This was looking like the final Fantasia post for 2020, because I didn't do great with managing screener requests and was waiting on emails during the last few days of time off. But, last night I got an email saying I had one more screener to watch, so that's what's going on after tonight's baseball.
If anybody reading this manages to find themselves in the same situation, covering a festival remotely and only allowed access to a limited number of screeners at a time, tilt your requests toward the ones that require talking to a third party first, even if that's not the order you can release the reviews. You've got to manage your supply chain, I guess, which is something I've never really had to worry about because I was always there in person and very rarely struggled to fill slots. You've also got to watch what's being added to the list - a lot of South Korean films were added late and I didn't immediately notice, which is why Bring Me Home is the only feature-length film from the ROK that I saw.
It was definitely a different experience, one I'm not entirely sure I'll be up to repeat if Montreal/Quebec/Canada are either (a) not allowing large gatherings or (b) not allowing Americans in next year. It's not the same, and for as much as I am grateful for everything they let me watch - honestly, I am pleasantly surprised every year that they think the numbers my coverage draws is worth giving a pass to even at this late date - the atmosphere is a big part of the experience. If they're doing a live festival but travel is limited, I'll happily show up two weeks early, work from my sublet, and put up with the same quarantine on the return home if necessary. I really want to do Fantasia properly next year.
Including the snacks! I had a half-joke idea of ordering from various local restaurants that had poutine on the menu and including a photo and review with the posts, but I never got around to it. Right now, I'm just really hoping that the combined effects of the never-ending construction and Covid-related closings hasn't devastated the restaurants around Concordia next year. I will be tremendously disappointed if I get there next July and Brit & Chips is gone.
Anyway - Bring Me Home was a pretty good finish if that's how it had turned out, and holy cow, how had the star of Lady Vengeance not made another feature in the time since? That's not even just "getting married and having kids" time - that wouldn't happen for another five years! And, also, how is Lady Vengeance not more easily available than it is? Little streaming, apparently only available on Blu-ray as part of a box set (I immediately checked to see if I had it or not, lest it go out of print). The discontinuity of this year has really had me thinking about the difference between when I started going to Fantasia and now - Park Chan-Wook seemed like he was going to be a much bigger deal than Bong Joon-Ho back then, what we get from Japan has completely changed (so many slick live-action manga adaptations and introspective indies compared to the Miike/Kitamura-inspired madness of the early aughts), and the rapid releases from China have pushed them to fill the schedule with more indies and farther-flung international releases. It's a different festival, in part because we're all different people, but it's still a ton of fun.
Please, world, let me go back next year.
Wotaku ni koi wa muzukashii (Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Has there been a great "young nerds in love" romantic comedy yet? I feel like I've seen and reviewed a few attempts, but something always keeps them from clicking, whether it be the references being too specific or made-up, someone in the production being condescending, or the cast just seeming too attractive and confident to play characters they claim are outcasts. Wotakoi is pretty good, but still doesn't quite hit the target it's aiming for.
The word "otaku" traditionally indicated all-consuming obsession to the point of withdrawal from society before westerners adopted it to mean being a fan of Japanese culture while younger Japanese people reclaimed it as something less derogatory than its original insulting form. That's how Narumi Momose (Mitsuki Takahata) can describe herself as a gaming and manga otaku but still mostly tries to hide it at her new job, especially after it was the reason her last boyfriend broke up with her. She doesn't expect to run into Hirotaka Nifuji (Kento Yamazaki) as a co-worker; they haven't seen each other since school but were always gaming buddies as kids. It's not long before they start seeing each other, but there's some strain even though they both like gaming - Hirotaka suggests they go on "non-otaku dates", and often feels left out when Narumi focuses on her other fandoms.
Narumi and Hirotaka are both otaku, but they're different types, even beyond Narumi actually liking manga and anime more than games. Narumi's enthusiasm can barely be contained, but she's wary of it; though the film doesn't get much into whether women are judged more harshly than men for nerdiness in Japan, it's clearly been an issue. Hirotaka is less uptight about it but less social in general, and it proves a little trickier to work with: Aside from the story mostly being told from Narumi's point of view, her anxieties being on her sleeve makes her perspective easier to see. Both writer/director Yuichi Fukuda and star Kento Yamazaki seem to have a little trouble showing what's going on behind Hirotaka's stony face; there's clearly a story about someone who wants to connect but doesn't know how there, but Hirotaka is so incapable of expressing it, even during the musical numbers, that Fukuda has a hard time finding an angle.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Nareul chajajwo (Bring Me Home)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Kim Seung-Woo's Bring Me Home is such a measured thriller that it at first seems like that's the wrong way to categorize it in genre terms, but that's what impresses about it: As much as one gets the sense of how the characters are stuck in limbo from how it doesn't move particularly fast, it's always moving forward, right up until the something happens in the last act and one realizes that things have gotten pretty tense. That is some nifty, steady screw-turning, the likes of which you don't often see.
The folks in limbo are Jung-Yeon (Lee Young-Ae) and her husband Myeong-Guk (Park Hae-Joon); she's an emergency room nurse in a Seoul hospital, while he used to be a teacher, though he has spent the previous six years searching for their missing son Yoon-Su, who would now be twelve. Though not giving up, Myeong-Guk is about to return to work when he receives a tip that turns out to have been an even crueler prank than intended. It makes the news, though, which is when Constable Kim (Seo Hyun-Woo), a cop on Naebu Island, notes that Min-Su down at the fishing spot matches the description. His partner, Sergeant Hong (Yoo Jae-Myung), says there's nothing to it, but word nonetheless reaches Jung-Yeon, who is not yet ready to give up on finding her son.
It seems almost inconceivable that this is star Lee Yeong-Ae's first feature since Sympathy for Lady Vengeance almost 15 years earlier; she's done some voice work, short films, and a recent television series in between, but unless she's been active on the Korean stage, that's one heck of a lay-off (of course, she's also given birth to twins, which my family tells me keeps a person busy). She doesn't seem to be particularly rusty, either; though she spends the whole movie playing Jung-Yeon as hollowed out but still, somehow, dragging herself through her next day, the variations on it are intriguing, from the way it lends her a combination of focus and numbness at work to how her sleuthing once she reaches the island is a series of relentless baby steps. She spends the climactic last section on a quiet, remarkable roller coaster, emboldened by hope and unleashed when that hope seems to be dashed, but always kind of restrained in how she does it by the fact that this is her first time - this sort of detective work has always been Myeong-Guk's thing and he's probably never gotten into quite this sort of situation - and she's naturally frightened that she'll fail and make everything worse.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Showing posts with label screener. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screener. Show all posts
Friday, September 04, 2020
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Fantasia 2020.11: Undergods and The Paper Tigers
This would have been a pretty good Sunday, I think, especially if the cast and crew of The Paper Tigers were to be on-hand. The Paper Tigers was also where I got to a point where I was really looking for good, straightforward stuff and prioritized that over some of the trickier material I could have been asking for over the last few days of the festival. You get to a point where you just want to have fun, you know?
Undergods
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
If the world is going to hell, it's going to hell in different ways in different places for different classes, and they all may as well be living in different worlds. Or at least, that's the apparent idea behind Chino Moya's Undergods, a set of three or four stories that may be set in the same decaying world or may just be stories the people in those worlds tell each other, but who can tell these days?
In a dystopian world, K (Johann Myers) and Z (Géza Röhrig) collect the bodies they find on the streets, selling the live ones to a sweatshop. Elsewhere, Ron (Michael Gould) and Ruth (Hayley Carmichael) appear to be the only residents of an apartment tower, at least until charming Harry (Ned Dennehy) knocks on the door, saying he's locked himself out of a flat on a different floor. In a storybook city, businessman Hans (Eric Godon) is offered what seems like an incredible opportunity by a foreign engineer (Jan Bijvoet), but when he copies the plans and turns the man down, daughter Maria (Tanya Reynolds) is kidnapped, forcing Hans to recruit her artsy new boyfriend Johann (Tadhg Murphy) to help rescue her. And just as middle-manager Dominic (Adrian Rawlins) is starting to curry favor with his boss (Burn Gorman), his wife's long-believed-dead first husband (Sam Louwyck) reappears, and Rachel (Kate Dickie) immediately devotes herself to his rehabilitation from crippling PTSD.
The niftiest trick Moya manages here comes from how he connects these various threads, very carefully creating fictional space between them until the characters in one stumble into another. At that point the audience can be forgiven if they think this is part of a parallel-worlds fantasy setup (and to some extent it may be), but soon characters from the most seemingly out-there portion are just popping up in the most bougie and familiar, and it suddenly becomes a different story. Sure, there's just enough distance that one can construct some sort of off-screen portal between worlds, but the very effort of doing that world-building on one's own indicates that it is probably unnecessary and counterproductive - despite the way each group of characters sees the others as part of some world so unfamiliar that it may as well be imaginary, the simpler answer is that this is all happening together, and may be more connected.
Full review at eFilmCritic
The Paper Tigers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
Just about everything about The Paper Tigers is mainstream cinema comfort food, but it's that sort of thing done pretty well: Yes, there are a lot of stock pieces in it, and they don't always fit together perfectly, but there's also good chemistry among the cast, not much wasted time, and a finale that delivers the goods without making the audience wish they'd had more of that stuff before. It's the sort of movie often dismissed for being predictable, although few filmmakers put it together as well as Quoc Bao Tran does here.
Twenty-five years ago, teenagers Danny, Hing, and Jim were big into kung fu, learning from a martial-arts master and practitioner of Chinese medicine who, rather than opening a school, taught those "Three Tigers" and worked as a cook. The friends had a falling-out soon after graduation and soon drifted apart, to the point where they learn that Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan) has died just before the funeral. These days, Danny (Alain Uy) works for an insurance company and often disappoints son Eddie (Joziah Lagonoy) and ex-wife Caryn (Jae Suh Park) on the days he has custody; Hing (Ron Yuan) is limping and receiving workman's comp after a construction job left his knee messed up; and Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) is teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, his trips to Chinatown long in the past. And that would be that, except that Carter (Matthew Page), Danny's would-be rival back when they were teenagers who has stuck with martial arts in the meantime, suggests that this was something more than a heart attack, and Carter's teacher (Raymond Ma) doesn't exactly say his student is off-base.
Where things go from there isn't particularly surprising, but Tran's script is impressively assured in how it follows the template and not too pleased with itself for how it diverts from it. He's got enough confidence in his characters to hang out and wander up a blind alley or two and even kind of make what is more or less a way to kill some time as the audience gets to know the characters and to keep things from moving forward too quickly. He also doesn't feel particularly compelled to set things up in the obvious way, as he introduces Danny in the present by having him not even think of getting in a fight when he has a confrontation. He also recognizes that the film doesn't need to run on conflict between the protagonists or to make people villains who don't need to be.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Undergods
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
If the world is going to hell, it's going to hell in different ways in different places for different classes, and they all may as well be living in different worlds. Or at least, that's the apparent idea behind Chino Moya's Undergods, a set of three or four stories that may be set in the same decaying world or may just be stories the people in those worlds tell each other, but who can tell these days?
In a dystopian world, K (Johann Myers) and Z (Géza Röhrig) collect the bodies they find on the streets, selling the live ones to a sweatshop. Elsewhere, Ron (Michael Gould) and Ruth (Hayley Carmichael) appear to be the only residents of an apartment tower, at least until charming Harry (Ned Dennehy) knocks on the door, saying he's locked himself out of a flat on a different floor. In a storybook city, businessman Hans (Eric Godon) is offered what seems like an incredible opportunity by a foreign engineer (Jan Bijvoet), but when he copies the plans and turns the man down, daughter Maria (Tanya Reynolds) is kidnapped, forcing Hans to recruit her artsy new boyfriend Johann (Tadhg Murphy) to help rescue her. And just as middle-manager Dominic (Adrian Rawlins) is starting to curry favor with his boss (Burn Gorman), his wife's long-believed-dead first husband (Sam Louwyck) reappears, and Rachel (Kate Dickie) immediately devotes herself to his rehabilitation from crippling PTSD.
The niftiest trick Moya manages here comes from how he connects these various threads, very carefully creating fictional space between them until the characters in one stumble into another. At that point the audience can be forgiven if they think this is part of a parallel-worlds fantasy setup (and to some extent it may be), but soon characters from the most seemingly out-there portion are just popping up in the most bougie and familiar, and it suddenly becomes a different story. Sure, there's just enough distance that one can construct some sort of off-screen portal between worlds, but the very effort of doing that world-building on one's own indicates that it is probably unnecessary and counterproductive - despite the way each group of characters sees the others as part of some world so unfamiliar that it may as well be imaginary, the simpler answer is that this is all happening together, and may be more connected.
Full review at eFilmCritic
The Paper Tigers
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 September 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
Just about everything about The Paper Tigers is mainstream cinema comfort food, but it's that sort of thing done pretty well: Yes, there are a lot of stock pieces in it, and they don't always fit together perfectly, but there's also good chemistry among the cast, not much wasted time, and a finale that delivers the goods without making the audience wish they'd had more of that stuff before. It's the sort of movie often dismissed for being predictable, although few filmmakers put it together as well as Quoc Bao Tran does here.
Twenty-five years ago, teenagers Danny, Hing, and Jim were big into kung fu, learning from a martial-arts master and practitioner of Chinese medicine who, rather than opening a school, taught those "Three Tigers" and worked as a cook. The friends had a falling-out soon after graduation and soon drifted apart, to the point where they learn that Sifu Cheung (Roger Yuan) has died just before the funeral. These days, Danny (Alain Uy) works for an insurance company and often disappoints son Eddie (Joziah Lagonoy) and ex-wife Caryn (Jae Suh Park) on the days he has custody; Hing (Ron Yuan) is limping and receiving workman's comp after a construction job left his knee messed up; and Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) is teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, his trips to Chinatown long in the past. And that would be that, except that Carter (Matthew Page), Danny's would-be rival back when they were teenagers who has stuck with martial arts in the meantime, suggests that this was something more than a heart attack, and Carter's teacher (Raymond Ma) doesn't exactly say his student is off-base.
Where things go from there isn't particularly surprising, but Tran's script is impressively assured in how it follows the template and not too pleased with itself for how it diverts from it. He's got enough confidence in his characters to hang out and wander up a blind alley or two and even kind of make what is more or less a way to kill some time as the audience gets to know the characters and to keep things from moving forward too quickly. He also doesn't feel particularly compelled to set things up in the obvious way, as he introduces Danny in the present by having him not even think of getting in a fight when he has a confrontation. He also recognizes that the film doesn't need to run on conflict between the protagonists or to make people villains who don't need to be.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Fantasia 2020.10: Minor Premise, Born of Woman 2020, and Sanzaru
Go figure, the two-plus-hour group of short features took some effort to get through. Good news/bad news is that the last few days only have a few "scheduled" items that have screeners, so maybe I'll be able to catch up a bit.
I struggled a bit more with the "Born of Woman" package than I did last year; it felt like there were more things in it that I just didn't get, and even the ones I did seemed more complicated by how including them in a block of films from women often seems to imply more than just the simple fact that women directed them, so meaning feels just a bit further out of reach. Still, a lot of good stuff in there.
I also found that I really liked Sanzaru; it's got a lot of moments when it could go off in typical horror movie directions of shock and trippiness, and while it never runs from either, there's purpose to every bit rather than just red herrings. It's kind of art-house horror, the sort of thing I could see A24 picking up, although the polish is in different places.
Minor Premise
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
There's a stretch at the start of Minor Premise when I wondered how a movie shot during quarantine was already finished and on the festival circuit, so cut off did it seem from the rest of the world even when a character was supposed to be delivering a lecture. That proves not to be the case, and it's kind of a shame; working their way around that sort of logistical challenge, whether it was part of the on-screen action or not, would have made for a much more interesting movie than the rickety Jekyll-and-Jekyll-and-Hyde-and-Hyde thing that viewers get.
The man in question is Ethan Kochar (Sathya Sridharan), who had long worked with his father Paul (Nikolas Kontomanolis) on technology to read and edit memories, although that was a mess - the father tried to take credit for the son's work and while a working prototype was built, crucial information was missing for their intended project of editing consciousness. Months later, a building at the college is being dedicated to Paul Kochar, but department head Malcolm (Dana Ashbrook) is pushing the difficult Ethan for results and presentations to the board; Ethan's ex-girlfriend Alli (Paton Ashbrook) has also returned to the university, as established a figure as he is. It's the sort of situation that inspires rash self-experimentation.
At least, it does in movies; in real life, it would seem like a long shot that Ethan's basement laboratory, with no graduate students or other team members to check his work, or any sort of proper protocols that include an actual control group, would get any sort of funding, and even if some rich eccentric did bankroll him, it seems unlikely that he'd be able to publish any sort of peer-reviewed paper, no matter how lax the standards have grown, or have what he has created gain government approval for commercial or therapeutic use. This may seem like party-pooping, nit-picking complaints to make, but it's indicative of how much the filmmakers are going to sweat the rest of the details or have supposedly smart people approach problems later, and it's also frustratingly uncreative: The movie is made up of tropes that were silly when they first started getting used for simplicity's sake decades ago, and it's big "what-if" idea is basically phrenology with more modern terminology on top.
The really frustrating thing is, all of this isn't even in service of making a streamlined, thrilling narrative; director Eric Schultz and co-writers Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey create a downright goofy scenario where different mental states cycle out at precisely timed intervals that just so happen to alight with the exact tops and bottoms of hours (dumb, but useful for the audience that has to keep track of it), but they don't use it very well on any scale. There's seldom any tension in how Ethan has to get some useful chunk of work done in six minutes, or how these passing hours are bringing him closer to some sort of collapse. They start subplots out of a sense of apparent obligation - Malcolm just has to knock on the door and discover Ethan isn't himself - and then do nothing with them, and the way Alli being there to assist is handled is just as frustrating as she literally walks in and out of things depending on whether they want Ethan to have someone to talk to or whether the story requires she be ambushed, despite it clearly not being a good idea to leave him on his own. She never particularly looks like this marathon effort is taking anything out of her, either.
Sathya Sridharan and Paton Ashbrook at least commit to what they're given, even if that's not much (especially in Sridharan's case, since he should be getting the chance to create ten memorable variations on Ethan but is never given the opportunity); they handle the commit to the pair being intelligent people who care for each other, in the specific way that Alli is going to be professional and friendly despite Ethan's arrogance having hurt her before, a chemistry between them that is not necessarily being pushed in the expected direction. And while Ethan's lab is silly in concept, it's a fun place to be an on-screen mad scientist from how the lighting is just the right combination of shadowy and fluorescent sterility, with blackboards, cobbled together computer systems, and a memory-reading barber's chair that matches the mood. If nothing else, Schultz and company know what they want this movie to look and feel like and nail that.
Unfortunately, that serves as a nice coat of paint on a movie that is dumb from its silly remote lectures to the one last twist that everybody knows is coming likely before the film even starts. It's a mess that could have created much more intrigue had it been just a little more smartly organized.
Originally published at eFilmCritic
"Come F*ck My Robot"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a better distillation of why women groan and say "why even are men?" than this movie's 12 minutes, where the range from villain to male hero is from an engineer (Ian Abramson) who creates a robot with a vagina and immediately starts to pimp it out (despite calling her "like a daughter") to a confused and generally decent young virgin (Nicholas Alexander) who decides he's not okay with this after meeting "Ivy" (voice of Catherine Tapling) but still has trouble with the fact that she is, shall we say, not conventionally attractive and not going to fall head over heels in love despite him doing one good thing. Nobody's perfect, but one might want that range to extend a little further in one direction.
That said, "Come F*ck My Robot" is still an entertaining, mostly-upbeat short film, with Alexander able to bring the audience on a pretty good emotional ride in that time while Tapling does nice voice work and Abramson makes his character awful while hugging the line between cartoonish and skin-crawling. Filmmaker Mercedes Bryce Morgan keeps things moving at an enjoyably frantic pace, slowing down just long enough to have Brian and Ivy connect while showing how Abramson's engineer resents that. I'm not sure that the anachronisms quite match up - I don't think cragislist was around until after car phones had evolved into flips - but the filmmakers are smart in how they use them, placing this far enough into an ambiguous past that Ivy doesn't have to be a perfect gynoid but where the film still doesn't come off as period. Ivy's actual design is a nifty blend of sleek and boxy plopped in the middle of sets that are both disturbing and sad.
It's a fun little short that gets at female frustration with men from an abstract place but does so in an extremely enjoyable, goofy way.
"Blocks"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
"Blocks" is just surreal enough that I keep wanting to assign some sort of meaning to it and then stepping back, thinking that's a little much although there's got to be something there from the way the film is built, and then wondering whether young mothers would say I'm reaching or not stretching far enough. It's got the feeling of being clever but is absolutely not smug about it.
That weird premise - mother-of-two Ashleigh (Claire Coffee) suddenly finds herself, shall we say, unlikely to ever run out of Legos - feels like the sort of thing filmmaker Bridget Moloney came upon by accident and then found just enough variations to fill a ten-minute short with, not building toward anything extra-crazy but not exactly repeating herself either. It's a nice job of milking a joke just enough, while also having eccentric stuff going on around it to keep the giggles coming and a fun performance from Claire Coffee, who is very much in line with Moloney's sense of humor.
It's agreeably absurd, doesn't wear out its welcome, and ends in a way that makes one feel like it has accomplished something, even if you're not quite sure what.
"Break Us"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
The part of me that loves crime movies and thrillers is kind of disappointed that Rioghnach Ni Ghrioghair didn't hit the double cross that I was looking for when I was looking for it, because there are bit where it certainly looks like Sophie (Danielle Galligan) is scoping out how she can not be caught on camera while the more apparently enthusiastic Mark (Gavid Drea) is. Of course, what she does is probably better, telling a story that evolves because of what's going on rather than just mechanically playing out what happened before the audience got there.
It's a fun play either way, as the pair launch a plot to rob a post office but find things immediately diverging from their plans, building the tension up a little and getting things rolling. I don't know that the main pair ever get a chance to show how well they work off each other for more than a second or two, but Galligan is especially good as she often has to make Sophie look like she's not connected with any of what Mark is doing but still have what she's feeling run across her face.
"Snowflakes"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
I'm not sure that the summary listed for this movie in its IMDB listing is necessarily something you can deduce for sure from the movie, in which a pair of Jamaicans (Sharon Duncan-Brewster & Cherrelle Skeete) who have been in the UK all their lives are being deported before an attempt to sedate the older, more agitated Esther seems to kick off an alarming series of events that turn the tables and then some.
As with a lot of shorts, I wonder a bit if filmmaker Faye Jackson (who wrote, produced, directed, and edited) initially saw this as a part of something bigger; the film poses a question but stops before it gets to any sort of logical endpoint, although I don't know that there's really a feature here, either. It's a lot of nifty pieces that form into a snapshot if not quite a story. It's an impressive snapshot, though, and the style is aces - there's a moment with two or three great moments coming rapid-fire and the big one leaves the audience shocked enough to carry through to the end, with what they seen on-screen reflecting that.
"Diabla"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
There are two separate moments in "Diabla" when I stop and wonder if it's supposed to indicate that what filmmaker Ashley George just showed the viewer was meant to be a premonition or something she's feared, and while I'm pretty sure it's not, I'm not quite sure what circling back around to that same shot or moment is accomplishing. Is it the last time Nayeli (Ruth Ramos) trusted the world around her, or a reminder that one still has to walk the same path even though something terrible has happened on it? I'm not quite sure.
In between, it's impressively strong. It feels strange to compliment a movie for how well it handles a rape scene, but it must be tremendously difficult as a filmmaker to make it appalling without actually stopping a short film that only has a little time to work with while not diminishing it or even making it exploitative. Part of why it works, I suspect, is because George and editor Diana Mata do an impressive cut to the doctor's office, with the visit ending on a whispered line delivered well enough to make one skip a breath. What comes after is a bit out there, but well-done.
Actress Ruth Ramos is in the middle of it, and she's pretty great; one gets a quick impression of her Nayeli and the of how what was done to her is huge but doesn't fundamentally change her - she may be warier, and a little harder, but she is still the same young woman underneath. It may take a great deal of support and help, but she never surrenders herself.
"The Rougarou"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
Huh. There are something like half a dozen short films and TV episodes about a "rougarou" in just the past few years. Is this some sort of new emerging urban legend or something that's been out there that I'd never heard of?
I genuinely thought it was just some sort of nonsense word being made up on the spot by a father recently released from jail (Jacob Tolano) trying to entertain his daughter Gerty (Victoria Dellamea) while explaining the scars he has picked up along the way. The pair are a nifty contrast, even if a sometimes alarming one - as much as Vin seems to genuinely adore his little girl, he's over-polished, slick, and not nearly as clever as he thinks he is compared to the smart, practical, if naive Gerty. It's great odd-couple energy that can't hold.
Still, it's fun to watch Gery see that there's potentially a monster in her neighborhood and start working to deal with it - Dellamea is a genuine delight - and then see how things play out as she confronts the reality of it. I like the direction filmmaker Lorraine Caffery takes with it, very much aware that Gerty's specific circumstances might not have this on the usual track.
"Narrow"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
Anna Chazelle's "Narrow" was probably not specifically inspired by A Quiet Place, but it's hard not to think of that feature when watching this short, with the scavenging for post-apocalyptic resources, paths you can't leave, and the like. It's science fiction/horror built around following the rules of its universe without really making the reason for them self-evident or building a mythology that makes them interesting. There's not even a metaphor that seems to work for it when all is said and done. Sure, at one point it looks like it will be about how exhausting staying on the path that someone else has left down is exhausting and often leads to dead-ends that force you to backtrack, but unfortunately, Chazelle doesn't wind up bringing her short somewhere that could actually get anything out of it.
It looks great, and Chazelle (who writes/produces/directs/stars) knows what she wants out of her own performance, but it feels empty at the end, even if it's intentionally making a point about how not following society's rules even as they exhaust you will have you destroyed. There's dark truth in that, but there's a point where making the in-story situation so arbitrary hurts the effort to do more.
"F For Freaks"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
At 30 minutes this is the longest of the shorts in the block but the one that feels like it can best be summed up with "ugh". To a certain extent, I get why filmmaker Sabine Ehrl does what she does, dragging Ursula Werner's wheezing, elderly Gabriela through scenes where she's not just absolutely unneeded, but a practical liability, and takes every opportunity to detour into cruelty; there's got to be no excuse, no way to offer sympathy to someone who is old and sick and maybe being exploited in a different way to the elves or gnomes (or whatever the little people being hunted are). She is not going to let her viewers miss her point.
Still, one wonders whether she could have maybe found a way to do this efficiently, because for all that she creates a striking, memorably ugliness, highlighted on occasion by pinpricks of wonder when the elves show up - Ehrl and her visual effects crew do a nifty job of putting them right on the line where a viewer can't be sure whether they're seeing an unusually small child or something unreal - it's just miserable enough to watch that I can see people bailing if it's the last piece in a collection (as the longest sometimes is) or getting unruly if it plays before a feature. It's the sort of movie where you can see the cynical realism and intent behind each decision, but while that is worthy, it's not necessarily worth enduring.
"Ils salievent" ("They Salivate")
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
Huh. That's a lot of fluid.
A lot of fluid.
I kind of don't have more than that. It's one of those shorts that I watch closely, because filmmaker Ariane Boukerche is obviously doing something very deliberate that has meaning to her, but where I watch all this drool happen and just don't connect it to anything. It just strikes me as weird images in sequence, with things escalating, but which never makes me think anything but "huh, that's weird".
Sanzaru
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
The opening scenes of Sanzaru are genuinely peculiar; most of the rest of the film is grounded and commonplace. In a lot of movies, that might serve as a reminder that there is some sort of dark force lurking in the background, but that's often the opposite of what filmmaker Xia Magnus is up to here. Larger-than-life evils are not always invented, but they may be easier to deal with than the more prosaic situations that they're used to explain.
Evelyn (Aina Dumlao) is far from home in Victoria, Texas; the Flilipina nurse provides in-home care to Dena Regan (Jayne Taini), a mostly-bedridden widow whose mind is starting to go. Daughter Susan (Tomorrow Shea) hired her; son Clem (Justin Arnold) is staying in his RV on the property, while Evelyn's nephew Amos (Jon Viktor Corpuz) is staying in Clem's old room, visiting while suspended from school in Dallas for fighting. It would be a slow, uncomfortable downward spiral, but Dena is panicking over a missing piece of jewelry, which she thinks Amos may have stolen; Amos is beginning to realize that his absent mother and aunt are keeping something from him, and Evelyn is starting to hear spooky noises from the intercom that lets her monitor Dena while doing other work in the house - at least, when the power isn't randomly cutting out. On top of that, the mail occasionally contains a letter for a Mr. Sanzaru, despite the mailman mentioning that Evelyn and "Mo" are the only Asians he can remember being in the area.
Though the audience is primed by the opening narration from Evelyn's dead mother and voices coming from the cemetery, they rapidly come to seem metaphorical. Not entirely - if the static and mysterious sounds from the intercom weren't enough to remind the audience that they were watching a horror movie, the glimpse she catches of old VHS tapes hidden in a room she hadn't realized was there in the preceding months certainly sound alarm bells for savvy viewers. More often, though, what haunting there is seems much more prosaic - Dena freezing, or suddenly seeming to be trapped in the past is the most obvious, but Mo, Clem, and Evelyn all have things that weigh them down. They don't need ghosts, even though there certainly seems to be one there.
Full review at eFilmCritic
I struggled a bit more with the "Born of Woman" package than I did last year; it felt like there were more things in it that I just didn't get, and even the ones I did seemed more complicated by how including them in a block of films from women often seems to imply more than just the simple fact that women directed them, so meaning feels just a bit further out of reach. Still, a lot of good stuff in there.
I also found that I really liked Sanzaru; it's got a lot of moments when it could go off in typical horror movie directions of shock and trippiness, and while it never runs from either, there's purpose to every bit rather than just red herrings. It's kind of art-house horror, the sort of thing I could see A24 picking up, although the polish is in different places.
Minor Premise
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
There's a stretch at the start of Minor Premise when I wondered how a movie shot during quarantine was already finished and on the festival circuit, so cut off did it seem from the rest of the world even when a character was supposed to be delivering a lecture. That proves not to be the case, and it's kind of a shame; working their way around that sort of logistical challenge, whether it was part of the on-screen action or not, would have made for a much more interesting movie than the rickety Jekyll-and-Jekyll-and-Hyde-and-Hyde thing that viewers get.
The man in question is Ethan Kochar (Sathya Sridharan), who had long worked with his father Paul (Nikolas Kontomanolis) on technology to read and edit memories, although that was a mess - the father tried to take credit for the son's work and while a working prototype was built, crucial information was missing for their intended project of editing consciousness. Months later, a building at the college is being dedicated to Paul Kochar, but department head Malcolm (Dana Ashbrook) is pushing the difficult Ethan for results and presentations to the board; Ethan's ex-girlfriend Alli (Paton Ashbrook) has also returned to the university, as established a figure as he is. It's the sort of situation that inspires rash self-experimentation.
At least, it does in movies; in real life, it would seem like a long shot that Ethan's basement laboratory, with no graduate students or other team members to check his work, or any sort of proper protocols that include an actual control group, would get any sort of funding, and even if some rich eccentric did bankroll him, it seems unlikely that he'd be able to publish any sort of peer-reviewed paper, no matter how lax the standards have grown, or have what he has created gain government approval for commercial or therapeutic use. This may seem like party-pooping, nit-picking complaints to make, but it's indicative of how much the filmmakers are going to sweat the rest of the details or have supposedly smart people approach problems later, and it's also frustratingly uncreative: The movie is made up of tropes that were silly when they first started getting used for simplicity's sake decades ago, and it's big "what-if" idea is basically phrenology with more modern terminology on top.
The really frustrating thing is, all of this isn't even in service of making a streamlined, thrilling narrative; director Eric Schultz and co-writers Justin Moretto and Thomas Torrey create a downright goofy scenario where different mental states cycle out at precisely timed intervals that just so happen to alight with the exact tops and bottoms of hours (dumb, but useful for the audience that has to keep track of it), but they don't use it very well on any scale. There's seldom any tension in how Ethan has to get some useful chunk of work done in six minutes, or how these passing hours are bringing him closer to some sort of collapse. They start subplots out of a sense of apparent obligation - Malcolm just has to knock on the door and discover Ethan isn't himself - and then do nothing with them, and the way Alli being there to assist is handled is just as frustrating as she literally walks in and out of things depending on whether they want Ethan to have someone to talk to or whether the story requires she be ambushed, despite it clearly not being a good idea to leave him on his own. She never particularly looks like this marathon effort is taking anything out of her, either.
Sathya Sridharan and Paton Ashbrook at least commit to what they're given, even if that's not much (especially in Sridharan's case, since he should be getting the chance to create ten memorable variations on Ethan but is never given the opportunity); they handle the commit to the pair being intelligent people who care for each other, in the specific way that Alli is going to be professional and friendly despite Ethan's arrogance having hurt her before, a chemistry between them that is not necessarily being pushed in the expected direction. And while Ethan's lab is silly in concept, it's a fun place to be an on-screen mad scientist from how the lighting is just the right combination of shadowy and fluorescent sterility, with blackboards, cobbled together computer systems, and a memory-reading barber's chair that matches the mood. If nothing else, Schultz and company know what they want this movie to look and feel like and nail that.
Unfortunately, that serves as a nice coat of paint on a movie that is dumb from its silly remote lectures to the one last twist that everybody knows is coming likely before the film even starts. It's a mess that could have created much more intrigue had it been just a little more smartly organized.
Originally published at eFilmCritic
"Come F*ck My Robot"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a better distillation of why women groan and say "why even are men?" than this movie's 12 minutes, where the range from villain to male hero is from an engineer (Ian Abramson) who creates a robot with a vagina and immediately starts to pimp it out (despite calling her "like a daughter") to a confused and generally decent young virgin (Nicholas Alexander) who decides he's not okay with this after meeting "Ivy" (voice of Catherine Tapling) but still has trouble with the fact that she is, shall we say, not conventionally attractive and not going to fall head over heels in love despite him doing one good thing. Nobody's perfect, but one might want that range to extend a little further in one direction.
That said, "Come F*ck My Robot" is still an entertaining, mostly-upbeat short film, with Alexander able to bring the audience on a pretty good emotional ride in that time while Tapling does nice voice work and Abramson makes his character awful while hugging the line between cartoonish and skin-crawling. Filmmaker Mercedes Bryce Morgan keeps things moving at an enjoyably frantic pace, slowing down just long enough to have Brian and Ivy connect while showing how Abramson's engineer resents that. I'm not sure that the anachronisms quite match up - I don't think cragislist was around until after car phones had evolved into flips - but the filmmakers are smart in how they use them, placing this far enough into an ambiguous past that Ivy doesn't have to be a perfect gynoid but where the film still doesn't come off as period. Ivy's actual design is a nifty blend of sleek and boxy plopped in the middle of sets that are both disturbing and sad.
It's a fun little short that gets at female frustration with men from an abstract place but does so in an extremely enjoyable, goofy way.
"Blocks"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
"Blocks" is just surreal enough that I keep wanting to assign some sort of meaning to it and then stepping back, thinking that's a little much although there's got to be something there from the way the film is built, and then wondering whether young mothers would say I'm reaching or not stretching far enough. It's got the feeling of being clever but is absolutely not smug about it.
That weird premise - mother-of-two Ashleigh (Claire Coffee) suddenly finds herself, shall we say, unlikely to ever run out of Legos - feels like the sort of thing filmmaker Bridget Moloney came upon by accident and then found just enough variations to fill a ten-minute short with, not building toward anything extra-crazy but not exactly repeating herself either. It's a nice job of milking a joke just enough, while also having eccentric stuff going on around it to keep the giggles coming and a fun performance from Claire Coffee, who is very much in line with Moloney's sense of humor.
It's agreeably absurd, doesn't wear out its welcome, and ends in a way that makes one feel like it has accomplished something, even if you're not quite sure what.
"Break Us"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
The part of me that loves crime movies and thrillers is kind of disappointed that Rioghnach Ni Ghrioghair didn't hit the double cross that I was looking for when I was looking for it, because there are bit where it certainly looks like Sophie (Danielle Galligan) is scoping out how she can not be caught on camera while the more apparently enthusiastic Mark (Gavid Drea) is. Of course, what she does is probably better, telling a story that evolves because of what's going on rather than just mechanically playing out what happened before the audience got there.
It's a fun play either way, as the pair launch a plot to rob a post office but find things immediately diverging from their plans, building the tension up a little and getting things rolling. I don't know that the main pair ever get a chance to show how well they work off each other for more than a second or two, but Galligan is especially good as she often has to make Sophie look like she's not connected with any of what Mark is doing but still have what she's feeling run across her face.
"Snowflakes"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
I'm not sure that the summary listed for this movie in its IMDB listing is necessarily something you can deduce for sure from the movie, in which a pair of Jamaicans (Sharon Duncan-Brewster & Cherrelle Skeete) who have been in the UK all their lives are being deported before an attempt to sedate the older, more agitated Esther seems to kick off an alarming series of events that turn the tables and then some.
As with a lot of shorts, I wonder a bit if filmmaker Faye Jackson (who wrote, produced, directed, and edited) initially saw this as a part of something bigger; the film poses a question but stops before it gets to any sort of logical endpoint, although I don't know that there's really a feature here, either. It's a lot of nifty pieces that form into a snapshot if not quite a story. It's an impressive snapshot, though, and the style is aces - there's a moment with two or three great moments coming rapid-fire and the big one leaves the audience shocked enough to carry through to the end, with what they seen on-screen reflecting that.
"Diabla"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
There are two separate moments in "Diabla" when I stop and wonder if it's supposed to indicate that what filmmaker Ashley George just showed the viewer was meant to be a premonition or something she's feared, and while I'm pretty sure it's not, I'm not quite sure what circling back around to that same shot or moment is accomplishing. Is it the last time Nayeli (Ruth Ramos) trusted the world around her, or a reminder that one still has to walk the same path even though something terrible has happened on it? I'm not quite sure.
In between, it's impressively strong. It feels strange to compliment a movie for how well it handles a rape scene, but it must be tremendously difficult as a filmmaker to make it appalling without actually stopping a short film that only has a little time to work with while not diminishing it or even making it exploitative. Part of why it works, I suspect, is because George and editor Diana Mata do an impressive cut to the doctor's office, with the visit ending on a whispered line delivered well enough to make one skip a breath. What comes after is a bit out there, but well-done.
Actress Ruth Ramos is in the middle of it, and she's pretty great; one gets a quick impression of her Nayeli and the of how what was done to her is huge but doesn't fundamentally change her - she may be warier, and a little harder, but she is still the same young woman underneath. It may take a great deal of support and help, but she never surrenders herself.
"The Rougarou"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
Huh. There are something like half a dozen short films and TV episodes about a "rougarou" in just the past few years. Is this some sort of new emerging urban legend or something that's been out there that I'd never heard of?
I genuinely thought it was just some sort of nonsense word being made up on the spot by a father recently released from jail (Jacob Tolano) trying to entertain his daughter Gerty (Victoria Dellamea) while explaining the scars he has picked up along the way. The pair are a nifty contrast, even if a sometimes alarming one - as much as Vin seems to genuinely adore his little girl, he's over-polished, slick, and not nearly as clever as he thinks he is compared to the smart, practical, if naive Gerty. It's great odd-couple energy that can't hold.
Still, it's fun to watch Gery see that there's potentially a monster in her neighborhood and start working to deal with it - Dellamea is a genuine delight - and then see how things play out as she confronts the reality of it. I like the direction filmmaker Lorraine Caffery takes with it, very much aware that Gerty's specific circumstances might not have this on the usual track.
"Narrow"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
Anna Chazelle's "Narrow" was probably not specifically inspired by A Quiet Place, but it's hard not to think of that feature when watching this short, with the scavenging for post-apocalyptic resources, paths you can't leave, and the like. It's science fiction/horror built around following the rules of its universe without really making the reason for them self-evident or building a mythology that makes them interesting. There's not even a metaphor that seems to work for it when all is said and done. Sure, at one point it looks like it will be about how exhausting staying on the path that someone else has left down is exhausting and often leads to dead-ends that force you to backtrack, but unfortunately, Chazelle doesn't wind up bringing her short somewhere that could actually get anything out of it.
It looks great, and Chazelle (who writes/produces/directs/stars) knows what she wants out of her own performance, but it feels empty at the end, even if it's intentionally making a point about how not following society's rules even as they exhaust you will have you destroyed. There's dark truth in that, but there's a point where making the in-story situation so arbitrary hurts the effort to do more.
"F For Freaks"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
At 30 minutes this is the longest of the shorts in the block but the one that feels like it can best be summed up with "ugh". To a certain extent, I get why filmmaker Sabine Ehrl does what she does, dragging Ursula Werner's wheezing, elderly Gabriela through scenes where she's not just absolutely unneeded, but a practical liability, and takes every opportunity to detour into cruelty; there's got to be no excuse, no way to offer sympathy to someone who is old and sick and maybe being exploited in a different way to the elves or gnomes (or whatever the little people being hunted are). She is not going to let her viewers miss her point.
Still, one wonders whether she could have maybe found a way to do this efficiently, because for all that she creates a striking, memorably ugliness, highlighted on occasion by pinpricks of wonder when the elves show up - Ehrl and her visual effects crew do a nifty job of putting them right on the line where a viewer can't be sure whether they're seeing an unusually small child or something unreal - it's just miserable enough to watch that I can see people bailing if it's the last piece in a collection (as the longest sometimes is) or getting unruly if it plays before a feature. It's the sort of movie where you can see the cynical realism and intent behind each decision, but while that is worthy, it's not necessarily worth enduring.
"Ils salievent" ("They Salivate")
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival: Born of Woman 2020, Vimeo via Roku)
Huh. That's a lot of fluid.
A lot of fluid.
I kind of don't have more than that. It's one of those shorts that I watch closely, because filmmaker Ariane Boukerche is obviously doing something very deliberate that has meaning to her, but where I watch all this drool happen and just don't connect it to anything. It just strikes me as weird images in sequence, with things escalating, but which never makes me think anything but "huh, that's weird".
Sanzaru
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
The opening scenes of Sanzaru are genuinely peculiar; most of the rest of the film is grounded and commonplace. In a lot of movies, that might serve as a reminder that there is some sort of dark force lurking in the background, but that's often the opposite of what filmmaker Xia Magnus is up to here. Larger-than-life evils are not always invented, but they may be easier to deal with than the more prosaic situations that they're used to explain.
Evelyn (Aina Dumlao) is far from home in Victoria, Texas; the Flilipina nurse provides in-home care to Dena Regan (Jayne Taini), a mostly-bedridden widow whose mind is starting to go. Daughter Susan (Tomorrow Shea) hired her; son Clem (Justin Arnold) is staying in his RV on the property, while Evelyn's nephew Amos (Jon Viktor Corpuz) is staying in Clem's old room, visiting while suspended from school in Dallas for fighting. It would be a slow, uncomfortable downward spiral, but Dena is panicking over a missing piece of jewelry, which she thinks Amos may have stolen; Amos is beginning to realize that his absent mother and aunt are keeping something from him, and Evelyn is starting to hear spooky noises from the intercom that lets her monitor Dena while doing other work in the house - at least, when the power isn't randomly cutting out. On top of that, the mail occasionally contains a letter for a Mr. Sanzaru, despite the mailman mentioning that Evelyn and "Mo" are the only Asians he can remember being in the area.
Though the audience is primed by the opening narration from Evelyn's dead mother and voices coming from the cemetery, they rapidly come to seem metaphorical. Not entirely - if the static and mysterious sounds from the intercom weren't enough to remind the audience that they were watching a horror movie, the glimpse she catches of old VHS tapes hidden in a room she hadn't realized was there in the preceding months certainly sound alarm bells for savvy viewers. More often, though, what haunting there is seems much more prosaic - Dena freezing, or suddenly seeming to be trapped in the past is the most obvious, but Mo, Clem, and Evelyn all have things that weigh them down. They don't need ghosts, even though there certainly seems to be one there.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Fantasia 2020.09: The Block Island Sound
Got two more from Friday maybe coming later because I didn't get my screener requests in before folks apparently went home for the weekend, so maybe we'll call that 2020.09.5 or something.
I really liked this one, though it's kind of funny that I followed the links back and saw that I apparently liked the filmmakers' first feature eight years ago but it hasn't been hugely "sticky". I can't remember whether it played the Boston area or not, but I hope this one does; it's a solid little movie, and the filmmakers are somewhat local, enough that it's got a real New England feel to it even if a fair amount was shot in Los Angeles. This sort of New England beach town is my favorite sort of non-city place, and incidentally one of the best places to set a movie.
The Block Island Sound
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
I don't know that anybody will be going to movies to just see whatever is playing next for a while, or if this will have the sort of distribution where it's an option, but I love the idea that someone might buy a ticket for The Block Island Sound, figuring it's some sort of rock and roll story, only to discover it's a horror movie, maybe about some sort of subsonic noise that drives men mad. It's none of that, but it is a pretty darn nifty little thriller that makes the most of what it's got.
It opens with a disoriented man (Neville Archambault) coming to on his boat while out to sea, and it turns out that Tom's spells, which only his son Harry (Chris Sheffield) knows about, aren't the only strange thing happening on and around Block Island; Harry's EPA scientist sister has been called out to the island to investigate an ongoing mass die-off of fish, with over nine tons having washed up on West Beach so far. She arrives with co-worker Paul (Ryan O'Flanagan) and daughter Emily (Matilda Lawler) in tow. Soon Tom disappears, and while investigating, Harry finds some sort of strange radio interference in the spot where his boat was found.
The McManus Brothers, who wrote and directed, had their last big-screen release eight years ago with Funeral Kings, and if this movie was nothing more than a story of a sometimes-contentious family dealing with the father's decay, it would be a worthy follow-up to that movie. Neville Archambault switches between friendly, cantankerous, and out of it in a way that would feel natural if there wasn't this other set of circumstances but also fits in nicely that way. Michaela McManus and Chris Sheffield make the relationship between Audry and Harry as something that's been worn kind of thin over time, and it adjusts in just the right way when Heidi Niedermeyer enters the picture as a second sister. The family is easy to relate to but also feels specific to this particular sort of community, where you're either stuck with each other or cut off, with the place overwhelmed by outsiders in the summer or a little too quiet during the off-season.
Full review at eFilmCritic
I really liked this one, though it's kind of funny that I followed the links back and saw that I apparently liked the filmmakers' first feature eight years ago but it hasn't been hugely "sticky". I can't remember whether it played the Boston area or not, but I hope this one does; it's a solid little movie, and the filmmakers are somewhat local, enough that it's got a real New England feel to it even if a fair amount was shot in Los Angeles. This sort of New England beach town is my favorite sort of non-city place, and incidentally one of the best places to set a movie.
The Block Island Sound
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
I don't know that anybody will be going to movies to just see whatever is playing next for a while, or if this will have the sort of distribution where it's an option, but I love the idea that someone might buy a ticket for The Block Island Sound, figuring it's some sort of rock and roll story, only to discover it's a horror movie, maybe about some sort of subsonic noise that drives men mad. It's none of that, but it is a pretty darn nifty little thriller that makes the most of what it's got.
It opens with a disoriented man (Neville Archambault) coming to on his boat while out to sea, and it turns out that Tom's spells, which only his son Harry (Chris Sheffield) knows about, aren't the only strange thing happening on and around Block Island; Harry's EPA scientist sister has been called out to the island to investigate an ongoing mass die-off of fish, with over nine tons having washed up on West Beach so far. She arrives with co-worker Paul (Ryan O'Flanagan) and daughter Emily (Matilda Lawler) in tow. Soon Tom disappears, and while investigating, Harry finds some sort of strange radio interference in the spot where his boat was found.
The McManus Brothers, who wrote and directed, had their last big-screen release eight years ago with Funeral Kings, and if this movie was nothing more than a story of a sometimes-contentious family dealing with the father's decay, it would be a worthy follow-up to that movie. Neville Archambault switches between friendly, cantankerous, and out of it in a way that would feel natural if there wasn't this other set of circumstances but also fits in nicely that way. Michaela McManus and Chris Sheffield make the relationship between Audry and Harry as something that's been worn kind of thin over time, and it adjusts in just the right way when Heidi Niedermeyer enters the picture as a second sister. The family is easy to relate to but also feels specific to this particular sort of community, where you're either stuck with each other or cut off, with the place overwhelmed by outsiders in the summer or a little too quiet during the off-season.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Fantasia 2020.08: Alone and A Mermaid in Paris
Only two movies with embargo dates on Thursday, so at least I haven't fallen much further behind in the last day. I'm kind of starting to feel the festival grind that I occasionally hear people talk about (but which I've seldom felt at Fantasia), and it's really making me miss the in-person experience, where even if I feel like I'm falling behind, there's another movie to get to and another and while it's nice that I'll have no more reviews to do at the end, I really miss the grind.
Anyway! Remember how earlier in the summer there were stories going around about people watching movies on the Seine? That movie was A Mermaid in Paris, and it's had an interesting year, opening up in March, seeing theaters close a week later, coming back when they re-opened in July, and if Box Office Mojo is to be believed, making pretty good coin in South Korea when it opened there. I wonder if it will make it here; I remember hearing about it enough early in the year to figure it had the profile, but I kind of don't know what the landscape is going to look like over the next few months with some theaters open while others running virtually and it likely being hard for distributors to supply a film to both. It's a bummer that I didn't love it more, but the female lead reminds me of young Julie Delpy and who doesn't love that?
Alone
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
There's a note at the end of the credits for Alone that states it was based upon another movie, and there's a temptation to wonder if anybody really would have known that this was adapted from any specific one of the couple thousand movies with a similar setup in Sweden or elsewhere. It and Försvunnen share the same screenwriter, so good on him getting paid twice for the frame of a decent, solidly-made thriller that wouldn't be particularly original even if it weren't a remake, but gets the job done.
It opens with Jessica (Jules Willcox) packing her stuff in a U-Haul and getting ready to move; not exactly sneaking out of town but not saying any long goodbyes; it's been a rough year. There's a little bit of weirdness on the road with an SUV that is going way below the speed limit and then riding her tail after she's able to pass. The same car shows up in the motel parking lot that night, with its driver (Marc Menchaca) coming up to apologize, which is kind of weird, but then she sees him broken down on the road, and then…
Well, let's just say that a guy doesn't have a room in his cellar with bars on the windows that locks from the outside if he hasn't done this before, and while that could be formidable, the film does not revel in Jessica's helplessness - it establishes the seriousness of the situation with Jules Willcox capturing how this situation is almost paralyzingly frightening, but the filmmakers quickly move on to the next stage of things. It's something the film does well throughout, so that even in the moments when Jessica has a brief advantage or chance to put some distance between her and her abductor, there's often a lingering force that threatens to freeze her even beyond the practical things that slow her down.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Une sirène à Paris (A Mermaid in Paris)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
France doesn't quite produce a steady stream of movies like A Mermaid in Paris, but probably more than wind up making it to even boutique theaters in the United States. If it feels like there used to be more, when Jean-Pierre Jeunet was working steadily with his movies getting world-wide distribution and some adventurous distributors picking up both animated and live-action movies that had one foot in the surreal, that's likely because it's not easy, with most of them winding up like Mermaid - often on the wrong side of the border between cute and cutesy, featuring a French sense of humor that is hard to translate, and so focused on whimsy that it's light on everything else. It's the sort of film one looks at and wants to love only to find that doing so is a bit harder than it looks.
Taking place after a series of 2016 floods that are well-remembered in France but maybe not so much in the rest of the world, it initially introduces Gaspard Snow (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who spends his evenings singing in the semi-secret below-decks section of Flowerburger, the floating restaurant started by his grandmother and currently owned by his aging father (Tchéky Karyo), who has decided to sell despite the nostalgic Gaspard's objection. A couple regulars have disappeared lately, walking straight into the Seine because of some sort of siren call. Apparently, the floods have washed an injured mermaid up the river, whom Gaspard finds and tries to rescue. When she awakes in Gaspard's bathtub, Lula (Marilyn Lima) is shocked to see that he is apparently immune to her song, which generally causes men to fall so deeply in love with her that their hearts explode, and what neither realize is that while he tried to bring her to a hospital the previous night, her song was overheard by a young doctor (Alexis Michalik), and his scientist wife Milena (Romane Bohringer) is determine to discover what happened - and perhaps take revenge.
Director Mathias Malzieu is actually best known as a rock star, though he also became an author before he started adapting his stories into films, and Mermaid is a multimedia project as well, with both an album and a book coming out more or less simultaneously. I wonder a bit if it might work out better as an album where he can hit an emotional theme or event, play with it for a few minutes and not really worry too much about the nuts and bolts of how it fits together. The story here makes a certain amount of sense, but Malzieu and co-writer Stéphane Landowski cut a fair amount of corners, telling the audience about Gaspard's heartbreak but seldom showing it affecting his personality, or having him seemingly betray no curiosity about having met an actual mermaid until very late. That Lula has killed is something that the film seldom reckons with, other than it being an easy excuse to make Milena an antagonist, and while there's some interesting stuff going on with Lula never having been in a situation where she could love before and Gaspard's hardened heart, it's a metaphor that Malzieu and Landowski thoroughly lose track and control of by the end of the film..
Full review at eFilmCritic
Anyway! Remember how earlier in the summer there were stories going around about people watching movies on the Seine? That movie was A Mermaid in Paris, and it's had an interesting year, opening up in March, seeing theaters close a week later, coming back when they re-opened in July, and if Box Office Mojo is to be believed, making pretty good coin in South Korea when it opened there. I wonder if it will make it here; I remember hearing about it enough early in the year to figure it had the profile, but I kind of don't know what the landscape is going to look like over the next few months with some theaters open while others running virtually and it likely being hard for distributors to supply a film to both. It's a bummer that I didn't love it more, but the female lead reminds me of young Julie Delpy and who doesn't love that?
Alone
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
There's a note at the end of the credits for Alone that states it was based upon another movie, and there's a temptation to wonder if anybody really would have known that this was adapted from any specific one of the couple thousand movies with a similar setup in Sweden or elsewhere. It and Försvunnen share the same screenwriter, so good on him getting paid twice for the frame of a decent, solidly-made thriller that wouldn't be particularly original even if it weren't a remake, but gets the job done.
It opens with Jessica (Jules Willcox) packing her stuff in a U-Haul and getting ready to move; not exactly sneaking out of town but not saying any long goodbyes; it's been a rough year. There's a little bit of weirdness on the road with an SUV that is going way below the speed limit and then riding her tail after she's able to pass. The same car shows up in the motel parking lot that night, with its driver (Marc Menchaca) coming up to apologize, which is kind of weird, but then she sees him broken down on the road, and then…
Well, let's just say that a guy doesn't have a room in his cellar with bars on the windows that locks from the outside if he hasn't done this before, and while that could be formidable, the film does not revel in Jessica's helplessness - it establishes the seriousness of the situation with Jules Willcox capturing how this situation is almost paralyzingly frightening, but the filmmakers quickly move on to the next stage of things. It's something the film does well throughout, so that even in the moments when Jessica has a brief advantage or chance to put some distance between her and her abductor, there's often a lingering force that threatens to freeze her even beyond the practical things that slow her down.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Une sirène à Paris (A Mermaid in Paris)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
France doesn't quite produce a steady stream of movies like A Mermaid in Paris, but probably more than wind up making it to even boutique theaters in the United States. If it feels like there used to be more, when Jean-Pierre Jeunet was working steadily with his movies getting world-wide distribution and some adventurous distributors picking up both animated and live-action movies that had one foot in the surreal, that's likely because it's not easy, with most of them winding up like Mermaid - often on the wrong side of the border between cute and cutesy, featuring a French sense of humor that is hard to translate, and so focused on whimsy that it's light on everything else. It's the sort of film one looks at and wants to love only to find that doing so is a bit harder than it looks.
Taking place after a series of 2016 floods that are well-remembered in France but maybe not so much in the rest of the world, it initially introduces Gaspard Snow (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who spends his evenings singing in the semi-secret below-decks section of Flowerburger, the floating restaurant started by his grandmother and currently owned by his aging father (Tchéky Karyo), who has decided to sell despite the nostalgic Gaspard's objection. A couple regulars have disappeared lately, walking straight into the Seine because of some sort of siren call. Apparently, the floods have washed an injured mermaid up the river, whom Gaspard finds and tries to rescue. When she awakes in Gaspard's bathtub, Lula (Marilyn Lima) is shocked to see that he is apparently immune to her song, which generally causes men to fall so deeply in love with her that their hearts explode, and what neither realize is that while he tried to bring her to a hospital the previous night, her song was overheard by a young doctor (Alexis Michalik), and his scientist wife Milena (Romane Bohringer) is determine to discover what happened - and perhaps take revenge.
Director Mathias Malzieu is actually best known as a rock star, though he also became an author before he started adapting his stories into films, and Mermaid is a multimedia project as well, with both an album and a book coming out more or less simultaneously. I wonder a bit if it might work out better as an album where he can hit an emotional theme or event, play with it for a few minutes and not really worry too much about the nuts and bolts of how it fits together. The story here makes a certain amount of sense, but Malzieu and co-writer Stéphane Landowski cut a fair amount of corners, telling the audience about Gaspard's heartbreak but seldom showing it affecting his personality, or having him seemingly betray no curiosity about having met an actual mermaid until very late. That Lula has killed is something that the film seldom reckons with, other than it being an easy excuse to make Milena an antagonist, and while there's some interesting stuff going on with Lula never having been in a situation where she could love before and Gaspard's hardened heart, it's a metaphor that Malzieu and Landowski thoroughly lose track and control of by the end of the film..
Full review at eFilmCritic
Friday, August 28, 2020
Fantasia 2020.07: Bleed with Me, Kriya, and Kakegurui
Been a while since I had one of those "can't write during the day but let's keep going until 2am" days, but that's where I was with Wednesday's movies, which had me behind anyway because I didn't get the Kakegurui link until late fairly late. Ah, well, there are some short days coming up, and maybe I won't overlap with NYAFF quite so much.
On the other hand, this does kind of get me back on the planned "watch movies during the day, write while watching baseball at night" schedule!
Bleed with Me
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
I reevaluate movies between watch and review all the time, often finding something that makes it at least a little more interesting with a little thought. For Bleed with Me, it got me from frustration with the ending to "yeah, well, I guess", which is good, because for most of the running time, I was pretty fond of this tight little thriller. I still am, actually, and I suspect those less bothered by certain plot devices will like it a whole lot.
It opens with Rowan (Lee Marshall) asleep in the back seat of a station wagon. She's not actually still a teenager, but kind of looks young and vulnerable. She's traveling to a cabin belonging to the family of co-worker Emily (Lauren Beatty) along with Emily's boyfriend Brendan (Aris Tyros). Brendan is initially none too thrilled about having a third wheel along, but Emily insisted, and he's been a pretty good boyfriend, helping out a lot as Emily recovered from an accident six months ago that still has her walking with a limp. It's looking like the under-the-weather Rowan might be spending a lot of the time in bed, and she's starting to suspect that Emily may be to blame, using the leftover painkillers she casually mentioned to keep her sedated.
Why? Well, more and more cuts keep appearing on her arm, and Rowan has spotted Emily with containers of blood when she thought Rowan couldn't see. Though Rowan doesn't have anyone she can confide it without sounding insane, there's a certain strange logic to it - Emily has a sort of strange, detached way about her, and Rowan had the first couple scars before she got there, so even if a body was found, it would be pretty easy to say there was no foul play. Writer/director Amelia Moses does a nice job of giving the audience time to construct this alongside Rowan without the customary need to stop and say things out loud, go back and forth about how it sounds silly, and the like. She just trusts the viewer to get in and go with it, rather than stepping forward and back to make sure one understands just exactly how unlikely it is.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Kriya
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
As I watched Kriya, I was somewhat reassured that the main character spends much of the movie in the same place I was as an audience member - extremely uncertain whether he was in the middle of something weird and creepy or just culturally outside his own experience. It's the sort of movie where that could very easily be misinterpreted, especially for someone for whom it is much further from the usual, but instead it's especially effective (although it does make me wonder how all the movies with various bits of Christian weirdness play to members of other cultures).
It opens in a club, where Neel (Noble Luke) and Sitara (Navjot Randhawa) catch each other's eyes. As they make out in Neel's car after his gig as DJ is done, Sitara feels uncomfortable about going further there, so they drive to her place - an unexpectedly large mansion - only to find that Sitara's father is laid out in the living room, apparently breathing his last, surrounded by her younger sister Sara (Kanak Bhardwaj), their mother Tara Devi (Avantika Akerkar), and a Panditji or wise man (Sudhanva Deshpande), nurse Magdali (Anuradha Majumder) off to the side. Neel isn't sure he should be there, and the mother agrees, but he also doesn't want to leave the distraught Sitara. Something feels badly off to him - shouldn't a family with this grand house have more friends and family here - but maybe that's just the unsettled feelings he has regarding the deaths of his own parents.
As is often the case with films this steeped in the specifics of another's culture, I'd be genuinely interested to hear from Hindus just how fast and loose this film plays with various traditions, although writer/director Sidharth Srinivasan has seemingly taken pains to note where this this "black funeral" diverges from the norm in order to invoke dark magic and attempts to break a curse through unholy means. Whatever the case may be, it does a really terrific job of placing the audience in Neel's place without making him a complete everyman placeholder. He's not in every scene, but it's close, and Noble Luke does an impressive slow-burn freakout as the film goes on. For a large chunk of the movie, there's almost an awareness that his situation could be darkly funny under slightly different circumstances, which Srinivasan and Luke are able to make things creepier - every time Neel tries to use the social awkwardness to escape, he gets pulled in a little deeper and finds himself a little more disturbed.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Eiga: Kakegurui
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
You do not actually need to have seen the 13 episodes of the Kakegurui television series to follow this film, which stars the same cast and appears to pick up where they leave off - there's a character whose primary purpose seems to be to get a new viewer up to speed - but it's probably useful to know that this is not a completely stand-alone film in order to temper one's expectations. There is some fairly inspired material here, but the audience can't get the entire picture.
As journalism club member Kyu Nitobe (Akira Onodera) informs us latecomers over the first fifteen minutes, Hyakkoah Academy is an elite school for children of the super-rich, but instead of focusing on academics or athletics, it is dedicated to gambling, under the premise that knowing when and how to bet and win big is the most important skill in business. Yumeka Jabami (Minami Hamabe) is a recent transfer student but one who has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of the school's most skilled and compulsive gamblers, quite possibly a rival to Student Council President Kiari Momobami (Elaiza Ikeda) herself. There are other threats to the Council's power - a group of students who have renounced gambling has formed The Village in an abandoned school building, with Jueri Arukibi (Haruka Fukuhara) its most public officer and Amane Murasame (Hio Miyazawa), said to have once bested Momobami herself, the mysterious leader; less high-minded vandals led by Tomo Inuhachi (Mariko Ito) destroying gaming tables - so she decides to hold a special election, in which students must gamble to vote and candidates play in pairs. Super-rich brat Itsuki Sumeragi (Ruka Matsuda) tries to recruit Yumeko to her team, but she decides to work with high-strung boyfriend Ryota Suzui (Mahiro Takasugi), while her friend Meari Saotome (Aoi Morikawa) teams with a Villager who still likes gambling a lot, Jun Kiwatari (Yuma Yamoto), while Jueri and Tomo form another team - and Murasame chooses to sit the election out.
That is a lot of characters, and it's pretty clear that there could have been even more, with the student council having some pretty colorful folks on the bench, a bunch of people Yumeko has defeated name-checked, and Nitobe kind of hanging around on the sidelines once his fifteen minutes or so of intense exposition at the start is done. On the other side, fans of the show can probably look through that description and spot the "guest star" pretty quickly. It makes that first stretch frantic and maybe dizzying for the newbies while likely being something the fans will fast-forward through, one of the busiest "previously on…" packages ever assembled. It's fairly effective for establishing the players, but leaves the whole set-up as something one definitely shouldn't examine too closely - is there any sort of faculty at this school, or classes, or is it all kind of self-directed, like Nitobe doing a sort of school paper thing? Why do the kids in The Village care about being expelled if they've got no interest in participating in the activity that is the school's reason for being? Just what sort of power do the "Life Plan" documents being thrown around have outside the academy's gates? There are some genuinely clever ideas at work here - the idea that captains of industry are being trained to treat the economy like a game rather than learn practical skills is both sociopathic and bitingly on-point satire, and there's a sort of lesson to how the game which takes up most of the film's second half requires a balance of skill and personal charisma - but, wow, does the premise as presented here have some big gaps to be filled in!
Full review at eFilmCritic
On the other hand, this does kind of get me back on the planned "watch movies during the day, write while watching baseball at night" schedule!
Bleed with Me
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
I reevaluate movies between watch and review all the time, often finding something that makes it at least a little more interesting with a little thought. For Bleed with Me, it got me from frustration with the ending to "yeah, well, I guess", which is good, because for most of the running time, I was pretty fond of this tight little thriller. I still am, actually, and I suspect those less bothered by certain plot devices will like it a whole lot.
It opens with Rowan (Lee Marshall) asleep in the back seat of a station wagon. She's not actually still a teenager, but kind of looks young and vulnerable. She's traveling to a cabin belonging to the family of co-worker Emily (Lauren Beatty) along with Emily's boyfriend Brendan (Aris Tyros). Brendan is initially none too thrilled about having a third wheel along, but Emily insisted, and he's been a pretty good boyfriend, helping out a lot as Emily recovered from an accident six months ago that still has her walking with a limp. It's looking like the under-the-weather Rowan might be spending a lot of the time in bed, and she's starting to suspect that Emily may be to blame, using the leftover painkillers she casually mentioned to keep her sedated.
Why? Well, more and more cuts keep appearing on her arm, and Rowan has spotted Emily with containers of blood when she thought Rowan couldn't see. Though Rowan doesn't have anyone she can confide it without sounding insane, there's a certain strange logic to it - Emily has a sort of strange, detached way about her, and Rowan had the first couple scars before she got there, so even if a body was found, it would be pretty easy to say there was no foul play. Writer/director Amelia Moses does a nice job of giving the audience time to construct this alongside Rowan without the customary need to stop and say things out loud, go back and forth about how it sounds silly, and the like. She just trusts the viewer to get in and go with it, rather than stepping forward and back to make sure one understands just exactly how unlikely it is.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Kriya
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
As I watched Kriya, I was somewhat reassured that the main character spends much of the movie in the same place I was as an audience member - extremely uncertain whether he was in the middle of something weird and creepy or just culturally outside his own experience. It's the sort of movie where that could very easily be misinterpreted, especially for someone for whom it is much further from the usual, but instead it's especially effective (although it does make me wonder how all the movies with various bits of Christian weirdness play to members of other cultures).
It opens in a club, where Neel (Noble Luke) and Sitara (Navjot Randhawa) catch each other's eyes. As they make out in Neel's car after his gig as DJ is done, Sitara feels uncomfortable about going further there, so they drive to her place - an unexpectedly large mansion - only to find that Sitara's father is laid out in the living room, apparently breathing his last, surrounded by her younger sister Sara (Kanak Bhardwaj), their mother Tara Devi (Avantika Akerkar), and a Panditji or wise man (Sudhanva Deshpande), nurse Magdali (Anuradha Majumder) off to the side. Neel isn't sure he should be there, and the mother agrees, but he also doesn't want to leave the distraught Sitara. Something feels badly off to him - shouldn't a family with this grand house have more friends and family here - but maybe that's just the unsettled feelings he has regarding the deaths of his own parents.
As is often the case with films this steeped in the specifics of another's culture, I'd be genuinely interested to hear from Hindus just how fast and loose this film plays with various traditions, although writer/director Sidharth Srinivasan has seemingly taken pains to note where this this "black funeral" diverges from the norm in order to invoke dark magic and attempts to break a curse through unholy means. Whatever the case may be, it does a really terrific job of placing the audience in Neel's place without making him a complete everyman placeholder. He's not in every scene, but it's close, and Noble Luke does an impressive slow-burn freakout as the film goes on. For a large chunk of the movie, there's almost an awareness that his situation could be darkly funny under slightly different circumstances, which Srinivasan and Luke are able to make things creepier - every time Neel tries to use the social awkwardness to escape, he gets pulled in a little deeper and finds himself a little more disturbed.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Eiga: Kakegurui
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
You do not actually need to have seen the 13 episodes of the Kakegurui television series to follow this film, which stars the same cast and appears to pick up where they leave off - there's a character whose primary purpose seems to be to get a new viewer up to speed - but it's probably useful to know that this is not a completely stand-alone film in order to temper one's expectations. There is some fairly inspired material here, but the audience can't get the entire picture.
As journalism club member Kyu Nitobe (Akira Onodera) informs us latecomers over the first fifteen minutes, Hyakkoah Academy is an elite school for children of the super-rich, but instead of focusing on academics or athletics, it is dedicated to gambling, under the premise that knowing when and how to bet and win big is the most important skill in business. Yumeka Jabami (Minami Hamabe) is a recent transfer student but one who has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of the school's most skilled and compulsive gamblers, quite possibly a rival to Student Council President Kiari Momobami (Elaiza Ikeda) herself. There are other threats to the Council's power - a group of students who have renounced gambling has formed The Village in an abandoned school building, with Jueri Arukibi (Haruka Fukuhara) its most public officer and Amane Murasame (Hio Miyazawa), said to have once bested Momobami herself, the mysterious leader; less high-minded vandals led by Tomo Inuhachi (Mariko Ito) destroying gaming tables - so she decides to hold a special election, in which students must gamble to vote and candidates play in pairs. Super-rich brat Itsuki Sumeragi (Ruka Matsuda) tries to recruit Yumeko to her team, but she decides to work with high-strung boyfriend Ryota Suzui (Mahiro Takasugi), while her friend Meari Saotome (Aoi Morikawa) teams with a Villager who still likes gambling a lot, Jun Kiwatari (Yuma Yamoto), while Jueri and Tomo form another team - and Murasame chooses to sit the election out.
That is a lot of characters, and it's pretty clear that there could have been even more, with the student council having some pretty colorful folks on the bench, a bunch of people Yumeko has defeated name-checked, and Nitobe kind of hanging around on the sidelines once his fifteen minutes or so of intense exposition at the start is done. On the other side, fans of the show can probably look through that description and spot the "guest star" pretty quickly. It makes that first stretch frantic and maybe dizzying for the newbies while likely being something the fans will fast-forward through, one of the busiest "previously on…" packages ever assembled. It's fairly effective for establishing the players, but leaves the whole set-up as something one definitely shouldn't examine too closely - is there any sort of faculty at this school, or classes, or is it all kind of self-directed, like Nitobe doing a sort of school paper thing? Why do the kids in The Village care about being expelled if they've got no interest in participating in the activity that is the school's reason for being? Just what sort of power do the "Life Plan" documents being thrown around have outside the academy's gates? There are some genuinely clever ideas at work here - the idea that captains of industry are being trained to treat the economy like a game rather than learn practical skills is both sociopathic and bitingly on-point satire, and there's a sort of lesson to how the game which takes up most of the film's second half requires a balance of skill and personal charisma - but, wow, does the premise as presented here have some big gaps to be filled in!
Full review at eFilmCritic
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Fantasia 2020.06: Unearth & Tezuka's Barbara
Not to argue marketing with film-industry professionals, but you put "a fracking horror movie" on your poster, I'm expecting something a little different than I got with Unearth, whether it's something a little tongue-in-cheek or something where the horror is a little more related to the subject matter, as with, say, Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter. I kind of liked the "dying farming town" material here, but it's drier than the tagline suggests and the movie takes a while to get there.
Still, I did enjoy Tezuka's Barbara a lot, especially since it felt like the director more or less disappeared after I saw Black Kiss at Fantasia 14 years ago (under the title "Syncronicity") and really liking it; I hoped he hadn't fallen away from cinema or been unable to escape his father's shadow. Macoto Tezka has seemed to do a fair amount for his father's estate since then, but this really does feel like his thing as well.
I'm actually mildly surprised I don't have a copy of Barbara on my shelf; I remember seeing it come out but as manga and graphic novels pile up, I sort of go on-again and off-again where buying Osamu Tezuka stuff is concerned. There's so much of it, and it's amazing to me that he died relatively young at 60, because his output is immense, and extends to television and film production as well as manga. The man was legitimately a giant.
Falling a bit behind, in part because I had a non-festival detour yesterday, but I hope to catch up tomorrow.
Unearth
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
There's a pretty good movie to be found in Unearth, but I am reasonably sure that it is not a horror movie, and trying to make this film into one does it a disservice. That's not a knock on horror as a genre or even saying that it's inappropriate for this setting; it's saying that the sudden turn in this movie's last act means that the filmmakers can't make the most of either what came before or the potential of what happens after.
It focuses on two neighbors in the small town of Silverthorn, Pennsylvania. Tom Dolan (P.J. Marshall) has recently lost his father Joe, who ran the family farm with Tom's mother Kathryn (Adrienne Barbeau). He has no children of his own, but wife Aubrey (Monica Wyche) has a daughter, Christina (Allison McAtee), who had been largely responsible for looking after Joe in his decline, learning a great deal about the farm, although her passion is photography. George Lomack (Marc Blucas) is a mechanic, though he inherited a fair amount of farmland from his late wife. His older daughter Heather (Rachel McKeon) is at college on scholarship, while younger daughter Kim (Brooke Sorenson) is returning to highschool after having had a baby. Both are seeing their fortunes squeezed - the Dolans had to sell off the cattle for their dairy operations, and locals are going to a chain for their inspections - and while Kathryn thinks they should merge their land, a natural gas exploration firm has come with offers.
Unearth is 94 minutes long and it is an hour in before there's any hint of something supernatural or paranormal going on, but that is not a particular weakness. Though many films about farming communities or families in decline focus on how small farms are squeezed by big business - and the script certainly makes reference to that - writers Kelsey Goldberg and John C. Lyons have a stronger focus on how they can crumble from the inside, as generations regard each other with suspicion and disagree about how to handle challenges they don't understand. Kathryn doesn't trust her son to handle her husband's legacy, George and Tom cannot adapt to a changing world, and the young women are sensible but lack the resources to venture out on their own. Directors Lyons and Dorota Swies do fine work in steadily operating the crank that grinds these people down, and how they are caught in a process that they were not given the tools to manage.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Barubora (Tezuka's Barbara)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
After some nifty animated titles, Tezuka's Barbara opens with a gorgeous blue-tinged view of Tokyo courtesy of Christopher Doyle, a jazzy soundtrack from Ichiko Hashimoto, and a great noirish bit of narration that screenwriter Hisako Kurosawa may or may not have brought over straight from manga/anime legend Osamu Tezuka's original work. It's an incredibly promising start for a film that winds up a bit all over the place, but at least that seems to be in the tradition of the original graphic novel and maybe this handles it a bit better.
"A woman like the city's excrement of millions it swallowed and digested - that was Barbara." She's a homeless girl that writer Yosuke Mikura (Goro Inagaki) encounters on the way home one evening, taking an interest as she drunkenly recites poetry and says she's heard of him, although she's blunt about how the novels that have made him rich are simple, middlebrow literature at best. He kicks her out after she gets mouthier and starts drinking his 50-year-old single malt, but soon encounters her again. He should perhaps be wary - as he grows more obsessed, Barbara (Fumi Nikaido) seems to supernaturally eliminate those she considers threats, and he's not the first person to have seen her as a muse.
Though manga-ka Osamu Tezuka created a number of more adult-skewing works, he is likely best known as the creator of Astro Boy, and even his more horrific works share that strikingly clean style, while son Macoto's films have often been grimy, noirish things. Macoto has said that Barbara was the piece of his father's work he feels most in sync with artistically, but bridging the two visions takes a fair amount of work. Happily, the filmmakers have put together a really terrific crew to make it happen, with Doyle (and Kubbie Tsoi) contributing beautiful shots that nevertheless feel icy, a mood matched by Hashimoto's soundtrack that feels like it harkens back to a different period's sort of movie. The production design departments along with costume, makeup, and the like create striking looks that are heightened but just far enough that it's easy to slip in and out of the more apparently fantastical moments. It's not perfect - there's one character where the attempt to capture her hairstyle or headwear had me thinking "what is that?" whenever she was on screen - but it's an impressive job of adapting someone whose style was not designed for live action in the slightest.
(Apropos of nothing, the English-language posters which have the names of the father and son side-by-side transliterate them differently, "Osamu Tezuka" versus "Macoto Tezka", whether to downplay the family connection or heighten how the son is noteworthy on his own.)
Full review at eFilmCritic
Still, I did enjoy Tezuka's Barbara a lot, especially since it felt like the director more or less disappeared after I saw Black Kiss at Fantasia 14 years ago (under the title "Syncronicity") and really liking it; I hoped he hadn't fallen away from cinema or been unable to escape his father's shadow. Macoto Tezka has seemed to do a fair amount for his father's estate since then, but this really does feel like his thing as well.
I'm actually mildly surprised I don't have a copy of Barbara on my shelf; I remember seeing it come out but as manga and graphic novels pile up, I sort of go on-again and off-again where buying Osamu Tezuka stuff is concerned. There's so much of it, and it's amazing to me that he died relatively young at 60, because his output is immense, and extends to television and film production as well as manga. The man was legitimately a giant.
Falling a bit behind, in part because I had a non-festival detour yesterday, but I hope to catch up tomorrow.
Unearth
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
There's a pretty good movie to be found in Unearth, but I am reasonably sure that it is not a horror movie, and trying to make this film into one does it a disservice. That's not a knock on horror as a genre or even saying that it's inappropriate for this setting; it's saying that the sudden turn in this movie's last act means that the filmmakers can't make the most of either what came before or the potential of what happens after.
It focuses on two neighbors in the small town of Silverthorn, Pennsylvania. Tom Dolan (P.J. Marshall) has recently lost his father Joe, who ran the family farm with Tom's mother Kathryn (Adrienne Barbeau). He has no children of his own, but wife Aubrey (Monica Wyche) has a daughter, Christina (Allison McAtee), who had been largely responsible for looking after Joe in his decline, learning a great deal about the farm, although her passion is photography. George Lomack (Marc Blucas) is a mechanic, though he inherited a fair amount of farmland from his late wife. His older daughter Heather (Rachel McKeon) is at college on scholarship, while younger daughter Kim (Brooke Sorenson) is returning to highschool after having had a baby. Both are seeing their fortunes squeezed - the Dolans had to sell off the cattle for their dairy operations, and locals are going to a chain for their inspections - and while Kathryn thinks they should merge their land, a natural gas exploration firm has come with offers.
Unearth is 94 minutes long and it is an hour in before there's any hint of something supernatural or paranormal going on, but that is not a particular weakness. Though many films about farming communities or families in decline focus on how small farms are squeezed by big business - and the script certainly makes reference to that - writers Kelsey Goldberg and John C. Lyons have a stronger focus on how they can crumble from the inside, as generations regard each other with suspicion and disagree about how to handle challenges they don't understand. Kathryn doesn't trust her son to handle her husband's legacy, George and Tom cannot adapt to a changing world, and the young women are sensible but lack the resources to venture out on their own. Directors Lyons and Dorota Swies do fine work in steadily operating the crank that grinds these people down, and how they are caught in a process that they were not given the tools to manage.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Barubora (Tezuka's Barbara)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
After some nifty animated titles, Tezuka's Barbara opens with a gorgeous blue-tinged view of Tokyo courtesy of Christopher Doyle, a jazzy soundtrack from Ichiko Hashimoto, and a great noirish bit of narration that screenwriter Hisako Kurosawa may or may not have brought over straight from manga/anime legend Osamu Tezuka's original work. It's an incredibly promising start for a film that winds up a bit all over the place, but at least that seems to be in the tradition of the original graphic novel and maybe this handles it a bit better.
"A woman like the city's excrement of millions it swallowed and digested - that was Barbara." She's a homeless girl that writer Yosuke Mikura (Goro Inagaki) encounters on the way home one evening, taking an interest as she drunkenly recites poetry and says she's heard of him, although she's blunt about how the novels that have made him rich are simple, middlebrow literature at best. He kicks her out after she gets mouthier and starts drinking his 50-year-old single malt, but soon encounters her again. He should perhaps be wary - as he grows more obsessed, Barbara (Fumi Nikaido) seems to supernaturally eliminate those she considers threats, and he's not the first person to have seen her as a muse.
Though manga-ka Osamu Tezuka created a number of more adult-skewing works, he is likely best known as the creator of Astro Boy, and even his more horrific works share that strikingly clean style, while son Macoto's films have often been grimy, noirish things. Macoto has said that Barbara was the piece of his father's work he feels most in sync with artistically, but bridging the two visions takes a fair amount of work. Happily, the filmmakers have put together a really terrific crew to make it happen, with Doyle (and Kubbie Tsoi) contributing beautiful shots that nevertheless feel icy, a mood matched by Hashimoto's soundtrack that feels like it harkens back to a different period's sort of movie. The production design departments along with costume, makeup, and the like create striking looks that are heightened but just far enough that it's easy to slip in and out of the more apparently fantastical moments. It's not perfect - there's one character where the attempt to capture her hairstyle or headwear had me thinking "what is that?" whenever she was on screen - but it's an impressive job of adapting someone whose style was not designed for live action in the slightest.
(Apropos of nothing, the English-language posters which have the names of the father and son side-by-side transliterate them differently, "Osamu Tezuka" versus "Macoto Tezka", whether to downplay the family connection or heighten how the son is noteworthy on his own.)
Full review at eFilmCritic
Monday, August 24, 2020
Fantasia 2020.04: Baby: The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be
Like I mentioned yesterday, sometimes it's hard to get screeners on the weekend, and that's before I took a large chunk of the day writing up shorts and then deciding that I was going to do my usual Sunday crosswords for a couple hours or so. A bummer, because the one movie I watched turned out to be a bit of a minor disappointment. Secret Diary of a Mom to Be isn't bad, but it's not as good as Jody Luk's first film and just generally feels like it should be better if she wasn't playing straight down the middle so often but instead went for the bigger laugh or odder circumstance more often.
Ah, well. No baseball tonight so plenty of time for the stuff already being lined up.
Baby: The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It's probably not a great sign that the bits that caught my attention in The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be weren't really anything to do with the story but random things I didn't know about life in Hong Kong, like how professional athletes don't make a lot of money and how one of the things they ask at your job interview is your preferred method for entering Chinese characters into a computer. It's a sign of how observant she is and how she's able to spin a movie out of little things, but it would be nice if the material at the center was as interesting as the stuff at the edges.
That center contains Carmen Yau (Dada Chan Ching), a PR manager at a Hong Kong sports stadium, and her husband Oscar Ching (Kevin Chu Kam-Yin), star of the basketball team that plays there. Carmen is up for a promotion to manage the company's facility in Vietnam, and doesn't figure anything will stand in the way - though all of her best friends are either pregnant or recent mothers, she's got a highly irregular period that makes conception very unlikely. But not, it turns out, impossible, and while her friends and co-workers are thrilled for her, she's not close to sure, especially once mother-in-law Margaret (Candice Yu On-On) finds out, bringing her friend Tam Yuk-Wing (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung), a popular childbirth consultant, in to help manage her pregnancy.
Margaret and Tam aren't the only people who feel free to make decisions for Carmen once they find out she's pregnant, and it's the seed for a potentially interesting story, as is Oscar feeling that he's got to become the family breadwinner now but not really equipped for it. Writer/director Jody Luk Yi-Sam doesn't exactly have much of a story lined up here, though - Carmen's job recedes into the background, Oscar picks up a new group of expecting/recent father friends ("Baba Club") to match Carmen's besties, and the movie becomes something of a split hangout picture with occasional bits of the couple together grousing about how the other doesn't understand. Eventually there's an well-worn suspected-infidelity plot to bring things to a climax that even the characters don't seem to believe in.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Ah, well. No baseball tonight so plenty of time for the stuff already being lined up.
Baby: The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It's probably not a great sign that the bits that caught my attention in The Secret Diary of a Mom to Be weren't really anything to do with the story but random things I didn't know about life in Hong Kong, like how professional athletes don't make a lot of money and how one of the things they ask at your job interview is your preferred method for entering Chinese characters into a computer. It's a sign of how observant she is and how she's able to spin a movie out of little things, but it would be nice if the material at the center was as interesting as the stuff at the edges.
That center contains Carmen Yau (Dada Chan Ching), a PR manager at a Hong Kong sports stadium, and her husband Oscar Ching (Kevin Chu Kam-Yin), star of the basketball team that plays there. Carmen is up for a promotion to manage the company's facility in Vietnam, and doesn't figure anything will stand in the way - though all of her best friends are either pregnant or recent mothers, she's got a highly irregular period that makes conception very unlikely. But not, it turns out, impossible, and while her friends and co-workers are thrilled for her, she's not close to sure, especially once mother-in-law Margaret (Candice Yu On-On) finds out, bringing her friend Tam Yuk-Wing (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung), a popular childbirth consultant, in to help manage her pregnancy.
Margaret and Tam aren't the only people who feel free to make decisions for Carmen once they find out she's pregnant, and it's the seed for a potentially interesting story, as is Oscar feeling that he's got to become the family breadwinner now but not really equipped for it. Writer/director Jody Luk Yi-Sam doesn't exactly have much of a story lined up here, though - Carmen's job recedes into the background, Oscar picks up a new group of expecting/recent father friends ("Baba Club") to match Carmen's besties, and the movie becomes something of a split hangout picture with occasional bits of the couple together grousing about how the other doesn't understand. Eventually there's an well-worn suspected-infidelity plot to bring things to a climax that even the characters don't seem to believe in.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Saturday, August 22, 2020
Fantasia 2020.02: Dinner in America, Hunted, Cosmic Candy, and "You Wouldn't Understand"
Would you believe me if I said The Undertaker's Home isn't included here because I was trying to emulate the festival experience and I would have been in de Seve watching Dinner in America while it played in Hall so that doesn't ring true? No? Is it because I clearly would have been in the other room because the subject matter would have been more my speed even if Dinner had actors I like?
Well, it would be fun to say, but I don't necessarily have the room to be clever like that. It turns out that Dinner in America is not necessarily a bad movie but it is very much a not-for-me one, although it likely would have found its way onto my dance card during a normal fest for the same reason it did here: I'm going to try and max out my time with as many movies as possible, and maybe only give the program a cursory glance early on so that I'm not 100% sure what I'm getting into as I sit down. I'm probably doing that a little bit more here than I would in Montreal, since I'm not carrying around the big paperback program which I like flipping through a lot more than the website. But I'm also just kind of taking the screeners as they come.
Hunted, on the other hand, turns out to definitely be my thing, especially now that I'm probably a little more aware of how Little Red Riding Hood probably resonates a lot more with women's experiences than I was when I noted that something like three or four entries in a short women's horror program referenced it. The star is actually wearing a red hoodie through much of the movie, but it's also tons of fun when you get down into the details, including a bunch that were too fun to put in the review because of the surprise (though I will say that the blue paint goes from "wait, what?" to "that's kind of perfect" in about two seconds). I also really dug Cosmic Candy along the same lines - it's another simple story told well with sharp details.
And then, finally, we looped back around to "You Wouldn't Understand", which I gather played before Dinner in America if you watched it via the livestream. It's a nifty little short that hits a really specific mood better than a lot of jokier attempts to do so, and I'm looking forward to having a little time to dig further into what the group has posted on YouTube.
Dinner in America
* * (out of four)
Seen 20 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Sometimes there's a thin line between characters who are difficult and abrasive but interesting and characters you just plain hate. Sometimes it's not necessarily thin, but it just seems to take forever to reach the point where you can see it and maybe get something out of it. Dinner in America is in the second category, but by the time I realized that I found it hard to give it the proper credit. It spends so much time being nasty and charmless that it is hard to take its better impulses seriously.
We first meet Simon (Kyle Gallner) puking as he takes part in a drug study which is going about as well for Beth (Hannah Marks). They're booted out, and she invites him over to her place for Sunday dinner, which goes about as well, with him burning some bridges and other items on the way out. Elsewhere in Detroit, mousy 20-year-old Patty (Emily Skeggs) is being bullied on the bus and at work, with her parents saying she can't go to a concert on Friday night. She spots Simon as he's dealing some drugs and running from the cops, and he decides to hide out at her place for a while, although he's got a whole list of things he's got to do while she's looking for a new job.
Simon is a miserable little jackass, and while writer/director Adam Rehmeier will occasionally toss in something to make him seem a bit more sympathetic, but almost every bit of it is just targeting his violence at people the audience disapproves of more, and even his eventual opening up to Patty is selfish, like he can't see her having value until it's revealed that she has talent directly related to his own interests. It could be a moment of growth, but he's not given much of a chance to show he's a better person in general. He's the sort of petulant punk-rocker who's got nothing but anger and violence most of the time, and while it's energetic and entertaining at moments, it can wear on a viewer.
yle Gallner is kind of fun to watch in the role, at least; he spends almost the entire movie not quite bug-eyed but with that sort of intensity either on display or obviously just under the surface, always ready to pull out an arch variation that indicates he's got a brain behind the bile, and even on occasion showing a bit of humanity. It's a broad performance but not a bad one. Emily Skeggs doesn't quite gel with him as Patty, but it may be more about Rehmeier not having the same handle on her than he does on Simon than any shortcoming of Skeggs's; she pulls off the necessary blank and uncomprehending stare that comes from a too-sheltered upbringing without looking stupid, which is no mean feat, while also occasionally bringing out frustration that there's more in her head than her folks have prepared her for
One almost wonders at times if the script started with Patty in high school only to be revised older, but not everything made it all the way, and it wouldn't really be surprising; it's a script full of moments and characters who are strong and well-crafted for single scenes or sequences but which don't stretch that much further. Sometimes that works out pretty well - the quick hits of black comedy work, and it occasionally gives a "guest star" like Lea Thompson or Hannah Marks the chance to be memorable without holding back. That the film seldom stops to explain people's backgrounds can be a bit of a double-edged sword; it doesn't slow things down artificially but can sometimes make things seem random, or has Rehmeier losing track of the line between the bits that seem real and the ones which are meant to be heightened.
Rehmeier brings enough scrappy energy to the movie that it's entirely possible I'm judging it harshly for doing a bunch of things that I generally don't care for - I've got spectacularly little patience for movies where someone being a talented musician is meant to excuse his being a turd as a person and baseline assumptions that families are all stuck with each other and kind of miserable about it, and this one has a lot of both. It's designed to rub me the wrong way, but even given that, it's enough of a battle between nastily clever and boringly nasty that those things can easily push a viewer one way or the other.
Dead(?) link to original review at eFilmCritic
Hunted (2020)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Most moviegoers don't see that many movies like Hunted, but if you go to genre festivals or spend a lot of time digging through your favorite streaming services to find the new selections, it gets categorized: Survival horror, nature, woman on the run, etc. What makes one of those stand out? A couple good performances. Some visual style. And a willingness to go kind of crazy at the point where the audience might be expecting the filmmakers to coast.
It starts in familiar-enough fashion - a fairy tale allusion, a woman frustrated at work who goes out to a bar to blow off some steam, and a guy who initially seems nice enough but shows his true colors quickly. Soon enough Eve (Lucie Debay) is stuffed in a trunk, but able to flee her kidnappers (Arieh Worthalter & Ciaran O'Brien) thanks to a freak accident. They are never that far behind, though the woods are full of surprises.
Writer/director Vincent Paronnaud is likely best-known internationally as Marjane Satrapi's collaborator on the film version of Persepolis, and he's spent much of the rest of his career in comics and animation, so it's not exactly a surprise when the bit before the opening title includes a nifty bit of animation that is nevertheless well-enough matched to the rest of the movie that it doesn't feel like it doesn't belong. It's quickly contrasted with a moment or two of grainy-video shot in less than great lighting, and that's a bit of a preview of what's going to happen throughout the movie: Every time Eve is able to put a little bit of distance between herself and her pursuers, the forest scene takes on a bit of a fairy-tale quality, albeit as much Grimm as Disney, while there's a flatness to the guys' scenes, maybe a slight washing-out, like they're living in the violent constructed fantasy meant to be captured on camera.
The violent nature of that means Lucie Debay is going to be spending a lot of the movie running, being afraid, and looking more worn-down as things go on, which could be fairly thankless, but she never gives a half-effort, especially considering that Paronnaud and co-writer Léa Pernollet have her start from a place of having a chip on her shoulder from people wanting the impossible at work rather than having her ever be surprised that any man can be like this. It is fun to see her suddenly redirect all of that into rage when she gets her hands on a nice, solid stick to swing, though, and I also want to compliment the hairstylists who give her a cut that lets her catch the camera's eye in early scenes, tagging her as confident and savvy, but degrades exceptionally well over the course of the film.
Opposite her, Arieh Worthalter seems to be having a lot more fun, doing a great turn from gallant to downright nasty without it being a showy mask-drop, and then happily chewing the scenery for the rest of the film because his guy (credited as just "The Guy") is just completely unhinged. For much of the film, he's given Ciaran O'Brien as a sidekick to abuse, and while his part is less showy, he does a good job of playing the put-upon beta without ever becoming more than nominally sympathetic. His job is to give Worthalter's guy an audience to perform to and otherwise remind the audience about this man's need to dominate even when Eve is far off, but it's a pairing that works.
It plays into a tiny scene that demonstrates how Paronnaud is bringing a little something extra in terms of skill to this bit of VOD fodder, as Worthalter opens a candy bar and casually chucks the wrapper into a nearby stream. The camera tracks it a bit until it passes Eve, and in that moment the audience gets a little more on edge, because the way that shot works establishes that she is moving toward her would-be rapists, rather than away. But it also seems calculated to anger even a jaded viewer who has watched hundreds of these chases, because the guy is freakin' littering. It's silly, but the different form of callousness of it works. There's another bit later when the filmmakers start messing around with things happening out of order, and it feels fair because there's a bit of a warning in it, and it also makes a natural lead-in to how crazy the last act will get.
Which is impressive, because for all that stuff like that candy wrapper was making the film feel fairly tight, the homestretch has at least three crazy things that come out of nowhere and send the chase off in a new direction, often in such an absurd way as to elicit a cackle or a delighted "what!?" It's an impressively go-for-broke set of bits that works because Paronnaud hasn't entirely forgotten what got him there in terms of style or essentially being Eve fighting the guy in an uncertain environment. He's willing to pick up and drop those bits of randomness fast enough that the film doesn't get overloaded on the way to maybe, sort of, coming full circle, and while it really shouldn't work - films which drop what had been a good tense thing for an hour to do something else entirely with the finale are usually misfires - but does.
Though made in Belgium with a broadly European cast, it's shot in English, likely because the producers knew that would be good for sales to the streaming services where this will inevitably find long-term homes. I am rather looking forward to the waves of tweets that will come from people stumbling upon it, expecting a generic 85-minute time-waster, and instead getting something where the filmmakers put in the effort to make something memorable and entertaining from start to end.
Dead(?) link to review at eFilmCritic
Cosmic Candy
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It took me a bit of time to reset my brain for how off-kilter Cosmic Candy is, and the funny part is that because I saw it via this festival and consume a fair amount of fantastical material anyway, I had to adjust it downard. It's trippy at the start but things didn't click into place until I realized that it didn't take place in a world where hallucinogenic confections make it to supermarket shelves, but one where things get plenty weird and interesting on their own.
So that piece at the start where Anna Pilarinou (Maria Kitsou) seems to fly into space from the liquor aisle of the supermarket where she works is just a dream, one from which she is wakened by Persa (Magia Pipera), the ten-year-old next door, loudly practicing her lines for the Independence Day school play. That may not be an issue for very long; the other residents of the building are circulating a petition to kick Persa's father (Dimitris Lalos) out, what with them being behind on the rent, attracting suspicious characters, and being generally weird. Of course, Anna is a bit of a mess herself, probably kept on at the shop because her late father was the best friend of proprietor Yannis (Fotis Thomaidis) and apparently suffering from some sort of compulsive behavior. But when Persa's father disappears and the landlord changes the locks, she can't bring herself to push the girl in front of her door away.
It takes a while for director Rinio Dragasaki and her co-writer Katerina Kaklamani to really start digging into the reason why Anna is the way she is, if that's what they actually do - for all that viewers may wisely nod at understanding why she's a lousy supermarket clerk clinging to certain things despite apparently owning a very nice apartment outright, the filmmakers leave the exact extent to which it is cause and effect up to viewers. Similarly, there's almost no time spent on exactly why Persa's father needs to run and hide; the two learn just enough about each other to recognize a bit of themselves, but the story keeps their backstories fuzzy enough that the film can't really lead to them confronting the past as opposed to deciding on a present and future.
Dead(?) link to full review at eFilmCritic
"You Wouldn't Understand"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
The fun of "You Wouldn't Understand" is that it never quite makes sense, but always feels like the piece that would make everything fall into place is just around the corner. It starts with a man (Anthony Arkin) having himself a tastefully-elaborate solo picnic, seeing something odd in the distance, and then having one of the folks he sees (Jacob A. Ware) approach and ask for some "horsey sauce" but dissemble just enough to make it weird before things start getting truly strange. From there, things seem to get even more bizarrely random.
But… not quite. I don't know whether director Trish Harnetiaux and co-writer/co-star Jacob A. Ware have mapped out what's really going on to the point where the film is actually tight and self-consistent if you know all the background, but they've built something just steady enough that they can throw in a bunch of science-fiction tropes and have the viewers both feel like they have seen this bit and understand it enough to get by but also sympathize with Anthony Arkin's bemused observer and get the feeling that this is what suddenly finding yourself in a sci-fi situation where the underpinnings of reality are being kicked out. Or, hey, living in a world where something that should be a really big deal gets tweeted out every ten minutes but the cumulative effect is kind of numbing, if you have to align it with the real world.
Not that there's much effort to do that, and indeed, Harnetiaux and company do a nifty job of mixing the comfortable with the unusual; all the white in the wardrobe and other spots marks things as specifically otherworldly, though there's a sort of comforting normalcy about the setting, even if it does seem like it's designed as an idealized early-twentieth-century. The two actors strike this balance extremely well too; Anthony Arkin has a reassuringly grounded nature even as he gets pulled into the weird here while Ware has a wide-eyed beaky presence that suggests a lot of times through the scenario has not exactly driven him mad but made him care very little about appearing sane.
It's kind of odd to apply the "it only felt like…" line to shorts, but it's amusingly true here - this ten-minute movie comes together well enough to only feel like five, never hitting a snag despite having a whole lot of ideas to fit in and move through. Arkin probably has a hand in that as editor, although it goes to show just how well Harnetiaux and the rest of this "Steel Drum in Space" team works together. I'm not sure I've ever been inspired to follow a YouTube channel from a festival short before, but this is certainly a group I'll keep an eye on.
Well, it would be fun to say, but I don't necessarily have the room to be clever like that. It turns out that Dinner in America is not necessarily a bad movie but it is very much a not-for-me one, although it likely would have found its way onto my dance card during a normal fest for the same reason it did here: I'm going to try and max out my time with as many movies as possible, and maybe only give the program a cursory glance early on so that I'm not 100% sure what I'm getting into as I sit down. I'm probably doing that a little bit more here than I would in Montreal, since I'm not carrying around the big paperback program which I like flipping through a lot more than the website. But I'm also just kind of taking the screeners as they come.
Hunted, on the other hand, turns out to definitely be my thing, especially now that I'm probably a little more aware of how Little Red Riding Hood probably resonates a lot more with women's experiences than I was when I noted that something like three or four entries in a short women's horror program referenced it. The star is actually wearing a red hoodie through much of the movie, but it's also tons of fun when you get down into the details, including a bunch that were too fun to put in the review because of the surprise (though I will say that the blue paint goes from "wait, what?" to "that's kind of perfect" in about two seconds). I also really dug Cosmic Candy along the same lines - it's another simple story told well with sharp details.
And then, finally, we looped back around to "You Wouldn't Understand", which I gather played before Dinner in America if you watched it via the livestream. It's a nifty little short that hits a really specific mood better than a lot of jokier attempts to do so, and I'm looking forward to having a little time to dig further into what the group has posted on YouTube.
Dinner in America
* * (out of four)
Seen 20 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Sometimes there's a thin line between characters who are difficult and abrasive but interesting and characters you just plain hate. Sometimes it's not necessarily thin, but it just seems to take forever to reach the point where you can see it and maybe get something out of it. Dinner in America is in the second category, but by the time I realized that I found it hard to give it the proper credit. It spends so much time being nasty and charmless that it is hard to take its better impulses seriously.
We first meet Simon (Kyle Gallner) puking as he takes part in a drug study which is going about as well for Beth (Hannah Marks). They're booted out, and she invites him over to her place for Sunday dinner, which goes about as well, with him burning some bridges and other items on the way out. Elsewhere in Detroit, mousy 20-year-old Patty (Emily Skeggs) is being bullied on the bus and at work, with her parents saying she can't go to a concert on Friday night. She spots Simon as he's dealing some drugs and running from the cops, and he decides to hide out at her place for a while, although he's got a whole list of things he's got to do while she's looking for a new job.
Simon is a miserable little jackass, and while writer/director Adam Rehmeier will occasionally toss in something to make him seem a bit more sympathetic, but almost every bit of it is just targeting his violence at people the audience disapproves of more, and even his eventual opening up to Patty is selfish, like he can't see her having value until it's revealed that she has talent directly related to his own interests. It could be a moment of growth, but he's not given much of a chance to show he's a better person in general. He's the sort of petulant punk-rocker who's got nothing but anger and violence most of the time, and while it's energetic and entertaining at moments, it can wear on a viewer.
yle Gallner is kind of fun to watch in the role, at least; he spends almost the entire movie not quite bug-eyed but with that sort of intensity either on display or obviously just under the surface, always ready to pull out an arch variation that indicates he's got a brain behind the bile, and even on occasion showing a bit of humanity. It's a broad performance but not a bad one. Emily Skeggs doesn't quite gel with him as Patty, but it may be more about Rehmeier not having the same handle on her than he does on Simon than any shortcoming of Skeggs's; she pulls off the necessary blank and uncomprehending stare that comes from a too-sheltered upbringing without looking stupid, which is no mean feat, while also occasionally bringing out frustration that there's more in her head than her folks have prepared her for
One almost wonders at times if the script started with Patty in high school only to be revised older, but not everything made it all the way, and it wouldn't really be surprising; it's a script full of moments and characters who are strong and well-crafted for single scenes or sequences but which don't stretch that much further. Sometimes that works out pretty well - the quick hits of black comedy work, and it occasionally gives a "guest star" like Lea Thompson or Hannah Marks the chance to be memorable without holding back. That the film seldom stops to explain people's backgrounds can be a bit of a double-edged sword; it doesn't slow things down artificially but can sometimes make things seem random, or has Rehmeier losing track of the line between the bits that seem real and the ones which are meant to be heightened.
Rehmeier brings enough scrappy energy to the movie that it's entirely possible I'm judging it harshly for doing a bunch of things that I generally don't care for - I've got spectacularly little patience for movies where someone being a talented musician is meant to excuse his being a turd as a person and baseline assumptions that families are all stuck with each other and kind of miserable about it, and this one has a lot of both. It's designed to rub me the wrong way, but even given that, it's enough of a battle between nastily clever and boringly nasty that those things can easily push a viewer one way or the other.
Dead(?) link to original review at eFilmCritic
Hunted (2020)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
Most moviegoers don't see that many movies like Hunted, but if you go to genre festivals or spend a lot of time digging through your favorite streaming services to find the new selections, it gets categorized: Survival horror, nature, woman on the run, etc. What makes one of those stand out? A couple good performances. Some visual style. And a willingness to go kind of crazy at the point where the audience might be expecting the filmmakers to coast.
It starts in familiar-enough fashion - a fairy tale allusion, a woman frustrated at work who goes out to a bar to blow off some steam, and a guy who initially seems nice enough but shows his true colors quickly. Soon enough Eve (Lucie Debay) is stuffed in a trunk, but able to flee her kidnappers (Arieh Worthalter & Ciaran O'Brien) thanks to a freak accident. They are never that far behind, though the woods are full of surprises.
Writer/director Vincent Paronnaud is likely best-known internationally as Marjane Satrapi's collaborator on the film version of Persepolis, and he's spent much of the rest of his career in comics and animation, so it's not exactly a surprise when the bit before the opening title includes a nifty bit of animation that is nevertheless well-enough matched to the rest of the movie that it doesn't feel like it doesn't belong. It's quickly contrasted with a moment or two of grainy-video shot in less than great lighting, and that's a bit of a preview of what's going to happen throughout the movie: Every time Eve is able to put a little bit of distance between herself and her pursuers, the forest scene takes on a bit of a fairy-tale quality, albeit as much Grimm as Disney, while there's a flatness to the guys' scenes, maybe a slight washing-out, like they're living in the violent constructed fantasy meant to be captured on camera.
The violent nature of that means Lucie Debay is going to be spending a lot of the movie running, being afraid, and looking more worn-down as things go on, which could be fairly thankless, but she never gives a half-effort, especially considering that Paronnaud and co-writer Léa Pernollet have her start from a place of having a chip on her shoulder from people wanting the impossible at work rather than having her ever be surprised that any man can be like this. It is fun to see her suddenly redirect all of that into rage when she gets her hands on a nice, solid stick to swing, though, and I also want to compliment the hairstylists who give her a cut that lets her catch the camera's eye in early scenes, tagging her as confident and savvy, but degrades exceptionally well over the course of the film.
Opposite her, Arieh Worthalter seems to be having a lot more fun, doing a great turn from gallant to downright nasty without it being a showy mask-drop, and then happily chewing the scenery for the rest of the film because his guy (credited as just "The Guy") is just completely unhinged. For much of the film, he's given Ciaran O'Brien as a sidekick to abuse, and while his part is less showy, he does a good job of playing the put-upon beta without ever becoming more than nominally sympathetic. His job is to give Worthalter's guy an audience to perform to and otherwise remind the audience about this man's need to dominate even when Eve is far off, but it's a pairing that works.
It plays into a tiny scene that demonstrates how Paronnaud is bringing a little something extra in terms of skill to this bit of VOD fodder, as Worthalter opens a candy bar and casually chucks the wrapper into a nearby stream. The camera tracks it a bit until it passes Eve, and in that moment the audience gets a little more on edge, because the way that shot works establishes that she is moving toward her would-be rapists, rather than away. But it also seems calculated to anger even a jaded viewer who has watched hundreds of these chases, because the guy is freakin' littering. It's silly, but the different form of callousness of it works. There's another bit later when the filmmakers start messing around with things happening out of order, and it feels fair because there's a bit of a warning in it, and it also makes a natural lead-in to how crazy the last act will get.
Which is impressive, because for all that stuff like that candy wrapper was making the film feel fairly tight, the homestretch has at least three crazy things that come out of nowhere and send the chase off in a new direction, often in such an absurd way as to elicit a cackle or a delighted "what!?" It's an impressively go-for-broke set of bits that works because Paronnaud hasn't entirely forgotten what got him there in terms of style or essentially being Eve fighting the guy in an uncertain environment. He's willing to pick up and drop those bits of randomness fast enough that the film doesn't get overloaded on the way to maybe, sort of, coming full circle, and while it really shouldn't work - films which drop what had been a good tense thing for an hour to do something else entirely with the finale are usually misfires - but does.
Though made in Belgium with a broadly European cast, it's shot in English, likely because the producers knew that would be good for sales to the streaming services where this will inevitably find long-term homes. I am rather looking forward to the waves of tweets that will come from people stumbling upon it, expecting a generic 85-minute time-waster, and instead getting something where the filmmakers put in the effort to make something memorable and entertaining from start to end.
Dead(?) link to review at eFilmCritic
Cosmic Candy
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
It took me a bit of time to reset my brain for how off-kilter Cosmic Candy is, and the funny part is that because I saw it via this festival and consume a fair amount of fantastical material anyway, I had to adjust it downard. It's trippy at the start but things didn't click into place until I realized that it didn't take place in a world where hallucinogenic confections make it to supermarket shelves, but one where things get plenty weird and interesting on their own.
So that piece at the start where Anna Pilarinou (Maria Kitsou) seems to fly into space from the liquor aisle of the supermarket where she works is just a dream, one from which she is wakened by Persa (Magia Pipera), the ten-year-old next door, loudly practicing her lines for the Independence Day school play. That may not be an issue for very long; the other residents of the building are circulating a petition to kick Persa's father (Dimitris Lalos) out, what with them being behind on the rent, attracting suspicious characters, and being generally weird. Of course, Anna is a bit of a mess herself, probably kept on at the shop because her late father was the best friend of proprietor Yannis (Fotis Thomaidis) and apparently suffering from some sort of compulsive behavior. But when Persa's father disappears and the landlord changes the locks, she can't bring herself to push the girl in front of her door away.
It takes a while for director Rinio Dragasaki and her co-writer Katerina Kaklamani to really start digging into the reason why Anna is the way she is, if that's what they actually do - for all that viewers may wisely nod at understanding why she's a lousy supermarket clerk clinging to certain things despite apparently owning a very nice apartment outright, the filmmakers leave the exact extent to which it is cause and effect up to viewers. Similarly, there's almost no time spent on exactly why Persa's father needs to run and hide; the two learn just enough about each other to recognize a bit of themselves, but the story keeps their backstories fuzzy enough that the film can't really lead to them confronting the past as opposed to deciding on a present and future.
Dead(?) link to full review at eFilmCritic
"You Wouldn't Understand"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
The fun of "You Wouldn't Understand" is that it never quite makes sense, but always feels like the piece that would make everything fall into place is just around the corner. It starts with a man (Anthony Arkin) having himself a tastefully-elaborate solo picnic, seeing something odd in the distance, and then having one of the folks he sees (Jacob A. Ware) approach and ask for some "horsey sauce" but dissemble just enough to make it weird before things start getting truly strange. From there, things seem to get even more bizarrely random.
But… not quite. I don't know whether director Trish Harnetiaux and co-writer/co-star Jacob A. Ware have mapped out what's really going on to the point where the film is actually tight and self-consistent if you know all the background, but they've built something just steady enough that they can throw in a bunch of science-fiction tropes and have the viewers both feel like they have seen this bit and understand it enough to get by but also sympathize with Anthony Arkin's bemused observer and get the feeling that this is what suddenly finding yourself in a sci-fi situation where the underpinnings of reality are being kicked out. Or, hey, living in a world where something that should be a really big deal gets tweeted out every ten minutes but the cumulative effect is kind of numbing, if you have to align it with the real world.
Not that there's much effort to do that, and indeed, Harnetiaux and company do a nifty job of mixing the comfortable with the unusual; all the white in the wardrobe and other spots marks things as specifically otherworldly, though there's a sort of comforting normalcy about the setting, even if it does seem like it's designed as an idealized early-twentieth-century. The two actors strike this balance extremely well too; Anthony Arkin has a reassuringly grounded nature even as he gets pulled into the weird here while Ware has a wide-eyed beaky presence that suggests a lot of times through the scenario has not exactly driven him mad but made him care very little about appearing sane.
It's kind of odd to apply the "it only felt like…" line to shorts, but it's amusingly true here - this ten-minute movie comes together well enough to only feel like five, never hitting a snag despite having a whole lot of ideas to fit in and move through. Arkin probably has a hand in that as editor, although it goes to show just how well Harnetiaux and the rest of this "Steel Drum in Space" team works together. I'm not sure I've ever been inspired to follow a YouTube channel from a festival short before, but this is certainly a group I'll keep an eye on.
Friday, August 21, 2020
Fantasia 2020.01: Special Actors and The Columnist
Welcome (again) to the Fantasia International Film Festival, which opened both its on-demand program and livestreamed screenings up to Canada yesterday, and while I'm not in that lovely, less-scorching-hot-in-the-summer country whose leadership appears to have show some interest in containing the pandemic, I am apparently still considered press, so I can request and work my way through screeners, which is what I'm doing, mostly trying to reflect the actual schedule but also fitting in on-demand films that I didn't get to before I started. It's a bit strange that everyone is really going to have their own festival experience, even more so than usual.
Anyway, I'm grateful and will try to earn this pass by pumping out as many reviews as I can, even taking off work for it. I say every year that eventually they're going to realize that this is something a little bit more than a hobby and way less than a job for me and as such will realize that I can and would pay for tickets, but I'm glad it's not this year.
So, no photo of the banner outside Concordia this year, but there is the annual tradition of the opening night film not accepting press passes and me being fine with that because it will probably open elsewhere, which is why I've got pretty much nothing to say about The Reckoning and its cancelled Q&A. I would have liked to see it - Neil Marshall's The Descent was one of my favorite films at the first or second Fantasia I attended - but all the stuff around Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, and some executive at Universal is something I'm kind of glad I don't have to spend much time on, especially since it would have taken me a while to get past the "wait, he's not with Axelle Carolyn anymore?" stage.
Still, I would usually get into the second show of the night, which was effectively Special Actors, and a lot of fun. There might be a bit of concern when watching this that Shin'ichiro Ueda is a one-trick pony or repeating himself, and I do wonder sometimes if filmmakers (and film critics) start immersing themselves in film so early that they don't really know anything else. I don't really think that's the case here, but it's something to watch for the future.
I didn't really see The Columnist as part of the "first day", but they asked for negative reviews to be held until the festival began, so… I think it's kind of a mess in a lot of ways, but I also got kind of irked for it being "So Much for the Tolerant Left: The Movie". It's an attitude I hate coming and going, and while I don't really expect a slasher movie to advance a solution to how social media has made free speech an even more sharply double-edged sword than ever before and more easily weaponized by those who mean harm, I'd kind of like to see it grapple with the issue rather than just say "there are two sides!"
Once again, if you're in Canada, enjoy Fantasia! If you're elsewhere, take notes; there's other virtual festivals coming up and some of these are already in the pipeline to some sort of distribution.
Special Actors (Supesharu Akutâzu)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
There are two, or maybe three, pretty solid ideas for a movie in Shin'ichiro Ueda's Special Actors, and while I suspect that they could maybe be separated to better effect, Ueda would probably feel like that was making the same movie twice. It works as one, oftentimes pretty well, in fact, enough that the folks who watch and enjoy it will have different things that they wish there had been more of.
Things start with Kazuto Ohno (Kazuto Osawa), a security guard who dreams of being an actor but has trouble with both because confrontation and tension makes him pass out. Surprisingly, his younger brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono) has become an actor of sorts, and after a chance encounter, Hiroki recruits him for "Special Actors", an agency which places its clients not just in stage and screen, but real-life encounters - laughing in movies, fake dates, even muggers you can look tough for fighting off. A former scam artist (Yosuke Ueda) writes the scripts, and their latest major job is right up his alley: Schoolgirl Yumi (Miyu Ogawa) says that older sister Rina (Rina Tsugami) has fallen in with a cult and wants them to infiltrate and expose them.
As soon as that set-up starts being laid out, some viewers might find their eyebrows rising involuntarily, because a caper film that pits two crews doing basically the same thing against each other is just a deliciously fun idea, and both the Special Actors and the "Musubiru" cult are full of colorful characters. If this were just a caper flick, it would probably be in large part about the reformed swindler diving into taking down his opposite number but possibly being hindered by how his team is much less experienced at this sort of thing. There's bits of that there, but mostly the Special Actors seem to know what they're doing well enough to keep things moving quickly, and that's okay; Ueda is clearly having fun with the con-artist material, from the Scientology-mocking religion to the inevitable USB stick gag, and presents it as a nifty mission where folks imitating movies can still pull some nifty feats off.
Full review at eFilmCritic
De Kuthoer (The Columnist)
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
You can see the strong idea that the rest of The Columnist was built around being put front-and-center during a climactic scene toward the end, and that's a thing people make movies like this should try to do. Put a nice cast around it and polish it up fairly nicely, and that should have the movie in good shape. And it is, much of the time, but in the moments when it's not, one gets the impression that the filmmakers haven't completely thought this through, leaving a movie that feels like they haven't thought their good idea through.
The columnist of the title is Femke Boot (Katja Herbers), who is working on her first novel to build off her fame as a regular newspaper columnist, while daughter Anna (Claire Porro) seeks to follow in her footsteps even as she's kicked off the school newspaper for a column the headmaster doesn't like. Like a lot of people, she has trouble dealing with social media, regularly swearing off Twitter and the like for the vitriol with which some respond to her work but logged back in the next morning. She spars on a panel show with horror writer Stephen Dood (Bram van der Kelen) but finds herself connecting when they meet under other circumstances. The tweets that get under her skin more than others come from a neighbor who is extraordinarily nasty online but different in person, to the point where something small can set her off.
It escalates quickly, and between them director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst don't necessarily seem to know where to go from there, or necessarily even how to get there. There's not a whole lot of room to examine how online pile-ons can make a person feel unsafe, or even genuinely in danger; on the other side, there's not enough twisted satisfaction in eliminating trolls. There's a bit implied in there about how murder seems to fuel Femke's ability to write her book, but only in a moment or two, and numerous instances that show that Femke is sort of a hypocrite where free speech and civility is concerned depending on whether it's directed at her or coming from her (or her daughter) just kind of sit there, like Windhorst and van Aart are content to have simply raised a point rather than having actually said much about it.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Anyway, I'm grateful and will try to earn this pass by pumping out as many reviews as I can, even taking off work for it. I say every year that eventually they're going to realize that this is something a little bit more than a hobby and way less than a job for me and as such will realize that I can and would pay for tickets, but I'm glad it's not this year.
So, no photo of the banner outside Concordia this year, but there is the annual tradition of the opening night film not accepting press passes and me being fine with that because it will probably open elsewhere, which is why I've got pretty much nothing to say about The Reckoning and its cancelled Q&A. I would have liked to see it - Neil Marshall's The Descent was one of my favorite films at the first or second Fantasia I attended - but all the stuff around Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, and some executive at Universal is something I'm kind of glad I don't have to spend much time on, especially since it would have taken me a while to get past the "wait, he's not with Axelle Carolyn anymore?" stage.
Still, I would usually get into the second show of the night, which was effectively Special Actors, and a lot of fun. There might be a bit of concern when watching this that Shin'ichiro Ueda is a one-trick pony or repeating himself, and I do wonder sometimes if filmmakers (and film critics) start immersing themselves in film so early that they don't really know anything else. I don't really think that's the case here, but it's something to watch for the future.
I didn't really see The Columnist as part of the "first day", but they asked for negative reviews to be held until the festival began, so… I think it's kind of a mess in a lot of ways, but I also got kind of irked for it being "So Much for the Tolerant Left: The Movie". It's an attitude I hate coming and going, and while I don't really expect a slasher movie to advance a solution to how social media has made free speech an even more sharply double-edged sword than ever before and more easily weaponized by those who mean harm, I'd kind of like to see it grapple with the issue rather than just say "there are two sides!"
Once again, if you're in Canada, enjoy Fantasia! If you're elsewhere, take notes; there's other virtual festivals coming up and some of these are already in the pipeline to some sort of distribution.
Special Actors (Supesharu Akutâzu)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, Vimeo via Roku)
There are two, or maybe three, pretty solid ideas for a movie in Shin'ichiro Ueda's Special Actors, and while I suspect that they could maybe be separated to better effect, Ueda would probably feel like that was making the same movie twice. It works as one, oftentimes pretty well, in fact, enough that the folks who watch and enjoy it will have different things that they wish there had been more of.
Things start with Kazuto Ohno (Kazuto Osawa), a security guard who dreams of being an actor but has trouble with both because confrontation and tension makes him pass out. Surprisingly, his younger brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono) has become an actor of sorts, and after a chance encounter, Hiroki recruits him for "Special Actors", an agency which places its clients not just in stage and screen, but real-life encounters - laughing in movies, fake dates, even muggers you can look tough for fighting off. A former scam artist (Yosuke Ueda) writes the scripts, and their latest major job is right up his alley: Schoolgirl Yumi (Miyu Ogawa) says that older sister Rina (Rina Tsugami) has fallen in with a cult and wants them to infiltrate and expose them.
As soon as that set-up starts being laid out, some viewers might find their eyebrows rising involuntarily, because a caper film that pits two crews doing basically the same thing against each other is just a deliciously fun idea, and both the Special Actors and the "Musubiru" cult are full of colorful characters. If this were just a caper flick, it would probably be in large part about the reformed swindler diving into taking down his opposite number but possibly being hindered by how his team is much less experienced at this sort of thing. There's bits of that there, but mostly the Special Actors seem to know what they're doing well enough to keep things moving quickly, and that's okay; Ueda is clearly having fun with the con-artist material, from the Scientology-mocking religion to the inevitable USB stick gag, and presents it as a nifty mission where folks imitating movies can still pull some nifty feats off.
Full review at eFilmCritic
De Kuthoer (The Columnist)
* * (out of four)
Seen 14 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Festival, internet)
You can see the strong idea that the rest of The Columnist was built around being put front-and-center during a climactic scene toward the end, and that's a thing people make movies like this should try to do. Put a nice cast around it and polish it up fairly nicely, and that should have the movie in good shape. And it is, much of the time, but in the moments when it's not, one gets the impression that the filmmakers haven't completely thought this through, leaving a movie that feels like they haven't thought their good idea through.
The columnist of the title is Femke Boot (Katja Herbers), who is working on her first novel to build off her fame as a regular newspaper columnist, while daughter Anna (Claire Porro) seeks to follow in her footsteps even as she's kicked off the school newspaper for a column the headmaster doesn't like. Like a lot of people, she has trouble dealing with social media, regularly swearing off Twitter and the like for the vitriol with which some respond to her work but logged back in the next morning. She spars on a panel show with horror writer Stephen Dood (Bram van der Kelen) but finds herself connecting when they meet under other circumstances. The tweets that get under her skin more than others come from a neighbor who is extraordinarily nasty online but different in person, to the point where something small can set her off.
It escalates quickly, and between them director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst don't necessarily seem to know where to go from there, or necessarily even how to get there. There's not a whole lot of room to examine how online pile-ons can make a person feel unsafe, or even genuinely in danger; on the other side, there's not enough twisted satisfaction in eliminating trolls. There's a bit implied in there about how murder seems to fuel Femke's ability to write her book, but only in a moment or two, and numerous instances that show that Femke is sort of a hypocrite where free speech and civility is concerned depending on whether it's directed at her or coming from her (or her daughter) just kind of sit there, like Windhorst and van Aart are content to have simply raised a point rather than having actually said much about it.
Full review at eFilmCritic
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