yoshihiro Nishimura would come up with for his own movies compared to the KNB-quality professionalism he brought to others.
The other "premiere" that I can review from the on-demand section is Sheep Without a Shepherd, which is this year's "wait, this played Boston but not Montreal, even though this sort of movie seems to be all the Cineplex at the Forum plays?" entry. It's kind of reasonable, though - as I noticed when it played here, it came out on the same day as The Rise of Skywalker and although it was a big deal in China, it was kind of secondary even among the Chinese movies playing in North America at the time. It is pretty darn good, and even if you're not able to access it via Fantasia because you're not in Canada, it's on Prime in the U.S., as are a couple of the "Fantasia Classics" that include a lot of Japanese movies listed toward the end. It's been kind of weird seeing embargo dates for some of these, as I've had reviews up from the last time around for a while.
Crazy Samurai Musashi
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It probably won't be too long before someone teaches an entire course on action cinema using just Crazy Samurai Musashi; though there is some extra material on either side, roughly 80% of this is a single shot of a single samurai taking on a veritable army. It's not perfect - folks taking that hypothetical course will likely learn a whole lot about how editing and coverage can be pretty useful - but it's a fairly amazing achievement and a must-see-it-at-least-once for fans of the genre.
It opens, more or less, with a child watching a butterfly; Matashichiro is the heir to the Yoshioka clan and it is technically his right to challenge Miyamoto Musashi (Tak Sakaguchi) to a duel to avenge the killing of a fallen comrade. Neither he nor his grandfather will actually fight Musashi, of course; there are over a hundred samurai loyal to the clan and 300 mercenaries hiding in the woods around the compound, prepared to swarm on him should he get too close.
They may almost be enough.
Star Tak Sakaguchi and director Yuji Shimomura both got their starts working with Ryuhei Kitamura on Versus (Tak starred and Shinomura choreographed the action), part of a group of young filmmakers who had incredible amounts of enthusiasm, imagination, and style but who by and large never really figured out storytelling beyond the high concept or the ins and outs of studio filmmaking. By all appearances, Crazy Samurai Musashi seems to have taken this idea to its logical extreme, with the big 77-minute fight shot around seven years ago - Sion Sono is listed as writing the "original story", so right around when Sakaguchi was choreographing the action for Tokyo Tribe - with the segments on either end either clearly featuring an older Musashi or trying to keep him in the shadows. They came up with the fight, did an impressive job of shooting it, and then took years to scrape together the bare minimum amount of material to make an actual movie out of it - and even then, it doesn't quite fit, as Sakaguchi plays Musashi as kind of put-upon and righteous during the fight but the material around it portrays him as more an unrepentant killer.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Wu Sha (Sheep Without a Shepherd)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)
Sheep Without a Shepherd is the sort of thriller that elicits happily complicit snickers from the audience because they are extremely invested in someone getting away with murder. Well, maybe not quite murder, but you get the point. The filmmakers know exactly what's going to get the audience rooting against the police and manage to make it work even when what they are doing is pretty obvious.
It starts with a jailbreak that's actually a story being told by Li Weijie (Xiao Yang), a Chinese man living in the Thai village of Chanban who watches a lot of movies between calls at his network service business. He's a bit tight with money - he, wife Ayu (Tan Zhuo), and daughters Pingping (Audrey Hui) & An-An (Zhang Ziran), have a fair-sized house because a lot next to the cemetery is a bargain - but he relents when 16-year-old Pingping needs 6000 baht (about $200) for a special weekend camp for high achievers. It goes badly, and things get worse when a fellow attendee, Suchat (Beety) shows up with cell phone video to blackmail her into another "date" while Weijie is away on business in nearby Lua Pathom. Ayu interrupts and Pingping fights back, accidentally connecting with Suchat's skull rather than his phone. The next morning, Weijie must call on everything he's learned about avoiding arrest from watching movies to keep what they've done from being discovered, especially tricky because not only are Suchat's parents chief of police Laoorn (Joan Chen) and mayoral candidate Dutpon (Philip Keung Ho-Man), but Sangkun (Shih Ming-Shuai), a corrupt cop who has long had it in for Weijie, actually caught a glimpse of him getting into the victim's car the next morning.
Six screenwriters are credited with adapting the Malayalam-language film Drishyam (the sixth remake, following four in other parts of India and one in Sri Lanka), something which often seems like a recipe for turning a pointed story into mush, but that is not the case here. It's a really impressively constructed machine of a film which lays out where it's going but still makes the audience enjoy the process of getting there, turns dark comedy into something that really stings, and finds plenty of room to bring emotions to a boil even as it's being methodical. The writers and Malaysian director Sam Quah Boon-Lip are able to wear their influences on their sleeves and even find a way to use a mid-credits scene to wring something out of the Chinese "content guidelines" that the film had mostly been mostly able to skirt by being set in Thailand. Quah and company manage to walk an impressive tightrope between the different ways that crime is difficult in the movies and in real life, keeping the audience aware of it but never becoming a movie about movies.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Mirokuroze (Milocrorze: A Love Story)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)
Milocrorze: A Love Story is the sort of colorful, genre-mashing flick that doesn't just try to bowl the audience over, but practically insists on it, overwhelming the viewer with color and sound and sudden shifts until they either walk out numb or give in. And there's no reason not to give in, as writer/director Yoshimasa Ishibashi finds ways to both pop the eyes and tug at the heart.
Of course, the title character (Maiko) doesn't seem to be that important at first; she's the etherially beautiful woman that oddly-independent seven-year-old Ovreneli Vreneligare falls for one day in the park, but soon enough she's gone, leaving the boy with a broken heart. That's when we meet Besson Kumagai (Takayuki Yamada), a "love counselor" for young men whose hotline leads to him berating his callers and giving them questionable advice. Following his path eventually brings us to Tamon (Yamada again), a one-eyed samurai on a quest to find his beloved Yuri (Anna Ishibashi), stolen away by kidnappers four years ago. It's only after the end of Tamon's quest that we catch up with the now-grown Ovreneli (guess who), who encounters a familiar face while still nursing a hole in his heart.
Though all three sections are quite something to see - Yoshimasa Ishibashi and his fellow filmmakers seldom see a frame that they don't think could be improved by a little more color, a poppier beat, and a bit of absurdity - it's Tamon's segment in the middle that is Ishibashi's and Yamada's tour de force. Yes, the film changes styles before and after, but it shifts genres several times within this part, jumping from samurai to something contemporary to western to a stylized blending of everything without any sort of explanation other than that this genre perhaps feels most appropriate for this moment. It also features one of the most astonishing action sequences in recent memory, in which Tamon hacks his way through a brothel filled with yakuza in one long, apparently continuous shot that moves like a side-scrolling video game and continually jumps between regular speed and slow motion. It's jokey at some points and surreal at others, but Ishibashi packs an amazing amount of activity into what certainly appears to be one continuous shot.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Tabineko ripôto (The Traveling Cat Chronicles, aka Tabineko Report)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The Traveling Cat Chronicles was the first film to play the festival lineup on this day, and it was a canny bit of scheduling not just because this was a more family-friendly movie than what makes up the bulk of this genre-heavy schedule, but because it's unapologetically sentimental in a way few other movies playing the event are. So, fine, let's get the day's crying done early and have fun with the rest of the movies; it's not like that will be unearned.
The film is narrated by a once-proud stray cat (voice of Mitsuki Takahata) who mentions that she as yet has no name, though has been living with Satoru (Sota Fukushi) since he found her on the side of the road. Satoru is a young man, at a point where one's life is often in flux, and there is no space for a cat in this next phase, but he's also a cat lover who wouldn't dream of not making sure Nana does not find a good home. So he travels up and down Japan meeting with childhood friends Kosuke Sawada (Ryosuke Yamamoto), who is recently divorced, and Yoshime (Tomoya Maeno), who has recently adopted a kitten; former classmate Sugi Shusuke (Takuro Ono) and ex-girlfriend Chikako (Alice Hirose), now married and running a pet-friendly B&B; and his aunt Noriko (Yuko Takeuchi), who raised him after his parents' death and whose itinerant work as a judge prevented Satoru from having a pet as a child. None of them, unfortunately, are quite able to take in a cat who has grown attached to her human.
There has, obviously, been a fair amount of tragedy and upheaval in Satoru's life already, and each time Satoru visits a friend there is an accompanying set of flashbacks to how Satoru met them, how they were separated, and some story about how they bonded over a cat. The stories inevitably fall into a bit of a pattern, but director Koichiro Miki makes that a good thing, telling some funny stories that glide into a bittersweet place; they point at where the film is heading while still misdirecting the audience a bit. Where the story is heading is both a surprise and not by the time it gets there, but that doesn't matter; the film is generally about taking both animals and people who need it in, even when it's difficult and leads to some heartache, and never loses sight of that.
Yes, this is the sort of movie that tries to soften a blow with cute animals, but since it's cats instead of dogs (as is more common), it's kind of no-nonsense about it. Nana is smart and not sentimental in her narration (or his; the subtitles use male pronouns despite the female voice, but I suspect that will be fixed if this gets any sort of official release), with Mitsuki Takahata giving her a default tone of annoyed indignation that matches the feline performer without ever seeming aloof (and occasionally being quite emotional). It's just enough tartness on top of a sort of simple, child-like vocabulary to feel like a cat. There are some other animal voices (though mostly confined to the present where Nana can relay them), but Takahata's performance sets the tone.
Full review at eFilmCritic
HK: Hentai Kamen (HK/Forbidden Super Hero)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2013 in le Cinéma Impérial (Fantasia Festival, HD)
Look, I'm not going to make Hentai Kamen out to be anything other than it is: It is a deeply silly, tacky, crude spoof of the superhero genre that takes Warren Ellis's description of their outfits as "underwear pervert suits" to its illogical extreme. It's got roughly one joke in it and hits that gag relentlessly. But, man, does it do that well.
A while back, Det. Hario Shikjio ran a gangster visiting his favorite dominatrix to ground. The gangster's, that is, although when Maki (Nana Katase) responded to the cops busting in on her business by slapping Hario around... Well, it was love at first sight. Sixteen years later, their son Kyosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) is part of his high-school martial arts team, but though he's inherited his father's sense of justice, he's kind of a wimp. Still, when new student Aiko Himeno (Fumika Shimizu) gets in trouble, he races to her rescue but the only mask he can find to conceal his identity is a pair of women's panties. Good thing wearing them on his face stirs the kinky blood of his mother that flows in his veins, and from then forward, he fights crime as Hentai Kamen, the masked pervert!
There's a way of telling this story that would make it about not denying who you are and embracing the totality of your heritage, even if it's kind of embarrassing. And while that's there, it's buried deep underneath a ton of crude jokes based on Kyosuke having the most embarrassing secret identity ever and fight scenes whose choreography is built around making evildoers (and audiences) kind of uncomfortable with all the raw beefcake on display and how every finishing move seems to involve pushing the contents of improvised g-string right up into somebody's face. There are plenty of jokes at the superhero genre's expense as well, with Spider-Man getting hit the hardest from the spoof of Marvel's familiar logo animation to the distinctive eye-holes that appear on the "mask" for no discernible reason.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Fukufuku-so no Fuku-chan (Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Huh. I missed something about this movie when reading the program description, although on a certain level it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that this is a big-hearted, charming movie that pays off in some unexpected ways. It also has one of the single funniest sequences I've seen in a movie this year, which never hurts.
The "Fuku-chan" of the title is Fukuda Tatsuo (Miyuki Oshima), a 32-year-old house painter who is fairly well-liked both at work and the cheap apartment block he calls home, where he winds up making peace between his neighbors Nonoshita (Asato Iida) and Mabuchi (Tateto Serizawa) over the matter of the gigantic snake the latter is keeping as a pet. He isn't quite rude in how he rebuffs his supervisor and friend Shimacchi's attempts to set him up with women, but is even more standoffish than one might expect given how he's overweight and not exactly handsome. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, pretty businesswoman Chiho Sigiura (Asami Mizukawa) quits her job after winning a photography prize, only to be put off that when her mentor (Toshiyuki Kitami) proves more interested in her body than her eye.
Where this is going is kind of obvious, but just as the audience is starting to wonder just how writer/director Yosuke Fujita is going to arrange the meet-cute, he throws the audience a curve that makes Fuku's and Chiho's story a bit more complicated than a girl who is, by her own admission, kind of focused on surface-level things realizing that Fuku has a big heart underneath a face that, while expressive, is not conventionally attractive. What's more impressive is that he doesn't waste much time in doing so after starting to hint that the audience is looking in the wrong direction. And while the events of the story are more or less the ones you might expect, Fujita doesn't just acknowledge how these two would likely view each other in real life, but deflects the film from the romantic comedy path fairly explicitly.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Crazy Samurai Musashi is a lot of fun, at least - not a great movie, perhaps, but one whose central gimmick is nifty enough that it's worth checking out even if star Tak Sakaguchi and his cohorts didn't have a major place in world genre cinema back when I first started going to Fantasia: Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus was a huge deal, arriving right around the same time Audition did and signally that there was this sort of energetic, entertaining live-action stuff being made in Japan when most of what came over was either animated or very formal, and they were followed by a group of B-movie filmmakers who often seemed to be making Crazy Japanese-Brand stuff for export as much as for consumption at home, especially when you consider what strong in-person presence these guys would have during the festival in Montreal (and, presumably, Austin a month or two later). As I mention in the review, the bubble kind of burst without anyone really taking that next big leap into the mainstream in Japan and Kitamura sort of becoming a journeyman here, their cheap-but-crazy entries more or less replaced with slick manga adaptations. I kind of miss them, from Tak Sakaguchi showing up and doing martial arts demonstrations to having my jaw drop at the utter madness of what Yoshihiro Nishimura would come up with for his own movies compared to the KNB-quality professionalism he brought to others.
The other "premiere" that I can review from the on-demand section is Sheep Without a Shepherd, which is this year's "wait, this played Boston but not Montreal, even though this sort of movie seems to be all the Cineplex at the Forum plays?" entry. It's kind of reasonable, though - as I noticed when it played here, it came out on the same day as The Rise of Skywalker and although it was a big deal in China, it was kind of secondary even among the Chinese movies playing in North America at the time. It is pretty darn good, and even if you're not able to access it via Fantasia because you're not in Canada, it's on Prime in the U.S., as are a couple of the "Fantasia Classics" that include a lot of Japanese movies listed toward the end. It's been kind of weird seeing embargo dates for some of these, as I've had reviews up from the last time around for a while.
Crazy Samurai Musashi
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It probably won't be too long before someone teaches an entire course on action cinema using just Crazy Samurai Musashi; though there is some extra material on either side, roughly 80% of this is a single shot of a single samurai taking on a veritable army. It's not perfect - folks taking that hypothetical course will likely learn a whole lot about how editing and coverage can be pretty useful - but it's a fairly amazing achievement and a must-see-it-at-least-once for fans of the genre.
It opens, more or less, with a child watching a butterfly; Matashichiro is the heir to the Yoshioka clan and it is technically his right to challenge Miyamoto Musashi (Tak Sakaguchi) to a duel to avenge the killing of a fallen comrade. Neither he nor his grandfather will actually fight Musashi, of course; there are over a hundred samurai loyal to the clan and 300 mercenaries hiding in the woods around the compound, prepared to swarm on him should he get too close.
They may almost be enough.
Star Tak Sakaguchi and director Yuji Shimomura both got their starts working with Ryuhei Kitamura on Versus (Tak starred and Shinomura choreographed the action), part of a group of young filmmakers who had incredible amounts of enthusiasm, imagination, and style but who by and large never really figured out storytelling beyond the high concept or the ins and outs of studio filmmaking. By all appearances, Crazy Samurai Musashi seems to have taken this idea to its logical extreme, with the big 77-minute fight shot around seven years ago - Sion Sono is listed as writing the "original story", so right around when Sakaguchi was choreographing the action for Tokyo Tribe - with the segments on either end either clearly featuring an older Musashi or trying to keep him in the shadows. They came up with the fight, did an impressive job of shooting it, and then took years to scrape together the bare minimum amount of material to make an actual movie out of it - and even then, it doesn't quite fit, as Sakaguchi plays Musashi as kind of put-upon and righteous during the fight but the material around it portrays him as more an unrepentant killer.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Wu Sha (Sheep Without a Shepherd)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)
Sheep Without a Shepherd is the sort of thriller that elicits happily complicit snickers from the audience because they are extremely invested in someone getting away with murder. Well, maybe not quite murder, but you get the point. The filmmakers know exactly what's going to get the audience rooting against the police and manage to make it work even when what they are doing is pretty obvious.
It starts with a jailbreak that's actually a story being told by Li Weijie (Xiao Yang), a Chinese man living in the Thai village of Chanban who watches a lot of movies between calls at his network service business. He's a bit tight with money - he, wife Ayu (Tan Zhuo), and daughters Pingping (Audrey Hui) & An-An (Zhang Ziran), have a fair-sized house because a lot next to the cemetery is a bargain - but he relents when 16-year-old Pingping needs 6000 baht (about $200) for a special weekend camp for high achievers. It goes badly, and things get worse when a fellow attendee, Suchat (Beety) shows up with cell phone video to blackmail her into another "date" while Weijie is away on business in nearby Lua Pathom. Ayu interrupts and Pingping fights back, accidentally connecting with Suchat's skull rather than his phone. The next morning, Weijie must call on everything he's learned about avoiding arrest from watching movies to keep what they've done from being discovered, especially tricky because not only are Suchat's parents chief of police Laoorn (Joan Chen) and mayoral candidate Dutpon (Philip Keung Ho-Man), but Sangkun (Shih Ming-Shuai), a corrupt cop who has long had it in for Weijie, actually caught a glimpse of him getting into the victim's car the next morning.
Six screenwriters are credited with adapting the Malayalam-language film Drishyam (the sixth remake, following four in other parts of India and one in Sri Lanka), something which often seems like a recipe for turning a pointed story into mush, but that is not the case here. It's a really impressively constructed machine of a film which lays out where it's going but still makes the audience enjoy the process of getting there, turns dark comedy into something that really stings, and finds plenty of room to bring emotions to a boil even as it's being methodical. The writers and Malaysian director Sam Quah Boon-Lip are able to wear their influences on their sleeves and even find a way to use a mid-credits scene to wring something out of the Chinese "content guidelines" that the film had mostly been mostly able to skirt by being set in Thailand. Quah and company manage to walk an impressive tightrope between the different ways that crime is difficult in the movies and in real life, keeping the audience aware of it but never becoming a movie about movies.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Mirokuroze (Milocrorze: A Love Story)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)
Milocrorze: A Love Story is the sort of colorful, genre-mashing flick that doesn't just try to bowl the audience over, but practically insists on it, overwhelming the viewer with color and sound and sudden shifts until they either walk out numb or give in. And there's no reason not to give in, as writer/director Yoshimasa Ishibashi finds ways to both pop the eyes and tug at the heart.
Of course, the title character (Maiko) doesn't seem to be that important at first; she's the etherially beautiful woman that oddly-independent seven-year-old Ovreneli Vreneligare falls for one day in the park, but soon enough she's gone, leaving the boy with a broken heart. That's when we meet Besson Kumagai (Takayuki Yamada), a "love counselor" for young men whose hotline leads to him berating his callers and giving them questionable advice. Following his path eventually brings us to Tamon (Yamada again), a one-eyed samurai on a quest to find his beloved Yuri (Anna Ishibashi), stolen away by kidnappers four years ago. It's only after the end of Tamon's quest that we catch up with the now-grown Ovreneli (guess who), who encounters a familiar face while still nursing a hole in his heart.
Though all three sections are quite something to see - Yoshimasa Ishibashi and his fellow filmmakers seldom see a frame that they don't think could be improved by a little more color, a poppier beat, and a bit of absurdity - it's Tamon's segment in the middle that is Ishibashi's and Yamada's tour de force. Yes, the film changes styles before and after, but it shifts genres several times within this part, jumping from samurai to something contemporary to western to a stylized blending of everything without any sort of explanation other than that this genre perhaps feels most appropriate for this moment. It also features one of the most astonishing action sequences in recent memory, in which Tamon hacks his way through a brothel filled with yakuza in one long, apparently continuous shot that moves like a side-scrolling video game and continually jumps between regular speed and slow motion. It's jokey at some points and surreal at others, but Ishibashi packs an amazing amount of activity into what certainly appears to be one continuous shot.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Tabineko ripôto (The Traveling Cat Chronicles, aka Tabineko Report)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The Traveling Cat Chronicles was the first film to play the festival lineup on this day, and it was a canny bit of scheduling not just because this was a more family-friendly movie than what makes up the bulk of this genre-heavy schedule, but because it's unapologetically sentimental in a way few other movies playing the event are. So, fine, let's get the day's crying done early and have fun with the rest of the movies; it's not like that will be unearned.
The film is narrated by a once-proud stray cat (voice of Mitsuki Takahata) who mentions that she as yet has no name, though has been living with Satoru (Sota Fukushi) since he found her on the side of the road. Satoru is a young man, at a point where one's life is often in flux, and there is no space for a cat in this next phase, but he's also a cat lover who wouldn't dream of not making sure Nana does not find a good home. So he travels up and down Japan meeting with childhood friends Kosuke Sawada (Ryosuke Yamamoto), who is recently divorced, and Yoshime (Tomoya Maeno), who has recently adopted a kitten; former classmate Sugi Shusuke (Takuro Ono) and ex-girlfriend Chikako (Alice Hirose), now married and running a pet-friendly B&B; and his aunt Noriko (Yuko Takeuchi), who raised him after his parents' death and whose itinerant work as a judge prevented Satoru from having a pet as a child. None of them, unfortunately, are quite able to take in a cat who has grown attached to her human.
There has, obviously, been a fair amount of tragedy and upheaval in Satoru's life already, and each time Satoru visits a friend there is an accompanying set of flashbacks to how Satoru met them, how they were separated, and some story about how they bonded over a cat. The stories inevitably fall into a bit of a pattern, but director Koichiro Miki makes that a good thing, telling some funny stories that glide into a bittersweet place; they point at where the film is heading while still misdirecting the audience a bit. Where the story is heading is both a surprise and not by the time it gets there, but that doesn't matter; the film is generally about taking both animals and people who need it in, even when it's difficult and leads to some heartache, and never loses sight of that.
Yes, this is the sort of movie that tries to soften a blow with cute animals, but since it's cats instead of dogs (as is more common), it's kind of no-nonsense about it. Nana is smart and not sentimental in her narration (or his; the subtitles use male pronouns despite the female voice, but I suspect that will be fixed if this gets any sort of official release), with Mitsuki Takahata giving her a default tone of annoyed indignation that matches the feline performer without ever seeming aloof (and occasionally being quite emotional). It's just enough tartness on top of a sort of simple, child-like vocabulary to feel like a cat. There are some other animal voices (though mostly confined to the present where Nana can relay them), but Takahata's performance sets the tone.
Full review at eFilmCritic
HK: Hentai Kamen (HK/Forbidden Super Hero)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2013 in le Cinéma Impérial (Fantasia Festival, HD)
Look, I'm not going to make Hentai Kamen out to be anything other than it is: It is a deeply silly, tacky, crude spoof of the superhero genre that takes Warren Ellis's description of their outfits as "underwear pervert suits" to its illogical extreme. It's got roughly one joke in it and hits that gag relentlessly. But, man, does it do that well.
A while back, Det. Hario Shikjio ran a gangster visiting his favorite dominatrix to ground. The gangster's, that is, although when Maki (Nana Katase) responded to the cops busting in on her business by slapping Hario around... Well, it was love at first sight. Sixteen years later, their son Kyosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) is part of his high-school martial arts team, but though he's inherited his father's sense of justice, he's kind of a wimp. Still, when new student Aiko Himeno (Fumika Shimizu) gets in trouble, he races to her rescue but the only mask he can find to conceal his identity is a pair of women's panties. Good thing wearing them on his face stirs the kinky blood of his mother that flows in his veins, and from then forward, he fights crime as Hentai Kamen, the masked pervert!
There's a way of telling this story that would make it about not denying who you are and embracing the totality of your heritage, even if it's kind of embarrassing. And while that's there, it's buried deep underneath a ton of crude jokes based on Kyosuke having the most embarrassing secret identity ever and fight scenes whose choreography is built around making evildoers (and audiences) kind of uncomfortable with all the raw beefcake on display and how every finishing move seems to involve pushing the contents of improvised g-string right up into somebody's face. There are plenty of jokes at the superhero genre's expense as well, with Spider-Man getting hit the hardest from the spoof of Marvel's familiar logo animation to the distinctive eye-holes that appear on the "mask" for no discernible reason.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Fukufuku-so no Fuku-chan (Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Huh. I missed something about this movie when reading the program description, although on a certain level it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that this is a big-hearted, charming movie that pays off in some unexpected ways. It also has one of the single funniest sequences I've seen in a movie this year, which never hurts.
The "Fuku-chan" of the title is Fukuda Tatsuo (Miyuki Oshima), a 32-year-old house painter who is fairly well-liked both at work and the cheap apartment block he calls home, where he winds up making peace between his neighbors Nonoshita (Asato Iida) and Mabuchi (Tateto Serizawa) over the matter of the gigantic snake the latter is keeping as a pet. He isn't quite rude in how he rebuffs his supervisor and friend Shimacchi's attempts to set him up with women, but is even more standoffish than one might expect given how he's overweight and not exactly handsome. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, pretty businesswoman Chiho Sigiura (Asami Mizukawa) quits her job after winning a photography prize, only to be put off that when her mentor (Toshiyuki Kitami) proves more interested in her body than her eye.
Where this is going is kind of obvious, but just as the audience is starting to wonder just how writer/director Yosuke Fujita is going to arrange the meet-cute, he throws the audience a curve that makes Fuku's and Chiho's story a bit more complicated than a girl who is, by her own admission, kind of focused on surface-level things realizing that Fuku has a big heart underneath a face that, while expressive, is not conventionally attractive. What's more impressive is that he doesn't waste much time in doing so after starting to hint that the audience is looking in the wrong direction. And while the events of the story are more or less the ones you might expect, Fujita doesn't just acknowledge how these two would likely view each other in real life, but deflects the film from the romantic comedy path fairly explicitly.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
